Luis de Morales Workshop

Workshop of LUIS MORALES (Badajoz, 1509 - Alcántara, 1586).
"Ecce Homo".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Measurements: 60 x 45 cm; 79 x 64 cm (frame).
This devotional table drinks directly from the paintings with the same theme by Luis de Morales. Due to the proximity in the theme and treatment, it is considered an artist of the workshop of the Flemish-Andalusian master. Of meticulous workmanship and tenebrist light, he transmits the Passionary moment with a masterful handling of chiaroscuro, having learned the teachings of Morales (see the Ecce Homos preserved in the Prado Museum or in the Staatliche Kunstsammlunguen Museum in Dresden). The figure is cut in half body on a black background enhances its gaunt anatomy and gaunt skin, bowed head and sorrowful eyes. He holds with one long-fingered hand the cane like a scepter. It communicates an intense, emotionally charged pathos, conveying a mystical experience. The theme around the Passion of Christ is one of the most significant aspects of the iconography of Luis de Morales. The Ecce Homo and its variant as Varón de Dolores, in the works of Morales, had great acceptance in his time, reaching to make several versions of these themes.
The Ecce Homo theme precedes the episode of the Crucifixion. The words "Ecce Homo" are those pronounced by Pilate when presenting Christ before the crowd; its translation is "behold the man", a phrase by which he mocks Jesus and implies that the power of Christ was not such in front of the leaders who were judging him there.
Luis de Morales is considered one of the Spanish painters of the second half of the 16th century. His training poses serious problems, although Palomino makes him a disciple of the Flemish, resident in Seville between 1537 and 1563. He uses a coloring and a sfumato related to the Lombard tradition of a Bernardino Luini and a Cristoforo Solario, whom he surely met not through a trip to Italy but possibly to Valencia, to get acquainted with the novelties contributed by the Leonardesque Fernando Yáñez and Fernando de Llanos and the Raphaelesque Vicente and Juan Masip. However, the most personal bias of his painting lies in the tormented and almost hysterical atmosphere in which his characters breathe, turned more than to action towards an intense inner life, full of melancholy and ascetic renunciation and characteristic of the climate of tense religiosity that the reform movements had imposed in 16th century Spain, from the less orthodox Erasmianism and Alumbradism, to the most genuine mysticism and Trentism. Morales, called the Divine by his first biographer, Antonio Palomino, because he painted only religious subjects with great delicacy and subtlety, reached his best period from 1550 to 1570, painting numerous altarpieces, triptychs and isolated canvases that obtained enormous diffusion because they satisfied the popular religiosity of the time, although some of his canvases contain quotations and data of learned erudition, product of the contact with the enlightened clients, to count in first place the bishops of the diocese of Badajoz, to whose service he was. On the other hand, his presence in the monastery of El Escorial, called by Philip II, is not documented, although it seems that the latter acquired some of his works to give them as gifts. The enormous production and the continuous request for his most frequent and popular iconographic themes forced him to maintain a large workshop in which his two sons, Cristóbal and Jerónimo, collaborated; a workshop responsible for many copies that circulate and are still considered to be Morales' autographs.