Saint Gregory

A title that names less than it seems

The record gives only Saint Gregory, and more than one saint answers to it — Gregory the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, among others. This is where attributes stop being decoration and become the only means of identification available. The most frequently painted of them, Gregory the Great, is marked by the papal tiara and cross-staff, a book, and a dove at his ear, from the tradition that his writing was dictated to him. Which Gregory this canvas shows is a question the catalogue entry does not answer, and it is not answered here.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1799 and gives the Museum of Romanticism in Madrid as its location. The dimensions are 190 x 115 cm — a tall upright, the format of a standing figure at rather more than life size. It is filed under male portraiture, Religion and religious cultural heritage, with Romanticism as the style and Spanish as the nationality; the measured colour families are ochre and yellow.

A saint at the end of the eighteenth century

The date sets this apart from most of the doctor-saints in this collection, which belong to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What the record establishes is a devotional subject, at full scale, made in 1799. Why an artist returned to it then is not something this entry records.