Matías de Arteaga.

MATÍAS DE ARTEAGA (Villanueva de los Infantes, Ciudad Real, 1633 - Seville, 1703).
"The nuptials of the Virgin".
Oil on canvas.
Preserves original canvas with patches on the back.
It presents Repainting and restorations in the pictorial surface.
Measurements: 94 x 139 cm; 113 x 159 cm (frame).
The spouses appear one in front of the other holding hands, slightly turned towards the spectator and surrounded by witnesses, in front of the priest who appears standing behind them centering the composition. The scene takes place in a rich interior meticulously described and worked following the laws of classical perspective, referring to Italian models of the 16th century. The work presents a great similarity with works by Matías de Arteaga, where the classical architecture has a great protagonism. An example of this is the work of the Wedding at Cana, which belongs to the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville, where a treatment of space similar to the present painting can be observed. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the theme of the nuptials of the Virgin was recurrent in Arteaga's painting, in fact in the collection of the Prado Museum there is a work very similar to this one, whose attribution, according to Angulo, is linked to Arteaga's circle.
Matías de Arteaga y Alfaro was a painter and engraver of the Spanish Baroque. Attached to the Sevillian school, he knew how to collect and interpret with his own personality the double influence of Murillo and Valdés Leal. Son of the engraver Bartolomé Arteaga, while still a child his family moved to Seville, where he would be trained in his father's workshop and in contact with Murillo, whose influence reveals his early work together with that of Valdés Leal, who settled in Seville the same year that Arteaga passed the master painter's exam, in 1656. In 1660 he was among the founding members of the famous drawing academy promoted by Murillo, among others, of which he served as secretary between that date and 1673. In 1664 he joined the Brotherhood of the Holy Charity and two years later in the Sacramental of the Sagrario of the Sevillian cathedral, for which he made some works. Around 1680 there is also evidence of his work as an appraiser of paintings. He died in 1703, the inventory of the goods left at his death reveals a well-to-do way of life, having a slave and a large and well-furnished house, which had a medium-sized library with important books in Latin and Spanish and an engraving studio, as well as more than one hundred and fifty paintings, almost half of them of religious subject matter. Among them were four series of the Life of the Virgin, some of which were expressly said to contain architectural views, such as those we see in this work and in those preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville. The most characteristic of his peculiar style are precisely these series of always religious subjects, set in broad landscapes and architectural perspectives taken from prints. Skillful in the creation of these deep perspectives, skillfully illuminated, however, in the treatment of the figures and their bodily expressions he tends to develop with a certain clumsiness. Arteaga is represented in the aforementioned Sevillian museum, various Sevillian temples including the cathedral and the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, among others.