Madrid School; second third of the XVII century.

Madrid School; second third of the seventeenth century.
"Magdalene penitent".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Provenance: Granados Collection, Madrid.
Measurements: 40 x 52 cm; 54,5 x 66,5 cm (frame).
This canvas represents Mary Magdalene as a penitent in the desert (not understood in the scriptures as such but as an isolated and uninhabited place), dressed in a simple tunic and orange cloak, accompanied by her iconographic attributes, such as the crucifix, the sacred scriptures, the perfumer and the skull. The present painting shows elements inherited from the baroque period, however, the softness of the forms, the measured composition and a certain luminism, show us the aesthetic advance of the painting, resulting in a more measured image, in which we are presented with a reflective Mary Magdalene and not the dramatic image of the character.
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 lead opportunely 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.