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A precociously talented artist, scarcely out of his teens, was in 1620 commissioned to paint the portrait of an intrepid nun passing through his home city of Seville on her way to one of the farthest outposts of Spain’s vast empire.
His painting reveals a shrewd, formidable woman in late middle age, who clasps a book in her left hand while wielding a crucifix, almost as if it were a weapon, in her right.
Christ is turned towards the viewer, his left leg crossed slightly over his right and his body fixed to the instrument of his death by four nails: one through each palm; one through each foot.
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez would go on to become the most famous artist of Spain’s golden age. The 66-year-old nun, Mother Jerónima de la Fuente, would sail to Mexico and traverse the country to take another ship across the Pacific Ocean, founding the first convent in the Philippines, where she would die 10 years later after a long life of devotion and physical penance.
More than 400 years on, Velázquez’s portrait of Mother Jerónima is to be displayed in public for the first time. Alongside it will be a bronze cast of the body of Christ, thought to have been modelled by Michelangelo, which inspired the crucifix brandished by the nun. The works will go on show from 15 March at the TEFAF art fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands, where they will be offered for sale.
The 25cm-high bronze corpus has been priced at €1.8m (£1.5m). Stuart Lochhead Sculpture, the company behind the sales, is not giving any estimates on the price of the Velázquez, which was kept in a convent in Toledo until it came into the hands of a Madrid family in the 1940s. But past prices tell their own story. Velázquez’s portrait of Saint Rufina sold for £8.4m in 2007, while his painting of the Spanish queen Isabel de Borbón was valued at about £27.8m before it was withdrawn from auction early last year.
Dizzying as the likely prices are, Stuart Lochhead says the aim of the side-by-side exhibition is to look beyond the marquee names of Velázquez and Michelangelo, and to explore the stories behind the two works, not least those of the two women who helped inspire them.
Lochhead believes that Michelangelo’s close, platonic relationship with the poet and noblewoman Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, may have informed his design for the tender, anatomically detailed bronze of Christ. The pair bonded over their shared faith and love of art, and, in 1540, Colonna gave him an edition of her poetry. One of its verses – a reflection on how the sacred can inform the creative – may have resonated deeply with her friend: “Let the holy nails from now on be my quills, and the precious blood my pure ink, my lined paper the sacred lifeless body.”
While Michelangelo’s best-known sculptures were made from marble, he also used wood and bronze. The Christ statue – which was discovered in a private collection in San Sebastían a few years ago – mirrors many of his designs, not least a bronze corpus on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, attributed to his followers.
“It’s also very similar to the large wooden corpus he does in Santo Spirito when he’s very young,” says Lochhead. “I think it’s a theme and an idea that he’s been developing all his life and it sort of coalesces around his relationship with Vittoria Colonna and his investigation of spirituality and religion at that moment in his life. He keeps returning to that motif.”
A bronze cast of Michelangelo’s corpus – possibly made in the Rome workshop of one of the artist’s pupils, the bronze founder Guglielmo della Porta – arrived in Seville in 1597, courtesy of a well-known Spanish silversmith. It proved wildly popular and numerous casts were made from it in bronze and silver, some of which were painted.
The Seville artist Francisco Pacheco, who mentions the cast three times in his writings and painted a polychromatic version of it, was Velázquez’s teacher and father-in-law, making it likely that the younger man would have come across the model many times in his workshop.
The link raises a tantalising question: where did the crucifix in Mother Jerónima’s hand come from? “Was it hers that she brought?” asks Lochhead. “Or was it Pacheco’s? Was it always there in the workshop, so was it something she was handed?”
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Given the nun’s demeanour and devotion, the dealer doubts she would have been steered into doing anything that she did not want to do. “She has this strength and this power,” he says of the portrait, another version of which is on display at the Prado in Madrid. “She’s on this epic voyage. But no one knew if she’d ever get there – or what she’d do – before she left.”
The fact that she has the crucifix in her hand and turned towards the viewer makes Lochhead think she was keen to show it.
He is loath to do more than fantasise about whether the corpus held in the nun’s grip in 1620 was the same cast that arrived in Seville 23 years earlier: “It would be lovely to think that our corpus is the one on the cross, but … ”
All he can say for certain is that the cast going on display in Maastricht is too good to have been made in Spain at the time and must have come from a workshop in Rome, probably Della Porta’s. The design, with its four nails, would echo throughout Spain and its empire, recurring in works by artists including Francisco de Zurbarán, José de Ribera and Francisco de Goya.
Lochhead thinks it unlikely the two works will stay together. “I’m slightly worried that someone will say: ‘I’ll buy the Velázquez and you can throw in the Michelangelo,’” he says. “I don’t think the owner of the Michelangelo would be too happy about that. It would be fantastic if [they were bought together], but the painting is such a powerful thing on its own that I probably don’t see that happening.”
Whatever happens at auction, the dealer hopes that the works’ brief time together in a specially constructed stand later this month will remind visitors that art – and the faith and iconography transmitted in it – is deeply personal and seldom static. It transcends its creators and also belongs, in part, to those who inspire it.
“We’re able to understand why these things were made – their backstory and who influenced them,” says Lochhead. “So we’re bringing in the influence of Vittoria Colonna and Jerónima into the creation of two works of art, which normally you’d look at and say: ‘Well, these were made by the great artists and that’s the end of the story.’ But it’s not.”
