The name of Juan de Mesa (Cordoba, 1583-Seville, 1627) has long occupied its rightful place in the art and sculpture of the Golden Age, as evidenced by textbooks, universities, exhibitions and auctions. Today he goes even further, as one of his works reaches the most important museum in Spain. At the Prado Museum.
This Tuesday, November 19, the center is inaugurating the exhibition ‘Shaking hands. Sculpture and color in the Golden Age”, in which five polychrome wooden sculptures that the Prado Museum that you have just purchased to be part of your funds. It is sponsored by the Axa Foundation.
One of them is a picture of Saint John the Baptist attributed to Juan de Mesa, which had been put up for sale at auction and which now belongs to the public heritage. The Prado Museum dates it between 1623 and 1627, the year of his death, and it would therefore be a work from his most mature period, after works like The Lord of the Great Power by Vergara or The Christ of the ‘Agony.
It is a work of considerable dimensions, in which the last of the prophets before Jesus is represented with a height of 168 centimeters. The Prado Museum highlights its “monumentality”, even if the Cordovan sculptor created larger works.
Saint John the Baptist appears standing and holding in his left hand a book on which there is a lamb. This is the lamb of Godwhich he announced when speaking of Christ. “The right arm is raised towards the viewer in a declamatory attitude,” specifies the Prado Museum.
In accordance with his traditional iconography and the Gospel story, he wears a camel skin tunic, but also a red coat, stewed on gold, “worked with great profusion”.
The information from the Prado Museum focuses on this work carried out by polychromatorand in the “wide border with plant and colorful motifs made with sgraffito and brush tip decoration”. It’s a must in an exhibition that talks about color.
Detail of the hand, with the seal of Juan de Mesa on the movement
What we can know about this Saint John the Baptist is already in the realm of hypothesis, including the date. For the Prado Museum, the monumentality indicates that it could have belonged “to the main altarpiece of a temple”, but there is something unique about it: it is a round image and it is also carved and finished on the sides and back.
The complete treatment of the volume and the chromaticism mean that the cultural center considers this work as “very attractive”, which could have belonged to an abandoned church and which would then have passed into private hands until landing in the art market.
This is not the first work by Juan de Mesa that the State has purchased, already acquired for the National Museum of Sculpture from Valladolid to San Nicolás de Tolentino and in 2019 to the Immaculate Conception.
The image has been known for a decade and some researchers had dated it precisely to the last years of Juan de Mesa, when he had already somewhat refined the roundness of his way of sculpting and showed a more subtle line. More conformable, for example, to Christ of Virgin of Angustiashis latest work.
Features
Of course, it presents many of the usual traits of its author, both in the strong dynamism and in the face of the image and in the musculature. This is the third known representation of Saint John the Baptist by the Cordovan sculptor, since he created one for the Seville Charterhouse (today in the city’s Museum of Fine Arts) and another which is today in a convent in Bormujos.
The work was put up for auction in 2022 for a price of 450,000 euros in the Isbilya room and did not find a buyer, and now it will be part of the collections of the Prado Museum, which he acquired with two works by Alonso Berruguete which represent Gestas and Saint Dimas, the two thieves crucified in side of Jesus, and José de Arimathea and Nicodemus, of Castilian origin from the end of the Middle Ages.
The exhibition which opens this Tuesday, November 19 aims to show how “the close and perfect collaboration between sculptors and painters testifies to the great value of color, which, far from being a simple superficial finish of the work, was an essential part of without which this would not be possible. ” “It was considered concluded.” There will be works of Juan Martínez MontañésProfessor of Mesa, and Gregorio Fernándezamong other great authors.
It is precisely these two authors who are the stars of an exhibition in the Cathedral of Valladolid in which there is a work by Juan de Mesa: the Blessing of the Child Jesus presented in the Museum of Fine Arts from Cordoba, and which was offered for this exhibition.
