Spanish painting

“ I doubt if the student of Spanish painting, particularly if he visits Spain, can escape the feeling that it exhibits a certain oppressive obviousness. How is this to be accounted for? In the first place, surely, by the influence of the Church, ever more intent on making art a handmaid of its own purposes than on developing its own inherent beauties. And, if this was true under the conditions in Italy, where the Church itself was penetrated with Humanism, how much more is it to be expected under those which existed in Spain! ”

“ The contest between the Flemish and Italian influences on Spanish painting resolved itself decidedly in favor of the latter, although a certain eclecticism, the germ of a national school, made itself apparent in the works of Spanish artists. Characteristics of a medieval type still persisted, such as faulty drawing, color lacking in energy and richness, a sad and sober ambient, and a disregard for everything in a painting except the human figures. Like sculpture, painting began to be dissociated from architecture, and was encouraged by the purchases of the wealthy. ”

“ And if these larger pictures have not quite the fresh charm of the “Madonna of Santa Ana,” in each one we find a real{118} understanding of beauty, and with it the Spanish gift of presenting the sacred stories as drama, just as the painter felt it all must have happened. Each figure in these scenes has life, has character. No lover of Spanish painting can afford to neglect any picture of Fernandez, and no estimate of the early art of the country can be true that does not include his work. ”

“ If the eighteenth century was for Spanish painting an epoch of external influences, the nineteenth century, especially its second half, must be characterized as one which sought for foreign direction. During this period the greater number of painters of talent sought for inspiration from foreign masters. ”

“ Another important influence upon the Spanish artists was their belief that the Virgin Mary and other holy spirits appeared to inspire them and aid them in painting their pictures. In fact, the church was the chief patron of art, and the artist was one of her most valuable teachers. A learned Spanish writer said: “For the ignorant, what master is like painting? They may read their duty in a picture though they may not search for it in books.”
The painters of Spain were divided between the schools of Castile, Seville, and Valencia. ”

“ I am sorry to hear you say so."
"Spanish painting has a character peculiar to itself," resumed Mr. St. John. "At least, I have always thought so. The artists were not free: they were compelled to bend to those laws that restricted their pencils to delineations of religious subjects. Had they been at liberty to exercise their genius unfettered, they would have left more valuable mementos behind them. Imagination is the very life and soul of painting ”

“ This is still apparent in the art of the sixteenth century when there poured into Spain a steady flow of Italian influence. Its general tendency was to produce a number of so-called “mannerists,” Spanish painters who experimented with and imitated the style of the Italian masters, particularly of the Florentines, Da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. It was a necessary stage through which Spanish art had to graduate in order to acquire facility in drawing, chiaroscuro and the principles of composition. ”

“ Horror, too, stands boldly forth in Spanish painting. The Spaniard is, incongruously enough, as realist of the first water. He will see things materially, graphically; the bullfight is his great delight, not the pretended reality of the theater. ”

“ The shadow of the Spaniard's dark cloak seems to be over every canvas. Then secondly, Spanish painting is intensely "naturalist." Velazquez exhibits this tendency at its best: there is an irresistible reality about his portraits which makes the men alive to all who look at them; Murillo exhibits it in its excess: his best religious pictures are spoiled by their too close adherence to ordinary and even vulgar types.
Both these characteristics are partly accounted for by a third. Painting in Spain was not so much the handmaid, as the bondslave, of the Church. ”

“ Their character appears to me to be utterly different from that to which we are accustomed as marking Spanish painting. Almost all our ideas are formed, as it seems to me, on the work of a school of painters who, adopting religious art as their special vocation, and shutting themselves out almost entirely from any representation of any other kind of subject, contrived unfortunately to take the gloomy side of religion, and to paint as though an officer of the Holy Office was ever at their elbow. ”

“ A POSTSCRIPT VERY suggestive of the force and persistence of the Spanish character is the fact that the only Spanish artists of recent years who have become notably distinguished are those who have remained true to the traditions of their School. Academic encouragement has been given to the production of historical pictures, which cover large quantities of canvas but excite little interest. On the other hand, those painters who have acquired a European and American reputation have all based their art on naturalism. ”

“ The profuse ornamentation of baroque art helped to cause a continuance of the use of stone in sculpture, since it was difficult, with wood, to procure the effects of foliage. The baroque was soon swept away, however, in favor of the neo-classic style, of which Álvarez was the most distinguished exponent. The same influences, in both architecture and sculpture, operated in the Americas as in Spain. Both arts prospered more than they had in the past.
Mediocrity of Spanish painting in this era. ”

“ If we seem to insist too much on ecclesiastical art in Spain, it is because, as we shall see still more clearly in the case of painting, art has here concentrated its choicest effort on religious subjects, and in them has won its greatest triumphs. Except, perhaps, in arms and in porcelain, in portrait-painting and in furniture, all the masterpieces of Spanish art are in some sense ecclesiastical. Take away religion from her art, how poor would be the residue, for even Arabian and Moslem art in Spain were essentially religious. ”

“ An intense passion of spiritual ecstasy burned within him. He was at once a man of action, hard and practical, and a pietistic dreamer, a fanatic and visionary. How this mingling of qualities affected Spanish art, causing it, on the one hand, to be distinctively national and, on the other, a product of naturalistic method and highly pietistic motive will appear in the course of our story. ”

“ The little beggar boys of Murillo may perhaps show a somewhat mannered realism, but the Spanish painting, as a whole, while it would be absurd to try to describe it under any one phrase, shows very clearly the determination to present the reality of the world under terms which are very different from those of the great Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. ”

“ But since they had to reach the masses of the people through the intervention mostly of the Church, which not only commissioned the subject but prescribed its treatment, they achieved their self-expression through religious pictures which had the character of sacred genre. Yet this Spanish brand of genre is inferior to the secular genre of Holland or to the sacred genre of old Flemish religious paintings. It has a quality, perceptible in neither of the latter, of obviousness. Its motive is less surely an æsthetic delight in things of beauty ”

“ SPANISH ART MOTIVES: What may have been the early art of Spain we are at a loss to conjecture. The reigns of the Moor, the Iconoclast, and, finally, the Inquisitor, have left little that dates before the fourteenth century. The miniatures and sacred relics treasured in the churches and said to be of the apostolic period, show the traces of a much later date and a foreign origin. Even when we come down to the fifteenth century and meet with art produced in Spain, we have a following of Italy or the Netherlands. ”

“ For Spain the eighteenth century was a period of misfortune. The reasons for this are simple and evident. Grace and good taste—in the best sense of the term—lightness, came to be the characteristics of this century, and these qualities were displayed in a perfect manner in French art. And it was precisely these attributes which Spanish artists most{22} lacked, and still lack. They are robust, strong and sincere, but without gracefulness, facility of expression or volatility. ”

“ They satisfied the Spanish taste in female loveliness, but have little abstraction of expression; and are inclined to be sentimentally pretty. It is rather when you visit the gallery in the Prado devoted to Ribera’s works, that you experience a new impression of this artist. With the exception of a powerful but ghastly Martyrdom of S. Bartholomew, the general suggestion of the gallery is the reverse of the violent and sensational. A sense of grave dignity prevails, which one begins to discover is largely the result of a fine reserve and frequent subtlety in the color schemes. ”

“ It seems to be the Spanish instinct to close himself round with interest in what is nearest to him, so that he abandons breadth or height of vision—imagination, in fact—in favor of the immediately present, which he invests with all the fervor of his pent up nature. This leads inevitably to a materialistic point of view and to the baldly naturalistic method; in a word, to the obviousness which we have noted.
Spain, in fact, with its large admixture of Germanic blood, exhibits in its art the trait that affects other races akin to the Teutonic: the German itself, the English and American. ”

“ It still lives in the vigorous and characteristic Spanish painters of to-day—such, for instance, as Zuloaga, Anglada-Camarasa, and Sorolla, artists who take high rank among European painters.
It is often contended that Spanish paintings, if we except the works of the masters El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya, are wanting in dignity, wanting in beauty. But are we p. 222not too apt to confine beauty to certain forms of accepted expression? Surely, any art that interprets life has beauty; and no one can doubt, who knows the Spanish pictures, that life was the inspiration of these painters. ”

“ The latter, as has been suggested in the previous chapter, was the product of a long and heroic struggle on behalf of nationality and the Christian{27} Faith. Among its conspicuous traits, in consequence, were self-consciousness and inflated egoism; traits that, if you consider it, are those of the actor; the necessary groundwork on which he builds his better qualities as an artist.
The Spaniards are a race of actors. The arts in which they have most naturally expressed themselves are those of the drama and the novel of character and action. And this trait similarly affects their painting. ”

“ We say complex, because, composed as it was of painters who came from one or the other part of the Peninsula, it does not possess a precise and regional character, but is the resultant of the work of many artists whose names we must not forget, as, for example, Carducho, Caxes and Nardi, of Italian origin, who, or perhaps their fathers, were brought to Spain as decorative painters. It seems natural that they should have had imitators or disciples, as it was precisely in the country of their adoption that artists of this genre were awanting. ”

“ Dating the beginning of the Spanish school from the last half of the fifteenth century, it is the third school in Europe as to age, it being about two centuries later than the Italian, and one century later than the Flemish school. Its importance is only exceeded by that of Italy. The distinguishing feature of Spanish art is its gravity, or we may almost say its strictly religious character, for, excepting portraits, there were few pictures of consequence that had not a religious meaning. ”

“ Yet, under conditions so different, the genius of each people was liberated, threw off the shackles of foreign influence and discovered its own racial expression in painting. Each of the great schools had its protagonist: Valencia, José Ribera (1588-1656) ; Andalusia, Murillo (1618-1682) ; Castile, Velasquez, (1599-1660) . Meanwhile, as we have noted, the early part of the century was occupied by the great artist, El Greco. ”

“ To the study of his palette alone we have dedicated a work of a purely technical character (of which The Studio of November 1920 printed an extract) which space does not permit us to reproduce here, but which we take occasion to refer to since the simplification of the palette of this artist, the creator of{18} a school, must be regarded as of exceptional importance, as characteristic of almost all later Spanish artistic achievement, endowing it with great individuality and distinguishing it from all other schools. ”

“ That which they accomplish is only a part of the national achievement. It is the medium in which it is fashioned, the environment in which it comes into being, its artistic matrix, which determines the precise type of racial endeavour. To its national character the new Spain cleaves, and by its light her ideas will be readjusted, her history interpreted, her present respected as in line with her tradition, which, in the sphere of things{2} artistic, Spaniards regard as a potent factor in the advancement of world art. ”

“ Meanwhile, self-consciousness and egoism readily yield to the temptation of exaggeration. Spanish literature evaded this weakness because it was left to go its own way and the artistic conscience of the author was permitted to discover for itself a sense of true values. But in the painter’s case the Church intervened and being, so to say, interested in the box-office receipts, compelled him to play to the gallery. It favored sensationalism and encouraged melodrama. The meekness of the martyr must be represented so that the dullest spectator would not miss the moral ”