Lorenzo de Ávila (Ávila, c. 1473/14921 – Toro, 1570)

Lorenzo de Ávila (Ávila, c. 1473/14921 – Toro, 1570)

"The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple"

Oil on panel. 104 x 72 cm.

On the back is a label from the Junta de Incautación y Protección del Patrimonio Artístico (Committee for Seizure and Protection of Artistic Patrimony).

We would like to thank Dr. Alberto Velasco, for the identification and cataloguing of this painting. A report on the painting can by written by Dr. Velasco on the buyer’s request. Dr. Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez points out that this panel was part of a reredos that has been dismantled and until now eleven of the panels that belonged to it had been located and studied, ours is the twelfth. All of them are stylistically unified and their measurements are all almost always exactly or very close to 100 x 70 cm. He writes about it very interestingly in his publication “Noves pintures de Toledo i Zamora de la primera meitat del segle XVI: Francisco de Comontes i Lorenzo de Ávila”, in which Dr. Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez explains the history and provenance of the eleven panels known until now, which concludes: “Recapitulating and returning to the set of eleven compartments which have been the focus of our attention, the noted coincidences lead us to consider the possibility that all of them formed part of a main altarpiece from a church in the Toro-Zamora area. At a certain moment in the 19th century the altarpiece was sold off which meant that it was dismantled and dispersed. Seeing as the panels that can be assigned to the set are the Embrace before the Golden Gate, Saint Anne with the Virgin Mary and the Child, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Epiphany, the Flight into Egypt, Circumcision, Arrest, Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Resurrection and Assumption – one must deduce that it was a reredos featuring a rather developed cycle, beginning with the Virgin Mary’s childhood, continuing with the Joys of the Virgin and there would certainly also have been scenes of the Death and Glorification of the Virgin Mary, and the series would have concluded with compartments dedicated to the Passion of Christ.…

It is possible that this reredos would have been created by various different painters, evidenced by the fact that the two panels that depict the Annunciation and Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary and the Child, despite having been recently linked to Lorenzo de Ávila, have traditionally been attributed to Juan de Borgoña II. Whichever the case, the stylistic unity of the set is very evident, not only in the features and attitudes that characterise Lorenzo de Ávila’s characters, such as the habitual genuflexions which have been highlighted in the historiography, but also in the presence of a series of aspects that we reencounter in his paintings, such as the primordial role of landscape, the characteristic blue skies which are bright and in cold tones in contrasting chromatic graduation, the clouds which are articulated through horizontal bands, architecture in the background with classical elements and equally bluish tones, trees in sinuous shapes and branches that are silhouetted against the background, the chromatic palette in which intense blues stand out in the Virgin Mary’s attire, the compositions which are articulated through central triangles and varied vanishing points and the sober architecture which surrounds the principal figures.

With regard to chronology, the aforementioned affinities with other work by the painter lead us to place this set in the fourth decade of the 16th century.”

In the same article, Dr. Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez indicates, with regard to the Master of Ávila: “He was one of the principal Masters of the Zamora workshops in the second third of the 16th century, and one of the introducers of the Renaissance to the North East of Castile-Leon.…

Oriundo de Ávila, settled in the Toro area, where he set up his workshop. The histography considers him to be a follower or disciple of Juan de Borgoña “the Older”, a painter active in Toledo, and paintings have been attributed to him that had been accredited to the Master of Toro years earlier, and especially also to the Master of Pozuelo. The last of these was attributed work which has now been mainly attributed to Lorenzo de Ávila and Juan de Borgoña II, and also to Martín de Carvajal, Alonso de Aguilar and Francisco de Valedecañas. Collaboration between these masters was very habitual, and this means that on occasions it is complicated to determine where the hand of one of them begins and the hand of another ends, especially when we are referring to Lorenzo de Ávila and Juan de Borgoña II. In order to complicate the panorama even further, a part of the historiography considers Juan de Borgoña to be the son of the painter of the same name who worked in Toledo, the two of them being distinguished by the soubriquet “the Older” and “the Younger.” However, Irune Fiz and Juan Carlos Pascual de Cruz consider that they were not related and called the younger one Juan de Borgoña II or Juan de Borgoña de Toro, considering him to be the student and collaborator of Lorenzo de Ávila, the principal painter in Zamora of those years.”

Bibliography: VELASCO GONÀLEZ, A.: “Noves pintures de Toledo i Zamora de la primera meitat del segle XVI: Francisco de Comontes i Lorenzo de Ávila” (New paintings from Toledo and Zamora from the first half of the 16th century: Francisco de Comontes andi Lorenzo de Ávila). pages. 311-318.