Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. Comes with additional booklet from exhibition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Directors’ Foreword The Sacred Made Real introduces to a large public in Great Britain and the United States of America masterpieces by several European artists of the first rank whose work is not widely known eutside their native Spain except to specialist art historians. It would perhaps be impossible to organise an exhibition which did full justice to the sculpture of Alonso Cano Gregorio Fern?ndez Francisco Antonio Gij?n. Juan Mart?nez Monta??s Pedro de Mena Juan de Mesa and Jos? de Mora because so much of it is still to use the anthropologist’s term. ‘in worship’-but what has been assembled here thanks to the extraordinary generosity of ecclesiastical and civil institutions in Spain demonstrates that Spanish polychrome wood sculptures are worthy of the same attention as the paintings by Zurbar?n. Murillo and Vel?zquez that are displayed beside them. The exhibition is designed to address a neglect that has its roots in the disdain with which the Enlightenment regarded these devotional works of art as objects of superstitious veneration a disdain that was often mingled with the Protestant distaste for Mariolatry and martyrs. The exhibition however has an additional argument. It does not merely make a claim for a technique of sculpture but it also explores the complex and reciprocal relationship between the sister arts in seventeenth-century Spain. This exploration begins with the fact that painters were responsible for colouring carved wooden sculptures and this created a mutual dependency-and rivalry-between painter and sculptor. However the chief models for religious imagery whose compelling power was sanctioned by popular appeal as well as official approval were more often sculptures than paintings. The painters seem to have striven to emulate the enhanced vividness and three-dimensionality of polychrome sculpture although there is a paradox in the case of Vel?zquez whose mature work with its supreme illusionism in its attention to light and atmosphere successfully renders the impalpable features of the real world. It is our hope that those who have viewed the exhibition whether in the National Gallery in London or the National Gallery of Art in Washington will find that their understanding of Spanish painting and sculpture has been altered and enhanced and will be inspired to discover for themselves the glories of the museums churches and monasteries in Spain