José Antolinez School

School of JOSE ANTOLINEZ (Madrid, 1635-1675), late seventeenth century.
"Immaculate Conception".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Presents restorations, Repainting and faults on the pictorial surface.
Preserves period frame with later polychrome.
Measurements: 187 x 142 cm; 211 x 166 cm (frame).

The Virgin joins her hands piously, while turning her face down, surrounded by angels in heaven, the mother of God is presented majestically as the Immaculate Conception. The piece stands out for the tactile quality of the Virgin's clothing, especially the tunic that presents a rich embroidery of flowers on the immaculate white. The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception was strongly introduced in Spain during the Counter-Reformation, which led to numerous iconographic representations of the Virgin Mary. Many were the artists who worked on this theme, some of them stood out such as Pacheco, Murillo, Velázquez, Valdés Leal and Francisco de Solís himself. Of Antonílez in particular, it has always been emphasized the large number of works he dedicated to the theme of the Immaculate Conception, of which about twenty copies have been preserved, three of them, signed, in the Prado Museum. Thus he managed to create his own iconographic type, of extreme elegance and refinement, in which the Virgin appears with a concentrated countenance, sweetly absorbed in spite of the busy group of angels that surround her.
The piece is close to the precepts of José Antolínez, who was one of the most interesting artists of his generation who, due to his early death, could not reach the splendid maturity that his training foreshadowed. This does not prevent him from being considered a great representative of the full Baroque current that renewed painting at the Spanish court during the third quarter of the 17th century. In his work one can perceive the exquisite sensitivity for the recreation of Titian's manners - always so present in the Spanish painting of his time -, combined with the reception of the elegant painting of the Nordic masters Rubens and Van Dyck, and the capture of the atmosphere of Velázquez. In this way, his technique is loose and vibrant, singularly seductive in the use of cold tonalities, which unfold in compositions full of vigorous movement and unstable activity. We know of his father's work as a carpenter craftsman, when the family was established in the Madrid street of Toledo, although with an ancestral home in the Burgos village of Espinosa de los Monteros. Palomino has conveyed to us the image of a person of a haughty and vain nature, so conscious of his worth that he was often arrogant, an attitude that would provoke abundant friction and disputes with other colleagues. He was a student of Francisco Rizi, with whom he would also become enemies, but this did not prevent his painting from being highly appreciated by his contemporaries. He cultivated all genres: religious painting, landscape -of which there are no examples left-, mythology, portraiture, as well as genre painting. Within the portrait facet are also worthy of note the two children's representations preserved in the Prado Museum. They are works that show, at the same time, the truthful closeness of the characters and the capture of the atmosphere that surrounds them, so much so that they were considered works by Velázquez, until recently when they were attributed to Antolínez by Diego Angulo. Of the canvases preserved in the Prado Museum, "The Transit of the Magdalene" and the two children's portraits come from the royal collections and two of the Immaculate Conception belonged to the Museum of the Trinity, while the third was acquired in 1931 with the funds bequeathed by Aníbal Morillo y Pérez, IV Count of Cartagena.