around 1475 -1551 · Valencia between Italian Renaissance and Spanish devotion

Monumental altarpieces, collected faces and Leonardo light make Vicente Masip a decisive master of the Valencian Renaissance.

Vicente Masip, also named Vicent Macip, was born in Valencia around 1473 -1475 and died there in 1551. Documented as an altarpiece painter from the beginning of the 16th century, he trained in an environment still attached to Gothic traditions while assimilating the novelties introduced to Valencia by Paolo de San Leocadio, Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina and Fernando de Llanos. His art thus evolves towards more coherent architectures, monumental figures and a model softened by the light. The Coronation of the Virgin displays a symmetrical and solemn order where the richness of the fabrics serves theological clarity. In Christ on the Road to Calvary or The Lamentation of Christ, the density of looks and gestures transforms the sacred episode into an immediate human experience. Masip runs an important workshop and works with his son Juan de Juanes, whose fame has long blurred the remit in both their hands. Modern research gave Vicente an autonomous place: that of a painter capable of linking the precision of the Valencian altarpiece to the inventions of the Italian High Renaissance. His compositions retain the expected readability of a devotional image while giving bodies, landscapes and faces a new presence. This synthesis explains its essential role in the transformation of Spanish painting of the first 16th century. The "Vicente Juan Masip" selection puts particularly with regard to Virgin and Child, Saints and Angels and The Coronation of the Virgin. His reading favors color.

Masip brings the Renaissance into the Valencian altarpiece without losing the silent gravity of the devotional image.