Circle or workshop of Alonso Berruguete, ca. 1520-1530

Spanish school of ca. 1520-1530. Circle or workshop of ALONSO BERRUGUETE (Paredes de Nava, c.1490-Toledo, 1561).
"San Pablo".
Carved wood, gilded and with original polychrome.
It presents cracks and old restorations.
Measurements: 143 x 80 x 52 cm.

This sculpture shows the technical quality of Alonso Berruguete, it could be a work of his circle or workshop. It is a high quality carving, monumental and majestic, representing St. Paul raising his arms (possibly holding a book in his left hand and a sword in his right hand, both attributes not preserved today). We can appreciate in this sculpture the strong personality of Alonso Berruguete, an artist who arrived in Italy being essentially a painter and who returned to Spain as a magnificent sculptor. In Italy he was strongly influenced by classical statuary (with works such as Laooconte) and by the sculptures of Michelangelo, a morphological aspect that can be appreciated in the powerful anatomy and the serenity that emanates from the face of the Saint.

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. Upon their return, the best of them (Pedro Berruguete, father of Alonso Berruguete, Diego de Siloé y Ordóñez) will revolutionize Spanish sculpture through Castilian sculpture, even advancing the new mannerist, intellectualized and abstract derivation of the Italian Cinquecento, almost at the same time that it is produced in Italy. Alonso González Berruguete (Paredes de Nava, c.1490-Toledo, 1561) was a Spanish sculptor and painter, son of the painter Pedro Berruguete and one of the fundamental references of Spanish Renaissance sculpture. From 1507 he was in Italy expanding his knowledge of painting, mainly in Florence, where he must have arrived around 1512. The long years of his stay in Italy allowed him to become deeply acquainted with the masters of the Quattrocento and the models of classical Greco-Latin sculpture. He took up residence in Valladolid in 1523, where he founded his workshop and dedicated himself to the carving of altarpieces and images.