We are facing a painter who has just discovered the still mecca of Art that Rome meant at that time. A city whose artistic outpost, although influenced by French Romanticism and initiatory Realism, was still, and in part, under the influence of the “Nazarenes”, Central European painters, mostly German, who came to Italy to embrace monastic customs of the Lower Middle Ages, and with them the fresco or panel painting of the Italian Quattrocento. As had happened before with Fortuny or Rosales, Agrasot is tempted to follow this current contrary to chiaroscuro, recovering flat colors in their breadth and purity, more primary perspectives, and a schematic simplicity typical of artists before the Cinquecento. This important work by the younger Agrasot responds to several of these “Nazarene” assumptions, including in theme: he painted it in 1863. The figures framed in the purest pre-Renaissance style are the antithesis of the baroque and neoclassicism that Agrasot has studied. at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia. A main plane, the only important one in which to frame this biblical scene, and both the second and third spaces in perspective are complementary with no greater relevance than the excuse of an insubstantial landscape as a necessary descriptive basis to complete the painting. Note the forced hieraticism of the characters in the image and likeness of the Flemish and Italian primitives who also greatly influenced the English Pre-Raphaelites, who, without ceasing to oppose the Academy, specified drawing with greater rigor, or interest than the Germans; evolution that runs parallel to the Spanish painters in Rome from 1860 onwards.
