Majorcan school; XII century.

Majorcan school; XII century.
"Still life with the abduction of Proserpina".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Measurements: 109 x 152 cm; 123 x 167 cm (frame).
In this canvas the author offers us a still life of flowers and fruits of great exuberance, adorned with the presence of a living animal, a swan that rests its head on the cloth that covers Hades, who holds Proserpina against her will. It is a still life where color prevails over the rest of the pictorial aspects, although the description of the qualities and the play of light and shadow, key elements of the Spanish Baroque still life tradition, are also important. The elements that make up the scene are placed on a table placed parallel to the lower margin of the painting, whose molded perimeter is highlighted by the effects of light. On it we see the large bouquet of flowers, arranged in apparent disorder, and several fruits. While in the other area of the canvas is represented the aforementioned sculpture on a pedestal, accompanied by several vestiges of antiquity that can be seen on the floor.
The Mallorcan school of still lifes shows a strong influence of the Valencian school, although it had its own personality and must have enjoyed a certain importance, given the number of works that have survived to the present day. It developed mainly from the late seventeenth century and during the eighteenth century, from the appearance of the figure of Guillermo Mesquida (1625-1747), which will raise the level of Mallorcan painting. He was the most famous painter of the Balearic Baroque and absolute dominator of the artistic panorama between the end of the XVII and the first half of the XVIII. He was an excellent painter of still lifes, although today we do not preserve a single one of them that we can attribute to him with absolute certainty. His biographers indicate that he was a disciple in Rome of the Italian Carlos Marata, a painter who had great influence in the development of still life, since he collaborated with numerous specialists of this genre. Mesquida represented in his works fruits, animals and flowers, and founded in Mallorca a workshop in which numerous works would be made, some of which are still preserved today. His style would have been characterized by a great chromatic richness and a clear ostentatiousness and abundance of fruit and floral elements, traits that his followers of the Majorcan school would inherit, as can be seen in this canvas. Thanks to Mesquida's influence, the Mallorcan still life painters picked up Italian elements, especially Neapolitan and Roman, always combined with the influence of the Valencian school.