Visione di San Pascual Baylón (1767-1769)

Tiepolo, Giambattista (1696-1770)

Visione di San Pascual Baylón (Vision of St. Paschal Baylon)
17671769
Oil on canvas, 340 x 180 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid

The two surviving fragments of the canvas painted before August 29, 1769 have been assembled together for the main altar of San Pascual de Aranjuez, from where it was torn off shortly after and replaced by another by Mengs. The lower fragment reproduces the image of San Pascual kneeling in prayer, with his gaze fixed on the upper one, which represents the angel carrying the Eucharist. Tradition tells that San Pascual Bailón was a modest Franciscan friar who, when it was impossible to attend religious services, would kneel in the place where he was, becoming absorbed in his meditations, at which time, miraculously, an angel offered him the Sacred Sacramento so that he could adore him. This is precisely the moment chosen by Tiepolo for this canvas. The saint, whom Pope Leo XIII declared in 1897, long after his canonization, patron of Eucharistic associations, appears prostrate in adoration before custody presented to him by an angel. It is a flat monstrance in which the virile is made up of a small circular box closed by a transparent glass or rock crystal disc (Fernández Navarro, J. M.; Capel del Águila, F.: El vidrio en la pintura from the Museo Nacional del Prado, 2012). The composition was well known from its sketch, at the Courtauld Institute Galleries in London, the preparatory drawings, in various collections, and the print made of the final composition by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, which has enabled its current reconstruction. The upper fragment comes from the royal collections (Inventory of 1857, no. 2730) and has always been kept in the Museo del Prado. The lower part was bequeathed in 1926 by the patron of the Museum, Mr. Luis Errazu, which was accepted at the meeting held by the Board of Trustees on November 18, 1926 and was delivered on Monday, March 21, 1927 (Text taken from Úbeda de los Cobos, A. in: Guide to eighteenth-century Spanish painting, Museo del Prado, 1997, p. 140).