Painting and Devotion in Golden Age Iberia: Luis de Morales

By Jean Andrews

Luis de Morales, known as El Divino because of his intensely religious subject matter, is the most significant and recognisable Spanish painter of the mid-sixteenth century, the high point of the Spanish and Portuguese counter-reformations. He spent almost his entire working life in the Spanish city of Badajoz, not far from the border with Portugal, and did not travel outside of a small area around that city, straddling the border. The social, political and cultural environment of Badajoz and its environs is crucial for a thorough understanding of Morales’s output, and this book provides context in detail – considering literature and liturgical theatre, the situation of converted Jews and Muslims, the presence of Erasmianism, Lutheranism and Illuminism (Alumbradismo), devotional writing for lay people, and proximity to the Bragança ducal palace in Portugal as a means of explaining this most enigmatic of painters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786836045

Book preview

PAINTING AND DEVOTION IN GOLDEN AGE IBERIA

STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

SERIES EDITORS

Margaret Topping

Queen’s University, Belfast

Rachael Langford

Cardiff University

Giuliana Pieri

Royal Holloway, University of London

EDITORIAL BOARD

Mieke Bal

University of Amsterdam

Paul Cooke

University of Leeds

Anne Freadman

The University of Melbourne

María Pilar Rodríguez

Universidad de Deusto

Eric Thau

University of Hawai’i at Manoa

available in series

Aimee Israel-Pelletier,

Rimbaud’s Impressionist Poetics: Vision and Visuality (2012)

Nathalie Aubert (ed.),

Proust and the Visual (2013)

Susan Harrow (ed.),

The Art of the Text: Visuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century

literary and other media (2013)

STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

Painting and Devotion in Golden Age Iberia

Luis de Morales

Jean Andrews

© Jean Andrews, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78683-602-1

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-604-5

The right of Jean Andrews to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Luis de Morales, St Jerome in the Wilderness (detail), c.1560-70. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. By permission.

Cover design: Olwen Fowler

Contents

Series editors’ preface

Acknowledgements

List of figures

Preface

1Badajoz in the 1540s: City of Joy

2Badajoz in the 1550s: Iconographical Licence

3Badajoz in the 1560s: Meditation on the Life and Death of Christ

4Tridentine Badajoz and its Environs: The Model Male Penitent

5Both Sides of the Border: The Two Franciscos

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Series editors’ preface

Studies in Visual Culture provides a forum for ground-breaking enquiry into visual-cultural production in its social, historical and cultural contexts. The series places particular emphasis on the exchanges, transactions and displacements that link Europe to wider global contexts across the visual-cultural field. The series seeks to promote critical engagement with visual media as ideological and cultural as well as aesthetic constructs, and foregrounds the relationship of visual cultures to other fields and discourses, including cultural history, literary production and criticism, philosophy, gender and sexuality research, journalism and media studies, migration and mobility studies, social sciences, and politics. The Studies in Visual Culture series thus focuses on exploring synergies and key debates between disciplines, concepts and theoretical approaches, and offers an exciting new arena for testing and extending disciplinary, theoretical and conceptual boundaries.

Acknowledgements

The list of institutions and individuals I must thank for their assistance and kindness over the course of the preparation of this book is long.

Institutions: the University of Nottingham for research leave and Santander Universities for funding visits to galleries and churches in Spain and Portugal. All those galleries, large and small, and churches who generously gave permission to reproduce images gratis.

Individuals: Leticia Ruiz Gómez for showing me the Prado Morales paintings not on public display; Alexandra Markl at the Drawings and Engravings Collection of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, for letting me look at their Morales (and possible Morales) drawings; Jesús Jiménez González for taking me round the collection at the Museo Catedralico de Badajoz and for sending me away with a pile of useful and hard-to-find books; Verónica Molano Cid and Fr Juan Manuel García Acedo for welcoming me to the parish church of the Assumption in Arroyo de la Luz to see the altarpiece there; Fr José María Muñoz for his kindness regarding the Virgin and Child with the Little Bird in the parish church of St Augustine, Madrid; Mercedes Orantos Sánchez-Rodrigo for allowing me into the church of St Martin, Plasencia to see the altarpiece before it became a visitor site; Daniel Silva for giving me access to the Hispanic Society of America’s Holy Family with the Horoscope of Christ, José Alberto Conderana for context on the Morales Magdalen once kept at the Clerecía building in Salamanca; Teresa Álvarez González for information on the sculptor Pedro de Árbulo; Olivia Fryman for intercession with trustees; Daniel Benito Goerlich for showing me the Morales triptych in the Real Colegio-Seminario de Corpus Christi in Valencia; María Cruz de Carlos Varona for help in sourcing images; and Eddie Langé for instructing me in how Morales worked and Gill Langé for her warm hospitality.

I also acknowledge the encouragement and support of Terry O’Reilly, Anne J. Cruz, Laura R. Bass and Jeremy Roe, as well as the friendship of my colleagues in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Figures

Figure 1

Luis de Morales, The Virgin and Child with the Little Bird, 1546, oil on panel transferred to canvas, 210 x 158 cms, church of St Augustine, Madrid.

Figure 2

Raffaello Sanzio, The Madonna with the Goldfinch, 1505–6, oil on panel, 107 x 77 cms, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 1890, 1447.

Figure 3

Juan Correa de Vivar, The Virgin with the Goldfinch, 1548–50, oil on panel, 43 x 36.5 cms, Colegio de Doncellas Nobles, Toledo © Patrimonio Nacional, inv. 00680728.

Figure 4

Luis de Morales, The Virgin and Child with St John, c.1545–55, oil on oak panel, 167 x 122 cms, Salamanca cathedral, Salamanca.

Figure 5

Luis de Morales, Holy Family with the Horoscope of Christ, c.1554–60, oil on walnut panel, 91 x 67 cms, Hispanic Society of America, New York, inv. A78.

Figure 6

Luis de Morales, The Presentation in the Temple, c.1562, oil on oak panel, 146.5 x 116 cms, Prado Museum, Madrid, inv. P943.

Figure 7

Luis de Morales, The Birth of the Virgin, 1562–7, oil on walnut panel, 69.2 x 93.2 cms, Prado Museum, Madrid, P7859.

Figure 8

Luis de Morales, Virgin Dressed as a Gypsy with the Child Jesus, c.1567, oil on panel, 57 x 41 cms, Fondo Cultural Villar Mir, Madrid.

Figure 9

Luis de Morales, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c.1566, oil on oak panel, 167.5 x 125 cms, Museo de Salamanca, inv. IG 106; photo Manuel Blanco/AMP digital, Archivo Fotográfico, Museo de Salamanca.

Figure 10

Luis de Morales, Juan de Ribera, c.1566, oil on oak panel, 52.3 x 40 cms, Prado Museum, Madrid, inv. P947.

Figure 11

Luis de Morales, Calvary with Donor, c.1565–75, oil on panel, 235.5 x 156.6 cms, Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia, inv. 445.

Figure 12

Luis de Morales, Virgin and Child, c.1565, oil on chestnut panel, 83.7 x 63.7 cms, Prado Museum, Madrid, inv. 2656.

Figure 13

Luis de Morales, The Virgin and Child with the Distaff, 1566, oil on chestnut panel, 64.5x 45 cms, Prado Museum, Madrid, inv. P7864.

Figure 14

Luis de Morales, Pietà, c.1560, oil on oak panel, 126 x 98 cms, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, inv. 612.

Figure 15

Luis de Morales, Pietà, 1553–4, oil on panel, 114.4 x 84.2 cms, Museo Catedralicio, Badajoz.

Figure 16

Anon. Netherlandish, Portable passion polyptich (10 panels), panel no. 10 Pietà (inner central panel), mid-sixteenth century, oil on oak panel, 24.2 x 20.2 cms, Wernher Collection, London, ©The Wernher Foundation Historic England Archive, inv. K011220.

Figure 17

After Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Yarnwinder, c.520–30, oil on panel, 62 x 48.8cms, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, inv. NG2270.

Figure 18

Luis de Morales, Man of Sorrows, 1566, oil on walnut panel, 60.5 x 44 cms, Prado Museum, Madrid, inv. P007867.

Figure 19

Luis de Morales, The Man of Sorrows, c.1560, oil on panel, 64.45 x 46.36 cms, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, inv. The Ethel Morrison van Derlip Fund, 62.24.

Figure 20

Frei Carlos, Christ, the Good Shepherd, c.1520, oil on panel, 90 x 65 cms, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, inv. 1 Pint; photo Luisa Oliveira/José Paulo Ruas ©Direção-Geral do Património Cultural/Arquivo de Documentação Fotográfica.

Figure 21

Nicolás Francés, St Jerome Translating the Gospels, c.1450, tempera on panel, 98 x 59 cms, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, inv. 1013.

Figure 22

Leonardo da Vinci, St Jerome, c.1480–2, oil and tempera on walnut panel, 102.8 x 73.5 cms, Vatican Museums, Rome, inv. 40337.

Figure 23

Cosmè Tura, St Jerome, c.1470, oil and tempera on poplar panel, 101 x 57.2 cms, © The National Gallery, London, inv. NG773.

Figure 24

Hieronymus Bosch, St Jerome in Prayer, c.1485, oil on panel, 80.1 x 60.6 cms, Fine Arts Museum, Ghent, inv. 1908-H.

Figure 25

Anon., The Penitent St Jerome, mid-sixteenth century, oil on panel, 49 x 34 cms, Museo de Bellas Artes, Cáceres, inv. CE000665.

Figure 26

Luis de Morales, The Penitent St Jerome, 1560–3, oil on panel, 65 x 80 cms, predella panel on the altarpiece of the church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Arroyo de la Luz, sculptor Alonso Hipólito, Arroyo de la Luz, Cáceres.

Figure 27

Luis de Morales, The Penitent St Jerome, c.1555, oil on panel, 80 x 58 cms, Museo Catedralicio, Badajoz.

Figure 28

Francisco de Navarra (with Hans de Bruselas), The Penitent St Jerome, 1555–9, choir stalls, Badajoz cathedral, Badajoz.

Figure 29

Pedro de Árbulo, The Penitent St Jerome, 1597, polychromed wood, Museo de la Rioja, Logroño, © Museo de La Rioja, inv. 416.

Figure 30

Juan Fernández de Navarrete, The Penitent St Jerome, 1569, oil on canvas, 367 x 261 cms, Escorial Gallery, Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, El Escorial, inv. 10014607, ©Patrimonio Nacional.

Figure 31

Luis de Morales, St Jerome in the Wilderness, c.1560–70, oil on panel, 62 x 46.5 cms, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, inv. NGI 1.

Figure 32

Diogo de Contreiras (attrib.), St Jerome, St Anthony and St Denis, 1546, oil on panel, 47 x 203 cms (det.), Museu de Évora – Museu Nacional Frei Manuel do Cenáculo, Évora, inv. ME1544; photo José Pessoa, © Direção-Geral do Património Cultural/Arquivo de Documentação Fotográfica.

Figure 33

Vicente Juan Masip (Juan de Juanes), The Penitent St Jerome, 1570s, oil on panel, 59 x 44.4 cms, private collection (image courtesy of the Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo, inv. DO 2013/13/1, 10/2013–03/2015).

Figure 34

Garcia Fernandes, The Penitent St Jerome, c.1530, oil on panel, church of the Real Mosteiro de São Francisco, Évora.

Figure 35

Francisco de Castillejo (attrib.), Pietà, 1560s, oil on panel, 83.5 x 67.5 cms, Museo de Bellas Artes de Córdoba, Córdoba, inv. DO0022P.

Figure 36

António Campelo, Christ on the Way to Calvary, 1565–75, oil on chestnut panel, 260 x 144 cms, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, inv. 1184 Pint; photo Luisa Oliveira © Direção-Geral do Património Cultural / Arquivo de Documentação Fotográfica.

Figure 37

Luis de Morales, Ecce Homo, c.1565, oil on oak panel, 182 x 94 cms, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, inv. 425 Pint; photo José Pessoa, © Direção-Geral do Património Cultural/Arquivo de Documentação Fotográfica.

Figure 38

Francisco João, The Taking of Jesus, 1575, oil on panel, c.150 x 70 cms, Franciscan church, Évora; photo © ISF-Manuel Ribeiro 2016.

Figure 39

Francisco João, Christ at the Pillar, 1575, oil on panel, c.150 x 70 cms, Franciscan Church, Évora, photo © ISF-Manuel Ribeiro 2016.

Figure 40

Francisco João, The Crowning with Thorns, 1575, oil on panel, c.100 x 100 cms, Franciscan church, Évora, photo © ISF-Manuel Ribeiro 2016.

Figure 41

Francisco João, Ecce Homo, 1575, oil on panel, c.150 x 70 cms, Franciscan church, Évora, photo © ISF-Manuel Ribeiro 2016.

Figure 42

Francisco João, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1575, oil on panel, c.150 x 70cms, Franciscan church, Évora; photo © ISF-Manuel Ribeiro 2016.

Figure 43

Francisco João, The Descent from the Cross, 1575, oil on panel, c.100 x 150 cms, Franciscan church, Évora, photo © ISF-Manuel Ribeiro 2016.

Preface

Luis de Morales is not much known outside Spain though he was possibly the most remarkable, and certainly the most idiosyncratic painter working in Spain before the arrival of the Cretan Doménikos Theotocópoulos in 1577. By then, Morales was well past his peak. The first work of note on Morales in English was a short book by Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, a curator at the Hispanic Society of America which holds three significant works by him, published in 1953.¹ It was followed eight years later by the Finnish Ingjald Bäcksbacka’s catalogue raisonné, published in English in 1962.² In Madrid, at almost the same time, Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño’s monograph on Morales appeared.³ After Gaya Nuño, the next important consideration of Morales came from the pen of Alfonso Rodríguez G. de Ceballos in 1987. His long article in the Spanish art journal Goya on the spiritual milieu of Morales’s work is definitive.⁴ From the late 1970s, the archival work undertaken by the musicologist Carmelo Solís Rodríguez provided depth and context for Morales’s career.⁵ Subsequent to this contribution, the next great step forward for Morales has undoubtedly been the Prado exhibition curated by Leticia Ruiz Gómez and shown in Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona in 2015–16. The exhibition catalogue, published in Spanish and English versions, is now the most important source for Morales, given the wide range of paintings from public and private collections in the exhibition, the number of new attributions, the identification of mistaken attributions and the transfer of paintings, some of them significant, to new ownership since the publication of Bäcksbacka’s catalogue.⁶ While the exhibition itself attracted a mainly Spanish viewership, the Prado’s decision to publish the catalogue in English is an acknowledgement of the need to provide material on Morales for a non-Spanish-speaking international audience.

A further indication of the growing international awareness of the significance of Morales’s work can be found in a pre-auction exhibition mounted in the summer of 2018 by Christie’s in London. Sacred Noise showcased a series of pieces for sale within a theme of Christian iconography from the medieval period to the present day. The painting chosen for the cover of the electronic catalogue is none other than a beautifully preserved and signed Morales Ecce Homo. This painting, authenticated recently by Isabel Mateo Gómez, who has done so much to establish the modern Morales canon, had last been seen at a Christie’s auction in Madrid in 2007.⁷

Morales did not undertake journeys to view work by great painters from Italy or Flanders. There is no definite information as to whom he may have studied with. With the exception of a single portrait of his most important patron, Juan de Ribera, bishop of Badajoz, his entire output is religious in nature. Within that output, he produced several paintings which are almost identical in iconography, only varying in size, support or elaborateness according to the nature of the commission. He does not have any followers of distinction, and he left no testimony, no letters, nothing in his own words to enable historians over the years to get a sense of the man, as distinct from his work. He may have been a deeply religious individual, or he may simply have had an ability to evoke devotion in his manner of representing religious images. In juxtaposition with the Italianate style which developed in Madrid from the 1580s under the influence of Italian painters brought in to work on the Escorial, and their naturalised sons who continued the tradition, Morales’s work, Leonardesque in technique, Flemish in composition, restricted both in narrative and in iconography, seemed hopelessly backward-looking. Many commentators considered his anatomy suspect, not least Trapier, who accuses him of ‘a lack of understanding of the human form’.⁸ In this respect, neither comparison with the conventionally Italianate Madrid School nor the more idiosyncratic, Italian-trained Doménikos Theotocópoulos, with his elongated, often etiolated figures, helps Morales’s case. However, these images were extremely popular in Morales’s lifetime as devotional aids, both in public and domestic contexts and, then as now, they spoke to the viewer in a way that transcends technique and composition.

Two of Morales’s altarpieces, restored and cleaned, are still in situ, in the church of the Assumption in Arroyo de la Luz, near Cáceres, and in the church of St Martin in Plasencia, recently opened to the public. Being able to examine Morales’s sequences of images, in oil on panel, set into the gilded timber frames of the original retables, in dialogue with the polychrome statuary, gives a sense of how his narratives impacted on the congregations of these small churches in his own time. It is probably only because these are very small, non-monastic churches in a relatively poor part of Spain that the altarpieces survived, first the impulse to redecorate or expand prevalent in the eighteenth century, and then the consequences of the disestablishment of the Church in the 1830s. The effectiveness of these altarpiece images, particularly the predella paintings which were more accessible to the viewer kneeling behind the altar rail, probably led some individuals to request smaller versions for personal devotion. Thus Morales became a painter with two separate groups of clients: churches requesting narrative sequences for altarpieces, and private individuals with sufficient resources to commission a painting for domestic use.

His domestic clièntele focused on a narrow range of images: the Virgin and Child, the Ecce Homo, the Pietà; and Morales produced large and small versions to order, while his altarpiece paintings, inevitably involving more collaboration with his workshop and no small degree of dependence on engravings and established iconography, tended to follow patterns put in place and adhered to by the mixture of indigenous and foreign, mainly Flemish, painters working in Extremadura and western Andalusia in the mid-sixteenth century.⁹

For all these limiting factors, Morales’s work has a voice and a presence that no other painter working in western Spain in this period can compete with. His very best work, exquisitely finished, has an emotional power that is hard to reduce to explicable factors. His Virgins and Christs are elegant, inward and still; some figures are enigmatic, others are arresting. He poses a problem for viewers today, who may not know what it is that draws them in. In his own time, the explanation was more straightforward, and he became, to an extent, a conduit for the devotional culture of Counter-Reformation Extremadura and Andalusia, if not for the whole of Iberia. For that he was known by subsequent generations as El Divino Morales, the Divine Morales, and it is under this appellation that the Prado chose to present him in the exhibition of 2015/16.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Morales was not just a quirky painter but one who spent his working life in an odd little place for which even Spaniards themselves had little time. In the nineteenth century, Badajoz was very much a backwater, and enmity between Spain and Portugal was entrenched at a popular and a political level. The distress on both sides brought about by the conflict surrounding the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy from 1640, with notable battles in Elvas, just across the border from Badajoz, in 1644 and 1649, and another in Montijo, to the east of Badajoz, in 1644, set the tone for the succeeding centuries. The French Hispanist Charles Davillier, writing in the 1860s, observes deep antipathy between Spaniards and Portuguese. Without perhaps fully understanding the nature of the aspersion cast on the Portuguese, he quotes lines from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: ‘Well doth the Spanish hind the difference know / Twixt him and Lusian slave, the lowest of the low’ (Canto 1, Stanza XXXIII).¹⁰ In fact, Byron’s throwaway line reflects his own ill-informed views on Portuguese resistance to the French invasion of the Peninsula, and the ‘pilgrimage’ to Portugal itself is based on a mere couple of weeks spent in transit in Lisbon in July 1809.¹¹ Davillier, however, lends more substance to his point about the ill will between both nations by citing an unnamed late eighteenth-century German author who mentions the proliferation of Portuguese border taverns named in honour of those who killed Spaniards, a reaction, in the German traveller’s view, to the disdain with which Spaniards treated the Portuguese. This disdain for the Portuguese, and indeed the poor opinion Spaniards have, to this day, of Badajoz, is summarised by the German botanist Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link. He spent a year in Portugal in 1798–9 in the company of another distinguished botanist, the Count von Hoffmannstegg, and writes very sympathetically on Portugal and its people.¹² Highly aware of military matters, given the parlous state of European geopolitics in 1798, Link reports on the attitude of the Spanish military to Badajoz: ‘The Spanish military, however, consider Badajoz as a place of banishment, being itself very dead, distant from other towns, on the frontiers of a nation they hate and despise, and in Summer an unwholesome situation.’¹³

Link’s travelogue does not concern itself with art or the interiors of churches, but, in his 1845 Handbook, the English traveller Richard Ford does. Sadly, he damns both Morales and his city in the following exercise in faint praise:

Badajoz, a dull unsocial town, pop. about 11.000, [. . .] distant about 5m from Portugal is an important frontier-place [. . .] The cathedral, which has survived so many sieges, is heavy inside and outside [. . .] the Capilla Santa Ana has some damaged paintings by Luis de Morales, called El Divino, more from his painting subjects of divinity than from any divinity of painting [. . .] He chiefly painted Saviours crowned with thorns and Madonnas dolorosas; he finished highly and was [. . .] defective in his lengthy drawing and often dark and cold in colouring. Meantime in Spain, and still more out of it, every lanky small head of Christ with a brown skin and suffering expression, is ascribed to Morales, just as most old castles are to the Moors. He painted many large pictures also, which, from lying out of the way, are scarcely known.¹⁴

Ford also rehearses the old chestnut about an impoverished and elderly Morales meeting Felipe II in Badajoz as the king journeyed to Lisbon to take formal possession of the Portuguese throne:

here he was living in 1581, when Philip II, on his way to Lisbon sent for him and said, ‘You are very old, Morales.’ ‘And very poor, sire’, was the reply; when Philip, a true patron of art, gave him an annual pension of 300 ducats, which he enjoyed until his death in 1586.¹⁵

The same encounter is mentioned in Davillier’s account of a visit to Badajoz in the late 1860s, accompanied, as in all his Spanish travels, by the painter and illustrator Gustave Doré.¹⁶ The story comes from the painter and historiographer Antonio Palomino’s Parnaso Español (1724), the third volume of his Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–24), and is told with rather more bathos by Palomino:

Y después de algunos años, pasando el Señor Philip Segundo a tomar posesión del Reino de Portugal en el de 1581, llegó a Badajoz, donde estaba nuestro Morales; el cual fue luego a ponerse a los pies del Rey, y habiéndolo recibido su Majestad con singular agrado, le dijo: ‘Muy viejo estáis, Morales’; a que él respondió: ‘Si, Señor, muy viejo y muy pobre’. Y entonces volvió el Rey a su Tesorero, y le dijo: que en las Arcas Reales de aquella Ciudad le señalasen doscientos ducados para comer. Replicó al punto Morales, y dijo: ‘Señor, y para cenar?’ Volvió el Rey y dijo: ‘Que le señalasen otros ciento’. En que se califica la liberalidad de aquel Gran Rey, y la discreción y donaire de aquel Vasallo.¹⁷

And after a few years, when King Philip II was on his way to take possession of the Kingdom of Portugal in the year of 1581, he came to Badajoz, where our Morales was living. The latter then went to prostrate himself at the king’s feet, and his Majesty, having received him with singular pleasure, said to him: ‘You are very old, Morales’, to which he responded: ‘Yes, my lord, very old and very poor.’ And then the King turned to his Treasurer, and said to him that 200 ducats should be assigned to him from the royal coffers of that City to provide his lunch. Morales swiftly replied, and said ‘My lord, and what about dinner?’ The king turned again and said: ‘Let him be assigned 100 more.’ By which the liberality of that great king and the diplomacy and wit of that vassal can be measured.

There is no eyewitness account of this encounter between Morales and Felipe II, and indeed the king’s pleasure in meeting the old painter is predicated by Palomino on the assumption that Morales worked at the Escorial for Felipe II and that Felipe was pleased with his work. Knowing that he painted only religious subjects and did not produce grand-scale paintings, Palomino reports that Morales provided muchas cosas de su devoción/‘many things for his devotions’ for the king. That Felipe should be presumed to like Morales’s style of devotional imagery makes a lot of sense, since Felipe was extremely devout, especially in his later years. Furthermore, his taste in private devotional imagery was firmly Flemish, as the items on display in his bedroomin the Escorial at the time of his death attest.¹⁸ However, like many other suggestions as to where Morales may have worked or travelled and with whom he may have studied, there is no evidence to substantiate this claim. Indeed, given Felipe’s strong preference, in the decoration of the Escorial, for Italian style and craftsmanship and for clear and orthodox narrative in the representation of sacred subjects, it is highly unlikely that he would have been interested in Morales’s work in the 1560s or 1570s, even for private devotional purposes.¹⁹ Palomino suggests that by 1581 Morales had not been able to paint for some time, as his hands trembled and his eyesight was failing. Some time after that, he moved to Alcántara where he remained until his death.²⁰

The brief Christie’s note on the Ecce Homo for sale in the summer of 2018 attempts to explain to the modern purchaser why Morales’s highly detailed depictions may have been attractive to the pious sixteenth-century client:

in an age long before the medium of photography, these incredibly fine details – from the individual handling of the strands of hair, to the light reflected in the sharp thorns and the glistening tears on Christ’s cheeks, the crescent moons on His fingernails, and His expressive eyes engaging directly with the beholder – would have struck and mesmerised the worshipper as though they were standing before Christ