Fernando Gallego and His Workshop: The Altarpiece from Ciudad Rodrigo

Start date: Saturday, March 22, 2008
Event is ongoing: Until Sunday, July 27, 2008

The Meadows Museum, in collaboration with the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, is organizing an exhibition focusing on 27 of the largest, most beautiful and iconographically ambitious panel paintings made in 15th-century Castile: the Meadows' San Acacio and the 10,000 Martyrs and the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson's 26 panels from the Cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo. Each was executed in the last decade of the century in Salamanca in the workshops led by Fernando Gallego (c.1440-1507) and his associate, the painter known as Maestro Bartolome. Their religious subjects were steeped in the Humanism newly imported to the University of Salamanca, and their styles were forged out of the Italian, Flemish, and German sources made available to them by virtue of their proximity to the University and its culture. Considerably more complex and varied than the artists' earlier works, these are the crowning achievements of two remarkable careers and a remarkable decade, and yet they are little understood because they have been relatively inaccessible for most of their existence.

Information from the museum's site