Page 164 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

Juan de Flandes and Michel Sittow began working This miniature retablo, with its many individ- Michel Sittow was born in Reval, a Hanseatic
on a miniature altarpiece for Queen Isabella in ual scenes from the life of Christ, was privately port on the Baltic (now Tallinn, Estonia). His
1496. Listed in a 1505 inventory of Isabella's pos- commissioned by Queen Isabella. It thus reflects apprenticeship and early career as a painter were
sessions in the castle at Toro are forty-seven small both her personal piety and, as was recently sug- served in Bruges, from about 1484 to 1491, when
panels (tablicas), which were stored in a cabinet gested by Chiyo Ishikawa, underlines the charac- Hans Memling was the most influential painter
(Sanchez Canton 1930, 99). These (and probably ter of the religious reform undertaken during the there. From 1492 to 1504 Sittow was in the ser-
others planned but not executed) were intended to reign of the Catholic Monarchs. The compositions vice of Queen Isabella. Not yet twenty-five
be framed as aretablo, with a format like that of are spare and simple, the stories told with impres- years old, he received an annual salary of 50,000
the enormous retablos in Spanish cathedrals, but sive sobriety, the facial expressions showing the maravedis, more than twice as much as Juan de
greatly scaled down to serve for Isabella's personal utmost seriousness. One of the panels even Flandes would receive four years later (Trizna
devotions. Twenty-eight of the panels are extant includes portraits of the king and queen; in the 1976,19). Although Sittow worked on the polyp-
today, fifteen of them in the Palacio Real, Madrid. Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes they are tych altarpiece of Isabella with Juan de Flandes,
Juan de Flandes painted the majority of the panels seen on the left, Isabella kneeling and Ferdinand he was probably retained primarily as a portrait
and probably served as supervisor of the project. standing behind her. painter.

EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 163