ÁLVARO PIRES DE ÉVORA - act. 1411-1434 Saint Cosmas tempera and gold leaf on wood Italian school restoration Dimensões (altura x comprimento x largura) - 28 x 21,5 cm Notes: Please note that this painting cannot be exported being in course the correspondent National Cultural Heritage classication process
 
A Saint Cosmas by Álvaro Pires de Évora. Álvaro Pires de Évora was a Portuguese painter documented in the region of Tuscany, in Italy, between 1411 and 1434. The first date corresponds to its documented integration in a group of Florentine painters in charge of painting the facade of the palace of Ceppo, in Prato, belonging to the merchant and banker Francesco Datini. The second date corresponds to the inscription on the Altarpiece of the Museum of Brawnschweig and is the most advanced reference to his work. Almost without documents known about his activity, the biography of this painter stems from the little more than 30 paintings attributed to him, which includes the altarpiece of the church of Santa Croce de Fossabanda, near Pisa, who signed "ALVARO PIREZ DEVORA PINTOV" ("PAINTED BY ALVARO PIREZ DE ÉVORA"). It is by this signature, and by the short biographical reference by Giorgio Vasari (1550) that he names him as "Alvaro di Piero di Portogallo", that we know the birthplae of Alvaro Pires, Portuguese by birth, but artistically framed in Italian painting. At a time when the painting was only emerging in Portugal, it is not known the reason that led Álvaro Pires to go to Italy. We know, however, that D. João I had at his service a Florentine painter, António Florentim, and that a painter formed among Giotto's followers, Gherardo Starnina, worked in Castile and Valencia in the late fourteenth century. The hypothesis of Pires having accompanied Starnina on his return to Italy in 1401 has been considered, but it has also been suggested that the painter of Évora was originally a goldsmith who later became a painter, a hypothesis sustained by the variety and great quality with which he uses the punch on the gold leaf backgrounds. Painting on the eve of the Florentine Renaissance, Álvaro Pires is still a painter much more sensitive to the echoes of the Italian Trecento, with marked influences of Orcagna, Starnina and Turino Vanni. Although formally a clearly Italian painter, he is still the first painter born in Portugal to whom we can safely attribute an artistic work. The painting now auctioned was authenticated by Frederic Zeri, one of the greatest specialists in the work of Pires, and is referenced in the London antiques market in 1977, when he belonged to the antiquary Rafael Valls. Originally it formed, with great probability, a pair with San Damiano, of the same size, known to have belonged to the T. Laurin collection in Stockholm, and later sold at Sotheby's in London on June 24, 1970 and the following year it was in the antiquaries Grassi, of Florence, its wherabouts is currently unknown. Álvaro Pires painted, at least three times, pairs of these lunettes with the two medical saints Cosmas and Damian, who crowned lateral panels of altarpieces, usually dedicated to the figuration of saints. The intact copy exists in the Pinacoteca and Civic Museum of Volterra, with the Virgin and Child in a larger central panel and two lateral panels with pairs of saints, on which are located the lunettes with Saints Cosmas and Damian. Another altarpiece, disjointed, is preserved for the most part at the Lindenau Museum in Altenburg, Germany. From this set there are the side panels in the museum, one with the Saints Paul and John the Baptist and the other with the saints Peter and Andrew and one of the small tondi representing Saint Cosmas, very similar to the work now at the auction. It is probable that another Saint Damian, whose whereabouts is unknown, is reproduced in the Fondazione Zeri photo library of the University of Bologna (No. 11011). In all these representations of Santos Cosmas and Damian, Álvaro Pires used the same masculine model, with the same form of face at ¾, with little beard, right nose and torn eyes, the same type of dress, of a pale red orange, even the fallen brim with a swirl of white hair, and the same wide halo decorated with the puncture mark. Klara Steinweg linked these representations of the Holy Doctors to the stay of Álvaro Pires in Volterra, where his cult was widely spread. Álvaro Pires is documented in this city in 1423, around which we must situate this panel of Saint Cosmas, both by the motif invoked by K. Steinweg, and by the style, of overlapped fine brushstrokes, creating shade patterns with fast and fine traces of brush of different shades, technique that we can appreciate in this work and is characteristic of the phase of greater maturity of the painter. Joaquim Oliveira Caetano Museum Historian and Art Historian.