Master of Saint George and the Princess. Zaragoza. Circa 1460-1470

Master of Saint George and the Princess. Zaragoza, circa 1460-1470
"The Prophet Zacharia"
Panel painting in tempera. 82 x 36 cm.
According to Dr. Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez on this painting, it is the previously unknown fragment of a reredos, which, due to its style, must be attributed to the Master of Saint George and the Princess, one of the most important painters of the late Gothic in the Aragon area. The panel, of rectangular and elongated format, is a fragment of an altarpiece dust cover with the representation of an almost full-length character in a three-quarter position. There is a small fragmentary tablet (30 x 26 cm) with a depiction of the prophet Daniel which is kept in the Prado Museum, which is not only relevant due to its iconography, but also because it is the work of the same painter who made the panel we have here.
Stylistically, the Prophet Zechariah offers no doubt as to the artist who painted him. This is undoubtedly a work by the Master of Saint George and the Princess, one of the most interesting painters of the late Gothic period in Aragon.
Among the works currently attributed to him are close parallels that justify this attribution. The best of them, surely, is the aforementioned Prophet Daniel from the Prado Museum. The parallels that could be pointed out are many and diverse, such as, for example, the fact that the facial features are completely identical, even in such secondary details as the black lines that can be observed around the lips, or the flashes of light made with fine brush strokes. In white near the tear duct of the eyes and by the nose. We also see the same type of prominent nose, somewhat sharper in the case of Daniel, or the summary depiction of the ear that is mostly covered up. The painter’s characteristic half-open eyes are found in both cases, brown and with a marked black pupil, and there is also the same treatment of the flesh. Finally, we see that the way of representing the eyebrows is repeated, through short brushstrokes that define the hairs.
This confirmed identity also occurs in the painter’s best-known work, the panel of Saint George and the Princess which is kept in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, where we detect an absolute coincidence in the styles previously noted.  The same can be said for the two panels painted on both sides that were part of the same set, and which were kept in Berlin until 1945, when they were destroyed. In them we find different faces whose characteristics refer us directly to those of the Prophet Zechariah, as is the case of Saint Paul or to Saint John the Baptist.
We can also mention the Saint Sebastian currently kept Gaasbeek Castle (Lennik, Belgium), which also has a human figure similar to that of our Prophet Zechariah, with his ear half-hidden behind his hair, a rounded nose and a troubled look.
The painter: The Master of Saint George and the Princess
To date, little is known about the painter. Neither his name nor the city he must have worked from, although it can be assumed that it must have been Zaragoza, the main artistic hub of Aragon in Gothic times. We do know, however, that he carried out one of his commissions for the monastery of San Pedro de Siresa (Huesca), located in the heart of the Pyrenees. We also know that he worked for the Cabrera family, an important lineage with origins in Catalonia. He created the work that gives the painter his name for a member of this family, the Altarpiece of Saint George and the Princess, of which only one compartment is preserved, in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, although through old photographs we know of others that were burned in a fire in 1945 in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin.
The painter’s great critical acclaim has been earned by an emblematic work which has been the focus of texts written about the artist by specialists and also a good part of what was written up to a certain point in time about late Gothic painting in Catalonia. We refer to the aforementioned Saint George and the Princess kept in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, which came to light for the first time in 1884 and was attributed to Jaume Huguet in 1909.
It is in the attribution of Saint George and the Princess to Jaume Huguet that the historiographic significance that the work and its author have had lies. Over time, the panel gained prestige among specialists and became a particularly representative painting of the art of Huguet, one of the emblematic Gothic painters of Catalonia.
Jaume Huguet's Aragonese journey was a novelty in the artist's historiography, and conditioned the study of Aragonese painting in the following decades. The formal relations between Aragonese and Catalan late-Gothic painting have drawn the attention of specialists for some time, although it must be said that for much of the 20th century a mistaken interpretative paradigm prevailed, as it was considered that Huguet had a decisive influence on a large group of active painters in Zaragoza and Huesca through the works he carried out in Aragon. He was introduced to the main focus of Catalan painting in the second half of the 15th century and a large proportion of the painters active in Aragon at that time were also placed under his influence.
As we can see, the proposal not only implied attributing a series of works to Huguet, but also assumed that a good part of Aragonese painting in the second half of the 15th century was influenced by him.
But time ended up resolving these issues, finally, and what Post had already supposed in 1938 was demonstrated, and affirmed more forcefully in 1941: that the Altarpiece of Saint George and the Princess was not the work of Jaume Huguet, but of an Aragonese painter who was certainly stylistically connected with the Catalan context. The American specialist mistakenly attributed the altarpiece to Martín de Soria, a documented master in Zaragoza between 1449 and 1487.  The art historian Joan Sureda took up Post's theory and it was he who in 1991 proposed removing the Aragonese works and the Altarpiece of Saint George and the Princess from Huguet’s catalogue.
More recently, there has been a growing agreement about the attribution of the work to the Master of Saint George and the Princess, who is gradually being revealed as one of the key characters around which Aragonese painting pivoted in the second half of the 15th century.
He is a master who shows subtlety in capturing certain details and a certain skill in the representation of emotion, an aspect that makes him stand out among his contemporaries.
After this long historiographical journey of more than one hundred years, the catalogue of works by the Master of Saint George and the Princess has only been established in three sets of works. As has already been mentioned, the most important was the Altarpiece of Saint George and the Princess, which the painter must have made for a member of the Cabrera family, to which the aforementioned prophet Daniel from the Prado National Museum must have been added, as well as the panels with Saint John the Baptist and Saint James the Elder kept in the church of the monastery of San Pedro de Siresa. It is important to note that the two Siresa panels are preserved in the place for which they were painted, which is an important further argument when it comes to justifying the Aragonese origin of their author.
Provenance: France - Barcelona private collection (2021).
We would like to thank Dr. Alberto Velasco González for identifying and cataloguing this painting.
The lot includes Dr. Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez’s report.