Spanish school; c. 1600.

Spanish school; c. 1600.
"Maria".
Carved wood, gilded and polychrome.
Presents faults.
Measurements: 160 x 47 x 34 cm.
Devotional carving representing Mary standing in a pious attitude, with her hands on her chest and her gaze directed towards heaven. Both the posture and the fact that it is technically worked only on the frontal area, indicate that the work originally belonged to a larger sculptural group. Stylistically, the carving belongs to the late Renaissance. The posture follows classical patterns, but the expressivity of the face is a forerunner of baroque solutions. The countenance, wiry and melancholic, transmits the empathy of the Virgin. The tunic is folded in naturalistic draperies, which completely envelop the figure, except for the feet, one of them being advanced.
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.