Our Lady of Good Counsel (c. 1680): Art, History and Details

Our Lady of Good Counsel (c. 1680) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Bartolomé Pérez (Spanish, 1634–1693).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This painting loosely and inventively depicts an actual chapel in the former Jesuit Imperial College in Madrid, which housed a Madonna and Child in gilded and painted wood, a focus of popular devotion. Pérez made temporary decorations for the Spanish court, none of which survive, but the fanciful architecture, curiously inverted obelisks, fruits and flowers, and pastel colors all stem from this side of his work. By representing a polychrome sculpture in two dimensions, Pérez further blurred boundaries between painting and sculpture. This intersection of the spiritual and the real worlds was important in Spanish art of the 1600s.

Object facts

• Title: Our Lady of Good Counsel
• Date: c. 1680
• Creator attribution: Bartolomé Pérez (Spanish, 1634–1693)
• Culture: Spain
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on copper
• Dimensions: Framed: 50 x 40 cm (19 11/16 x 15 3/4 in.); Unframed: 37 x 26 cm (14 9/16 x 10 1/4 in.)
• Collection: P - Spanish before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2012.5

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Escribano, Raul Gomez. "Herrera Barnuego en Atocha: entre los Uffizi, la Academia y la Biblioteca Nacional." Goya 373 (October-December 2024): 290-309.
• Palencia Cerezo, J. Ma. Dibujos Barrocos Madrileños del Museo de Bellas Artes de Córdoba. [Córdoba] : Consejería de Turismo, Cultura y Deporte, 2022.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.