Alonso Berruguete's Spanish Flair for Ancient Story of the 'The Sacrifice of Isaac'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Mary Thomkins Lewis

"The Sacrifice of Isaac" (c.1526/32) by the Spanish artist Alonso Berruguete. Museo Nacional de Escultura

SPAIN---The ancient story of Abraham and his beloved young son Isaac is threaded through the sacred narratives of Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths, and has long raised unanswerable questions about sacrifice, authority and blind obedience to divine will. The sculpture is housed today in Valladolid's Museo Nacional de Escultura. Though isolated, along with related figures, from the fragments that have been reassembled in an adjoining gallery too small to hold the retablo in its entirety, its staggering power as an image is scarcely diminished. Unlike Donatello's more narrative work, in which the protagonists' dawning awareness of their redemption draws us around the sculpture, we are stopped in our tracks by Berruguete's freeze-frame of the final moment before the angel's arrival. [link]