HERNANDO DE ESTURMIO (known in Seville from 1537 to 1556) - Lot 7

HERNANDO DE ESTURMIO (known in Seville from 1537 to 1556) The Crucifixion Pine panel 40 x 35.5 cm Old restorations A small devotional painting, intended for personal meditation, this Crucifixion should be compared with the works of Hernando Esturmio, a Flemish painter from Ziericksee. Like Peter Campeneer (Spanishized as Pedro Campana), Esturmio was one of many artists and craftsmen in the Netherlands who fled the disorders of their region in the 16th century. Nothing is known of his training prior to his move to Seville, where he settled in July 1537 and where he is regularly documented. In this city, prosperous for its trade in precious metals with America, he married and lived in the same San Andrés district until his death in 1556. He enjoyed considerable local renown, running a workshop with several assistants and receiving commissions for altarpieces, including the Four Evangelists in Seville Cathedral, signed and dated 1555, revealing its origin: "Hernandus Sturmius ziriczeencis faciebat 1555". His style, defined by J. M. Serrera in three stages of approximately five years, from 1537 to 1556, bears witness to the influence on him of the engravings and prints circulating between northern and southern Europe at the time, in particular those by Durer, as well as Italian art, which the artist seems to have discovered through these images, as no journey by Esturmio to Italy is attested, and this influence cannot be attributed to a stay there. Our Crucifixion bears witness to these borrowings through its composition, which, like Durer's, places the protagonists in the foreground before a mountainous, wooded landscape in the background - which Esturmio links, with a more subdued chromatics, to the holy figures, and which he enlivens with flowing horsemen, apparently Moorish, hunting in the surrounding woods. As in Durer's work, the Virgin Mary and St. John the Evangelist stand on either side of Christ's central cross, on a grassy knoll, with St. John facing the victim, hands clasped in adoration. The three crucified figures, arranged in a semicircle, show Christ in the center nailed to a framed cross, while the two thieves standing next to him are tied to badly scaled crosses. In this work, Esturmio also turns to other sources: the earlier work by Martin Schongauer - later taken up by Durer - in the deployment of the twirling angels, receptacles of the precious blood, and the Italian work by Michelangelo in the energetic twisting of the reprobate on the right, reminiscent of the muscular vigor and tension of the damned in the Last Judgment. In the dynamic tension of the composition, the depth and luminosity of the landscape animated by playlets, and the expressions on the faces, this panel is similar to three works produced around 1555 by Hernando Esturmio: the Sacrifice of Isaac, Seville, Santa Ana church circa 1553-1554, the Altarpiece of the Four Evangelists, Seville, Cathedral 1553-1555 and, in 1555, the Allegory of the Immaculate Conception, in the Collegiate Church of Osuna.