Marianos salvador maella biography of christopher
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Born in Valencia in and son of a local humble painter with the same name, in he moves to Madrid first entering in the drawing studio of the sculptor Felipe de Castro and shortly after enters the recently inaugurated Academy of San Fernando. There he will study under the guidance of Antonio Gonzalez Velazquez, and thereafter moves to Rome in to complete his studies. He will remain in the Eternal City until the time when he returns to Court to become part of the workshop of the First Court Painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who was engaged at the time on the mural decoration of the new Royal Palace of Madrid. Through him he gains access to the orbit of the Palace, painting shortly after some of the vaults in the Chambers of the Princes of Asturias. His social ascent occurs in when appointed court painter. Since then he will simultaneously work on the fresco decorations for major areas of the royal palaces while undertaking other commissions of religious nature. In the following years he bec
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Portrait of Christopher Columbus
Maella presented three options for the project. The first was an Allegory of Christopher Columbus (fig. 1, Madrid, Real Academia de Historia, Fondo Juan Bautista Muñoz, vol. II, fols. ), 3 in which the bust of the navigator is dignified with a laurel wreath held by a small angel who has a trumpet in reference to Fame in its other hand. At the base of Columbus’s image is a female figure holding a nautical chart and at her feet a book, a terrestrial globe and an anchor, referring to Columbus’s maritime explorations. Terminating the composition behind the sculptural bust are two columns with the motto Plus Ultra, an allusion to Hercules and the mythical origins of Hispania. This first option was rejected by the author, who only wanted “[…] to tell the simple truth without recourse to fiction or embellishment”, 4 meaning that as a front cover illustration, Maella’s composition did not reflect the principle of historical truth to which he aspired
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The Meadows Museum, SMU (Dallas, Texas), announced recently that it has acquired six new works for its collection: fem Spanish drawings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including one by Alonso Cano (–), and one terracotta sculpture by the Catalan Modernist Agustín Querol y Subirats (–).
From the museum:
Purchased tillsammans from dem la Mano Gallery in Madrid, Spain, the fem sheets reflect the strong tradition of Spanish draftsmanship in the early modern period, and significantly enhance the museum’s collection of drawings.
Works bygd Francisco dem Herrera the Elder (c. –) and Pedro Duque Cornejo (–) are the first bygd these artists to enter the Meadows’ collection, while other drawings offer new insight into the creative processes of artists already represented, including Alonso Cano, Mariano Salvador Maella (–), and José Camarón Bonanat (–).
The sculpture by Agustín Querol y Subirats adds to the Meadows’ growing collection of Catalan art and joins two important pa