Painting in medieval spain [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The history of Spanish painting has long been dominated by the great names of El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera and Goya to the exclusion of artists active in earlier periods. Nor has our interest in the more familiar art of Italy and France been conducive to an appreciation of medieval painting in Spain. Such fortuitous considerations should certainly not deter us from devoting our attention to an art which has preserved the unique atmosphere of the Iberian Peninsula. A general consideration of the trends in European painting leads us inevitably to the conclusion that there were periods in the Middle Ages when Spanish painting was in the vanguard. We have only to think of the Romanesque panel painting of Catalonia, the local variant of Gothic or late Gothic as loiown all over Europe. We can recall a great many works and countless names, for example, the Master of Tahull, the artist known as the Budapest Master, Fernando Gallego, Rafael Destorrents and Bartolomé Bermejo—all deservedly recorded in the history of universal art. Their pictures testify to a particular historical and cultural reality and could not have come into being in any other part of the world. But as well as the work of these outstanding masters, there are also Spanish paintings in which we find interesting traits of European painting to which they are linked either by quality or subject. There is therefore ample justification for a single volume on the paintings of medieval Spain. And there is an additional reason why this volume should be published in Hungary: with the exception of churches, galleries, museums and collections in Spain, and the museums of Leningrad, London, Munich and New York, it is in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts that we can see the greatest number of 5 early Spanish panel paintings.