The goal of Hand in Hand. Sculpture and colour in the Spanish Golden Age, the new exhibition organized by Museo Nacional del Prado, is to analyse the relentless quest for realism in Spanish art during the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, increasingly more centred on achieving a greater degree of verisimilitude as an instrument for persuasion. The show focuses on how the desired effect was enhanced by the perfect combination of colour and painting with the three-dimensional representation of the figure; on how painting and sculpture went hand in hand to create exceptional works of art.

The Prado museum has brought together a fascinating selection of works to illustrate this thesis, mostly coming from its own collections, though complemented with notable works from other institutions, including the BBVA Collection, which is participating in this project with the loan of the painting Our Lady of Valvanera dating from the first third of the eighteenth century.

This canvas painting is an excellent example of how a devotional sculpture is immortalized in painting, thus propagating the diffusion of models and consolidating certain iconographies. Rendered in a superb rococo style, it depicts Our Lady of Valvanera, patroness of La Rioja, enthroned and richly garbed, with the Child on her lap and her usual attributes. The work is evidently related with an anonymous print dedicated to Íñigo de la Cruz Manrique de Lara Ramírez de Arellano (1673-1733), Captain-General of the Army and Navy, with which it shares many details in common, such as the position of the tree, the apparition of the angel to the repenting thief on the right, the coffer in the foreground and the eagle of the throne.