The Apostle Santiago and his disciples adoring the Virgen del Pilar
Asset of Cultural Interest.
Paint The Apostle Santiago and his disciples adoring the Virgen del Pilar, attributed to Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, is one of the hundreds of religious paintings on this subject attributed to the painter.
It stands out from the other versions undertaken by Goya in the 1770s for its expressive force, the size of the characters, larger than that of other devotional works, restraint and compositional syncretism, as well as its bright colors and marked light contrasts.
Taking into account the relevance of the author, the high quality of the painting and the few examples known today of Goya's religious production painted on easel in that period; as well as the excellent state of conservation of the work, the painting has been declared an Asset of Cultural Interest, by Decree 2/2023.
The Apostle Santiago and his disciples adoring the Virgen del Pilar
The Apostle Santiago and his disciples adoring the Virgen del Pilar
Work description
Oil painting, c. 1772-1782.
The scene picks up the iconographic theme of the coming of the Virgin Mary in the presence
of the Apostle Santiago when he was praying on the banks of the Ebro river, at the beginning of his preaching of Christianity, and six of his disciples, although written sources usually mention the number of seven. According to tradition, the virgin left as a testimony of her appearance in caesaraugusta a column, known as the Pillar, on whose location Santiago and his disciples built an adobe chapel.
In Goya's painting, the virgin is represented standing on a stone pillar, crowned and gathering up her garments with her right hand, while with her left she holds the Child Jesus, who also wears a crown. Unlike the traditional narration and iconography, the Virgin is not depicted in "mortal flesh" nor does she descend surrounded by a choir of angels. Instead of the sacred character, Goya chooses to represent, as he did in other versions (Museo Provincial de Zaragoza and Museo Nacional de Arte de Catalunya), the late-Gothic gilded wood sculpture attributed to the sculptor Juan de la Huerta, It is venerated in the Holy Chapel of the Basilica del Pilar.
Francisco de Goya and Lucientes (Fuendetodos, Zaragoza, 1746-Bordeaux, France, 1828)
He is considered a great genius of painting. In addition to participating in the aesthetic movements of his time, with his latest works he broadly penetrated the new social and pictorial concepts of the XNUMXth century, anticipating, to a certain extent, many of the artistic and innovative advances of the XNUMXth century, even in aspects of the non-figurative, and establishing the basis for understanding the aesthetic evolution of a good part of the "isms" of the Contemporary Age.
Goya did much of his religious painting in the 1770s and early
years from the next. Upon returning from his training trip to Italy, in 1771, he received his first important commission from the council of the Basilica del Pilar: the decoration of the vault of the choir of the Holy Chapel of the Virgen del Pilar of the Zaragoza temple.
Two years later, Goya will undertake his second important commission: the cycle
of eleven mural paintings that he executed in 1774 for the nave, the transept and the presbytery of the Cartuja de Classroom Dei.
Elected a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1780, he received as his next major commission (thanks to the mediation of Francisco Bayeu) painting the frescoes of two of the five domes of the Basilica of Nuestra Señora del Pilar in Zaragoza. At that time Goya professed great devotion to the Virgen del Pilar.
From a stylistic point of view, the work shows similarities with various tapestry cartoons that Goya made for the ante-bedroom of the Princes of Asturias in the Palacio del Pardo, dated around 1778. On the other hand, both the vividness of the colors how the grouping and postures of the figures coincide with the plastic solutions that the master adopted in the large canvas of The preaching of Saint Bernardino of Siena, painted for one of the altars in the Madrid church of San Francisco el Grande in 1781-82. The dates of these last two works (1778-1782) fall within the chronological framework proposed for this painting.
