Roberto Jimenez | Valladolid, June (EFE) community members of Castile”.
This large canvas, 35 square meters, has been hanging since Monday in the lobby of the regional parliament after more than a year of restoration after being transferred by the Prado Museum.
very real commoners
It was painted by Juan Planella y Rodríguez in 1987, historicist but realistic, without forgetting nuances that reveal rigorous documentation such as the overcast sky and the muddy terrain as a result of a storm that fell hours before and that conditioned the battle held in Villalar (Valladolid). on April 23, 1521.
The Comuneros headed there, as the painting suggests, to confront the royalist troops, fall defeated, their leaders beheaded for royal justice, and begin the beginning of the end of the comunera revolt that María Pacheco, Padilla’s wife, prolonged for several months.
The restoration, prolonged in time due to the dimensions of the canvas, has consisted in the elimination of folds, marks and small erosions as a consequence of the way in which it has been preserved during the last decades.
No irreversible damage
The canvas showed no irreversible damage and has been ceded for permanent exhibition in the lobby of the Cortes de Castilla y León, in the same way as hundreds of patrimonial assets of the Prado Museum, around 4,000, which are found in other places for historical, traditional and affective ties.
This is the case of “Los Comuneros de Castilla”, which ends up in Castilla y León, an autonomy that determined April 23 as Community Day in commemoration of the defeat of Villalar that occurred on that day and month of 1521.
On the canvas, the community pennants and flags wave in the strong wind and the troops cross a flooded road, with a sky that Planella painted very dark as a symbol of the fatal outcome that would unleash shortly after.
The painting was part of the National Fine Arts Exhibition of 1887, a prize for which it was designed. Within his pilgrimage through different institutions are the Barcelona City Council, the Art Museum of Catalonia and the Museum of Modern Art.
Later, it was deposited and stored in the Prado Museum during the eighties of the last century.
Its author, Juan Planella y Rodríguez, was born in Barcelona in 1849, although other scholars point to 1850. In addition to being a painter, he was also a poet and philosopher, and he stood out in the art of watercolor as a technique and in portraiture as his favorite theme. EFE