JUNI, Juan de

Juan de Juni received the commission for the Antigua altarpiece in 1545 and he finished it in 1562. (It was installed in Valladolid Cathedral in 1922.) Juni tried to produce a classical work in an architectural framework - the firt he ever used. Taken separately, the Corinthian columns, entablatures, and niches are based on the classical Italian arrangement, but the general organization, the relationship between the different parts, the proportions of the niches, and above all the importance given to sculpture are closer to Mannerism.

The detail shown is the panel with the relief Birth of the Virgin.

The iconography of the Valladolid altartpiece is somewhat confused; several statues of male and female saints are mixed with scenes of the childhood and the life of the Virgin. The same confusion is found in the alternation of large statues and relief panels. Juni was above all a statue maker, as can be seen from the relief representing the birth of the Virgin. His main preoccupation is the rendering of the third dimension. The carving is self-assured, the volumes well-defined in the expressive composition. The influence of D�rer’s woodcuts has been suggested as the explanation for such clarity of outline.

The detail shown is Christ on the Cross.

As in most Spanish altarpieces, a Christ on the Cross towers over the ensemble. Juni placed this Crucifix outside the architectural framework, above the central part of the attic, in impressive isolation. The anatomical details are masterfully rendered, but the body is distorted by Juni’s dramatic genius: from the head to toe, it is twisted round in a spiraling movement which expresses its last convulsion.

Juan de Juni wished that his body should lie in the church of Santa Catalina, where the remains of his wife and sons already rested. The exact spot where the remains of the sculptor lie is unknown, but it is certain that they are in Santa Catalina.

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One of the more interesting foreign artists who worked in Spain during the second third of the sixteenth century is the Frenchman Juan de Juni, whose sculpture is noted for its spirituality, manifested in full and beautiful forms, natural in their proportions but declamatory in their distortion of gesture. Juni may have been trained in Italy, since his art shows evidence of contact with the Lombard Renaissance and Michelangelo. In about 1533 he appears in Le�n but by 1541 he was settled in Valladolid. Several of his works deserve individual mention, among them the retables in Valladolid and Burgo de Osma cathedrals, and the Entombment in Segovia cathedral, dating from 1571, which combines figures on the same theme forming part of another Entombment, preseved in the Museum in Valladolid.

The Entombment group was executed for the Bishop of Mondonedo, Antonio de Guevara. Originally it formed the decoration of the lower part of an altarpiece. The artist took great pains with the composition of his group: six life-size figures surround the body of Christ in an oval; the accentuated contapposto and the related gestures create a dynamic balance that draws the gesticulating protagonists into a concentrated unity. The source of inspiration for this group must be in the Lombard sculpture of Milan or Bologna.

Spanish sculpture probably never reached such a degree of expressionism as in the art of Juan de Juni, whose French origins were swept aside by the feverish breath of Castilian art. The faces are violent and convulsed; thick, animated curls twist and twine in the turbulent hair and beards. This Christ has in truth experienced his Passion in human flesh, and his face retains an indelible memory of it. This Romantic conception, emphasizing the tragic sense of sorrow and death, is profoundly Spanish, foreshadowing already the Baroque art of Spain.

The statue is in a church situated outside the ramparts of �vila, in the place where, according to tradition, the house in which San Segundo lived used to be.