Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-da-fe

Among the most historically charged images in Spanish Renaissance painting, this work depicts Saint Dominic presiding over an auto-da-fé—the ritual public penance and execution ceremony associated with the Inquisition. Commissioned for the altarpiece of Santo Tomás in Ávila by Inquisitor-General Tomás de Torquemada, the work retrospectively legitimized Inquisitorial practice by linking it to the saintly founder of the Dominican order. Berruguete brought a new spatial sophistication to the arrangement of the watching crowd, demonstrating how completely he had absorbed Italian compositional principles.

The composition organizes a large crowd in a tiered architectural space with remarkable clarity for this date in Spanish painting, showing Berruguete's Italian training in managing complex figural arrangements within coherent architectural depth. The figures tending the condemned in the lower register display an expressive naturalism that was unprecedented in Iberian altarpiece painting of this generation.