Portrait of Ghirlandaio, Rafael Coronel

Exhibition Label:
“Selecciones: Mexican Art from the Collection,” Nov-2005, Kate Meyer
The Spencer Museum is pleased to present four new gifts from Elizabeth Schultz, all created by Mexican artist Rafael Coronel in the 1960s. Coronel’s paintings and drawings are shown here alongside highlights from the museum’s collection of twentieth-century Mexican works on paper. This display invites the viewer to consider Coronel’s connections to works by other Mexican artists. Can affinities be found between Coronel’s imagery and the iconography employed by his contemporaries and predecessors? Or, does Coronel’s modernism stand out, perhaps suggesting global, rather than national, comparisons?
Coronel often looked to his artistic predecessors’ treatment of humanity, such as Michelangelo, El Greco, Rembrandt and Goya. In this drawing he depicts the Italian Renaissance painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. Ghirlandaio is best known for his ability to relay a clear narrative in his frescos through a focus on the individual. Coronel’s drawing, with its emphasis on the artist’s head and hands, suggests the importance of Ghirlandaio’s thoughts and the means by which he expressed those thoughts.