Talk:The Fountain of Life (painting)

Correction to dating

After the forgery scandals of the 1990s, as part of the worldwide general reappraisal of the museum catalogues, Pilar Silva Maroto, it's curator in the Prado, had it dendrochronologically tested to 1418 ie used soon after seasoning was finished c1428, making it the companion piece to the Ghent Mystic Lamb and an unsigned work by Jan van Eyck, not some fictitous follower. Its style is utterly anachronous for 1454, the date being merely that of the first documented record of its existence in the Libero de Bercal, the Vellum Register of acquisitions recording its donation to the Monastery of the Parral, outside Segovia, where it spent its life being gradually painted into the vestry wall, until removed in 1838 to join the rest of secularised monastic art in the Trinidade monastery opposite the Atocha syation in Madrid, whence it was moved to the Prado in 1870. It was at that point the error was made, as it should have read BEFORE 1454: it was part of a clear-out of palace religious artwork seen as compromising by the new King Henry IV of Castile, whose sexual morals were not compatible with Catholic doctrine. The only question remaining open is whether, given its poor brushwork, it is actually the original or a copy by van Eyck done on his diplomatic mission to Spain in the early 1430s: the Prado's display attribution is currently 1432. The putative original, according to the context established by Amsterdam's Professor Josua Bruyn in his 1957 Utrecht doctoral thesis on the work may be associated with Pope Eugenius IV's 1435 Bulla establishing an expiatory Eucharistic chapel on the site of the synagogue, the scene of the notional Host Sacrilege which caused the 1370 Brussels Pogrom. Its size is certainly coherent with the Chapel, making it likely the original has not survived. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.25.142.238 (talk) 15:55, 20 April 2015 (UTC)