Hand in hand

sculpture and colour in the Spanish Golden Age

Arias Martínez, Manuel (ed.)

Volume and colour have gone hand in hand for millennia. When polychromed, sculptures gained a more lifelike and vivacious appearance, becoming effective instruments of persuasion from the earliest moments of history. Devotional sculpture, in which the divine took on a tangible and bodily form, was more effective as a means of communication when it was merged with colour – not simply as an adornment but as an essential part of the artwork, as it gave it a more familiar and lifelike appearance. Sculptors and painters worked together to create pieces in which both arts were perfectly combined, overcoming the rivalry between these sister arts. Painted sculptures were also used as doctrinal weapons whose intensity was heightened by making full use of their theatrical potential when they were paraded in processions or depicted in paintings.
This catalogue and the accompanying exhibition illustrate the tireless search for realism in Spanish Renaissance and Baroque art in everything that affected the envelope of the figure, and show through a hundred or so works, paintings, prints and sculptures the natural integration of painting into sculpture and its triumph in the Hispanic world, highlighting the value of the three-dimensional in the transmission of the sacred message.