Madrid School; second half of the XVII century.

Madrid School; second half of the seventeenth century.
"Ecce Homo".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Presents restorations.
Measurements: 86 x 65 cm; 108 x 88 cm (frame).
Of simple and clear composition, with the bust of Christ in the foreground, the absence of narrative details deepens the expressive power of the image. The marked features of this Ecce homo enhance the expressiveness of the face. Blood drips from the crown of thorns that girdles his forehead. The red cloth, a color associated with passion and sacrifice, leaves his muscular torso naked and vulnerable. The modeling of lights and shadows defines the forms and volumes, especially expressive in the treatment of the red cloak that covers her hips and thorax, and in the skin already bruised by the last sufferings. An intimate image that conveys the extreme loneliness of Jesus at the moment when he is exposed to be judged and condemned.
The Madrid Baroque school arose around the court of Philip IV first and Charles II later, and developed throughout the seventeenth century, continuing well into the eighteenth 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 are appreciated. 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, is walking 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. Stylistically, it starts from a naturalism with a remarkable 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.