Retablos II

Spanish Paintings and Polychromed Sculpture from the 13th to 16th centuries

The late medieval period was a time of extraordinary artistic dynamism in the Spanish kingdoms. Among its most remarkable expressions was the retablo, a type of fixed monumental altarpiece unique to the Iberian Peninsula. Positioned behind the altar table and completely filling the apse in a display of brilliant colours and shimmering gold leaf, Spanish retablos reached towering dimensions, combining panel paintings, polychromed sculptures and sumptuous traceried frames. Their scale, presence, and graphic depiction of the lives and deaths of the Christian saints made them the visual and spiritual focus of Spanish churches, framing the liturgy and guiding devotion.

Over the centuries, many retablos were dismembered as a result of renovation, changing taste, or simple decay. Most have been scattered across private collections and museums right around the world, a process which, paradoxically, often ensured their survival. Following the success of the gallery's first exhibition of Spanish late-medieval retablos in 2019, this new iteration brings together eighteen panel paintings alongside five polychromed sculptures created by artists working in the wealthy northern Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon between around 1250 and 1520. Selected highlights from the exhibition can be seen below, by scrolling down this page, but a complete digital catalogue of the exhibition is available upon request.

The arresting, inventive, and iconographically complex works of art brought together for this new exhibition all reflect the rich and rapidly changing artistic climate that characterised the Iberian Peninsula during the period. The earliest paintings in the group vividly document the influence of the so-called 'International Gothic' style with its decorative stylisation, rich colour and lavish application of gold, which persisted in Spain longer than anywhere else in Europe. As we move through the fifteenth century however, we begin to discern new models and innovations introduced from Northern Europe through trade routes, itinerant artists and the circulation of drawings and prints. Rather than abandoning tradition, artists and workshops right across Spain adapted to change in remarkable, creative ways, assimilating foreign influences and transforming them into a distinctive Iberian style which, though regionally diverse, stands out for its material richness and complexity. Collectively, these astonishing and arresting works of art help to shine a searing light on the extraordinary artistic splendour of medieval Spain as it developed and evolved from the end of the Romanesque to the birth of the Renaissance.

18 September - 17 October 2025

Painted in the central Aragonese town of Daroca around the year 1420, the Entombment of Christ takes place within a tightly enclosed garden, a water fountain positioned beside a tomb decorated with fictive pseudo-kufic carved letterforms. Christ’s death is mourned by Saint John, the Virgin Mary, the Magdalene, and a further female attendant who claps her hands to her mouth in grief. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus lower the body into its tomb shrouded in white cloth. The scene unfolds in silent but theatrical dramatization, its key protagonists wringing their hands or collapsing in anguish. The identity of its painter, Martin del Cano, is one of the key figures of Aragonese painting at this early date, though he is only known for a small number of surviving altarpieces, and only one retablo by his hand remains intact.

Martín del Cano, also known as the Master of Langa (doc. Daroca 1411-1421)
The Entombment of Christ
Crown of Aragon, Daroca
c. 1420

This massive, horizontal-format panel was once part of a predella or ‘banco’, the lower register of an altarpiece positioned immediately above and behind the altar table. Executed by an artist in the circle of the mid fifteenth-century Catalan painter Jaume Cirera, it shows three canonical scenes from Christ’s Passion arranged in chronological order: Christ before Pilate, Christ carrying the Cross, and the Deposition. Its viscous portrayal of Christ’s tormentors, who mock and pull at him while he buckles beneath the weight of the cross on the road to Calvary, is uncompromisingly direct. Following his death on the Cross, his corpse is laid out on the funerary bier at far right in a manner that forces us as viewers to contemplate our own part in his sacrifice for mankind. The uncontrolled anguish exhibited by the Magdalene, who throws her hands up to the Heavens in despair, remains as visceral and affecting today as it was intended over five centuries ago.

A predella depicting three scenes from the Passion of Christ
Catalonia
c. 1440

This brooding representation of Christ as the man of sorrows, a class of image developed in the Middle Ages to concentrate the minds of the faithful on the human suffering experienced by Christ in the days following his sentence, is an astonishing image of the man behind the sacrifice. The identity of its author, Master Felipe, has only recently been resurrected in scholarship, but he seems to have hailed from Northern Europe before moving to Castile and later south to Extramadura for work. There he benefited from the patronage of the local nobility, who supported his career for more than twenty years. Only a tiny handful of paintings by his hand have survived however, and this one is characteristically direct and uncompromising. As if to concentrate the effect even further, the painter suppressed his original design (which included a length of cloth suspended behind Christ’s head), in favour of a solid white backdrop, which serves to emphasize his physical presence along with every spike of the crown of thorns encircling his bruised and wounded forehead.

Master Felipe (The Master of the Zarzoso Triptych, active c. 1440-1470)
Christ Crowned with Thorns
Castile or Extramadura
c. 1450-1470

It would be surprising to learn that the Master of the Becerril Saints, a Castilian painter active in the town of Palencia during the middle years of the fifteenth century, had benefitted from any formal training whatsoever. His small corpus of extant paintings is united by the great eccentricity with which he wielded the brush; perspective meant nothing to him, landscapes verge on almost complete and lurid abstraction, and figures are represented with an intense graphic linearity that seems to align them far more closely with early experiments in printmaking than it does to pigmented flesh or physiognomic modelling. And yet he very clearly took delight in the whole process of his artform, seeking to create visual interest and variety in surface and colour with a spirit both joyously untamed and doggedly meticulous all at once. Instead of the barren earth ground which Saint Bridget of Sweden claimed Christ had been born onto in the shelter of the lowly Bethlehem stable, here he lies on a lavish floor of the most vivid and perfectly green tessellating tiles.

The Master of the Becerril Saints
A pair of panel paintings showing the Nativity and the Adoration of the Kings
Castile, Palencia
c. 1450

Saint Michael, clad in a full suit of shimmering gold armour, crushes the body of a terrifying beast beneath his feet, a cross staff in his right hand and the scales with which he weighs the souls on the day of Judgment in his left. Pus and blood spew from the body of the devil, still clinging in vain to the spear with which it has just been overcome and defeated by the archangel. Measuring almost two metres in height, this monumental panel once formed the central section of the retablo mayor – high altar – of the church of San Miguel del Pino near Valladolid in northern Spain. It was executed in the years around 1480 by an anonymous Castilian artist known by the provisional name ‘the Master of Palanquinos’ and is one of his greatest surviving works.

The Master of Palanquinos
Saint Michael weighing the Souls, from the high altar of San Miguel del Pino, Valladolid
Castile, Valladolid
c. 1480

The Virgin and Child are shown seated below the vaulted canopy of a gilded architectural shrine. While the elaborate traceried forms of its microarchitecture are distinctively Castilian in their design, and help align the object with the great, late fifteenth-century sculptor Gil de Siloé (who worked for the Crown of Castile in the royal city of Burgos), the positioning of the figures and the many-ribbed vault under which they sit enthroned raise the tantalising possibility that our sculptor had some form of contact with the work of Donatello, as well as the della Robbia dynasty in Florence, who specialised in producing such images using glazed terracotta. With its painted scheme beautifully preserved, this large shrine attests to the complex and powerful symbiosis between carving and polychromy pioneered by Castilian sculpture during the late Middle Ages.

Workshop of Gil de Siloé (c.1440-1501) and Diego de la Cruz (fl.1482-1500)
A gilded shrine showing the Virgin and Child
Castile, Burgos
c. 1490-1500

Standing triumphantly on the body of Satan, who writhes beneath him in the form of a beast with a face in its scaly abdomen, the figure of Saint Michael holds a sword aloft above his head and a shield in his left hand. Ornate, plated armor and a gold-trimmed green and red mantle emphasize his role as a holy warrior saint, safeguarding humanity from evil. An elaborate inscription carved prominently around the lower hem of his chainmail shirt identifies the sculpture’s patron, a Castilian presbyter who rather neatly shared his name with the archangel himself. Carved from a single block of walnut, and retaining almost all of its original polychromy, this magnificent group is the key work of an extraordinarily talented sculptor who has, nonetheless, yet to be identified by art historians.

Saint Michael vanquishing the Devil
Spain, Castile
c. 1500

At over three metres in height, this monumental image is one of the largest single-section Aragonese panel paintings to have survived from the late Middle Ages. Executed by the Valencian painter Nicolas Falcó in the second decade of the sixteenth century, it depicts the tale of Saint Christopher and the infant Christ, in which Christopher, a man of great size and strength, devoted himself to Jesus by helping travellers cross a dangerous river. One day a child asks for Christopher's help across the water, but the infant seemed to grow heavier with every step. When after much effort they finally reached the opposite shore, the child identified himself as Christ, telling the holy man that he had just carried the weight of the world. Underscoring the Herculean strength of the saint is the depiction of his massive walking stick – here shown as the trunk of an entire palm tree.

Nicolau Falcó (doc. 1493-1530)
Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child
Valencia
c. 1510-1520