Mateo Cerezo (BURGOS, 1637 - MADRID, 1666)

Lot description

Mateo Cerezo (Burgos, 1637 - Madrid, 1666) 'Immaculate Conception' Oil on canvas. 146 x 103 cm. Mateo Cerezo was a renowned Spanish painter, born into a family of local artists. He joined Carreño's workshop when he was barely fifteen years old, becoming one of the artist´s best collaborators, as the Prado Museum confirms. This training marked “the style of the young Cerezo profoundly in the double Flemish-Venetian direction so fashionable at the time,” as Alvaro Piedra reports for the Royal Academy of History. He became in a short time, continues Piedra, “one of the most brilliant and revealing painters of Spanish Baroque, until his death at the tender age of twenty-nine”. He was an artist who was sought after by a wide clientele, especially for his religious paintings, such as the impetuous Immaculate Conception that we present in the auction, although that is not the only genre he painted. “In this regard,“ states the Prado, ‘the treatise writer and biographer Palomino declared the excellence with which he painted ’still lifes, with such superior excellence, that no one surpassed him,” a judgment fully corroborated by contemplating the paintings in the Museo Nacional de San Carlos in Mexico, which are signed and dated.” Mateo Cerezo´s drawings were also remarkable, and “heads, bodies and figures made with black pencil and sanguine in the manner of Carreño” are still preserved (Piedra, RAH). Reference bibliography: - Museo del Prado. (s.f.). 'Cerezo, Mateo'. https://www.museodelprado.es/en/aprende/enciclopedia/voz/cerezo-mateo/e27cc281-3ed9-4aa3-878a-f1de7cd2ab5a - Piedra Adarves, Álvaro. (s.f.). 'Mateo Cerezo Delgado'. Historia Hispánica. Real Academia de la Historia. https://historia-hispanica.rah.es/biografias/11694-mateo-cerezo-delgado