Jerónimo Ezquerra

JERÓNIMO EZQUERRA ( Madrid, c. 1658/1659 -1733).
"Immaculate Conception".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Attached report issued by Don Ismael Gutiérrez Pastor, pigment analysis and condition report.
Measurements: 163.5 x 108 cm; 185 x 127 cm (frame).
This devotional painting is evidence of the persistence and reinterpretation of the late Baroque models of Madrid in the early years of the 18th century. Probably trained in the environment of Juan Carreño de Miranda and active in Madrid during the final reigns of the Habsburgs and the beginning of the Bourbon dynasty, Ezquerra developed a painting deeply linked to the Madrid court tradition, characterized by chromatic softness, compositional elegance and a spirituality with an intimate accent. The work analyzed here is clear evidence of this stylistic dependence on the language of Carreño, whose iconographic model of the Immaculate Conception was very widespread in Spain at the end of the 17th century.
The painting falls within the genre of devotional religious painting, specifically in the representation of the Immaculate Conception, one of the central themes of Hispanic Baroque spirituality. Long before the dogmatic proclamation of 1854, the defense of Mary's original purity constituted in Spain an authentic question of identity, promoted both by religious orders and by the monarchy itself. In this context, the immaculist iconography acquired an extraordinary artistic development, from the Sevillian formulations of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo to the Madrid court versions linked to Carreño and his disciples.
The composition responds clearly to the model created by Carreño de Miranda: the Virgin appears suspended above a mass of clouds and cherubs, wrapped in a wide blue mantle that generates a powerful dynamic and ascending effect. Dressed in a white tunic and covered by the traditional ultramarine mantle, Mary adopts a serene and monumental attitude, with her hand on her chest and her arm extended in a gesture of acceptance and spiritual mediation. The figure is silhouetted against a vaporous atmosphere of golden lights and blurred skies, a characteristic resource of the late Baroque Madrid school, where the pictorial matter loses density to become luminous vibration.

From the stylistic point of view, the work shows a clear continuity with the courtly baroque tradition derived from Diego Velázquez and prolonged by painters such as Carreño, Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo or Francisco Rizi. The brushstroke is fluid and atmospheric, particularly visible in the treatment of the clouds and angelic faces, where the forms seem to melt in the light. In contrast to the more intense naturalism of the Sevillian Baroque, here an idealized and courtly elegance predominates. Color plays an essential role: the deep blues of the mantle contrast delicately with the pearly tones of the tunic and the warm flesh tones of the putti, generating a refined chromatic harmony of evident Venetian resonance. The documentary sources and the few works preserved show an artist interested in the Italian colorist tradition and in the atmospheric landscape inherited from the Velázquez school. Although few secure paintings by his hand are known today, works such as the Allegory of Water demonstrate his ability to integrate the Madrid tradition with a technique of great chromatic richness and subtle lighting effects. In this Inmaculada that same sensibility is translated into a painting of vaporous tones, constructed more by means of glazes and transparencies than by rigid drawing.