Author Archives: rpfjacques

A headline in The Times newspaper recently claimed ‘Spain falls back in love’ with Baroque polychromed sculpture, citing a number of spectacular exhibitions that can currently be seen in the cities of Valladolid and Madrid. I thought we might therefore spend some time looking at this phenomenon and the artists and artworks from seventeenth centuryContinue reading “Spain ‘falls back in love’ with Baroque polychromed sculpture”

One of the undeniable qualities of Spanish polychrome sculpture is its ability viscerally to engage the viewer’s emotions, often using a realism that can be difficult to look upon. The most harrowing example of this is the figure of the Recumbent Christ developed by Gregorio Fernández (1576-1636). In this versions from the Prado the RecumbentContinue reading “The raw emotion of Gregorio Fernández’s Recumbent Christs”