Juan fernandez navarrete biography of christopher

An illness in infancy deprived Navarrete of his hearing, which affected his ability to learn to speak. At a very early age he began to express his wants by sketching objects with a piece of charcoal.

Juan fernandez navarrete biography of christopher: I. Birth, Parentage, and Early Life

He visited Naples , Rome , Florence and Milan. According to most accounts he was for a considerable time the pupil and assistant of Titian at Venice. In Philip II of Spain summoned him to Madrid with the title of king's painter and a salary, and employed him to execute pictures for the Escorial. Titian was very old, and died in , and Tintoretto , Veronese and Anthonis Mor all refused to come to Spain.

Philip had to rely on the lesser talent of Navarrete, whose gravedad y decoro "seriousness and decorum" the king approved. For eleven years until his death Navarrete worked largely on El Escorial. The most celebrated of the works he produced there are a " Nativity " in which, as in the well-known work on the same subject by Correggio , the light emanates from the infant Saviour , a "Baptism of Christ" now Prado , and " Abraham Receiving the Three Angels " one of his last works, dated , National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

He executed many other altar-pieces, all characterized by boldness and freedom in design, and by the rich warm colouring which has acquired for him the surname of "the Spanish Titian. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Chisholm, Hugh , ed. Cambridge University Press.