Matías de Arteaga

MATÍAS DE ARTEAGA Y ALFARO (Villanueva de los Infantes, Ciudad Real, 1633 - Seville, 1703).
"The nuptials of the Virgin".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Work exhibited in "Lights of the Baroque. Painting and sculpture of the seventeenth century in Spain". Caja Vital Kutxa, Vitoria, 2002.
It has slight restorations.
It has English stamps on the back.
Provenance: Sir Edgar Vincent Collection (England pp. S. XX) and Philatelic Forum Collection.
Measurements: 62 x 83 cm; 83 x 103,5 cm (frame).

Bibliography:
-Beruete y Moret, A. Valdés Leal. Critical study. Madrid, 1991. p. 70 (lam. 21).
-Mayer, A. L Die Sevillaner Malerschule, Leipzig 1911, p.194.
-Beruete.1914 p. 73.
-Gestoso, J. Biography of the Sevillian painter Juan de Valdés Leal. Seville, 1919 pp. 212.
-Loga V. Von Die Malerei in Spanien. Berlin, 1923. P. 360.
-Mayer, A. L. La pintura española. Barcelona, 1928. P. 340: Kinkead, D.T. Valdés Leal, New York, p. 502.
-Gutiérrez Pastor, I. Lights of the Baroque. Painting and sculpture of the XVII century in Spain. Caja Vital-Kutxa, Vitoria. 2002 pp. 116- 117.
The piece shows the same composition as Arteaga's painting "Los desposorios de la Virgen", which is in the collection of the Prado Museum. In the words of the Museum "This canvas and its companions (P586 - P590), come from the Convent of San Felipe el Real (Madrid). They entered the Prado Museum from the Museo de la Trinidad. Traditionally attributed to Francisco Antolínez, Angulo does not believe them to be his, but rather by a still anonymous artist, whose style is somewhere between Antolínez, Arteaga and Juan Alfaro". The present work shows Mary and Joseph in the temple, in a classical composition, centered and balanced, of Italian heritage. The spouses appear facing each other, holding hands, slightly turned towards the viewer and surrounded by witnesses, in front of the priest standing behind them, centering the composition.
Matías de Arteaga y Alfaro was a Spanish Baroque painter and engraver. 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.