Gregorio Fernández and the myth of the artist

Abstract

The text deals with the idea of artistic myth applied to the Baroque sculptor Gregorio Fernández, studying different texts from the 18th until the end of the 20th century and showing how every era adapts the study of Art History to its own needs. Once the artist was consecrated as a Spanish myth he became just a cliché, the incarnation of some permanent characteristics that even, as happened in the 19^th century, reduced him into a devout, almost mystical sculptor, linked to a specific way of popular devotion. In this manner, the intellectual aspects of his art were lost in order to turn him into a naturalist artist who did nothing but to copy the physiognomies of a Castilian people that also became a cliché in the same 19^th century. These ideas, as many a texts shows, have greatly hindered the understanding of Fernández’s art, which has become a figure without nuances that must be rediscovered an studied anew in order to understand him in all its importance.

The text is, on the one hand a state of the art, which includes references not taken previously into account by the historiography and on the other a reflection on the need for a different way of approaching the study of Art History, from a strictly scientific point of view, questioning the validity of traditionally accepted ideas and enhancing the importance of the historical context in which the work of art was created.