Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wethey, Harold E.

Titel

A Madonna and Child by Diego de Siloe

Ist Teil von

• The Art bulletin (New York, N.Y.), 1940-12, Vol.22 (4), p.190-196

Ort / Verlag

New York, etc: Taylor & Francis

Erscheinungsjahr

1940

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Prominent among the Spanish artists of the Renaissance trained in Italy was Diego de Siloe of Burgos 1 whose sojourn in the Italian peninsula is even documented, for we know that he collaborated with his fellow townsman, the sculptor Bartolomé Ordóñez, upon the altarpiece of the Epiphany in S. Giovanni a Carbonara in Naples (circa 1517). 2 In this work both men reveal themselves as sons of the Italian Renaissance, and neither gives any hint of his Spanish birth. Ordóñez maintained his workshop in Italy until 1520, when death overtook him at an early age in Carrara where he was engaged with numerous assistants upon the tombs of the Cardinal Cisneros and of Felipe and Juana, parents of Charles V. 3 Diego de Siloe, on the other hand, returned to Burgos presumably in 1519, and the style of his early sculpture in Spain attests to his years of study and work in Italy, and it proves that he must have lived not only in Naples but surely in Florence and Rome as well. His young mind was filled with the wonders of Italy and most of all with Michelangelo's paintings on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, a fact which is proclaimed in all of his early works. Evidence of his devotion to Michelangelo are the two nude youths astride fantastic beasts who appear among the decorative carvings on the famous Escalera Dorada in Burgos Cathedral, one of the masterpieces of the Spanish Renaissance, begun by Diego in November, 1519 and completed four years later. 4 These two youths are derivations from but not copies of the famous ignudi on the Sistine ceiling.