Last weekend I fortunate to attend a ‘Scholars’ Day’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focused on their new exhibition “El Greco to Velazquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III.” The morning consisted of a guided tour of the exhibition led by William B. Jordan and Richard Kagan, and both the tour and the exhibition itself were tremendously enjoyable‚ÄîI highly recommend a visit when the exhibition opens to the public tomorrow.
Two paintings in particular stood out to me. The first was Juan Bautista Maino’s 1612 Adoration of the Magi. (Apologies for the terrible picture, but it’s all that I could find to link to. A better image is available in the slideshow on the MFA’s website.) To my untrained eye, the painting looks virtually identical to one of the belenes, or cr?™che scenes, still popular in Spain. The ivy on the stones, the appearance of the Magi… Maino’s scene is a dead-ringer for its modern three-dimensional counterparts. This makes perfect sense to me: “Belenismo,” the art of making lifelike belenes, was essentially imported from Naples in the early seventeenth century, at precisely the time that Maino was painting. (Fow what it’s worth, iIt is still considered a high art in Spain, and every December the city of Madrid assembles a walking tour of the city’s most impressive examples.)
The other painting that caught my eye was Luis Trist?°n de Escamilla’s 1613 Crucifixion. (No online photo, I’m afraid.) As one of my fellow participants pointed out, deep in the background of the painting, barely visible behind the crucified Christ’s feet, the city of Toledo stands in for Jerusalem. This may just be an example of a tendency which I tend to associate with northern art of the period: that is, to transpose biblical events to local landscapes, perhaps to make it easier for the beholder to feel that he/she is really witnessing the scene before him/her. But this may also be a reference to the legend, popularized in the early 1570s by the court historian Esteban de Garibay, that Toledo literally was the New Jerusalem. The legend rested on two bases: first, the alleged topographical identity of Jerusalem and Toledo; and second, the fact that Toledo is supposed to have been founded by a contingent of Israelites brought to Spain in the sixth century BC by Nebuchadnezzar, in the period commonly known as the “Babylonian Captivity.”
In any case, it is a terrific show, and I hope that it will receive many visitors!