Manuel Pereira

San Bruno by Manuel Pereira is located in the Cartuja de Miraflores (Burgos).

Manuel Pereira (Porto, 1588-Madrid, January 29, 1683) was a Portuguese Baroque sculptor who lived in Madrid, where he did much of his work.

Biography

Born in Porto in 1588, no other information about his life and activity is known until 1624, when he executed the stone statues of the church of the Company of Jesus in Alcalá de Henares. A year later he was already in Madrid, where he had moved in the company of his mother and his brother Pantaleón Gómez, also a sculptor, who collaborated with him until his death in 1645. In 1625 he married María González de Estrada in Madrid., from whom two children will be born, widowed in 1639. In 1635 he was in prison for debts, leaving him guarantors the assembler Juan Bautista Garrido and the painter Jusepe Leonardo, polychromer of some of his works.

In a curious contract, by which the assembler and architect Pedro de la Torre undertook in 1652 to make the altarpiece for the chapel of Blessed Simón de Rojas in the church of La Trinidad in Madrid, the condition is that the sculptures must be by the hand of Pereira or Juan Sánchez Barba, "and not by any other", a condition that would be repeated in 1661 in the contract for an altarpiece for the convent of La Merced with the assembler Juan de Ocaña. In both cases it seems that the chosen one was Sánchez Barba, the only image maker who could compete in Madrid with Pereira in those years.

He obtained the appointment of Familiar of the Holy Office, a title that he will prefer in his will to that of sculptor, for which he had to present proof of purity of blood. The same noble pruritus will be revealed when he married his daughter Damiana to José de Mendieta, a knight of the Order of Santiago, to which his grandchildren will also belong, a witness claiming "that he and his ancestors were knights of the Kingdom of Portugal, where they had exercised the trades and occupations that in that Kingdom only the hixodalgos knights can have ». He died in Madrid in 1683, almost blind and after more than ten years of inactivity.

Disciples or collaborators were, in addition to his brother Pantaleón already mentioned, Manuel Correa, also a native of Porto and twelve years younger, Manuel Delgado and José Martínez from Navarre.

Work

San Bruno. Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando

Although his training is supposed to have taken place in Porto, Pereira is going to become one of the great representatives of the Madrid school of sculpture. With the exception of a group of sculptures destined for the Portuguese convent of Santo Domingo de Benfica, which he took care of without leaving Madrid in 1636 commissioned by the Count of Figueiro, all his known works are distributed between Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, Burgos, Segovia and other nearby towns. Pereira was exclusively a sculptor, in stone, alabaster or wood, never dealing with the architecture of his altarpieces or polychrome. There are no known reliefs by his hand either and his work, even working for the court, is almost exclusively religious, mentioning only the execution of a sculpture of Neptune outside of that genre.

Established at court from a young age, his work reveals a classical spirit. In his figures with an elongated canon, sober expression and serene pathos, he will always avoid crudeness and torn gestures. The first known work of his is from 1624, for the façade of the church of the Compañía de Jesús in Alcalá de Henares, where he made various figures of saints. In the manner of the Castilian school, the figures have large volumes and dry, broken folds, but in the San Bernardo that he made a little later for the façade of Las Bernardas in the same city, there are and to the characteristics of his own style, perhaps influenced by Alonso Cano. These works made in Alcalá immediately brought him notable fame and the following commissions would be in the same line: wooden statues for altarpieces and stone saints to occupy the niches of the facades of churches and other public buildings, such as the Cárcel de Corte, among those preserved, the San Antonio de Padua of the church of San Antonio de los Portugueses in Madrid (1647) and, most especially, the San Bruno of the Hospedería that Cartuja de El Paular had on Calle de Alcalá in Madrid (1652), currently in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, a carving before which, according to Antonio Palomino, King Felipe IV used to stop.

In wood he made a series of images of great realism and extraordinary expressive intensity, among which we can highlight the San Marcos of the parish church of Martín Muñoz de las Posadas (Segovia), in attitude mystique, the San Antonio de Padua of the main altarpiece of the church of San Antonio de los Portugueses in Madrid, 1631, or the San Bruno of the Cartuja de Miraflores, before 1635. Also very notable are a series of crucified Christs, with a stylized body and an intensely emotional face, headed, apparently, by the Crucifix in the parish church of El Sagrario in Seville Cathedral. It is recorded that in 1646 Don Alonso de Aguilar, alderman of Segovia, commissioned Pereira another Christ that was to follow the model of the one he had previously made for the bishop of the same Castilian city. This second Crucified has been identified with the so-called Cristo de Lozoya, currently located in the cathedral of Segovia, which is undoubtedly the most famous of the series and the one in which Christ is presented with the arms raised in greater tension. Yet another, richly polychrome, is found in the Oratorio del Olivar in Madrid, different from the previous ones due to the more open position of the arms.

His will also be the wooden sculptures that occupy the altars of the buttresses in the Madrid Convent of San Plácido, with the tilting of the heads and the stylization of the bodies that are characteristic of the master. In addition, some famous sculptures destroyed at the outbreak of the civil war in 1936 were famous, including the Cristo del Perdón of the Dominicans of Rosario in Madrid, according to Palomino "a portentous thing, greatly helped by the incarnation, de mano de Camilo", of which there is a replica, possibly by Pereira himself, in the chapel of the Marquises of Comillas in Cantabria, and the carving of the titular saint in the altarpiece, carved according to traces by Alonso Cano, in the church of San Andrew. For the chapel of San Isidro in the same church in Madrid, construction of which began in 1657, he executed a series of farmer saints who, already in the reign of Carlos III, after the expulsion of the Jesuits, were repainted in the Imperial College church. white according to the neoclassical fashion, being likewise destroyed in 1936.

Other works that can be related to Pereira are an Immaculate Conception in the convent of Agustinas Recoletas in Pamplona, the Ecce Homo of the Carmelites in Larrea (Vizcaya) and a crucifix preserved in the church of San Juan de Rabanera de Soria, full of baroque tension and looking up.

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  Christ of Forgiveness (1655) in the Church of St John of Rabanera of Soria

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  Crucifix at the altar of the chapel of the Sagrarium, Segovia Cathedral

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  San Bruno and San Guido at the National Museum of Warsaw

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  Miraflores Carthusian

Consulted bibliography

• Palomino, Antonio (1988). The pictorial museum and optical scale III. The Spanish parnaso quaint laureate. Madrid: Aguilar S.A. de Ediciones. ISBN 84-03-88005-7.
• Martín González, Juan José (1983). Baroque sculpture in Spain, 1600-1700. Madrid: Editions Chair. ISBN 84-376-0392-7.