Master from Madrid; c. 1666.

Master from Madrid; c. 1666.
"The nuptials of St. Catherine".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
It has Repainting and restorations on the pictorial surface.
It has remains of signature and date in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 109 x 82 cm; 124 x 96 cm (frame).

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 even though the logical divergences due to the personality of the members can be 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.
This image represents the mystical nuptials of Saint Catherine. Her cult was widely spread throughout Europe from the 6th century onwards, she is included in the group of the holy helpers and is invoked against sudden death. Catherine was born around 290 in the bosom of a noble family of Alexandria. Endowed with a great intelligence, she soon stood out for her extensive studies, which placed her on the same level as the greatest poets and philosophers of the time. One night Christ appeared to her and she decided, at that moment, to consecrate her life to him and to consider herself his fiancée, in a sort of mystical marriage.