Spanish School, 16th century.

Spanish School, 16th century.
"Virgin and Child."
Carved and polychrome wood.
Measurements: 122 x 35 x 27 cm.

At the beginning of the 16th century, Spain was the European nation best prepared to embrace the new humanist concepts of life and art due to its spiritual, political, and economic conditions, although, from the standpoint of the visual arts, its adaptation of the styles introduced by Italy was slower due to the need to learn new techniques and to shift the tastes of its clientele. Sculpture perhaps reflects this desire to return to the Greco-Roman classical world better than other artistic fields, exalting human individuality in its nudes and creating a new style whose vitality goes beyond mere imitation. Soon, artists began to value anatomy, the movement of figures, compositions with a sense of perspective and balance, the naturalistic play of folds, and the classical poses of the figures; but the strong Gothic tradition maintained expressiveness as a vehicle for the profound spiritualism that informs our finest Renaissance sculptures. This strong and healthy tradition fostered the continuity of religious sculpture in polychrome wood, which embraced the formal beauty offered by Italian Renaissance art with a sense of balance that prevented it from overshadowing the immaterial content that animates the forms. In the early years of the century, Italian works arrived in our lands, and some of our sculptors traveled to Italy, where they learned firsthand the new standards in the most progressive centers of Italian art—whether in Florence, Rome, or even Naples. Upon their return, the best among them—such as Berruguete, Diego de Siloe, and Ordóñez—would revolutionize Spanish sculpture through the Castilian style, even advancing the new, intellectualized, and abstract Mannerist offshoot of the Italian Cinquecento, almost simultaneously with its emergence in Italy.