NAVARRETE, JUAN FERNANDEZ surnamed El Mudo (The Mute), Spanish painter of the Madrid school, was born at Logrofio in 1526. An illness in infancy de prived him of his hearing, but at a very early age he began to express his wants by sketching objects with a piece of charcoal. He received his first instructions in art from Fray Vicente de Santo Domingo, a Hieronymite monk at Estella, and afterwards he visited Naples, Rome, Florence and Milan. According to the ordinary account he was for a considerable time the pupil of Titian at Venice. In 1568 Philip II. summoned him to Madrid with the title of king's painter and a salary, and employed him to execute pictures for the Escorial. The most celebrated of these are a "Nativity" (in which, as in the well-known work on the name subject by Correggio, the light emanates from the infant Saviour), a "Baptism of Christ" (now in the Madrid Picture Gallery), and "Abraham Receiving the Three Angels" (one of his last works dated 1576). He died at Toledo in February 1579. NAVARRO, PEDRO (c. 1460-1528), Spanish military engineer and general. Beginning as a sailor, he became snow de espuela, or running footman, to the cardinal Juan de Aragon. In 1485 he enlisted as a mercenary in a war between Florence and Genoa, and took part in the warfare between the Genoese corsairs and the Mohammedans of northern Africa. He enlisted under Gonzalo de Cordoba when he sailed to Sicily, to take part with the French in the partition of Naples, and in 1500 he laid mines to breach the walls at Cephalonia without much success.
He distinguished himself in the campaigns of 1502-03, by the defence of Canosa and of Taranto and by his share in the victory at Cerinola. His mining operation against the castles of Naples, held by French garrisons, in 1503, won him fame as the first military engineer of his age. At the expulsion of the French from Naples, he received from Gonzalo a grant of land and the title of count of Olivetto. In 1508 he took Velez de Gomera, .largely by means of a species of floating battery which he invented. He did excellent service in the conquest of Oran (1509), and took Bougie and Tripoli in 151o. At Ravenna he covered the orderly retreat of the Spanish foot, was taken prisoner by the French and imprisoned in the Castle of Loches. Ferdinand, "the Arago nese skinflint," refused to pay his ransom, and of ter three years of imprisonment, Navarro entered the service of Francis I. in a pique. He distinguished himself in the passage of the Alps, at Marignano, at Milan, and in the siege of Brescia. He was at the battle of Pavia, and in 1522 was taken prisoner at Genoa by the Spaniards. He was confined at Naples till the peace of 1526 and his Olivetto estate was confiscated. His last service was in the disastrous expedition of Lautrec to Naples (1527).
See Documentos ineditos pare la Historia de Espana, vol. xxv. (Madrid,