Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 99. (Budapest, 2003)

NYERGES, ÉVA: New Attribution in the Spanish Collection: An Hitherto Unidentified Painting by José del Castillo

The early 19th-century attribution was probably based, on the one hand, on the deep color scheme that, due to the strongly darkened varnish layer, characterized the picture before conservation, and, on the other, its subject, which may have been paralleled with Viladomat s Life of Saint Francis series of 1724. Nevertheless, the large-scale altarpiece in Budapest have nothing in common either in its figures, composition or even coloring, with the qualities currently associated with the great master of Catalonian Late Baroque painting, and none of the recent general works treating the painter makes reference to the Budapest picture, either, within the context of his oeuvre.

8 In the foreground of the picture the haloed Saint Anthony Abbot is represented lying on a mat. His left is being kissed by a monk, while another crying monk, seen from behind, can be recognized to the left of him. To the right, offering a green wreath adorned with small white flowers to the saint, is a flitting angel in white shirt and blue mantle. He is uplifted by nude putti, the middlemost one holding a palm leaf. In the left foreground appear an open book and a hermit's staff with a small bell. To the right a vista opens up towards a landscape articulated by palm trees, with blue mountains beyond and a cloudy sky above. The foreground of the painting is dominated by brownish hues, whereas the background's color scheme is based on the dark gray-blue and the lively Rococo blue-rosy combinations. The iconography of the painting was properly recognized already while it was in the Esterházy collection: it represents the death of Saint Anthony Abbot, who is identified by his characteristic attributes as the T-shaped cross on his robe, the hermit's staff with the bell, and the open book. The hermit saint died in 356 AD. Upon his death, he instructed two monks not to reveal the site of his resting-place to anyone.

9 The still life with radishes and lemon in the right-hand corner and the palm tree appearing in the mountainous landscape constitute an environment adequate to the hermit saint's iconography, which the painter followed accurately when treating the subject. It was principally the warmer color scheme defined by roses and intensive blues, which has become visible upon the conservation, that incited us to reconsider the authorship of the painting. Characteristic of the prominent master of Madrilenian Rococo painting, José del Castillo, the exposing of this color scheme disproved the traditional dating of the picture, as well: the style, which shows similarities with the of the saint, are missing, and there is a simple circle in the place of the wreath. The angel carrying the wreath is different in its character from the corresponding figure in the Budapest painting, whereas the details that are less successfully treated in the latter, for example the right hand of the saint, are rather awkward in the Lisbon painting, too. The author thus does not exclude the possibility that the smaller Lisbon canvas, whose attribution to Viladomat has to be similarly rejected, would be a reduced copy after either an unknown sketch or the Budapest painting itself. 8 Camón Aznar, J. - Morales y Marín, J.M. - Valdivieso, E., Arte espanol del sigh XVIII (Summa Artis XXVII), Madrid 1986, 72-75; Perez Sanchez, A.E., Pintura barroca en 1600-1750, Madrid 1992, 430-31; Luna, J.]., in The Dictionary of Art 32 (ed. Turner, J.), New York 1996, 536. 9 Kirschbaum, E. - Braunfels, W., Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie 6, Rom-Freiburg-BaselWien 1973, 205-14.