Valladolid School; c. 1550.

School of Valladolid; c. 1550.
"San Agustín".
Carved, polychromed and gilded wood.
It shows wear and damage caused by xylophages.
Measurements: 79 x 45 x 23 cm.
This sculpture of Saint Augustine, attributed to the School of Valladolid around 1550, is a magnificent example of the Castilian imagery of the Renaissance. Carved in wood, polychrome and gilded, it presents the saint in a solemn attitude, seated, with one hand raised in a gesture of preaching or blessing, which reinforces his character of doctor of the Church. In the other hand he holds a book, symbol of his vast theological production and his role as one of the main thinkers of Christianity, the saint wears a miter, an episcopal attribute that identifies him as bishop of Hippo, and he wears large liturgical vestments whose folds, carefully sculpted and enhanced with gilding, confer monumentality and visual richness to the figure. The polychromy, although sober, maintains the balance between the sumptuousness and the spiritual recollection of the character, and the fact that the carving is not worked on the back suggests that it was conceived to occupy a niche or altarpiece, designed to be contemplated exclusively from the front.
Spain is, at the beginning of the 16th century, the European nation best prepared to receive the new humanist concepts of life and art due to its spiritual, political and economic conditions, although from the point of view of plastic forms, its adaptation of those introduced by Italy was slower due to the need to learn the new techniques and to change the taste of the clientele. Sculpture reflects perhaps better than other artistic fields this eagerness to return to the classical Greco-Roman world that exalts in its nudes the individuality of man, creating a new style whose vitality surpasses the mere copy. Soon the anatomy, the movement of the figures, the compositions with a sense of perspective and balance, the naturalistic play of the folds, the classical attitudes of the figures began to be valued; but the strong Gothic tradition maintains the expressiveness as a vehicle of the deep spiritualistic sense that informs our best Renaissance sculptures. This strong and healthy tradition favors the continuity of religious sculpture in polychrome wood that accepts the formal beauty offered by Italian Renaissance art with a sense of balance that avoids its predominance over the immaterial content that animates the forms. In the first years of the century, Italian works arrived in our lands and some of our sculptors went to Italy, where they learned first hand the new norms in the most progressive centers of Italian art, whether in Florence or Rome, and even in Naples. On their return, the best of them, such as Berruguete, Diego de Siloe and Ordóñez, revolutionized Spanish sculpture through Castilian sculpture, even advancing the new mannerist, intellectualized and abstract derivation of the Italian Cinquecento, almost at the same time as it was produced in Italy.