Granada school, following the models of PEDRO ATANASIO BOCANEGRA (Granada, 1638 - 1689) .; late 17th

Granada school, following models of PEDRO ATANASIO BOCANEGRA (Granada, 1638 - 1689); end of the 17th century.
"Virgin and Child".
Oil on canvas.
Size: 102 x 71 cm; 130 x 89 cm (frame).
In this work the Virgin with the Child is presented following the usual forms within the devotional painting of the Spanish Baroque: Mary appears half-length, with the Child in her lap, in the foreground and on a neutral, dark and flat background, on which the figures stand out directly illuminated. This is a typically Baroque work, which emphasises the love between mother and Child through a naturalistic and tender representation, with the two figures joining heads and embracing.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, ambitious pictorial series and extensive iconographic programmes were created for churches and convents, as well as printed prints, medals and reliquaries for private devotion. As a whole, regardless of their size or medium, these images fulfilled the aim of sacralising everyday life beyond the altars. As for the Granada school, when Alonso Cano returned to Granada in 1652, he attracted all the artists to him. It could almost be said that the features that characterise the school are the features of its style. Thus, in all of them, the search for the ideal and elegant in the types, the avoidance of realism and genre scenes, paying little attention to portraiture and almost no attention to still life. Rich colour intonations abound in all of them, with specific palette preferences, such as the use of asphalt, as well as a taste for Flemish painting, which would have been encouraged by Pedro de Moya, who is said to have travelled to Flanders and England. From its style, we can relate this image to the hand of Pedro Atanasio de Bocanegra, a painter from Granada who was a disciple of Alonso Cano, Pedro Moya and Juan de Sevilla, the most active artist in Granada in the 1660s. His first known work was the decorations for the Corpus Christi festivities in his native city in 1661. During the following years we find commissions such as the series of canvases he executed between 1665 and 1666 for the cloister of the convent of Nuestra Señora de Gracia, now lost; or the numerous paintings, including the "Conversion of Saint Paul", which he painted between 1668 and 1672 for the altar of the college of the Society of Jesus, now the church of Saints Justo and Pastor (in situ). At the same time he was commissioned to decorate the Carthusian monastery in Granada with large scenes from the life of the Virgin. He was also appointed painter to the cathedral. After this period he went to Seville in 1686, and from there he left for the court of Madrid, where he was protected by Don Pedro de Toledo, Marquis of Mancera. Thanks to the influence of his protector, Bocanegra was awarded the title of painter to the king "ad honorem" for his painting "Allegory of Justice", inspired by a mid-16th-century Venetian print and now in the Royal Academy of San Fernando. After his stay in Madrid, Pedro Bocanegra returned to Granada. In addition to the aforementioned art galleries and religious centres, works by this master can now be found in the Zaragoza Museum, the Goya Museum in Castres, the Diocesan Museum of Sacred Art in Vitoria and the Fine Arts Museum in Granada, as well as in various private collections.