Workshop of Luis de Moreles

Workshop of LUIS DE MORALES "El divino" (Badajoz, 1509 - Alcántara, 1586).
"Ecce Homo".
Oil on canvas adhered to panel.
It has additions in the margins and restorations on the pictorial surface.
Measurements: 69 x 51 cm; 83 x 66 cm (frame).
The devotional intensity of this piece is defined by the sobriety of the artist who reduces the subject to the essential elements to be able to transmit the Christian faith. The half-length Christ in the foreground, against a dark background, is illuminated with a lighting that is based on the precepts of a tenebrist, artificial and directed light. The aforementioned sober, clear composition lends great expressivity to the image, which is intended to move the soul of the faithful, thus indicating that this painting is probably a work intended for private devotion. Painting was thus obliged to express the ideals prevailing in these circles, and religious themes were therefore the preferred subject matter in Spanish painting of this period.
The theme of Ecce Homo belongs to the Passion cycle and immediately precedes the episode of the Crucifixion. The words "Ecce Homo" are those pronounced by Pilate when presenting Christ to the crowd; their translation is "behold the man", a phrase by which he mocks Jesus and implies that Christ's power was not so great as that of the rulers who were judging him.
Due to its technical characteristics, the work is close to the aesthetic postulates of Luis de Morales. A painter of great quality and marked personality, perhaps the best of the Spanish painters of the second half of the 16th century, with the exception of El Greco. His training poses serious problems, although Palomino makes him a disciple of the Flemish painter Pedro de Campaña, who lived in Seville between 1537 and 1563. Certainly the meticulousness and detail of his brushstrokes and the conception of the landscape are Flemish in origin, and most of his iconic themes are of late medieval tradition. But he painted human types and used a colouring and sfumato related to the Lombard tradition of a Bernardino Luini and a Cristoforo Solario, whom he probably met not on a trip to Italy but possibly to Valencia, in order to catch up with the novelties brought by the Leonardesque Fernando Yáñez and Fernando de Llanos and the Raphaelesque Vicente and Juan Masip. However, the most personal aspect of his painting lies in the tormented, almost hysterical atmosphere in which his figures breathe, more focused on an intense inner life than on action, full of melancholy and ascetic renunciation and characteristic of the climate of tense religiosity imposed in 16th-century Spain by the reform movements, from the less orthodox Erasmianism and Alumbradism to the more genuine mysticism and Trentism. Morales, called the Divine by his first biographer, Antonio Palomino, because he painted only religious subjects with great delicacy and subtlety, reached his peak from 1550 to 1570, when he painted numerous altarpieces, He painted numerous altarpieces, triptychs and isolated canvases that were widely distributed because they satisfied the popular religiosity of the time, although some of his canvases contain quotations and information of literary erudition, the result of his contact with enlightened clients, primarily the bishops of the diocese of Badajoz, in whose service he worked. On the other hand, his presence in the monastery of El Escorial, called by Philip II, is not documented, although it seems that the latter acquired some of his works to give them as gifts. The enormous production and the continuous demand for his most frequent and popular iconographic themes obliged him to maintain a large workshop in which his two sons, Cristóbal and Jerónimo, collaborated; a workshop responsible for many copies that circulate and are still considered to be Morales's autograph works.