Madrid School; second half of the XVII century.

Madrid School; second half of the seventeenth century.
"Saint Walburga".
Oil on canvas, preserves original canvas.
Presents restorations.
It has a XIX century frame.
Measurements: 93 x 96 cm; 103,5 x 79 cm (frame).
Work starring the figure of a saint, dressed as a nun and with the crosier in her hand, indicating her ecclesiastical relevance. The work is set in a classicist interior with a large red curtain that opens to the outside in whose upper area dominates a break of glory with cherub heads. As can be read in the inscription painted on the column, the protagonist is St. Walburga who was born in Dumnonia, which roughly corresponds to modern Devon, during the period when it was incorporated into Anglo-Saxon England. She was the daughter of Richard the Pilgrim, probably a British king of the West Saxons.
The Madrid school arose around the court of first Philip IV and then Charles II, and developed throughout the seventeenth 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 based next to the royalty. This allows and favors a stylistic unity even though there are logical divergences due to the personality of the members. 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 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.