Fernando Gallego - Issues in Attribution

Issues in Attribution

Getty Museum’s Pietà

In 1988, Barbara Anderson wrote an article arguing the Pietà acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1985 was from the circle of Fernando Gallego. While this Pietà is a rather typical example of its kind, she notes the artist’s, “...blunt rejection of the female beauty and decorous grief typical of fifteenth-century depictions of the Virgin. In their place is a boldly unidealized but nonhistrionic depiction of profound sorrow.” Anderson notes that as opposed to Flemish practice at the time, Spanish artists stripped away many of the mundane objects in order to emphasize a more conceptual religious experience. Provenance of the piece proved tricky, as the Virgin’s face was overpainted in subsequent restorations, and its continental style led many scholars to believe it was an early 16th century French piece.

When it was finally attributed to a Spanish artist by art historian Charles Sterling, it was at a time when workshops and masters were still being classified, and the Getty’s piece was discussed as a possible Juan Nuñez or Bartolome Bermejo, due to the Netherlandish style and similarities in composition. Anderson compares the Pietà to the Crucifixion now in the Prado Museum and Saint Acacius and the Ten Thousand Martyrs on Mount Ararat in the SMU collection, discussing color palette, figural representation, and landscape. Although there are disparities between the three paintings, Anderson argues that they are all linked to Gallego's circle via style and date. This discussion proves the difficulties in attribution to Medieval and Early Renaissance works, many of which were completed in an artist’s workshop and had many painters involved. As this was published in the late 1980s, more research has been conducted on Gallego’s workshop and the Saint Acacius panel has now been attributed to Francisco Gallego, along with the Getty’s Pietà.