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| That Gorgeous Debutante: Saint Engracia (Boston, Gardner Museum) |
I wish I could write novels, because the life and career of
the 15th century painter Bartolomé de Cárdenas, a.k.a. Bartolomé el
Bermejo (Bart the Red) would make a terrific one. He had an amazing talent, was able to
completely master the extremely difficult and subtle craft of oil glaze
painting developed in Flanders. Even more amazing, was able to adapt it to the
demands of his home country, Spain—or more exactly the Kingdom of Aragon
without losing its integrity. Others who
tried, like Lluís Dalmau, simply didn’t have the ability to do so, or like that
amazing Sicilian master Antonello de Messina, subsumed it into local aesthetic
demands, Helping to launch something quite new..
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| Engracia Tortured: Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts |
Bart had to take a technique suited to small-scale paintings
evoking more precious objects of gold and jewels into billboard size
altarpieces of many components, keeping a comic-book-like sequence of visible
episodes readable while not sacrificing the illusion of detail. He did this like no one else. Big pictures of formally posed iconic saints
like the gorgeous Saint Engracia (what! you’ve never heard of her?) are
combined with smaller stories of her life, like her torture by being whipped,
though she never removes her hat, in a very melodramatic situation, and
everything works aesthetically as well as dramatically.
Someone this good, even as an artisan-class craftsperson,
should have been able earn a tidy fortune and live really well, but Bart turns
out to have been his own worst enemy. He
wasn’t a murdering psychopath like Caravaggio, but perhaps more of a
sociopathic hippie: in an age when the painting business was contract driven
and the patron could make the demands, he was definitely idiosyncratic.
Contracts for altarpieces were generally legalistically
routine. Dimensions and components would
be specified, along with subject matter, a due date and a payment
schedule. Payments were usually one
third down (which allowed the painter to buy his materials), one third at a
midpoint, most commonly when the big wooden panels were prepared and the
compositions were drawn in ready to paint, and the last at completion and
installation. We have only one contract
for Bart, and it is definitely not typical.
The usual dimensions, subjects, etc. are mentioned, and also a
specification that oil be the medium, but then come a series of clauses that
speak to the behavior of the painter: there was a second painter in the
contract, Juan de Boniella whose role seemed to be as Bart’s monitor.
Juan had to manage expenditures, and more importantly, keep
a record of the days that Bart actually worked, and the days he “wandered
away.” The painting had to be done in
Daroca, where the altarpiece was destined for a local church, and if Bart left
it incomplete or skipped town, he was to be excommunicated. This last provision sounds drastic, but it
was common practice at the time. The
contract writers did make one mistake though.
The second payment was when the big center image of the altarpiece (in
this case, Saint Dominic of Silos) was complete and installed on the altar, and
the remaining eleven panels were to be finished for final payment.
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| Saint Dominic of Silos (Prado) - The Part Bart Really did |
Bart finished the big image (it’s now in the Prado Museum),
but then he skipped town and was duly excommunicated. He wasn’t a local to begin with. He was probably born in the south of Spain,
(Cordoba), if a later frame inscription is true. But he was first working in Valencia, in
1468. Six years later he was in Daroca,
and the next he was heard of was in Zaragoza in 1477, where he worked with
another painter Martín Bernat, who became his guarantor, finished the
altarpiece (or at least Martin seems to have done a lot of the labor), and got
“recommunicated.”
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| Rube |
Where he was in the intervening three years is anybody’s
guess (though there’s one speculation that he went back to Valencia to do the
Virgin of Montserrat (see Part I), but he abandoned the subordinate parts of
that too. “wandering away,” as mentioned
in the contract sort of evokes someone going AWOL—I keep thinking of the early
20th century baseball player, Rube Waddell, an incredible pitcher,
but given to leave a game in progress to chase a passing fire engine. We
don’t know how long Bart spent in Daroca either, but did some other work there
for a converso merchant, Juan de
He also married a widow, Gracia de Palaciano,
who was also part of Daroca’s converso community. It’s interesting that both Loperuelo and
Gracia were called before the newly-established Inquisition later in the
century, and both paid fines, Gracia also performing some form of penance.
Loperuelo—once more religious paintings for this New Christian.
Bart was probably Christian, but if he moved in Loperuelo’s
circle, he was probably hanging out not only with conversos, but also Jews and Muslims (Loperuelo was accused of
being too friendly with both). At any
rate Bart apparently never went back to Daroca, though his wife may have
remained there, since she is mentioned in a document there concerning the
property of her first husband in 1481.
Meanwhile, Bart worked with Bernat in Zaragoza,
collaborating with him on at least one other altarpiece. It was probably an expedient relationship,
with Bernat giving him professional legitimacy, and as Bernat’s own paintings
show, this fellow seems to have borrowed a lot from Bart in compositions. This might sound like an intellectual
property issue now, but in the 15th century, sameness was considered
good, and many craftsmen did it. But no
matter, Bernat never got the hang of Bart’s subtleties.
One other indication of our painter’s character comes in
another clause of a contract to paint some alabaster sculpture in the biggest
altarpiece in Zaragoza cathedral that head been damaged in a fire. Bart was one of a group of local painters who
worked on this project, but not only was he paid more than the others, but he insisted
on having his own painting space, that he could lock up when not in use, and
nobody was to observe him at work. His
specialized technique must have been a well-guarded commodity.
It seemed as if Bart eventually either got bored in Zaragoza
too; as an inland city, it was probably less interesting than Valencia, where
he was before, and Barcelona, where he was working by 1486. Here again, he started another altarpiece
that he probably didn’t finish (and it was destroyed during the Spanish Civil
War in 1936, so there’s no way of knowing for sure).
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| The Pietà (Barcelona Cathedral), Best Possible Image |
He did have the fortune of meeting a wise and enlightened
Canon of Barcelona Cathedral, Lluís Desplà, and for his personal chapel, Bart
painted his masterpiece, as fabulous as the Virgin of Montserrat, but unlike
Francesco della Chiesa, Desplà got a completed work. And what a work! It’s after Jesus was taken down from the
cross, and he lies on his lamenting mother’s lap. On one side was Desplà’s favorite saint, the
erudite Jerome, on the other kneels Desplà himself. This is a guy who has been out here a long
time: he has more than a 5 o’clock shadow and circles under his eyes,
suggesting extended meditation on the Crucifixion tragedy. Like the Virgin of Montserrat, there is an
amazing landscape, both more subdued and subtle: there’s a rainstorm to the left, a rainbow
over a distant mountain range with one snow-capped summit in the middle, and a
city under a sunset sky to the right.
Flowers, butterflies and little lizards are everywhere, so integrated
into the landscape that you really have to look for them.
This painting never reproduces well: you have to see it and
meditate on it for awhile, just like Desplà probably did. It’s now in the Barcelona Cathedral museum,
so any visitor can do this. When Bart
was on his game, there was no one like him.
The problem was that he was still flaky.
Unsurprisingly, he never made it into the city’s painting establishment
as far as can be seen, and the last notices we have are of him designing
stained-glass windows in 1500.
Bartolomé de Càrdenas stands out from a conventional
occupation within a conventional world.
Even the fact that he had a nickname (El Bermejo—the Red: lots of painters in Italy at the time had
nickname as did everyone else, but it’s very uncommon in Spain. Was he a redhead? Was his complexion ruddy? Did he get angry
and rage a lot?
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| Christ in Limbo: Ugly Nudes (Barcelona, Museu Nacional d'art de Catalunya |
When he really devoted himself to his art and craft, he was
unique. He painted the ugliest nude
figures in art history: hairy and round-shouldered, including Jesus
himself. Most of them look like
merchants and workers that he might have encountered in a local bathhouse. Few of them look His virgin saints are lovely (except when
being tortured). But it’s those
spectacular landscapes that have all the poetry. He took the oil glaze medium to its limits
for its time and the figural conventions that bounded that period’s
imagination.
happy, either.
If anybody wants to write the
novel, contact me. I’ll give you all the
background, and the spaces between the documented facts leave lots of room for
juicy inventions.
I have been fascinated with Bartolomé “el Bermejo” for most
of my professional life, ever since I saw a really bad photo of the Pietà as an
undergraduate. I did both my
dissertation and a book on him, and I still have an article about him in press.
My book is; Bartolomé
de Cárdenas “el Bermejo,” Itinerant Painter in the Crown of Aragon,
Bethesda, International Scholars Publications, 1996.
But there has been so much more found about him since then,
though most of it has been published in Spanish. I wrote the Wikipedia article on him, and
recently updated it, so there’s a good deal of citations in the footnotes for
up-to-date research. The Wikipedia link is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomé_Bermejo
For Rube Waddell, see: http://baseballhall.org/hof/waddell-rube
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