Madrid School; second half of the XVII century.

Madrid School; second half of the seventeenth century.
"Saint Anne.
Oil on canvas. Relined old.
Measurements: 77 x 61 cm.
The Madrid school arises around the court of Philip IV first and Charles II later, and develops throughout the seventeenth century. The analysts of this school have insisted in considering its development as a result of the agglutinating power of the court; what is really decisive is not the place of birth of the different artists, but the fact that they are educated and work 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 can be appreciated. In its origin, the Madrid school is linked to the rise to the throne of Philip IV, a monarch who made Madrid, for the first time, an artistic center. 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 will walk 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. The techniques most used by these painters were oil and fresco. Stylistically, they start from a naturalism with a notable capacity for synthesis to opportunely lead 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.