Jonathan Brown

The Duke of Alcalá: His Collection and its Evolution

Fernando Enriquez Afan de Ribera, third Duke of Alcala (1583-1637), was an important statesman and art collector and a member of a leading noble family of Andalusia. His artistic and literary interests are partially recorded in scattered references in Pachecos Arte de la pintura. He is also known to have been a patron of Jusepe de Ribera. The discovery of an inventory of the contents of his palace in Seville, the famous Casa de Pilatos, now permits a fuller reconstruction of Alcalas collection of painting and sculpture. Compiled shortly after the dukes return from his tenure as viceroy of Naples (1629-31), the inventory not only lists the works but also furnishes some indication of when and where they were acquired. A second inventory made after the dukes death documents a further stage in the formation of a collection that contained pictures attributed to important Spanish and Italian painters, including Velazquez, Pantoja, Reni, Arpino, and Artemisia Gentileschi, among others.

Hieroglyphs of Death and Salvation: The Decoration of the Church of the Hermandad de la Caridad, Seville

The Jeroglificos de nuestras postrimerias by Juan de Valdes Leal have held many a viewer in their grim thrall ever since the painter finished them for the Church of the Brotherhood of Charity in Seville in 1672. Rarely in art have the spectacles of death and the sepulcher been realized with such vividness. In the first painting, subtitled In Ictu Oculi (In the Twinkling of an Eye) (Fig. 1), the time-honored formula of a memento mori is observed with gruesome exactness. Death is a skeleton, carrying a coffin, shroud and scythe, who disdainfully extinguishes the candle of life. The eyeless sockets seem to leer with satisfaction as the light goes out on the symbols of human greatness and power. In the twinkling of an eye, the sum of lifes achievement is obscured by dark death. The second painting, Finis Gloriae Mundi (The End of Worldly Glory) (Fig. 2), elaborates the theme of death by a chilling representation of sepulchral existence, where the fragile human substance is human no more, but merely decomposi...