Spanish school; 18th century.

Spanish school; XVIII century.
"Christ of Medinaceli".
Oil on glass.
It presents faults in the pictorial surface.
It has a frame of the eighteenth century with damage caused by xylophages.
Measurements: 75 x 54 cm; 83 x 62 cm (frame).
The iconography of the Christ of Medinaceli (also known as Jesús Nazareno Rescatado or El Señor de Madrid) evokes the moment of the Passion when Pontius Pilate presents him to the people. This work, like the great majority of works of this iconography, draws from the sculpture of the Christ of Medinaceli located in the Basilica of Our Father Jesus of Medinaceli in Madrid. Although the author of this carving is unknown, it is believed that it may belong to the Sevillian school of the Cordovan Juan de Mesa.
The Madrid school arose around the court of Philip IV first and then Charles II, and developed throughout the seventeenth century. Analysts of this school have insisted on considering its development as a result of the agglutinating power of the court; what is truly decisive is not the place of birth of the different artists, but the fact that they were educated and worked around and for a nobiliary and religious clientele located next to the royalty. This allows and favors a stylistic unity, although the logical divergences due to the personality of the members can be appreciated. In its origin, the Madrid school is linked to the rise to the throne of Philip IV, a monarch who made Madrid, for the first time, an artistic center. This meant an awakening of the nationalist conscience by allowing a liberation from the previous Italianizing molds to jump from the last echoes of Mannerism to Tenebrism. This will be the first step of the school, which in a gradual sense will walk successively until the attainment of a more autochthonous baroque language and linked to the political, religious and cultural conceptions of the monarchy of the Austrias, to go to die with the first shoots of the rococo that are manifested in the production of the last of its representatives.