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Framed, on view
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Little is known about the artist Cristóbal Ramírez de Arellano. (1) A Cristóbal Ramírez de Arellano y Villanueva was born in Salamanca and baptized on July 23, 1610, in Santo Domingo de Salamanca. (2) This Cristóbal Ramírez de Arellano died on January 6, 1682 and was buried in the Chapel of the Incarnation of the Cathedral of Badajoz. It is uncertain, however, whether this person is the same as the artist in question. A Xristofol Ramires is recorded in the Colegio de Pintores of Valencia in 1616, and an artist of that name is recorded in 1631 in Toledo, where he was registered as a painter of the archdiocese of Toledo on March 9, 1635. (3) In September 1641, a Cristóbal Ramírez, painter and resident of Toledo (Chrisptoval rramirez pintor vezino de ella [Toledo]) appraised the paintings left at the death of the Canon Gregorio Barreiro, including a view of Toledo by El Greco, and in November the same artist (cited both as christobal rramirez pintor and christobal Ramirez) appraised the paintings left at the death of a Doña Jerónima Tenorio. (4) Two signed paintings are known by Cristóbal Ramírez, each dated 1638: a Christ the Savior in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, (5) and a Guardian Angel in the Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo. (6) Whether these paintings are by the same artist that painted the Dumbarton Oaks still lifes is unclear, although it is possible. The Prado painting is particularly close to the still lifes in its use of chiaroscuro modeling and well-executed details. All four paintings suggest the artistic heritage of the Toledo artist Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627), also a painter of both religious subjects and still lifes.
Spanish still life painting developed and matured into a sought-after art form during the first half of the seventeenth century. During this period, many artists who otherwise painted religious and historical pictures were drawn to this genre with its challenges of representational mimesis and compositional inventiveness. These challenges seem to have inspired a degree of artistic experimentation that was often absent from their blandly idealizing narrative paintings. Sophisticated patrons responded to the monumental and startlingly original Spanish still life, where the tangible reality of raw vegetables and fruits was realized with an intense naturalism combined with a precise arrangement of each object in a pattern of austere simplicity. Indeed, seventeenth-century Spanish still life paintings, known as bodegones, were notably austere in comparison to contemporary Dutch still life paintings, which often featured rich banquet dishes surrounded by ornate and luxurious items of fabric, metal, and glass. Although there is a rationality to both Dutch and Spanish still lifes, in the Spanish genre, the impenetrable black backgrounds, the complete isolation of the objects, and their sharp highlighting often give something of a location-less or otherworldly feeling to the composition despite the hyper-realism of the depiction.
Both Dutch and Spanish still lifes often have been described as having an embedded moral purpose, (7) and the austerity and compositional simplicity of the Spanish genre may have served as an admonishment against sensual pleasures, plenitude, and sheer luxury. (8) However, in the Dumbarton Oaks still lifes by Cristóbal Ramírez, the ripe, almost fecund quality of the fruits, especially the melon and the pomegranates, seemingly proffers an invitation to enjoyment and sensuality. Moreover, the opulence of the colorful fruit and elegance of the polished silver vessels, as revealed within the dark austerity of the shelf of the storeroom (bodega), suggest several possible thematic dichotomies, one or more of which Ramírez might have intended as a moral allegory: formality vs. informality, largess vs. hoarding (both of pleasure and wealth), nourishment vs. display, use vs. waste, and hedonism vs. frugality. Cristóbal Ramírez’s pronounced modeling and his sensuous painterly quality may reflect his knowledge of the still life paintings of the Neapolitan followers of Caravaggio that had been collected by Spanish aristocrats. (9) Ramírez shared these artistic qualities with his Sevillan contemporary, the still life painter Juan de Zurbarán (1620-1649) who painted a silver dish of pomegranates similar to the one in the Dumbarton Oaks painting. (10)
The Spanish artist Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627) helped to establish the prototype of the Spanish still life, employing in his work a strikingly ascetic depiction of vegetables relieved in raking light against a stark background. This compositional format of raw kitchen produce placed on the ledge of a storeroom in direct sunlight and against impenetrable darkness became the hallmark of seventeenth-century Spanish still life painting. It is this tradition that Cristóbal Ramírez followed in the Dumbarton Oaks paintings, the only still life paintings known by this artist. However, Cristóbal Ramírez’s style is distinctly individual and is notable for its soft painterly naturalism, warm coloring, and chiaroscuro modeling which ultimately is indebted to the Italian artist Caravaggio (1571-1610). His description of surfaces varies from sharp and vivid, as in the silver vessels, to soft and limpid, as in the grape skins or the stalks of the cardoon in Still Life with Cardoon, Grapes, and Pomegranates. This cardoon—a vegetable related to the artichoke and harvested for its root and stalks—enlivens an otherwise static still life composition by arching upward with its finger-like stalks and dominating almost two-thirds of the painting, filling the canvas from top to bottom. Its pendant painting, Still Life with Grapes, Melon, and Apricots, was signed and dated by the artist. The painting depicts a slice of melon and a shiny silver plate of apricots, displayed on a stone plinth, which, together, are compositionally off-center somewhat to the left. Against the especially dark background are two bunches of grapes and leaves which hang on their stems by cords from above. A duplicate version of this composition is in a private collection in New York City.
Both paintings contain depictions of several hanging bunches of grapes. In Spain in the second third of the seventeenth century, the realistic depiction of the grape cluster became something of a painter’s challenge and emblem. This popularity of depictions of grape clusters among Spanish painters and their patrons may well have been due to the ancient Greek Zeuxis’s legendary painting of grapes–a painting so realistic that birds descended and tried to eat the fruit. The grape cluster thereby offered a test of a painter’s mastery of chiaroscuro modeling and realism. (11) Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, in which the Zeuxis story was recounted, was translated into Spanish and published by Jerónimo de la Huerta in 1599. Although most Spanish still life painters of bodegones included hanging grapes in their compositions in combination with other fruits and vegetables, some artists, such as Juan Fernández (El Labrador) (documented 1630-1640, died 1657), occasionally represented grapes exclusively. It is possible that El Labrador was influenced in this by his Italian patron, Giovanni Battista Crescenzi, Marquis of la Torre (1677-1645; in Madrid from 1617), who may have encouraged the artist to conceive grape still lifes in response to the Zeuxis story. This learned allusion may well explain the popularity of depictions of grapes in the seventeenth century in Spain and elsewhere. (12)
(1) For biographies of seventeenth-century artists named Cristóbal Ramírez, see Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario Histórico de los más Ilustres Profesores de las Bellas Artes en España [1800] (Madrid, 1965) vol. 4, 145-146; Diego Angulo Íñiguez and Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Historia de la Pintura Española, Escuela Toledana de la Primera Mitad del Siglo XVII (Madrid, 1972), 103-106; William B. Jordan, Spanish Still Life in the Golden Age 1600-1650 (Fort Worth, 1985), 193; Jonathan Brown, The Golden Age of Painting in Spain (New Haven and London, 1991), 99; Conde de la Viñaza, Adiciones al Diccionario Histórico de los más Ilustres Profesores de las Bellas Artes en España de Don Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez [1889-1894] (Valencia, 1992), vol. 3, 283-284.
(2) Jesus Chacon, Descendienntes de Señor de Peñacerrada Sancho Ramírez [undated]. >http://entomologia.rediris.es/pub/bscw.cgi/d726968/Sancho%20Ramirez%20por%20Jesus%20Chacon.pdf< (accessed June 29, 2011).
(3) M. Gutiérrez García-Brazales, Artistas y Artífices Barrocos en el Arzobispado de Toledo (Toledo, 1982), 130.
(4) Diego Suarez Quevedo, “Prestigio de la Obra de El Greco en Colecciones Toledanas del Siglo XVII, Reflexiones sobre Inventarios y Tasaciones de Pinturas,” Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología vol. 57 (1991), 377.
(5) El Salvador, P1060 (signed and dated 1638, oil on canvas, 207 x 129 cm).
(6) Ángel de la Guarda (signed and dated X... RAMIREZ / FAC 1638, oil on canvas, 170 x 112 cm).
(7) See Harry Berger, Jr., Caterpillage, Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting (New York, 2011), and Christian Klemm, “Weltdeutung—Allegorien und Symbole in Stillebem,” in Stilleben in Europa, Gerhard Langemeyer and Hans-Albert Peters, eds. (Munster, 1979), 140-170.
(8) William B. Jordan and Peter Cherry, in Spanish Still Life from Velázquez to Goya (London and New Haven, 1995), conclude that “[t]here is no evidence that they [the painters] set out to show the dangers of gluttony,” p. 20. However, they do admit that “[w]hen decay is represented on the foodstuffs, such details may have provoked viewers to think about change, transience and the brevity of life,” p. 21.
(9) Jordan and Cherry, Spanish Still Life, 109.
(10) Apples in a Wicker Basket with Pomegranates on a Silver Plate and Flowers in a Glass Vase on a Stone Ledge (oil on canvas, 81.3 x 109.2 cm). Sold by Christie’s, New York, January 31, 1997, sale 8584, lot 218.
(11) The eighteenth-century Valencian art historian, Marcos Antonio de Orellana Mocholi (1731-1813), in discussing the Spanish still life painter Tómas Yepes (1610-1674), wrote that he owned a painting by Yepes of a basketful of grapes where the limpid and translucent grapes and the vine leaves could have deceived the birds, like those other celebrated grapes by Zeuxis. Biografía Pictórica Valenciana o Vida de los Pintores, Arquitectos, Escultores y Grabadores Valencianos, Xavier de Salas, ed., (Valencia, 1967), 221-222.
(12) Jonathan Brown and John Huxtable Elliott, eds., The Sale of the Century: Artistic Relations between Spain and Great Britain, 1604-1655 (New Haven, 2002), 214-215. See also Jordan and Cherry, Spanish Still Life, 14 and 71.
J. Carder
Bibliography
Jordan, William B. Spanish Still Life in the Golden Age 1600-1650. Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1985, 193-195, pl. 35.
Harris, Enriqueta. "Spanish Still Life, Fort Worth and Toledo." The Burlington Magazine, vol. 127, no. 990 (September 1985), 643.
Cherry, Peter. Arte y Naturaleza, El Bodegón Español en el Siglo de Oro. Madrid, 1999, 85, 36 (English text), pl. 97.
Exhibition History
"The Golden Age of Spanish Still Life: 1600-1650," Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 5/11-8/3/1985, and Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, 9/7-11/2/1985, no. 35.
Acquisition History
Purchased from the Matthiesen Gallery, London, by Mildred Bliss and Annie Louise Warren as a birthday present for Robert Woods Bliss, August 22, 1955;
Collection of Mildred Barnes and Robert Woods Bliss, Washington, DC, August 22, 1955 to January 17, 1969;
Bequest of Mildred Barnes Bliss (1879-1969), January 17, 1969;
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, House Collection, Washington, D.C.
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