Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/514

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

481 Painting (1480 — 1561), who took lessons at first from his father Pedro, and in the year 1503 went to Florence and studied under Michelangelo, whose famous cartoon of the Pisan war he copied. He then went to Rome, where he assisted his master in the great works at the Vatican, ordered by Julius II. On his return to Spain in 1520 — though he found himself famous and was appointed sculptor and painter to Charles V., as he had been to Philip I., before he quitted his native country — he scarcely painted any- thing but altar-screens for churches, which required a union of the three arts which he cultivated — painting, sculpture, and architecture. Luis de Morales, called el Divino (1509 ? — 1586), is a painter of whose life very little is known. About 1564 he was summoned to Madrid by Philip II., but he soon returned to Badajoz. When Philip II. visited that city in 1581, and found the artist in poverty, he gave him a yearly pension of three hundred ducats. His pictures, frequently painted on copper or wood, are as a rule very small and simple ; the most complicated are those representing the Madonna supporting a Bead Christ. There are some works, however, of Morales in which there are whole-length figures, such as the six large paintings of the Passion, which decorate the church of a small town in Estremadura, Higuera de la Serena. Madrid has only succeeded in collecting in its museum five works by his hand, which proves that they are rare, when authentic. The Circumcision is the largest, and seems to be the best of the five. Genuine works by Morales are rarely to be seen out of Spain. His efforts were cramped by the narrowing thraldom of the rules with which Spanish painters in his time were compelled to comply,