Alejo Fernández
1475–1545 · Spain · Spanish Renaissance, Northern Renaissance
The story
In the Royal Alcázar of Seville, in the rooms of the old House of Trade, hangs an altarpiece Alejo Fernández painted around 1531 to 1536 for its chapel. The House of Trade, founded in 1503, licensed and recorded the voyages and cargoes between Spain and the Americas. The Virgin of the Navigators shows Mary opening her mantle over a crowd of kneeling men, with ships sailing on the sea below them. Tradition sees Christopher Columbus in the man on the left in the foreground. Columbus had died in 1506, so whatever likeness the painter used, he did not paint it from life.
Fernández himself is partly a puzzle. He is first found working in Córdoba, and a Seville Cathedral account book calls him German, so both his birthplace and his birth year, around 1475, are uncertain. In 1508 the cathedral chapter brought him to Seville to work on its great altarpiece, and for roughly a quarter of a century he was the leading painter in the city, joining Flemish precision to Italian ideas of space and figure. He probably died in Seville around 1545.
