Title

St Paul Visiting St Peter in Prison

Maestro Bartolomé (Active in Castile: the last third of the 15th century)

Generic classification

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Inventory Number in Current Collection

Object history

The information provided by the Cincinnati museum about this work traces its origin to the Barcelona art market, later to the Madrid collection of Francisco Merelo-Barberá Beltrán, from where it passed into the hands of José Gudiol y Ricart, who sold it to the Cincinnati museum, where it is currently preserved. However, we have been able to document that the work must have been found, prior to this tour, in the Madrid art market, specifically in the antiques store of Juan Lafora y Calatayud. At that time, the painting was in a delicate state of conservation and was photographed together with another, which must have come from the same altarpiece, in which the scene of Quo Vadis was represented, also related to the story of St Peter, presumably both coming from an altarpiece dedicated to the life of the saint.

Juan Lafora y Calatayud was one of the most outstanding antiques dealers of the first decades of the 20th century. His antiques store was located at Carrera de San Jerónimo 51, in an area where there were numerous establishments dedicated to the art and antiques trade, very close to the Moreno art photography studio, which took the snapshot that allows us to identify this piecewhen it was in that antiques store (Martínez Ruiz, 2022). Lafora frequently traded in art objects from the provinces that today make up Castile and León. He acquired, for example, some caskets from the cathedral of Zamora, which was the cause of a lively controversy and resulted in the purchase of one of them by the State for the Museo Arqueológico Nacional: it is the popularly known as the 'bote de Zamora' (the box or pyxis of Zamora).

The bibliographic and documentary research about the work of Fernando Gallego and his circle yields several interesting references, the first is the one offered by Manuel Gómez-Moreno when he made the Catálogo monumental de la provincia de Salamanca; he described in the parish church of Cantalpino three panels that, in his opinion, would come from the same set, surely a dismantled altarpiece: one of them depicted the 'Virgin with the naked Child in her arms, seated on a seat before an engraved gold canopy...', measuring 1.30 x 0.79 m, another 'St Bartholomew seated on a pink seat, with a great knife and an open book...', measuring 1.18 x 0.72 m, and the third with 'St Peter, titular of the church, on his cathedra and blessing...', of this last one he offers the measures of 1.09 x 0.90 m. The historian indicated: 'All three panels seem to be by the same hand, made in oil and constituting a very interesting gradation between Nicolao Florentino and Fernando Gallego, so that they participate in the characters of both, without being able to specify if they reflect an early style of Gallego or are the work of another more indecisive master; but their intrinsic and historical value is undeniable' (Gómez-Moreno, p. 477). The scholar was struck by the quality of these paintings, and not only did he record them in the aforementioned catalogue, but he also expressed this impression in a personal letter to his family from Salamanca on November 27, 1901: 'I was able to make a long walk to Cantalpino, where I saw three good 15th-century panels' (Lorenzo Arribas, J. and Pérez Martín, S., 2023, I, p. 294).

Post, years later, alluded to the presence of two significant panels by Fernando Gallego in private collections in Barcelona, which he understood to be parts of an ancient altarpiece, in the center of which, the historian believed, would be an image of the enthroned saint in the Pani Collection of Mexico City, later identified by the historiography with the one Gómez-Moreno saw in Cantalpino. One of the panels, at the time of Post's study, was in a private collection in Barcelona, the one depicting the Quo vadis scene, the Prats Tomàs collection, while the other showed the scene of St Paul visiting St Peter in prison, which was part of the Merelo-Barberá Beltrán collection in Madrid (although Post erroneously located it in Barcelona) –this is precisely the one that concerns us and is today in Cincinnati– (Post, 1966 pp. 246-249). The scholar included an image of this painting in his publication, in which one can appreciate the renewed aspect of the painting, very restored, since there is no longer any trace of the crack between the two boards that formed the material support of the work, nor of the lacunae and deterioration of the pictorial surface, nor of the traces of xylophages in the wood. Therefore, it seems clear that the restoration took place during the transit between Lafora's establishment in Madrid and its new owners. According to information provided by the Institut Amatller d'Art Hispànic, the photographs they hold of this panel, belonging to the collection of the Arxiu Mas, were taken at the Galerías Layetanas in Barcelona in 1949 (an establishment in whose property and management participated José Gudiol). In these photographs, it is interesting that the panel has a neo-Gothic frame identical to that of its companion, currently in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. This indicates that the two panels were restored for their value in the art market in the same establishment (either Lafora's or Gudiol's), after which they followed different paths. The panel now in Cincinnati was sold to Francisco Melero-Barberá Beltrán this very same year of 1949, but it would return later to Gudiol, who finally sold it to the Cincinnati museum in 1961.

Silva Maroto, in her monographic study about Fernando Gallego published in 2004, refers to the central panel of the altarpiece from which this work came, and offers more interesting details about it: 'The information we have about the panel of St Peter enthroned confirms that it must have been taken from Cantalpino a few years after Gómez-Moreno saw it'; according to this historian, this panel of St Peter was taken from Cantalpino to the Madrid art market. It was acquired by Kuno Kochertaler, and although it was initially attributed to Jacomart, it was Post who recognised this piece as belonging to Fernando Gallego, at a time, 1935, when the painting was already in the hands of the Mexican collector Alberto J. Pani. This work did not become part of the Academia de San Carlos of Mexico, as it was part of a second Pani collection. Silva Maroto echoed Post's idea that the panels published by this scholasr in 1966 came from the same altarpiece, although he attributed the work in question, St Paul visiting St Peter in prison, to the so-called 'Master of the Armours', whom she identifies with Master Bartolomé (Silva Maroto, 2004, p. 238).

Beyond the details related to the concrete attribution of the piece, in the circle of Fernando Gallego, we can propose the Cantalpino origin of this painting: St Paul visiting St Peter in prison; it would have been part of an altarpiece dedicated to the titular saint of the parish church of this Salamanca town, a group to which the work that passed to the Pani collection must have also belonged: St Peter enthroned, as well as the one dedicated to the scene of Quo Vadis, which was in the Prats Tomàs collection and today is in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, institution that received it as a donation in 1973; and surely also St Bartholomew, described by Gómez-Moreno at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was still in the church of San Pedro de Cantalpino. The measurements of all of them (an element of judgment that Silva Maroto could not count on) would allow us to endorse this common origin.

Thus, the St Peter enthroned  of the Pani collection, whose present whereabouts is unknown, would measure, according to the data collected by Gómez-Moreno, 1.09 x 0.90 m, although, as the Granada scholar himself noticed, it is cut off at the bottom, so its original height must have been somewhat greater. This data would be consistent with the height of the Cincinnati panel (1.21 x 0.65 m) and with the height of the currently heavily manipulated Barcelona panel: the photograph in the Moreno Archive shows that both were of a similar height. It would also be consistent with the height of the St Bartholomew panel (1.18 x 0.72 m) that Gómez-Moreno saw in Cantalpino and of which neither its fate is known nor any visual evidence is recorded. In this way, the St Peter enthroned could belong to the central vertical lane of the altarpiece, presiding over it as its titular image, and the Cincinnati and Barcelona panels, as well as the St Bartholomew whose whereabouts is unknown, could belong to the side vertical lanes of the altarpiece, which would house an extensive narrative cycle dedicated to St Peter, as well as a series of apostles (which, like the titular, would be presented seated: Gómez-Moreno thus describes the St Bartholomew in Cantalpino). If we assume the attributions of the titular panel to Fernando Gallego and of the Cincinnati and Barcelona panels to Master Bartolomé, we would be noting a new example of the collaboration between the two artists, which produced its greatest fruit in the main altarpiece of the cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo, of which twenty-six panels are kept in The University of Arizona Museum of Art. Evidently, such a collaboration would only be necessary if the altarpiece was great enough, which, together with the fact that the altarpiece is dedicated to St Peter and that the titular saint of the parish church of Cantalpino is also St Peter, indicates that this altarpiece must have been, without doubt, the former main altarpiece of the temple. It is more complicated to include in this ensemble the panel of the Virgin and Child (1.30 x 0.79 m), photographed by Gómez-Moreno, whose present whereabouts is unknown.

Description

The panel shows, in the foreground and occupying almost its entire surface, St Paul embracing St Peter. While the former bows respectfully, the latter, seated on a bench, tries in vain to sit up, as shackles bind him securely around his ankles. The hostile atmosphere of the prison is manifested not only in this descriptive element, but also in the emaciated face of St Peter, in the presence of a rough guardian who watches over the encounter between the two apostles and, finally, in the architectural framework of the scene, in which all the openings end in an oppressive black that, together with the presence of a staircase, reminds us that we are in a sordid basement. The faces, especially those of St Peter and the guardian, have the characteristic bony configuration of Master Bartolomé.

Post was surprised by the unusual nature of the scene, but, although it is true that it is not a theme that appears frequently, it is linked to the custom of associating the episodes of the lives of St Peter and St Paul, especially in their Roman stay, and has an illustrious precedent in the fresco of the same theme by Filippino Lippi in the Brancacci chapel of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence.

Locations

• XV^th c. - post. 1901

  church

  Church of San Pedro, Cantalpino (Spain)

• post. 1901 - Early XX^th c.

  dealer/antiquarian

  Juan Lafora Calatayud, Madrid (Spain) *

• First half of the XX^th c. - 1949

  auction house

  Layetanas Galleries, Barcelona (Spain)

• 1949 - pre. 1961

  private collection

  Francisco Merelo-Barberá Beltrán, Madrid (Spain) *

• pre. 1961 - 1961

  private collection

  José Gudiol Ricart, Barcelona (Spain) *

• 1961 - present

  museum

  Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati (United States)