November 2007

The picture gender is now the main topic these two stamps devoted to the gothic-renaissance painter, Pedro Berruguete and the neoclassic Mariano Salvador Maella. The self-portrait of Berruguete belongs to the Lazaro Galdiano Museum and the one of Maella is amongst the batches of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando), both in Madrid.

A self-portrait is the most intimate mean of expression of an artist as it implies capturing their own personality and desire to be immortalised. The self portrait allowes the artist to experiment in the loneliness of his studio new techniques and artistic language. In portraits and self-portraits, the need to depict the psychology of the person who’s been painted motivated, as time went by, a radical change in the visual expression genre, emphasising the importance of the gesture, posture and the attitude and movement of the person as a way of expressing a message or feeling. Self portraits from the Renaissance to the end of the XIX century depict painters and authors with total realism, whereas the artists of the XX century gave more importance to colour and the metaphorical identity of the character being painted since although the face and features appeared distorted, the personal identity of the character was safeguarded and it became impossible to identify.

Berruguete

The self portrait of Pedro Berruguete (born in Paredes de Nava in the middle of the XIV century and deceased in Avila in 1504 ) depicts a young man wearing a hat with a hair cut of an Italian renaissance style, the country where he lived between 1473 and 1474. At his return to Castille, his art evolved and became an exponent of the gothic style with its strong expressivity, since although his models have a strong humanism around them, the sensation of realism stands out in all his works.

Maella

The second stamp that makes up this issue is that of Mariano Salvador Maella (Valencia 1739 - Madrid 1819) and depicts its author in his youth. He is a disciple of Mengs and became a chamber painter in 1795, position which he shared with Goya. He did official portraits as well as religious themes and combined the baroque style of the XVIII century with neoclassicism. He spent several years in Italy where he practiced the fresco technique which later he used when working on walls and vaults if the Royal Palace.