Madrid School; second half of the XVII century.

Madrid School; second half of the seventeenth century.
"The baptism of Christ".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
It has apocryphal signature.
Measurements: 70 x 50 cm.
The present work shows an idealized natural landscape in the background, with the figures in large size in the foreground, as was usual after the provisions of the Council of Trent that directed the change of Roman Catholicism in the Counter-Reformation. On the right, dressed in the typical unfinished tanned leather in shades of brown but in this case without his characteristic red cloak, is Saint John the Baptist, pouring water on Christ and with his staff with phylactery held by his left hand. Christ alone is dressed only in a cloth of purity and adopts a gesture of humility as he bows his head while holding his two hands clasped on his chest. Iconographically, the theme of the Baptism of Christ is one of the oldest in Christian art because of its theological importance and the Sacrament that derives from it (which is why it has undergone variations that, at times, can be related to liturgical variations in the Sacrament of Baptism). As it is logical, it has varied according to the moment, the style and the school to which each work belongs.
The Madrid school arose around the court of Philip IV first and Charles II later, and developed throughout the seventeenth century. Analysts of this school have insisted on considering its development as a result of the agglutinating power of the court; what is truly decisive is not the place of birth of the different artists, but the fact that they were educated and worked around and for a nobiliary and religious clientele located next to the royalty. This allows and favors a stylistic unity, although the logical divergences due to the personality of the members can be appreciated. In its origin, the Madrid school is linked to the rise to the throne of Philip IV, a monarch who made Madrid, for the first time, an artistic center. This meant an awakening of the nationalist conscience by allowing a liberation from the previous Italianizing molds to jump from the last echoes of Mannerism to Tenebrism. This will be the first step of the school, which in a gradual sense will walk successively until the attainment of a more autochthonous baroque language and linked to the political, religious and cultural conceptions of the monarchy of the Austrias, to go to die with the first shoots of the rococo that are manifested in the production of the last of its representatives, A. Palomino. The techniques most used by these painters were oil and fresco. Stylistically, they start from a naturalism with a notable capacity for synthesis to opportunely lead to the allegorical and formal complexity characteristic of the decorative baroque. These artists show a great concern for the studies of light and color, as we see here, highlighting at first the games between extreme tones typical of tenebrism that later will be replaced by a more exalted and luminous colorism. They receive and assimilate Italian, Flemish and Velázquez influences. The clientele will determine the fact that the subject matter is reduced almost exclusively to portraits and religious paintings.