The Meadows Museum plays host through July 27th to "Fernando Gallego and His Workshop: The Altarpiece from Ciudad Rodrigo", an altarpiece show, whose drama extends beyond the biblical narratives played out on the walls, into ongoing studies which reassigned authorship to many of the works on view. Research during the course of the project revealed Maestro Bartolomé as a major artist in his own right, showing that twelve of the panels on display belong to his hand.
Dating to the 1480's, twenty-six panels survive of the original twenty-nine, which formed a massive backdrop to the altar of the Cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo in Castile. The remaining works made their way to the University of Arizona Museum of Art in the late 1950's as part of the Samuel H. Kress Collection.
In a compelling installation at the Meadows, twenty-three vertical format panels are dispersed around the semi-circular gallery on terracotta walls. The three surviving portraits of the apostles stand alone on pedestals at the gallery's center. The wall-mounted works display narratives drawn primarily from the Gospels, with a sprinkling of Old Testament themes, all driven by pre-Reformation era Catholic ideology.
"Christ Among the Doctors", attributed to Gallego and his workshop, depicts the adolescent Jesus at the top of a compressed proto-Renaissance perspectival space flanked by the Jewish scribes and elders. Having just heard his teaching, the elaborately dressed doctors of the synagogue tear the pages of their own scriptures with contorted faces, in what is presumably a jab at their supposed ignorance.
The Devil gets similar short shrift, depicted in Bartolomé's "The Temptation" as an elderly robe-clad tempter in veridian knee-high dragon claw boots. A perturbed looking Christ waves off his sales pitch with a wary peace mudra. Further back in the exaggerated space, Satan has no better luck trying to convince the Saviour to leap off the high city walls, or to give him the kingdoms of the world.
A surreal and crowded "Last Judgement" shows the victorious Christ seated amongst archangels and apostles looking down on the masses of humanity as they are sorted into the ubiquitous "saved" and "damned" categories. The players in this drama, tip forward and almost into the room in the flattened stacked perspective of the scene.
Most startling is Bartolomé's "Chaos". It stands, almost postmodern in its pastiche of various motifs. At top center sits God the Father enclosed in a mandala flanked by angels and archangels in a yantra target of concentric circles. Below this, the Greek god Chaos gets naming rights to the primordial "soup" of creation, and the Latin word "NILLE" (nothing or void) is the spoke at the center of it all. Depicting concepts such as the eternal Godhead prior to the world's creation is problematic by any means, but here Bartolomé has constructed a blend of western rationalism and eastern abstraction that pulls it off.
An accompanying display of backlit infrared photos of the paintings depict the working process of underlying sketches and compositional revisions. Of particular interest here is "The Creation of Eve", which shows how the original position for Eve, alongside a very Christ-like creator, was moved to a subordinate position and replaced by a camel. The reworking no doubt took place at the behest of a clerical advisor.
This revealing exhibit came together as a collaborative effort between The University of Arizona Museum of Art, which housed the collection, the Kimball Museum, where chief conservator Claire Barry oversaw restoration and the infrared research, and the Meadows Museum, whose director Mark Rogland and assistant curator Amanda W. Dotseth co-edited the accompanying book on the project.
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