‘Me juzgo por natural de Madrid’: Vincencio Carducho, Theorist and Painter of Spain's Court Capital

Abstract More than a guide for painters, Vicente de Carducho's Diálogos de la pintura has long been recognized to promote painting as a liberal art and to advocate for the creation of an academy of painting in seventeenth-century Madrid. But questions of patriotic belonging and prestige are also at stake in this erudite treatise. In his prologue, Carducho prioritizes his allegiance to his adopted city even while acknowledging his debts to his native Florence. The first part of this article argues that the treatise serves to showcase that allegiance as it participates in a project to make the young political capital a great cultural centre. The second part makes the case for Carducho as a practitioner who understood the debt he owed to the visual culture of his adopted homeland while remaining true to the aesthetic principles of his Florentine training. His late depictions of saints in adoration of the crucifix provide a focus for examining a religious sensibility subtly informed by Spanish devotional literature.

Vincencio Carducho's Diálogos de la pintura and a Sense of Patria Laura R. Bass La mas heroica accion del hombre (según enseña Séneca) es la que haze en favor de su República. Mi natural Patria es la nobilísima ciudad de Florencia, Cabeza de la Toscana; y por tantos títulos ilustre en el mundo, pero como mi educación desde los primeros años haya sido en España, y particularmente en la Corte de nuestros Católicos Monarcas, con cuyas Reales mercedes me veo honrado (si allí es la Patria, donde mejor sucede lo necesario a la vida) justamente me juzgo por natural de Madrid, para que sin negar lo que debo a la originaria, satisfaga a lo que pide la Patria donde habito. 1 Thus Vincencio Carducho (Florence 1576/1578-Madrid 1638) opens the prologue to his 1633 Diálogos de la pintura, a work often trumpeted as the first published treatise on painting in Spanish. At the same time, its Florentine-born author is often identified with his place of origin. Carducho arrived in Madrid at the age of eight or nine in the care of his older brother and guardian Bartolomeo Carduchi, a workshop assistant to Federico Zuccaro, one of the many Italian artists invited by Philip II to complete the decoration of El Escorial. Accounts of Vincencio's career have traditionally privileged the close connections he maintained with Italy. Emphasizing that his formative years were spent in the company of Italian emigrants like his brother, scholars have argued that his training among Tuscan painters indelibly marked his artistic style. Similarly, they have maintained that Italian art theory provided the principal scaffolding of the Diálogos. 2 Yet a recent resurgence of interest in the painter-theorist is bringing to light a fuller picture of his social, intellectual and artistic affinities and affiliations in Spain, and its international court capital. Álvaro Pascual Chenel and Ángel Rodríguez Rebollo's 2015 catalogue raisonné of his drawings newly illuminates Carducho's prolific career throughout Madrid and its environs. 3 A forthcoming edition of the testimony given in favour of This essay analyses the plural claims of social location and allegiance that Carducho makes at the outset of his treatise. Scholars often cite these lines for the biographical information they provide. Yet at least just as important, they illuminate the nature and aims of the Diálogos as a whole. Moreover, Carducho's opening statement invites consideration of notions of belonging and forms of local attachment in seventeenth-century Madrid. Art historians have long recognized that the overarching goal of the book was to elevate the status of painting in Spain from a manual, taxable craft to a liberal art studied and practised under the auspices of a royal academy. 7 What bears emphasizing, however, is that Carducho's commitment to the ennoblement of painting participates in a larger project of cultural promotion of his adopted city shared with intellectuals and writers to whose same networks of urban sociability he belonged.
As Marta Bustillo has shown, particularly important among those networks were the confraternities of which Carducho was a member: Cristo de la Fe, the Congregación de los Esclavos del Santísimo Sacramento, and the Venerable Órden Tercera de San Francisco. He even served on the governing council of the latter brotherhood and assumed charge of the building and decoration of its chapel. Fellow members included men from the highest social ranks such as the Cardenal Infante and the Marqués de Cañete, as well as cultural luminaries like the writers Lope de Vega and Juan Pérez de Montalbán, royal mathematician and architect Julio César Firrufino and humanists Lorenzo van der Hamen and Jerónimo de Quintana. 8 Several of these intellectuals contributed to the Diálogos: Firrufino wrote the second aprobación, Lope and Pérez de Montalbán contributed poems, van der Hamen composed a defence of painting reprinted in the Memorial informatorio at the end of the Diálogos.
These figures were members of a creative elite of the lesser nobility or professional classes whose concentration in Madrid owed itself to the city's establishment as Spain's court capital. Of the men just listed, only Quintana came from a long-established local family. 9 The rest were products of the waves of immigration, both from other parts of Spain and abroad, that transformed Madrid from a town of 20,000 inhabitants in 1561 to a city of 130,000 by 1630, the most populous on the Iberian Peninsula. 10 As is well known, Lope was the son of a master embroiderer, originally from the mountains of Cantabria, who settled in Madrid (via Valladolid) as early as 1561. Pérez de Montalbán's father, Alonso Pérez, was a bookseller from Valladolid who relocated to Madrid by 1588, becoming one of the city's most active publishers in the period. 11 Van der Hamen was one of three culturally prominent sons of a nobleman from Utrecht who moved to Madrid as a member of the Flemish Royal Guard. 12 Firrufino's father came to Madrid from the Piemonte (via Burgos and Seville) in the service of Philip II, who named him catedrático de Matemáticas de Palacio-a post Julio César would subsequently assume. 13 Madrid's literati were not just products of the city's capital status; they were its producers as well, committed to giving it a historical memory and intellectual prestige worthy of its political importance. 14 Nor were they dependent on court patronage for their full range of professional activity and recognition. If the men in Carducho's circle all coveted aristocratic and royal favour, they also flourished in a wider arena, exploiting demands for their talent by municipal and church authorities and a booming commercial market for culture. 15 For native-born writers like Lope de Vega, Pérez de Montalbán and Quintana, exalting Madrid, sometimes with direct municipal backing, was a vehicle for affirming their own professional dignity, semi-autonomous from the royal court even as it inevitably basked in the latter's prestige. In Carducho's case, the matter was somewhat more complex: he wrote as a naturalized citizen, with a deep pride and nostalgia for the Florence of his first years. 16  15 See also Javier Portús, Pintura y pensamiento en la España de Lope de Vega (Hondarribia: Nerea, 1999), 86. 16 That nostalgia comes out with particular poignancy in Maestro's response to Discípulo's laudatory description of his visit to Florencia in the first Dialogue, discussed below: 'Agradézcote la lisonja, que si bien es mi Patria, salí della de tan poca edad, que casi no tengo memoria de cosa alguna. Y así he escuchado todo con tanta novedad, como ufano de appointment as pintor de su majestad for close to three decades. Still, he had no less an investment in the city than did his friends who were born there. His social allegiances belie the assumption that immigrants to the city identified so exclusively with its cosmopolitan court that they showed little interest in the local community. 17 Carducho launches his prologue with the Humanist precept that great men are obliged to serve the common good: 'La más heroica acción del hombre (según nos enseña Séneca) es la que haze en favor de su República' (f. [ ¶ ¶3]). Such statements were routine in Renaissance treatises on the arts and technology and in historical chronicles, but for Carducho, a writer intent on affirming his local allegiance, the specific invocation of Seneca -'el Séneca español', as he was claimed in the period-could not have been accidental. 18 Of particular resonance as well is Carducho's use of república. In one sense, the word pairs with patria, almost as a synonym for the latter term, insistently repeated in the following sentences. 19 However, while patria is more closely identified with loyalty to a concrete place-'la tierra donde uno ha nacido'-república conveys ideals of political community: the res publica of classical Humanism that promoted the good of its citizens and prized individual virtue, learning and artistic achievement. 20 As espoused by such Early Modern theorists as Giovanni Botero, author of the influential essay On the Greatness of Cities (1588), such ideals found their quintessential expression in the city, in the words of James Amelang, 'both symbol and source of social and cosmic order'. 21  in exalting the city as the embodiment of republican principles. As historian James Hankins argues, these principles did not necessarily correspond to an ideal of egalitarian rule; indeed, the Florentine civic Humanists largely promoted a meritocratic vision of the res publica and sought to 'open up the ranks of the political elite to those who were truly virtuous, not merely noble by descent '. 22 It is this spirit of república that Carducho invokes: a social and political order in which select men of his profession enjoy aristocratic privileges in recognition of their necessary contributions to the common good. 23 There was nothing democratic in his defence of painting; indeed, his ambitions for the establishment of a royal academy of art were thwarted by none other than Madrid's guild painters. 24 What Carducho wanted was to broaden the criteria for nobility to include men like himself-learned painters of dignified subjects. 25 Later in the prologue, he will inveigh against those who would 'empadronar [la pintura] como a villana' ('register her in the local census as a [tax-paying] commoner') (f. [ ¶ ¶3 v ]). The comment invites a double reading: to treat painting like a villana in a city that is no longer only a villa but also a corte was an indignity both to the art form and to Madrid itself. For Carducho, the ennoblement of painting and the city's grandeur as the capital of the Spanish monarchy went hand in hand.
Before mentioning Madrid, however, Carducho extols his 'natural Patria': 'la nobilisima ciudad de Florencia, Cabeza de la Toscana; y por tantos títulos ilustre en el mundo [ … ]', employing a rhetoric of praise that echoes such influential urban panegyrics as Bruni's Laudatio Florentinae urbis. 26 Florence comes first here for reasons that go beyond biographical chronology. It will figure prominently in the first Dialogue as one of the first cities Discípulo visits on his study trip of Europe's art collections and monuments and the one he describes in greatest detail. Besides the sheer splendour of Florence, 'la ciudad más hermosa de toda Europa' (f. 7 r ), Discípulo foregrounds the social eminence of its painters and sculptors-manifest, above all, in the city's Accademia del Disegno. It so happens that Discípulo visited the academy the very day that Maestro, Carducho's alter-ego in the Diálogos, was unanimously elected as one of its members. In fact, the paintertheorist had been awarded membership in the Florentine academy in absentia in 1630. 27 So proud was he of this honour that it is the first he advertises on the title page of his book (Fig. 2). What the Accademia del Disegno meant to Carducho can perhaps best be gleaned by Discípulo's description of the privileges and competencies of its members: Los Académicos que fueren desta Academia, quedan nobles ellos, y sus hijos, cuando de suyo no lo sean, y dellos nombra su Alteza un Pintor, y un Escultor, para que juntos con el que preside en nombre suyo (que de ordinario es Letrado, y uno del Consejo Supremo, que llaman Quarantotto) conozcan de los casos, y pleitos destas Artes, sin que la Justicia ordinaria se meta en cosa dellos. (f. 11 v ) An elite institution governed by appointees of the Grand Duke and empowered with independent jurisdiction over all matters related to the arts of painting and sculpture, the Florentine academy clearly stands as a model for the art academy which Carducho and his peers assiduously promoted at the Madrid court. Set forth in a 1624 petition to the Cortes, their ambitions were nothing short of what Jonathan Brown has aptly described as an 'imperialist' monopoly over artistic production in Madrid involving full regulation of the practice of painting. 28 Among other charges, they would assume an advisory role in the appointment of royal painters, sculptors and architects to avoid 'las negociaciones y favores que ordinariamente en estos casos concurren'. 29 A paradox emerges here: along with the desire and need for royal patronage comes a challenge to royal prerogative. Carducho depends on the king but seeks a sphere of competency in which the king depends on him.
A similar paradox appears in the first lines of the prologue as Carducho shifts the focus from his first patria to the place of his upbringing and adult life: the Spanish court, 'pero como mi educación desde los primeros años haya sido en España, y particularmente la Corte de nuestros Católicos Monarcas, con cuyas Reales mercedes me veo honrado'. There is unquestionable sincerity in Carducho's affirmation of loyalty to 'nuestros Catolicos Monarcas'. As Jean Andrews shows, he was a genuinely devout Catholic who infused his art with religious feeling; moreover, Catholicism was the common denominator of his membership in the local confraternities mentioned above. So, too, is there unquestionable pride, along with suitable gratitude, in his reference to the royal favours he has received: i.e., his 29 Brown, 'Academies of Painting in Seventeenth-Century Spain', 180; Calvo Serraller, La teoría de la pintura en el Siglo de Oro, 169. appointment as Pintor de su Majestad brandished on the Diálogos' title page (Fig. 2).
Yet as Carducho continues, the 'I' who sees himself honoured at court ('me veo honrado') gives way to a more self-determining agent within a larger civic sphere: '(si alli es la Patria, donde mejor sucede lo necesario a la vida) justamente me juzgo natural de Madrid'. In legal terms, naturalization depended on the authority of the king and applied to the kingdoms of Spain, although in notarial records 'natural de' normally designated the native town or city. Obviously, Carducho employs natural rhetorically to mean 'like a native', but his polyptotonic 'justamente me juzgo' is striking: in effect, he is the authorizing judge of his status in Madrid, the patria where he has enjoyed well-being and successdiscreetly alluded to in the aphoristic 'si alli es la Patria, donde mejor sucede lo necesario a la vida'. 30 No one could have disputed the validity of Carducho's claim. From its earliest legal definition in the Siete Partidas, naturaleza was a capacious concept describing the sense of affinity which bound people together in mutual loyalty and obligation: Uno de los grandes debdos que los homes pueden haber unos con otros es naturaleza; ca bien como la natura los ayunta por linage, asi la naturaleza los faze ser como unos por luengo uso de leal amor. 31 Birth was the foremost condition of naturaleza, but the Partidas enumerated an additional nine factors that could legitimately constitute nativeness. Carducho invokes three: upbringing, vassalage and longtime residence. He met yet another criterion in his marriage to Francisca Astete de Benavides, 'natural de la ciudad de Salamanca', according to the couple's will. 32 There is no evidence that Carducho ever became officially 'naturalized' in Spain, but records indicate that he had become a vecino ('citizen') of Madrid by 1630. 33 In their writings, his contemporaries frequently invoked his 30 Carducho seems to be drawing from the proverbs, 'patria est, ubicumque est bene' in Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, V, 37, 108; and, 'Illic enim patria est, ubi tibi sit bene' in Erasmus' Adagio, translating Aristophanes' Plutus. My thanks to Saúl Martínez for these likely sources.
33 Vecindad applied to local communities (villages, towns, cities). While less precisely defined in Castilian legislation than naturaleza, it was similarly granted to those who could demonstrate a long-term commitment to the community (e.g., through the ownership of Florentine origins along with his service to the king. In his aprobación to the Diálogos, Firrufino extolled Carducho as both 'Pintor de su Magestad' and 'Académico insigne en la ilustre y docta [Academia] de Florencia su Patria'. Likewise in his prefatory poem, Joseph de Valdivielso recalled the honours Carducho received from Spain's 'tres Filipos' (Philip II, III and IV) and 'su Patria FLORENCIA'. Following his death, Francisco Pacheco celebrated him as 'nuestro íntimo amigo [ … ] gentilhombre florentín, hermano de Bartolomé Carducho, heredero de su opinión y honroso título de pintor de la Majestad de Felipo III'. 34 In all these cases, the authors were undoubtedly capitalizing on the cultural prestige of Florence, invoking Carducho's origins more for added lustre than as an indicator of perceived foreignness. In fact, he was already embraced as a Spanish artist, especially by Lope de Vega who included him in several poetic lists of local painters. 35 Carducho's allegiance to Spain and its royal court would thus have been self-evident. Why, then, does he so emphatically declare himself a 'natural de Madrid'? One reason has to do with questions of generic affinities and local affiliations and the link between the two: 'me juzgo por natural de Madrid' allows Carducho to situate his book from the start within a discourse of urban promotion common to native-born sons in his circle. 36 Moreover, it affirms his authority to write such a book in the first place.
As stated above, authorial declarations of nativeness and patriotic obligation were commonplace in local histories and other works of urban praise. Thus, for example, in the prologue to his 1599 epic poem Isidro Lope de Vega invokes his birth in Madrid as a guarantee of truthfulness: 'Todo lo que escribo es auténtico. Y cosas hay que los que nacimos en esta villa las property, marriage and residence) (see Herzog, Defining Nations, Chapter 2). I have not been able to locate a petition by Carducho for vecinidad; however, notarial documents point to him acquiring that status between 1628 and 1630: among the documents published by Volk is a 1628 letter of payment in which he appears as a 'residente'; on the other hand, in their will and testament of 1630, both Carducho and his wife appear as 'vecinos desta V sabemos en naciendo, sin que nadie nos las enseñe y diga'. 37 Already in his dedication to the 'muy insigne villa de Madrid', Lope had presented the poem as an homage 'a mi patria en reconocimiento de ser hijo suyo'. Jerónimo de Quintana introduced his chronicle A la muy antigua, noble y coronada villa de Madrid, historia de su antigüedad, nobleza y grandeza (1629), the first comprehensive history of the city, in a similarly patriotic dedication to the Villa itself, 'Nací con obligaciones de servir a V.S., así por haber nacido en esta nobilísima Villa, como por ser de antiguo naturales della mis pasados' (f. [ ¶4 r ]). From the very title page of the book, Quintana was able to advertise his authority as a 'natural de esta misma Villa' (my emphasis) (Fig. 3). Carducho, who owned a copy of Quintana's chronicle, could not claim the latter's ancestral roots or the native birth Quintana and Lope both shared; however, as we have seen, he had justification to avow a similar depth of loyalty to Madrid. 38 Making that loyalty explicit allowed him to assure his readers that his civic ideals, so closely hewn to Florentine paradigms, belonged to a collective local project.
The book itself was a virtual gathering space for the lettered community with which Carducho was associated. As Lawrance has emphasized, the author drew on the support of no less than fifteen contemporary writers and intellectuals for its extensive paratextual apparatus: Fray Micael Avellán and Firrufino for the aprobaciones; Juan Fernández de Ayuso for a prefatory poem in Latin; José de Valdivieso for an additional preliminary poem, as well as the poem following the second Dialogue and one of the prose defences of paintings in the 'Memorial informatorio' at the end; Lope de Vega for the poem at the end of the fourth Dialogue and the second contribution to the 'Memorial'; Diego de Niseno, Miguel de Silveira, Antonio de Herrera Manrique, Francisco López de Zárate, Pérez de Montalbán for the poems following the third, fifth, sixth, seventh and eight Dialogues respectively; and Rodríguez de León, Lorenzo de van der Hamen, Juan de Jáuregui, Juan de Butrón and Antonio de Pinelo for the additional arguments comprising the 'Memorial informatorio'. 39 Together, these multi-authored texts lent support to Carducho's determination to equate poetry and painting-the main pillar of his defence of the latter as a liberal art-and praised the author for his exceptional skills with both pen and brush; indeed, Carducho himself brought home the relationship between the two arts in the engravings he created to illustrate the poems provided by his colleagues. 40 Figure 3 Roberto Cordier, title-page engraving from Gerónimo de Quintana, A la muy antigua, noble y coronada villa de Madrid. Historia de su antigüedad, nobleza y grandeza (Madrid: Imprenta del Reino, 1629). Reproduced by courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.
40 The classic study on the poems and engravings in the Diálogos is George Kubler, 'Vicente Carducho's Allegories of Painting', Art Bulletin 47:4 (1965), 439-45. See also Wázbiński; 'Los Diálogos de la pintura de Vicente Carducho'; Portús, Pintura y pensamiento, 94-95; and Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, 'Vincencio Carducho y Lope de Vega: los grabados de los Diálogos de la pintura y la silva "Si cuanto fue posible en lo imposible" ', in press (I am grateful to the author for sharing the manuscript in advance of its publication).
Lawrance has suggested that in inviting writers to contribute 'bespoke poems' to his book, Carducho was undoubtedly emulating Francisco Pacheco's Libro de retratos, a verbal and visual encyclopedia of eminent men of letters-especially from the author's Seville-in which Pacheco supplemented his pictorial and textual portraits with verses by accomplished poets. 41 I would emphasize that Carducho's assemblage of intellectuals is a specifically Madrid-centred response to Pacheco, for the authors who contributed to the Diálogos were all established in Madrid by the 1620s. 42 Notably, one of those contributors, Pérez de Montalbán, had produced what may be another Madrid counterpart to Pacheco's book in his 1632 Índice de los ingenios de Madrid. Four of Pérez de Montalbán's ingenios, besides the author himself, would appear in the Diálogos a year later (Fernández Ayuso, Herrera Manrique, Lope and van der Hamen) 43 Again, Carducho's book works in consonance with a native-son's celebration of Madrid.
Another Sevillian adds a layer to our understanding of Carducho's avowal of nativeness in Madrid: Pacheco's son-in-law Diego Velázquez. While a number of scholars have questioned Carducho's supposed animosity towards Velázquez, it seems unlikely that after his long years of service to the crown the older painter would have fully embraced the latter's swift ascent. 44 As Brown has suggested, Carducho's proposal that the royal art academy assume a role in appointments of court artists was perhaps a 'veiled reference to the appointment of Velázquez as painter royal' in 1623. 45 In 1627, less than five years later, Velázquez famously won a competition against Eugenio Cajés, Angelo Nardi and Carducho himself to paint a canvas of the Expulsion of the Moriscos. As first reported by Pacheco, it was precisely after Velázquez's victory that Philip IV appointed  48 He also owed his move to Madrid to the network of intellectuals and artists from the great Andalusian city promoted in the palace by the Count-Duke of Olivares. In proclaiming Madrid as his patria, Carducho implicitly defines himself in contradistinction to Velázquez as a beneficiary of Olivares' 'Seville connection'. 49 Carducho's emphasis on his status as 'natural de Madrid' thus surely betrays some displeasure at the young Sevillian's preeminence at court.
More significantly, however, the statement affirms broader parameters of professional achievement and civic belonging. In contrast to Velázquez who painted almost exclusively for the crown as Jean Andrews comments, Carducho carried his status as pintor de su majestad to the wider context of Madrid and its surrounding areas, especially the churches and convents whose construction or reconstruction characterized much of the city's building activity during his lifetime. 50 Just as church patrons commissioned Carducho's works for Madrid's built environment, so, too, did the authors of relaciones de fiesta, the seventeenth-century urban genre par excellence, quite literally inscribe the artist into the city's historical memory. For example, Sor Aldonza de Ayala, prioress of Santo Domingo el Real, showcases his contribution to the convent's rebuilt chapel, completed in 1638, thus: Acabada la Capilla, se tratò de colocar esta santa Imagen, y para que la pintura fuesse de la grandeza y disposición que se requería, se hizo vna nueua pintura por Vice Another relación de fiesta, for the beatification of San Juan de Dios organized in 1631 by the Hospital de Antón Martín, reveals an artistic production that extended to the religious ceremonial life of the city. As the author tells it, the celebration gained lustre thanks not only to the sponsorship and presence of royal and municipal authorities, grandees and noblemen, but also to the eminent artist who painted the processional standard: El Estandarte, que era de una rica tela, llevaba de la una parte pintada la figura del Santo, y de la otra los escudos de Armas de su Santidad, y Rey: que lo pintó, por lo es de su Magestad, Vincencio Carducho. 52 That San Juan de Dios was a Luso-Spanish saint further reinforces the artist's identification with his adopted patria.
In addition to the rivalry with Seville, Carducho's 'me juzgo por natural de Madrid' engages a discourse of national rivalry emergent in early Spanish art historiography. Well known is Fray José de Sigüenza's 1605 account of the construction and decoration of the palace and monastery of El Escorial. Of the many artists who contributed to Felipe II's monumental complex, Sigüenza reserves highest praise for the Spanish painter Juan Fernández de Navarrete, El Mudo. Navarrete had trained in Italy, as Sigüenza himself recognizes. However, the author insists that in his best paintings Navarrete 'siguió [ … ] su propio natural y se dejó llevar del ingenio nativo, que se ve era labrar muy hermoso y acabado, para que pudiese llegar a los ojos y gozar cuán de cerca quisiesen, propio gusto de los españoles en la pintura'. 53 '[P]ropio natural' and 'ingenio nativo' do not simply refer to the artist's individual nature and innate genius; in addition, they suggest artistic proclivities somehow native to Spain in their appeal to local taste. In an oft-cited quote, the chronicler laments that if only Navarrete had not died prematurely, there would have been no need to bring in Italian painters to complete the monastery's decoration-most notably, Lucas Cambiaso and Federico Zuccaro after him: '[Federico Zúcaro] [ … ] vino a sufrir la falta que hizo Lucas Cangiaso, y suplióla también, como Lucas la del Mudo, que si viviere éste, ahorráramos de conocer tantos italianos aunque no se conociera tan bien el bien que se había perdido'. 54 Of course, among those Italians was Carducho's brother Bartolomeo. While explicitly indebted to Sigüenza for his own brief account of the monastery's decoration, the author of the Diálogos not surprisingly expresses none of the former's nativist regret. To the contrary, he embraces Philip II's patronage of Italy's most renowned painters to complete 'aquella suntuosa y rica obra' (f. 32 r ). At the same time, when he lists the painters who contributed to El Escorial he offsets Italy's dominance by bringing together in a single sentence Italian artists, identified by their cities of origin (e.g.,  55 Moreover, Carducho shares the broad concern for the status of painters in Spain that troubles Sigüenza. In the eighth Dialogue, for instance, Maestro laments a preference among collectors at court for foreign artists ('no hay que negar que los estrangeros nos hacen grande ventaja' [f. 151 v ])-a topos of seventeenth-century Spanish art treatises. 56 In addition, national prestige comes into play in the pleas for ennoblement made by Carducho and his supporters such as Juan de Jáuregui. Himself an accomplished amateur painter, Jáuregui argued that without excusing the alcabala and rewarding artists with 'preeminencias y honores', Spain risked their flight to more favourable provinces ('irian estos a otras Prouincias, donde es cierto hallen el honor que en la suya'). At stake was nothing short of Spain's preeminence among the civilized nations of the world, 'perdería mucho la nación Española en todas las naciones cultas: y en vez de señalarse en el mundo, se igualaria con las regiones Barbaras'. 57 Javier Portús has rightly argued that in contrast to Sigüenza, Carducho showed little interest in constructing a Spanish school of painting. 58 However, the very attention the author lavishes on court collections in the eighth Dialogue conveys an unmistakable sense of place and connectedness. This is a rarefied milieu distinctive to Madrid, in which art and learning are prized by aristocrats with high appointments in government, noble servants in the palace, artists themselves, and above all the king. There is a strong sense of the local, but the local is cosmopolitan: a Madrid that is 'Madre de todas las naciones', as the saying went, or at least from Carducho's perspective a place where la nación de los italianos had prominence. 59 In this section of the treatise, Carducho highlights contributions of men of Italian background to the court city's artistic and intellectual prestige and the vast monarchy centred there. Scholars agree that the first residence Discípulo visits on his return from abroad is none other than Carducho's own. 60 It is a home-cum-gallery filled with 'pinturas dibujos, modelos y estatuas' and other objects, where 'los mejores Artífices [en la corte] [ … ] muchos ingenios particulares, Caballeros y señores' (f. 147 v -148 r ) converse about art and trade works amongst themselves. Discípulo's next visit is to the Marqués de Leganés, and it was perhaps out of deference to social rank that Carducho leaves the owner of the first house unidentified. Indeed, this gesture of modesty would have been politic because in effect the author places his residence in the parish of San Sebastián-known for its writers, artists, architects, musicians and printers, but also home to some alcaldes and regidores-almost on a par with the aristocratic mansions described in subsequent pages. 61 As Pérez Preciado has analysed in detail, Carducho uses Discípulo's tour, specifically the description of Leganés' residences, to promote two of the people closest to him: Firrufino, 'Catedrático de su Magestad', seen imparting classes on mathematics and artillery, and Luis Carduchi, the artist-author's nephew (son of Bartolomeo), presented as one of Firrufino's prized pupils with promise for a prominent career in service to the monarchy ('favorecidos, y ocupados de su Majestad, harán mucho fruto en la Geografía, Cosmografia, y serán de grandísima importancia para la navegación, y para todo género de guerras' [148 v ]). 62 Amidst the multiple references to residences of grandees and gentlemen of the court, Maestro recommends that Discípulo also visit the house of the sculptor and medallionist Rutilio Gaxi (Gaci), 'noble Florentino', where, in addition to wax portraits, he would see the models Gaci created for numerous fountains in Madrid, made 'para el adorno desta Corte [ … ] ennobleciendo esta Villa' (150 v ).
Following 'me juzgo por natural de Madrid', there is one last segment of the passage which has been the point of departure for this article that begs comment, 'para que sin negar lo que debo a la originaria, satisfaga a lo que pide la Patria donde habito'. The symmetry of the phrase ('lo que' / 'lo que'; 'la [patria] originaria' / 'la Patria donde habito') announces in miniature the structure of Carducho's book as a whole, as it moves from Florence in the first Dialogue to Madrid in the eighth. But the symmetry is imperfect. For all his rootedness in Madrid, his success as a pintor de su magestad, his acclaim among both cultural luminaries and local nuns and friars, his ultimate goal of an official academy of painting remained elusive. His adopted patria denied its most eminent painters the same noble status and sphere of authority artists had achieved sixty years earlier in his patria originaria.

Jean Andrews
As Laura Bass has intimated, Sigüenza's appreciation of Juan Fernández Navarrete as an artist who responded to 'el gusto de los españoles en la pintura' demonstrates the Hieronymite historian's strong view that Spanish taste and Spanish style, in all its regional varieties, should have primacy in the visual culture of the nation. 63 His defence of indigenous practice has to be taken as political, a rider to Philip II's patronage of Italian artists, while his authority, or at least his licence for such opinions, derives from the closeness of his Iberian order to the Habsburg throne. Vincencio Carducho is one of that generation of artists, sons and brothers of Italian expatriates working at the Escorial, who inherited the Italian style of their elders but learned to blend it with prevailing Spanish taste as they established their own careers in early seventeenth-century Madrid. As far as religious painting was concerned, my argument in this section is that this taste, while legislated for by Counter-Reformation imperatives, found its domestic expression mediated through the prism of Spanish devotional literature and practice. Thus, while the constituent iconography of the crucified Christ deployed in Spanish art of the period was of course determined by commonly used, mainly Flemish, engravings, the stipulations of the religious superiors commissioning the images and, in the case of very large commissions, the vagaries of studio collaboration, a new spirit is, none the less, evident in the effect these images are designed to produce on the devout viewer. This effect is the facilitation of inwardness and contemplation, whether in a church or a private oratory. The intensification of this emphasis on prayerfulness can most clearly be traced in the patronage and influence of Juan de Ribera, as Bishop of Badajoz from 1562-1568 and then as Patriarch of Antioch and Archbishop of Valencia (1568-1611). Though Ribera's influence on Madrid was not direct, the same evocation of piety can be discerned in elements of Carducho's output, particularly his late work, demonstrating his acute awareness of and sympathy for Counter-Reformation spirituality in Spain.
As a mature artist Carducho was primarily called upon to render 'el gusto de los españoles' in relatively large-scale works for monasteries, convents and parish churches. As Laura Bass has commented, he had been rapidly eclipsed as a court painter by Diego de Silva y Velázquez and the latter's elevation in the young king's favour. However, there is no evidence of personal animosity on the elder artist's part and Carducho was fully occupied exploiting the numerous lucrative religious commissions that came his way, leaving the court, classical antiquity and portraiture to Velázquez. 64 He became particularly adept at rendering historias, usually though not exclusively interpreted as tableaux narrating stories from the Bible, the lives of the saints, or Classical antiquity. 65 Within these rather complex tableaux, depictions of saints meditating on the Crucified Christ are occasionally to be found, images which reflect very closely the recommendations for private prayer formulated in Spanish devotional writing and sermons of the period. Carducho's late cycle for the Carthusian monastery of Santa María de El Paular in Rascafría, north of Madrid, contains four instances of this topos.
In general, the Paular tableaux consist of two related narratives, one in the foreground and another in the background. (1626-1632; Prado, P05405). 66 The second portrays the death of the saint, with one of the brothers holding a small crucifix up for him to see (1626-1632; Prado P05481) and atypically, this painting contains only one scene. The third depicts Bernard d'Ambronay, the founding prior of Nôtre Dame de Portes, the third charterhouse to be established in France, in 1115. He is seen in the foreground kneeling in prayer before an altar with a crucified Christ placed over it (1632; Prado, P05455). The fourth renders two episodes from the life of the Catalan monk, Juan Fort. In the background, he is represented interacting with a stone figure of Christ on the Cross (1632; Prado, P05406). The small metal crucifix in the two St Bruno paintings is identical and it appears elsewhere in the series; the Bernard d'Ambronay crucifix is larger and consists of a wood polychrome figure on a wooden cross. Both show a Christ figure with his head bowed and eyes closed. There is no clear interaction between the saint and the figure of Christ in these three paintings; that is to say, the saint is not looking directly at the Christ figure but is clearly meditating on it. However, there is an obvious exchange between Christ and Juan Fort, and the nature of this interaction will provide the focus of the rest of this discussion.
Carducho grew from childhood to young manhood between the devotional world of the Escorial Hieronymites and the more mundane workshops of Florentine and Tuscan artists. It is likely he moved to Valladolid when Philip III installed the court there and from this point there are records of payments to him, initially for craft-level work such as gilding railings and painting cabinets. 67 At the Escorial, he was exposed to three different manners of painting: the airy, graceful Florentine style of Zuccaro, the painter and architect Pellegrino Tibaldi and the other Italians present, dominated by the primacy of drawing and line; the Venetian colourism employed by the Italian-trained Navarrete to express his own Northern Spanish (riojano) religious sensibility, a combination beloved of Philip II; and the plangency and realism evident in the small collection of Flemish religious art then housed at the Escorial, most notably in paintings by Michiel de Coxcie, who had some exposure to Italian training. 68  widespread use of engravings emanating from Flanders by, among others, the Wierix and Collaert families, as models for religious compositions cemented the Flamenco-Hispanic iconographical nexus in the Peninsula. Thus, while the renovation of painting in Spain through the importation of Italian expertise, exposure to Italian masterpieces and training in Italy led to the enhancement of technique and compositional awareness, the increasing devotional seriousness in Spanish religious art remained rooted in Flamenco-Hispanic visual material and Iberian devotional practice.
Carducho was himself a pious man and this is reflected in the seventh of his Diálogos, which deals with religious art. The most relevant comment he makes in relation to the correct approach to be taken by the devout artist comes in Maestro's citing Fra Angelico (Fra Giovanni da Fiesole), 'que jamàs se puso a pintar, que primero no tuviesse oracion', as an example of how a painter ought to conduct himself when preparing to work on subject matter relating to the person of God (f. 125 r ). 69 More precisely, Maestro relates that Fra Angelico, a Dominican (beatified in 1982) insisted that the image of Christ must be painted in a prayerful manner by all painters and adds that Fra Angelico wept for the suffering of Christ every time he approached the topic: 'dezia, que el que pintava a Christo avia de estar con Christo siempre: llorava siempre que pintava a Christo crucificado' (f. 125 r ). In typical seventeenth-century fashion, however, the Diálogos are peppered with verbatim 'borrowings' from Italian sources and this account is no exception. It comes from Giorgio Vasari's pen picture of Fra Angelico and undergoes some re-fashioning in Carducho's hands. According to Vasari, Fra Angelico: Fu humanisimo, e sobrio; e castamente vivendo, da i lacci del mondo si sciolse, usando spesse fiate di dire, che chi faceva quasta arte, haveva bisogno di quiete e di vivere senza pensieri: e che chi fa cose de Christo, con Christo deve star sempre.
(He was most humane, and sober; and lived chastely, from the bonds of the world he released himself, taking frequent opportunities to say, that he who made this art, had need of quiet and of living without care: and he who made images of Christ, had to be with Christ always.
[ … ] Some say that Fra Giovanni would never lay a hand on his brushes if he had not first prayed. He never made a crucifixion without being bathed in tears. What is most salient here is the emphasis by Carducho on 'estar con Christo siempre' when engaged in painting religious subjects, especially the figure of Christ. The suggestion that Fra Angelico 'llorava siempre que pintava a Christo crucificado', clearly acknowledged by Vasari as hearsay, comes several lines later in his pen picture, after remarks on Fra Angelico's's technique. Carducho, in his reference, however, omits the imprecision inferred by 'dicono alcuni' and blends the two comments into one, producing a portrait not of a spiritually-informed artist but of an ascetic who was also a painter. This change in emphasis perhaps sums up the difference between Counter-Reformation spirituality in early seventeenth-century Spain and the Florentine milieu of Vasari's Vite. In Spain, prayer and religious observance come first, in Italy, the painter was and would continue to be, first and foremost, an artist.
Vasari amended his Vite, first published in 1550, to take formal account of the 1563 Council of Trent strictures on the representation of religious subjects. He even expanded his life of Fra Angelico to deal with the question of lasciviousness in religious iconography. 71 However, it seems clear that as far as Vasari is concerned, those who detect lasciviousness in depictions of beautiful celestial creatures by highly competent painters should examine their own consciences before impugning the artist. They should not assume that only poorly made art, incapable of rendering beauty, serves religion adequately: [ … ] alcuno s'inganasse interpretando il goffo, & inetto, devote; & il bello e buono; lascivo; come fano alcune i quale vedendo figure, o de femina o di giovane un poco piu vaghe, e piu belle, & adorne, che l'ordinario la pigliano subito, e giudicano per lascive, non si avedendo che a gran torto dannano il buon giudizio del pittor, il quale tiene i santi e sante, che sono celeste, tanto piu belle della natura mortale, quanto avanza il cielo la terrena bellezza, e l'opere nostre.
([ … ] some are deceived when they interpret the clumsy and inept as devout; and the beautiful and well-made as lascivious; as some do who, seeing the forms of a woman or a young man a little more graceful, and more beautiful, and adorned, than the ordinary, pick it out immediately, and judge them to be lascivious, not realizing that by their great mistake they do damage to the good judgment of the painter, who holds the saints, male and female, who are celestial, to be as much more beautiful than mortal nature, as the sky is more beautiful than the earth, and our works. He adds that these individuals with their corrupt and infected views cause harm in general and affect painters' morale in particular. Excellence of technique and the depiction of beauty therefore remains paramount and evil is in the eye of the beholder. Italian practice in the depiction of sacred subjects would remain much more relaxed than that permitted in Spain and her realms, including Naples. If a painter working in Spain observes the norms established by Carducho, and later, more extensively, by Francisco Pacheco in his 1649 treatise, Arte de la pintura, the message conveyed should be both orthodox and unequivocal. Such a context leaves no voice for the opinion of the mortal viewer, unlike in Vasari. The only opinion that matters is divine.
Thus, Carducho appears to invert Vasari's conclusions on lasciviousness in his Dialogue VII. He explains that God will judge a religious painting primarily on the intentions in the painter's heart, irrespective of the quality of its execution: [ … ] es cierto, que no le desagradan à Dios las pinturas sagradas hechas con arte y perfeccion, sino el afecto con que acuden à celebrar el Arte, y quiças con descortesia, y poca atencion a lo que representa; de suerte que Dios mira al coraçon y intención. (f. 124 v ) He does allow that a better executed image will be more effective in encouraging prayer, 'con quanta diferencia mueve los afectos de la devocion y disposicion la pintura, con mayor perfeccion conducida' (f. 126 r ), but his focus on the emotions and intentions of the artist underlines his point that religious painting, particularly that involving images relating to the major subject of post-Tridentine meditative practice, the life of Christ, had to be undertaken in the correct, prayerful, frame of mind. 73 It might be added that it would also need to take into account popular devotional practice and expectations.
Carducho counted amongst his friends and associates the most important court preachers of the early seventeenth century, such as Hortensio de Paravicino, Juan Rodríguez de León and Cristóbal de Torres. 74 He also kept a substantial library, including a range of texts containing descriptions of episodes from the life of Christ. Based on his inventory, Marta Bustillo suggests titles such as Juan Ceverio de Vera's Viaje de la tierra santa, and Agustín de Benavente's Luz de las luzes de Dios. 75 These however, were not 75 Juan Ceverio de Vera, Viaje de la tierra santa y descripcion de Jerusalem y del santo monte Libano (Pamplona: Nicolás de Asiaín, 1613); Agustín de Benavente, Luz de las luzes de Dios, resplandor de las llagas de Christo, empleo del pensamiento christiano (Valladolid: Viuda the crucial devotional texts employed by lay people and religious in their daily prayer. Though the vast, illiterate majority acquired their spiritual sustenance through sermons preached in Spanish within the Latin Mass, those who were both devout and literate would have been familiar with the published work of sixteenth-century preachers such as Luis de Granada and Juan de Ávila, and the devotional exercises of Ignacio de Loyola. 76 Juan de Ribera promoted the work of his friend Juan de Ávila and promulgated this style of heightened spirituality in his sermons throughout Extremadura and eastern Andalusia, and at the seminary he founded on his arrival in Valencia, the Colegio Seminario de Corpus Christi. Indeed, his enterprise in Valencia was nothing less, in the words of Fernando Benito Domenech, than to convert Valencia into 'un especie de ciudadconvento que sirviera de ejemplo al resto de España'. 77 Moreover, Ribera's Levantine ciudad-convento and Philip II's monasterio-palacio at the Escorial constitute two sides of the same coin, with Philip intent on the projection of piety as an arm of the state and Ribera's emphasis firmly on the development of lay spirituality. For Ribera's purpose, the devotional writing of Juan de Ávila, more than that of any other preacher, proved both accessible to and compassionate towards the general public. A good example of this are his thirty-two Reglas muy provechosas para andar en el camino de nuestro señor.
These were published in his Obras in 1588 and probably written in the first instance for one of his many lay female correspondents. They subsequently achieved wider currency amongst the laity and the religious communities. The first eight reglas, under the title Regla muy provechosa para andar en el camino del señor, are, for example, present in manuscript form in the library of the Escorial. 78 The sixth regla in this brief manual offers the most concise advice on contemplative practice. In line with Ignatian teaching and the Franciscan discipline of recogimiento, it instructs those who wish to 'aparejar su ánima para recibir y conservar la gracia del Espíritu Santo' to do as follows: La sexta, busque algún rato o lugar desocupado cada día para que lea libros y piense en algún paso de la pasión de nuestro Señor Jesucristo y en el artículo de su muerte. Consuélese con Jesucristo y hable con El en su corazón, teniendo confianza que será piadoso y remediador, y pídale su amistad y gracia con todas sus fuerzas; y cada vez que triste o alegre se sienta, recorra a Jesucristo a pedir consuelo o a darle gracias. Lo que leyere no ha de ser para ser sabia, sino para aprovechamiento de su ánima; y estando leyendo tenga el corazón en Dios. 79 The emphasis in regla sexta is not primarily on contemplation of the horrors of the torture undergone by Christ in order to redeem Mankind-these are not detailed here-but rather on the consolation the soul can find in conversing mentally with Christ ('hable con El en su corazón'). This advice to enter into conversation with Christ was central to meditational practice in Counter-Reformation Spain. Since the best example to follow was that of the saints, images of saints in communion with Christ during his passion were commissioned more frequently, for public and private use.
Pictorially, this interaction is conveyed in two ways: in images of saints speaking to Christ, often embracing him, at some point during the journey from the pillar at which he was scourged to Calvary, and in depictions of the crucified Christ that show him engaging with a saint or biblical figures during his final torment on the cross. Apparitions of the resurrected Christ to living saints also fall into this category. In 1605, Juan de Ribera commissioned a painting of Christ appearing to the Dominican and native of Valencia, St Vincent Ferrer for his Colegio (Museo del Patriarca, Valencia). 80 Devotion to St Vincent Ferrer had grown considerably since the arrival of a relic believed to pertain to him in 1601. The painting shows Christ appearing to Ferrer in Avignon in 1398 and touching his cheek to cure him of the illness that had prevented him from re-converting the French. It was painted for the main altar of the college chapel by the Catalan Francisco Ribalta who began his career in Madrid but was drawn in 1599 to Valencia, a city much more open to Italian painterly influence, by commissions from the Patriarch. Interestingly, Ribalta may have trained at the Escorial, though evidence for this lies in the similarity of his early work to that of painters working there, including Bartolomeo Carduchi, and not in documentary material. 81 Two decades later, in 1625-1627, Ribalta would produce another version of a conversation between a saint and Christ, for the Carthusian monastery of Porta Coeli in Valencia. 82 His Christ Embracing St Bernard (Prado, P02804) is a version of the Amplexus Bernardi, a legend told about Bernard, initially by Herbert of Clairvaux in his Liber Miraculorum compiled in the late twelfth century and then disseminated in Conrad of Eberbach's Exordium magnum (Fig. 4). This apocryphal account of the crucified Christ's embrace of the meditating saint achieved significant pictorial currency in the German-speaking lands in the medieval period. 83 In Herbert of Clairvaux's anecdote, Christ reached up from a cross that the kneeling Bernard had placed in front of himself on the floor of a church, to aid meditation: 'Then that Majesty removed his arms from the branch of the cross and he seemed to embrace the servant of God and draw him to himself'. 84 Pedro de Ribadeneyra's Flos sanctorum, a sanitized Counter-Reformation version of the Golden Legend, first published in 1599, offers this vignette in the context of Bernard's abandonment of his physical self through deprivation of sleep and nourishment in order to engage in spiritual contemplation of Christ: Estando San Bernardo tan mortificado, y su carne tan sujeta al espiritu, y el espiritu tan recogido, y tan interior, viviendo siempre dentro de si, vino a ser como un espejo, limpio y terso, para recebir los rayos de la divina sabiduria. Y asi no solo alcanço un perfetisimo habito de oracion, y meditacion, sino tambien de un altisimo grado de contemplacion pasiva, por la qual enagenado de los sentidos y obras exteriores, y derretido y empapado en una suavidad ineffable, con un silencio profundo, y con unos abraços castisimos se unia con el sumo bien. Y el Señor le regalava en tanto grado, y una vez estando llorando delante de un Crucifixo, el mismo Crucifixo estendio el braco, y se le echo encima, abraçandole, y acariciandole con singular favor. 85 In Ribalta's hands, this moment of epiphany becomes one of the most exquisite renditions of a mental conversation between the contemplative soul and Christ in his passion produced in Spain in the Early Modern period, and it does full justice to Ribadeneyra's 'suavidad ineffable'. The expression of sweetness and affection on the face of the delicately-drawn, gentle Christ, gazing tenderly on the rapt St Bernard whose eyes are closed in a trance, has few equals. 86 There is a very strong resemblance between this Christ and the beautifully-modelled and elegant Christ in Bartolomeo Carduchi's Descent from the Cross of 1595 (Prado, P00066), painted for the chapel of St Rita in the Church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid and later kept in the Royal Collection (Fig. 5). 87 While on the one hand, this formal similarity may be evidence for Ribalta's having trained within the Italian expatriate milieu at the Escorial, more importantly it demonstrates how effectively the elder Carducho had absorbed Flamenco-Hispanic taste in depictions of the Descent and found a way of conveying the intimacy of communication with or contemplation of Christ in the Spanish devotional manner. Thus the emotional delicacy of the tender handling of the body of Christ by St John, Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalen, coupled with the grieving gaze of his mother, in Bartolomeo's Descent is echoed and developed in Ribalta's close-up of a conversation between Christ and St Bernard. Yet, while Ribalta's painting may be seen as the visual expression, par excellence, of the devotional culture promoted by Juan de Ribera, an earlier and more idiosyncratic painter may be said to have captured it even more acutely. length close-up, with very little indication of the wilderness beyond the arch of a cave, yet the crucifix he holds in his clasped hands, unlike Morales' other close-up versions of St Jerome, has a Christ figure, possibly bronze, nailed to it. 89 This sculpted Christ is a more conventionally modelled human form than Jerome and, because of the warm golden tones in which the figure is painted and the expression of resigned endurance on his face, he seems more vibrant and alive than the living saint (Fig. 6 [detail]). The sweetness of the figure on the cross anticipates the warm tones of Bartolomeo Carduchi's dead Christ taken down from the cross and Ribalta's Christ voluntarily descended from the cross. It evokes the atmosphere of 'suavidad ineffable' associated with Bernard by Ribadeneyra and responds to Juan de Ávila's exhortation to the devout to hold conversations with Christ in his passion: 'piense en algún paso de la pasión de nuestro Señor Jesucristo y en el artículo de su muerte. Consuélese con Jesucristo y hable con El en su corazón'. The extreme malnutrition of Morales' Jerome anticipates the emaciated saints Jusepe de Ribera would produce in the following century in Naples, yet the emphasis here, because of the sweetness of the crucified figure, is not on the suffering of the saint but the bounty of the love of God. 90 Devotional orthodoxy is transferred into iconography in a similar fashion by these three painters, one who probably never left his native region of Extremadura, one who spent most of his working life at the Escorial and in Madrid, and a third whose career took him from Madrid to Ribera's Valencia, because the spiritual context was uniform throughout Philippine Spain. In this world, painters were both artists in the service of the Church and also Christian souls. Therefore, Carducho's identification of the correct attitude of the painter approaching the image of Christ, derived from Vasari's comments on Fra Angelico, 'que jamàs se puso a pintar, que primero no tuviesse oracion', blends both functions. The figures of Bernard and Jerome provide models for the painter's behaviour when working on the iconography of Christ as well as for the viewers of the finished paintings. Interestingly, while there is contemporary comment on Ribalta's 'saintly bearing', there is no such evidence for Morales, in spite of his epithet, El Divino. 91 However, Vincencio Carducho's piety in this regard is incontestable.
The historia of the Catalan monk, Juan Fort, cloistered in the oldest charterhouse in Spain, Scala Dei, now defunct, near Tarragona, La Virgen se aparece a Juan Fort (Fig. 7) is the one instance in his El Paular series of an apocryphal exchange between a Christ figure and a contemplative in which the figure of Christ is responsive.
The eighteenth-century chronicler Joseph de Valles tells how Juan Fort used to bow deeply to a stone crucifix that lay on his path from the casa inferior of the lay and professed brothers to the Monjía (monastery). One day the figure of Christ leant forward, still attached to the cross, to return the compliment. According to Valles, 'aun hasta hoy se manifiesta este admirable prodigio, mirandose la cruz inclinada'. 92 The representation of this incident is almost certainly based on one or more engravings by Hieronymous Wierix or Hans Collaert. 93 The similarities with both Ribalta and Morales in terms of sensibility and iconography are also more than evident. For this painting, there appears to be a corresponding drawing of the crucified Christ (British Museum, 1920, 1116.21) (Fig. 8). An artist trained like Carducho according to the Florentine principles of disegno would first create drawings to work out his concept, the Platonic dibujo interior or disegno interno, on paper. As Zahira Véliz observes of Carducho: [ … ] disciplined training of hand and eye was fundamental to bringing forth the truth established in dibujo interior and expressing it visually as a truth to be apprehended by the senses. 94 Carducho's comments in Dialogue 7 make it clear that this dibujo interior for the crucified Christ also contains a prayerful element, 'que primero no tuviesse oracion', to complement and perhaps legitimize aesthetic decorum. Effected with what Pascual Chenel and Rodríguez Rebollo term 'una sencillez magistral', Carducho's drawing of Christ bending forward, bringing the cross with him, shows an open-mouthed saviour, not merely grimacing but also perhaps speaking to Juan Fort. 95 Though there appears to be a pentito or re-shaping of the line around the moulding of Christ's profile in the drawing, taking it back slightly from the first position, the facial expression, particularly around the mouth, conveys extreme suffering and the fact that any communication is taking part under great duress (Fig. 8 [detail]). The rest of the body is supremely long-limbed and elegant, minimally contorted. The facial expression brings the figure close to the plangency of Flemish representations of the Crucifixion, the body remains firmly within the Italianate tradition. Transferred to canvas, the modelling of the figure of the crucified Christ is almost exactly the same as the drawing, with the addition of the wound in Christ's side, with blood flowing from it (Fig. 7 [detail]). 96 However, the scene is placed in the background of the historia of Juan Fort with the apparition of the Virgin in glory overshadowing it and certainly drowning out the delicacy of the painted Christ figure, so evident in the preparatory drawing. This is not an unusual occurrence in Carducho's output. As the recent catalogue raisonné of his drawings proves, he was an inspired artist with pen or pencil, but in spite of great technical and narrative assurance, his finished work on canvas is frequently considerably less fluent, no doubt in part owing to the collaborative nature of the artist's large studio and the contribution of many hands. This Christ is one instance, however, in which the master's hand seems to have prevailed on canvas. In the painting, the upper torso appears more cadaverous, with the greater use of shading paint applied through the sternum, along the rib cage, in the groin area and the armpits. This is a more agonized body and yet the face, in contrast, seems less haggard and less pained than in the drawing. Greater detail on the crown of thorns and deeper shading on the beard and eye sockets serve to highlight Christ's finely-formed nose and open mouth. The effect is a younger, more vibrant Christ, not a figure in the final throes of death. As in Morales' St Jerome in the Wilderness, this sculpted Christ seems more alive than the pale-faced, tonsured ascetic bowing before him, while the tenderness he projects towards the contemplative is of a piece with the loving saviour depicted in Ribalta's Christ Embracing St Bernard.
Carducho's placing of the episode of the statue of Christ crucified acknowledging Juan Fort demonstrates his understanding, and certainly also that of Juan de Baeza, the Prior of El Paular who oversaw the project, of the distinction to be drawn between the miraculous movement of a stone statue, however venerated, and an apparition of the Virgin Mary in glory. 97 It shows too that his pragmatism and his ability as a choreographer of complex narratives led him sometimes to relegate what might be deemed his best work to a secondary status within a composition. In this and indeed in all his religious commissions, Carducho proved himself to be deeply embedded in Spanish Counter-Reformation iconographical practice. Thus, while there was a part of him which would remain an elegant Florentine, the artist who took up his drawing pen to give physical outline to his disegno interno, this process, as his precepts in Diálogo VII and his beautiful, background Christ here indicate, would always be informed that little bit more by Spanish piety than by Italian aesthetic considerations.* 97 Ruiz Gómez, La recuperación de El Paular, 185-90. * Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.