20 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I49 



where Bermejo obtained this knowledge with which he endowed 

 his painting of St. Isidore- There is nothing in Tormo y Manzo's 

 study (1926) of the artist, the most extensive one to date, that 

 provides any suggestion. He merely categorizes our painter as the 

 last of the primitives, hardly a characterization to evoke assimila- 

 tive scholarship as one of the artist's traits. Though some students 

 have assumed that Bermejo may have had some contact with early 

 Flemish painters, or, at least, with some of their work, this is only 

 an assumption. 



By and large Spanish use of symbolism was more direct, more 

 explicit, and more emphatic than was generally the case with artists 

 in Flanders, France, or Italy. A case in point is the use of the par- 

 tridge by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz in his painting of St. Nicholas of 

 Tolentino that I had occasion to discuss in an earlier paper (Fried- 

 mann, 1959). This almost tediously matter-of-fact attitude makes 

 one truly wonder what an Iberian artist of the last years of the 15th 

 century would have felt constrained to do when designing a picture 

 of the most scholarly and erudite of all medieval Spanish ecclesias- 

 tics. It seems that Bermejo responded to this need by introducing 

 into his panel many allusions to the intellectual conceits of learning, 

 surrounding the great encyclopedist with symbols congenial to his 

 work and character. Whether Bermejo did this alone, or with the 

 assistance of more learned advisors, it is impossible to say. The 

 result is, however, an intellectual credit to the final years of "primi- 

 tive," pre-Renaissance painting in the Iberian peninsula. The pic- 

 ture was intended, in all probability, for a church school or seminary 

 as the use of some of its symbolic contents are sufficiently unusual 

 as to suggest that they might have been beyond the comprehension 

 of the average lay person. 



For assistance in gathering the photographs illustrating this paper, 

 I am indebted to the Art Institute of Chicago (particularly to Mr. 

 Waltraut M. Van der Rohe), the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, 

 and the Samuel 11. Kress Foundation (especially to Miss Mary M- 

 Davis), New York. I am indebted to Charles P. Parlshurst for call- 

 ing my attention to the omphalos and to the book by E. B. Smith. 



