Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Meanwhile the school of El Greco was producing worthy fruit; from
it, in the infancy of the seventeenth century, came forth Luis
Tristan, an artist even now almost unknown in London and Edinburgh,
but whose style Velasquez did not disdain to imitate, and whose
praises he was never tired of sounding. "Born, bred, and sped"
in Toledo, or its neighbourhood, as Morales was emphatically the
painter of Badajoz, so may Tristan be termed the painter of Toledo.
No foreign graces, no classical models, adorned or vitiated his
stern Spanish style; yet, in his portrait of Archbishop Sandoval,
he is said by Mr Stirling to have united the elaborate execution
of Sanchez Coello with much of the spirit of Titian. And of him is
the pleasant story recorded, that having, while yet a stripling,
painted for the Jeronymite convent at Toledo a Last Supper, for
which he asked two hundred ducats, and being denied payment by the
frugal friars, he appealed with them to the arbitration of his old
master, El Greco, who, having viewed the picture, called the young
painter a rogue and a novice, for asking only two for a painting
worth five hundred ducats. In the same Toledan church that contains
the ashes of his great master, lies the Murcian Pedro Orrente,
called by our author "the Bassano, or the Roos--the great sheep and
cattle master of Spain:" he too was employed by the art-encouraging
chapter, and the cathedral possessed several of his finest pictures.
But with Tristan and Orrente the glories of Toledan art paled and
waned; and, trusting that our readers have not been uninterested
in following our brief sketch of the remarkable men who for four
hundred years rendered this quaint old Gothic city famous for its
artistic splendours, we retrace our steps, halting and perplexed
among so many pleasant ways, blooming flowers, and brilliant bowers,
to the magnificent, albeit gloomy Escurial, where Philip II lavished
the wealth of his mighty empire in calling forth the most vigorous
energies of Spanish and of foreign art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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