Spanish masters [antikvár]

"Dad para la Maya, gentil caballero Tmás vale la honra ^ que todo el dinero." Lope de Vega he Budapest Museum of Fine Arts has one of the best collections, outside Spain, of Spanish painting, so unique in the history of European art. From the retables of the late Middle Ages until the appearance of Francisco de Goya, every important trend of Spanish painting can be seen in the Hungarian collection. In addition to the religious themes that provide the subjects of most of the pictures, there are court portraits, genre-paintings, still lifes and allegories, revealing the richness of Spanish art in theme or subject. The first in chronological succession is a Deposition of Christ signed by Pedro Sánchez, who was active in the second half of the fifteenth century. The golden age of Spanish painting is introduced by a humanistic allegory quite unusual in Spanish art, by the so-called "Alcira Master", and then can be traced through seven works of the Cretan-born but characteristically Spanish Domenicos Theotocopoulos, called El Greco; through paintings by Luis Tristán, Vicente Carducho, Bartolomé González, the monumental Francisco de Zurbarán, a realistic altar-piece by Jusepe de Ribera who worked in Naples and was there nicknamed "Lo Spagnoletto" ; the popular and realistic compositions by Murillo; The Breakfast (El Almuerzo), an early genre-painting by Diego Velazquez; and through two court portraits which were closely influenced by Velazquez. Finally, there are in the collection, in addition to several minor Baroque masters, the works of Francisco de Goya, this great personality of Spanish painting, who, after Velazquez, contributed most to European art, and whose world-famous Water-Carrier and Knife-Grinder already point the way to the realistic branch of schools of nineteenth-century painting. In his Preface to the Catalogue of the representative Spanish exhibition arranged in the Louvre, in 1963, Paul Guinard wrote about the Spanish material in the French museums: "Ilest clair qu'aucun d'eux ne peut offrir un ensemble espagnol riche et nuancé, comme celui de l'Ermitage ou meme, sur un plan mineur, comme celui de Budapest." (Trésors de la peinture espagnole. Églises et Musées de France. Paris, 1963, p. 27.) In this most recent and most significant evaluation, the author states that the Spanish collection of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts is, even among the great museums of the world, distinguished 5