Spanish school; XVI century.

Spanish school; XVI century.
"San Mateo".
Carved wood, gilded and polychrome.
It presents faults and losses in the pictorial surface.
Measurements: 155 x 70 x 48 cm.
Spanish sculpture representing St. Matthew. Stylistically, the carving is inscribed in the late Renaissance. The posture of the saint follows classical patterns, but the expressiveness of the face advances baroque solutions. The melancholic countenance transmits the empathy of the Evangelist. The robe is folded in naturalistic drapery, which completely envelops the figure, except for one of the saint's feet placed on the lion's head. Saint Matthew the Evangelist was one of the twelve apostles chosen by Jesus, and author according to Christian tradition of the Gospel that bears his name. He is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, and also in the Gospel of Luke, under the name of Levi.
Spain is, at the beginning of the 16th century, the European nation best prepared to receive the new humanist concepts of life and art because of its spiritual, political and economic conditions, although from the point of view of plastic forms, its adaptation of those introduced by Italy was slower due to the need to learn the new techniques and to change the taste of the clientele. Sculpture reflects perhaps better than other artistic fields this eagerness to return to the classical Greco-Roman world that exalts in its nudes the individuality of man, creating a new style whose vitality surpasses the mere copy. Soon the anatomy, the movement of the figures, the compositions with a sense of perspective and balance, the naturalistic play of the folds, the classical attitudes of the figures began to be valued; but the strong Gothic tradition maintains the expressiveness as a vehicle of the deep spiritualistic sense that informs our best Renaissance sculptures. This strong and healthy tradition favors the continuity of religious sculpture in polychrome wood that accepts the formal beauty offered by Italian Renaissance art with a sense of balance that avoids its predominance over the immaterial content that animates the forms. In the first years of the century, Italian works arrived in our lands and some of our sculptors went to Italy, where they learned first hand the new norms in the most progressive centers of Italian art, whether in Florence or Rome, and even in Naples. Upon their return, the best of them, such as Berruguete, Diego de Siloe and Ordóñez, revolutionized Spanish sculpture through Castilian sculpture, even advancing the new mannerist, intellectualized and abstract derivation of the Italian Cinquecento, almost at the same time as it was produced in Italy.