Born in Córdoba, raised among canons
Céspedes was born in Córdoba around 1538, though some biographers put it nearer 1548, and the exact date of his birth is unknown.[5][6] He grew up in the house of his father's maternal uncle, Francisco López de Aponte, a canon of the cathedral, and received a learned education there.[7]
He went on to Alcalá de Henares to study theology and Oriental languages.[8] An odd start for a painter, and the oddity runs through his reputation. The Real Academia de la Historia's biography finds him more humanist than painter or poet,[9] and the art historian Díaz Cayeros reads his late theory of painting through his Roman training.[10] Much of what is known about his life goes back to Francisco Pacheco, the painter and theorist who taught Velázquez.[11]
The list of trades is long. He is catalogued as painter, sculptor, architect, art theorist, humanist and poet, and each label fits one part of the record.[5] None is wrong. None is the whole man.
For a visitor the practical consequence is simple. Expect traces rather than a studio: a canvas in the cathedral, a chapel altarpiece, and writing that other people rescued and edited long after his death.
Rome and the Bonfili chapel, 1571 to 1575
Céspedes was in Rome by 1571 at the latest, although the year he left Spain is not known.[6] Between 1571 and 1575 he worked with the painter Cesare Arbasia on the fresco decoration of a chapel in the church of Santa Trinità dei Monti.[1] That is the Bonfili chapel, also called the chapel of the Annunciation,[12] and the Spaniard Antico Bonfili was the patron who commissioned its paintings.[13] Its frescoes are the only works from his Italian period that survive.[4]
The Descent label that some Spanish entries attach to the chapel is a different matter: Daniele da Volterra's Descent from the Cross is the painting that now occupies the altar wall.[14]
The two painters shared a home and a workshop until 1576, when the Córdoba prebendary decided to go back to his city.[15] Rome was not a short episode: his absence from Córdoba is put at seven, nine or perhaps 18 years, depending on which departure date a historian accepts.[16]
He took his seat in the cathedral in September 1577,[2] with a prebend attached, and Córdoba kept him there until his death in 1608.[17][5] Thirty-one years in one chapter is long enough to explain why the Roman painter who left came back as a prebendary, an antiquarian and a writer.
The partnership mattered beyond Rome. Córdoba's reception of Italian art owed much to the Piedmontese Cesare Arbasia, his partner in the Roman workshop.[18]
- c. 1538 (some sources: c. 1548)
Born in Córdoba
The exact date is unknown.[5]
- 1571 to 1575
Frescoes at Santa Trinità dei Monti
Worked with Cesare Arbasia in Rome.[1]
- 1576
Decides to return to Córdoba
The partnership's shared workshop ends.[15]
- September 1577
Takes up his cathedral post
Back in Córdoba as prebendary.[2]
- 1595
Santa Cena dated
The canvas now in the former chapel of San Clemente.[19]
- 1608
The Santa Cena and what Rome left in the cathedral
The painting most visitors can actually find is the Santa Cena, an oil on canvas in the former chapel of San Clemente on the western wall of the Mezquita-Catedral.[3] It is dated 1595, eighteen years after his return.[19] Stand in front of it with the Roman years in mind and the question is not whether it is good but what it is doing in a building of striped arches.
The cathedral's own account reads the canvas as clearly Italian, painted after his stay in Rome.[20] The art historian Angulo went further and placed Céspedes among the followers of the Michelangelesque tendency of Daniele da Volterra.[21] Bring that lens to the wall: a Roman manner, learned in a chapel on the Trinità dei Monti, hung on an Andalusian wall.
Explore nearby · Monument
Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba
856 columns, 1,300 years of Islamic and Christian history. UNESCO monument in Córdoba, Andalusia. Red-and-white arches, Byzantine mosaics, a Renaissance nave.
The canvas hangs inside the Renaissance cathedral that rose within the mosque, a building story told in the Ruiz dynasty of Córdoba's Renaissance architects. Céspedes painted; others built.
The humanist: a poem, a Temple of Solomon and a Janus essay
The writing is where Céspedes carries the most weight. His poem on painting, known in Spanish as the Poema de la Pintura, sets out how to reach technical excellence in the art.[22] It is hard to judge as a unit, because Pacheco printed in his Arte de la pintura only the fragments that supported his own arguments.[23]
Céspedes wrote on antiquarian subjects too, among them the architecture of the Temple of Solomon, and he befriended Benito Arias Montano.[24] His Discourse on the Temple of Solomon, which treats the origin of painting, has been studied and edited by Rubio Lapaz.[25] The Museo de Bellas Artes tells the same story: the humanist painter returned to the city with the style of Raphael and Michelangelo, after training in Italy.[26]
Shortly before his death in 1608 Céspedes wrote a short essay on the antiquity of the cathedral of Córdoba, arguing that the site had first been a temple of Janus.[27] He did not start the idea: he was answering an antiquarian tradition begun in the late 16th century by Ambrosio de Morales.[28] Céspedes began from two Roman milestones that he read as naming a temple to Janus Augustus and closed by identifying Janus with Noah, a step that pulled the pagan temple into biblical history.[29][30] Stylow's reading of the inscriptions turned the temple into a phantom born of a misreading,[31] and Robert Knapp had already dismissed it as speculation in 1983.[32] The milestones name a monumental border arch of Ianus Augustus, and Bellón Ruiz and colleagues identified the foundations of an arch and monumental platform at Mengíbar, in Jaén province, as that monument, not anything in Córdoba.[33] The Janus temple of the Mezquita is therefore a story about the building, not a fact about it.
Much of the rest survives because others rescued it. A large number of his original writings were taken to Granada by his companion and continuator Bernardo de Aldrete and came to light long after his death, which is one reason Pacheco's biography stayed the foundation of what is known about him.[34]
Keep the proportion in mind. The Janus essay is one piece in a body of work on painting, the Temple of Solomon and antiquity. It travels furthest because it is about the Mezquita. Nor is it the best of him.
Where to find Céspedes in Córdoba today
Céspedes is a trail rather than a single stop. These are the places where the record puts his work, with one caveat about the museum:
- Santa Cena: the former chapel of San Clemente, on the western wall of the Mezquita-Catedral.
- Santa Ana chapel: he also painted the paintings on its altarpiece, in the same cathedral.[35]
- Museo de Bellas Artes: the museum's own story presents his Virgin with angels (1578/1580), so check with the Museo de Bellas Artes de Córdoba what is on view before you build a visit around it.[36]
- Seville cathedral: the Virtues in the chapter house, dated 1592, if you are travelling on.[37]
His face survives in a bust-length drawing that shows him in maturity, dressed in the fashion of the late 16th century.[38]
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The honest way to read him on the spot is to start with the Santa Cena, then walk the nave with the Janus essay in mind. In the modern era only Pedro Díaz de Ribas contradicted that essay, pointing to its lack of serious historical argument.[39] A temple that never existed, a Roman manner brought home and a poem on painting all come from the same prebendary, and the cathedral that holds the canvas is the one he spent thirty-one years serving.