Obra comentada: retrato del bufón Perejón, de Antonio Moro

How noble is this portrait of a plebeian, of a buffoon, to be found in a room of a portrait and to be almost the most dazzling. Antonio Moro was the creator of this image, of a portrait of a chamber, of a portrait in which Pejerón is precisely almost a parenthesis, a difference between the same. To explain a painting like this, there are many aspects, but one of them is the figure of the buffoon himself. In this portrait I find the root of what is the painting of buffoons of the Spanish court. They are portraits, as in this case, in which the apparatus of the court is removed and the person is portrayed as a real person. In this portrait of a real person is where we find Antonio Moro. Antonio Moro is his Spanish name, he was born in Utrecht and was part of the court. He made his first trips to Italy, where he learned and drank from the sources of Italian art and, very importantly, from Titian. What do I see of Venetian painting in this painting? Without a doubt, the study of light. I don't have an incised light on the right or on the left, it's not a theatrical light as the Spanish Baroque would later use, it's a light that envelops the figure, that gives it its own space. I find the position Moro uses very brave, the framing of this painting. He is dressed as a courtesan, with a jubon, with rich clothing, with his hand resting on the sword, the line of the buttons is really precise, that is, it shows us the lower abdomen, the fall of the silhouette of this character, and he is a little shorter than his legs, but with a noble gaze. What I see in this character is an intelligent head, an intelligent gaze. He does have a certain deformity, we can see that perhaps the lower limbs are a little short, but the most striking feature is the hemiplegia in the right hand. What we have in the foreground is that arm, that arm that is a little useless, collected, turned, as the protagonist. Not only does he not try to cover up the defect, but he uses it as the axis of the painting. This arm, which in the collected hand holds a deck of cards, as a symbol of what is his trade, of games, of entertainment, but also as a symbol of many other things. It is the only touch of colour in the painting. We have a completely black and white painting, with a rich range of tints, and we only have the touch of colour in those three or four hearts of the six hearts that we see on the deck. This touch of colour leads us to his defect. Colour was one of the main difficulties in my restoration. The background of the painting was very repainted, with a lot of paint on top. It was heavily varnished, so browns, greens, blacks were absolutely even and we couldn't capture all the light and space around the figure. The decision was then to clean it up. I was able to do a quick, simple and adequate restoration. It's a restoration that always measures you with the painting and you end up talking to it. For me it's a masterful portrait. It doesn't need a chair to lean on, a table, a curtain, nothing. It's simply a figure placed in the void, almost as wise as Pablo de Valladolid of Velázquez. When Antonio Moro painted this painting, he painted it practically without any resources. It has no colour, no space, no place to hold on to. In my restoration I found myself in the same situation, in an immense void. I had no place to hold on to, no space, and only the trust in the painter, the trust that he had designed a space for me to get out of under so much repainting. He invited me to clean it up and, indeed, with the cleaning there is a projected shadow of the character on the ground, a difference between the wall and the ground, a small space that surrounds him that you can perfectly capture as the light bounces on his right shoulder and all over his right side, that light that seems to envelop him from behind. It's a difficult painting to clean up because it has very few tones and there is an almost absolute darkness and an absolute white. We always know that dark, greyish colours are earths that alter chemically over time, that tend to darken more, while that which is white, in this case lead white, is preserved in perfect condition, as Antonio Moro left it at the time of his painting. I had to play with cleaning the whites a little less to leave them that passage of time above and to clean the shadows a little more intensely, which, in addition to being repainted, had been covered in castings, palladium, dirty varnishes and a lot of debris that had been stored. Whenever I go down to see him, whenever I pass by the gallery, I feel a certain pride. This has really allowed me to rediscover Antonio Moro as an exceptional portraitist, as the character who was really the direct master of Sanchez Cuello, of whom we also have a portrait in this gallery. Bartolomé González also learned a lot from him and all this technique of the Spanish courtesan portrait reached our magnificent Velázquez. I think that in this portrait Antonio Moro achieves absolute mastery in space, in light, in pictorial technique and, above all, in the psychological treatment of the character. Thank you very much.