Calavary of Sagunto

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, a new practice was introduced in the academic institutions dedicated to art education: landscape painting in nature. The artist left his studio and entered nature in order to paint it. One of the fruits of this change of custom is Calvario de Sagunto (Via Crucis of Sagunto) (1904), produced by Nogué Massó during his youth, specifically during a tour of the Spanish Levante region that took place in the provinces of Valencia, Castellon and Teruel. As is frequent in the works of many artists during their youth, Nogué Massó had yet to define what would later become his characteristic traits. It was still a few years before he travelled from Rome, where he lived in 1909, to France, where he discovered the divisionist and luminist techniques he would develop in his artistic plenitude. In this case, he resolved the work with solutions taken from the works of other established artists, among whom the influence of members of the Catalan modernist movement was prominent. A particularly accentuated influence in the treatment of light: he relies on the work of Modest Urgell  to reflect the sunlight and in that of Lluís Graner when he wants to focus it on a specific part of the work. In Calvario de Sagunto we can already see elements that would become icons in the work of Nogué, such as the cypress trees located at the rear of the composition. These cypress trees manage to transmit a sensation of verticality in all the works in which Nogué includes them. Thematically, Calvario de Sagunto shows us the last section of the via crucis, situated at the edge of the path that links the shrine with the village. Nogué decides to use three plains to represent this space. In the first plane, we can observe a construction in which the image of the via crucis appears; in the second, the relgious building, and finally, in the background, the mountain range that surrounds Sagunto, exceded only by the sky. José Nogué Massó (1880-1973) He was trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, completed his studies at the Spanish School of Rome and lived in Italy until 1923, when he moved to Jaen as a professor of drawing; he was also a teacher in Madrid and at the School of Arts and Crafts in Barcelona. His work, framed within realist lines, is notable for great technical skill and special attention to the effects of light. Text by Damià Amoròs Albareda.