Spanish school; second third of the XVI century.

Spanish school; second third of the XVI century.
"San Antón".
Oil on panel.
Presents faults.
Measurements. 85 x 69 cm; 89 x 75 cm (frame).
According to the legend, Saint Anthony Abbot was born in Egypt in the year 251, and very young he retired to the solitude of the desert. Towards the end of his life, he visited Paul the hermit, superior of the anchorites of the Thebaid, miraculously fed by a raven that day carried in its beak double ration of bread. Some time later, upon learning of the death of his venerable brother, he went to bury him with the help of two lions. In addition, in Catalonia, adventures and miracles were attributed to him, which served as a theme for Jaume Huguet for his altarpiece of Saint Anthony in Barcelona. The order of the Antonines was founded in the 11th century under the invocation of Saint Anthony as a holy healer. To maintain their encomiendas and hospitals, the Antonines dedicated themselves to raising pigs. They enjoyed the privilege of letting their animals, recognizable by the bell that jingled on their necks, roam the streets of the villages and the communal lands. Hence one of the most popular attributes of the saint is an animal with a cowbell around its neck, usually a pig. The extraordinary popularity of Saint Anthony is due, however, to his fame as a healer saint, and that is why he is represented here with a crutch as an iconographic attribute. Usually, this saint is represented as a bearded old man wearing a hooded sackcloth, a common garment of the Antonines. Apart from those already mentioned, another of his most frequent attributes is the tau.
Spain is, at the beginning of the 16th century, the European nation best prepared to receive the new humanist concepts of life and art due to its spiritual, political and economic conditions, although from the point of view of the plastic forms, its adaptation of those implanted by Italy was slower due to the need to learn the new techniques and to change the taste of the clientele. Soon the anatomy, the movement of the figures, the compositions with a sense of perspective and balance, the naturalistic play of the folds, the classical attitudes of the figures began to be valued; but the strong Gothic tradition maintains the expressiveness as a vehicle of the deep spiritualistic sense that informs our best Renaissance sculptures. This strong and healthy tradition favors the continuity of religious painting that accepts the formal beauty offered by Italian Renaissance art with a sense of balance that avoids its predominance over the immaterial content that animates the forms. In the first years of the century, Italian works arrived to our lands and some of our artists went to Italy, where they learned first hand the new norms in the most progressive centers of Italian art, such as Florence or Rome, and even in Naples.