15th Century Spanish School. Lot n° 15

Alonso de Villanueva (Active in the first half of the 16th century) “Annunciation” Tempera and burnished gold panel painting. Panel measurements: 153 x 87 cm. Total measurements: 203 x 103 cm. This panel painting, along with three others, the Nativity, the Epiphany, the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, all dedicated to the life of the Virgin Mary, and painted by the artist Alonso Villanueva, as well as a fifth “Saint Clare” by the same painter, all came from the disentailed Convent of Saint Clare in Úbeda, from where they left in 1922, to join Carlos Pickman’s collection in Seville. Clara Beltrán and José J. Quesada note in their article in “Archivos de Arte” which is cited in the bibliography: “This was probably Carlos Pickman Pérez (1888-1971), Marquis of Pickman and a great lover of the arts. He was descended from Charles Pickman Jones (1808-1883) – an English merchant who settled in Seville and acquired the disentailed monastery of Santa Maria de las Cuevas on the Cartuja island in which he installed his china factory, the famous “La Cartuja de Sevilla-Pickman.” In 1921,Gómez Moreno pointed out that these paintings very possibly belonged to the original main altarpiece in the Church of the Saint Clare Convent. With regard to the artist, as stated in the abovementioned article by Beltrán and Quesada: “The painter, Alonso de Villanueva, worked in Cordoba between 1510 and the 1540s and, for this reason, he was connected to the group of artists who, with Pedro Romana at their helm after the departure of Alejo Fernández to Seville in 1508, supplied the demand for paintings in the area, their paintings arriving as far as the Kingdom of Jaen. Precisely the formal characteristics that are ascribed to Romana – limitation in expressivity, balanced compositions and Roman-style architectural backgrounds – can also describe Villanueva’s style, although with an additional factor of Flemish tradition. The extent of his output, which continued until the middle o