Italy, founded the various schools of Valentia, Toledo, Seville, and
Madrid. Madrid soon absorbed the school of Toledo, and the attraction of
Seville was too powerful for Valentia. The Andalusian school counts
among its early illustrations Vargas, Roelas, the Castillos, Herrera,
Pacheco, and Moya, and among its later glories Velazquez, Alonzo Cano,
Zurbaran, and Murillo, last and greatest of the mighty line. The school
of Madrid begins with Berruguete and Na-varrete, the Italians Caxes,
Rizi, and others, who are followed by Sanchez Coello, Pantoja,
Collantes. Then comes the great invader Velazquez, followed by his
retainers Pareja and Carreno, and absorbs the whole life of the school.
Claudio Coello makes a good fight against the rapid decadence. Luca
Giordano comes rattling in from Naples with his whitewash-brush,
painting a mile a minute, and classic art is ended in Spain with the
brief and conscientious work of Raphael Mengs.
There is therefore little distinction of schools in Spain. Murillo, the
glory of Seville, studied in Madrid, and the mighty Andalusian,
Velazquez, performed his enormous life's work in the capital of Castile.
It now needs but one word to show how the Museum of Madrid became so
rich in masterpieces. During the long and brilliant reigns of Charles V.
and Philip II., when art had arrived at its apogee in Italy, and was
just beginning its splendid career in Spain, these powerful monarchs had
the lion's share of all the best work that was done in the world. There
was no artist so great but he was honored by the commands of these lords
of the two worlds. They thus formed in their various palaces,
pleasure-houses, and cloisters a priceless collection of pictures
produced in the dawn of the Spanish and the triumphant hey-day of
Italian genius. Their frivolous successors lost provinces and kingdoms,
honor and prestige, but they never lost their royal prerogative nor
their taste for the arts. They consoled themselves for the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune by the delights of sensual life, and
imagined they preserved some distant likeness to their great forerunners
by encouraging and protecting Velazquez and Lope de Vega and other
intellectual giants of that decaying age. So while, as the result of a
vicious system of kingly and spiritual thraldom, the intellect of Spain
was forced away from its legitimate channels of thought and action,
under the shadow of the royal prerogative, which survived the genuine
power of the older kings, art flourished and bloomed, unsuspected and
unpersecuted by the coward jealousy of courtier and monk.
The palace and the convent divided the product of those marvellous days.
Amid all the poverty of the failing state, it was still the king and
clergy who were best able to appropriate the works of genius. This may
have contributed to the decay of art. The immortal canvases passed into
oblivion in the salons of palaces and the cells of monasteries. Had they
been scattered over the land and seen by the people, they might have
kept alive the spark that kindled their creators. But exclusiveness is
inevitably followed by barrenness. When the great race of Spanish
artists ended, these matchless works were kept in the safe obscurity of
palaces and religious establishments. History was working in the
interests of this Museum. The pictures were held by the clenched dead
hand of the Church and the throne. They could not be sold or
distributed. They made the dark places luminous, patiently biding their
time.
It was long enough coming, and it was a despicable hand that brought
them into the light. Ferdinand VII. thought his palace would look
fresher if the walls were covered with French paper, and so packed all
the pictures off to the empty building on the Prado, which his
grandfather had built for a museum. As soon as the glorious collection
was exposed to the gaze of the world, its incontestable merit was at
once recognized. Especially were the works of Velazquez, hitherto almost
an unknown name in Europe, admired and appreciated. Ferdinand, finding
he had done a clever thing unawares, began to put on airs and poser for
a patron of art. The gallery was still further immensely enriched on the
exclaustration of the monasteries, by the hidden treasures of the
Escorial, and other spoils of mortmain. And now, as a collection of
masterpieces, it has no equal in the world.
A few figures will prove this. It contains more than two thousand
pictures already catalogued,--all of them worth a place on the walls.
Among these there are ten by Raphael, forty-three by Titian, thirty-four
by Tintoret, twenty-five by Paul Veronese. Rubens has the enormous
contingent of sixty-four. Of Teniers, whose works are sold for fabulous
sums for the square inch, this extraordinary museum possesses no less
than sixty finished pictures,--the Louvre considers itself rich with
fourteen. So much for a few of the foreigners. Among the Spaniards the
three greatest names could alone fill a gallery. There are sixty-five
Velazquez, forty-six Murillos, and fifty-eight Riberas. Compare these
figures with those of any other gallery in existence, and you will at
once recognize the hopeless superiority of this collection. It is not
only the greatest collection in the world, but the greatest that can
ever be made until this is broken up.
But with all this mass of wealth it is not a complete, nor, properly
speaking, a representative museum. You cannot trace upon its walls the
slow, groping progress of art towards perfection. It contains few of
what the book-lovers call _incunabula._ Spanish art sprang out
full-armed from the mature brain of Rome. Juan de Juanes came back from
Italy a great artist. The schools of Spain were budded on a full-bearing
tree. Charles and Philip bought masterpieces, and cared little for the
crude efforts of the awkward pencils of the necessary men who came
before Raphael. There is not a Perugino in Madrid. There is nothing
Byzantine, no trace of Renaissance; nothing of the patient work of the
early Flemings,--the art of Flanders comes blazing in with the full
splendor of Rubens and Van Dyck. And even among the masters, the
representation is most unequal. Among the wilderness of Titians and
Tintorets you find but two Domenichinos and two Correggios. Even in
Spanish art the gallery is far from complete. There is almost nothing
of such genuine painters as Zurbaran and Herrera.
But recognizing all this, there is, in this glorious temple, enough to
fill the least enthusiastic lover of art with delight and adoration for
weeks and months together. If one knew he was to be blind in a year,
like the young musician in Auerbach's exquisite romance, I know of no
place in the world where he could garner up so precious a store of
memories for the days of darkness, memories that would haunt the soul
with so divine a light of consolation, as in that graceful Palace of the
Prado.
It would be a hopeless task to attempt to review with any detail the
gems of this collection. My memory is filled with the countless canvases
that adorn the ten great halls. If I refer to my notebook I am equally
discouraged by the number I have marked for special notice. The
masterpieces are simply innumerable. I will say a word of each room, and
so give up the unequal contest.
As you enter the Museum from the north, you are in a wide
sturdy-columned vestibule, hung with splashy pictures of Luca Giordano.
To your right is the room devoted to the Spanish school; to the left,
the Italian. In front is the grand gallery where the greatest works of
both schools are collected. In the Spanish saloon there is an
indefinable air of severity and gloom. It is less perfectly lighted than
some others, and there is something forbidding in the general tone of
the room. There are prim portraits of queens and princes, monks in
contemplation, and holy people in antres vast and deserts idle. Most
visitors come in from a sense of duty, look hurriedly about, and go out
with a conscience at ease; in fact, there is a dim suggestion of the
fagot and the rack about many of the Spanish masters. At one end of this
gallery the Prometheus of Ribera agonizes chained to his rock. His
gigantic limbs are flung about in the fury of immortal pain. A vulture,
almost lost in the blackness of the shadows, is tugging at his vitals.
His brow is convulsed with the pride and anguish of a demigod. It is a
picture of horrible power. Opposite hangs one of the few Zurbarans of
the gallery,--also a gloomy and terrible work. A monk kneels in shadows
which, by the masterly chiaroscuro of this ascetic artist, are made to
look darker than blackness. Before him in a luminous nimbus that burns
its way through the dark, is the image of the crucified Saviour, head
downwards. So remarkable is the vigor of the drawing and the power of
light in this picture that you can imagine you see the resplendent
crucifix suddenly thrust into the shadow by the strong hands of
invisible spirits, and swayed for a moment only before the dazzled eyes
of the ecstatic solitary.
But after you have made friends with this room it will put off its
forbidding aspect, and you will find it hath a stern look but a gentle
heart. It has two lovely little landscapes by Murillo, showing how
universal was that wholesome genius. Also one of the largest landscapes
of Velazquez, which, when you stand near it, seems a confused mass of
brown daubs, but stepping back a few yards becomes a most perfect view
of the entrance to a royal park. The wide gate swings on its pivot
before your eyes. A court cortege moves in,--the long, dark alley
stretches off for miles directly in front, without any trick of lines or
curves; the artist has painted the shaded air. To the left a patch of
still water reflects the dark wood, and above there is a distant and
tranquil sky. Had Velazquez not done such vastly greater things, his few
landscapes would alone have won him fame enough. He has in this room a
large number of royal portraits,--one especially worth attention, of
Philip III. The scene is by the shore,--a cool foreground of sandy
beach,--a blue-gray stretch of rippled water, and beyond, a low
promontory between the curling waves and the cirrus clouds. The king
mounts a magnificent gray horse, with a mane and tail like the broken
rush of a cascade. The keeping is wonderful; a fresh sea breeze blows
out of the canvas. A brilliant bit of color is thrown into the red,
gold-fringed scarf of the horseman, fluttering backward over his
shoulder. Yet the face of the king is, as it should be, the principal
point of the picture,--the small-eyed, heavy-mouthed, red-lipped, fair,
self-satisfied face of these Austrian despots. It is a handsomer face
than most of Velazquez, as it was probably painted from memory and
lenient tradition. For Philip III. was gathered to his fathers in the
Escorial before Velazquez came up from Andalusia to seek his fortune at
the court. The first work he did in Madrid was to paint the portrait of
the king, which so pleased his majesty that he had it repeated _ad
nauseam._ You see him served up in every form in this gallery,--on foot,
on horseback, in full armor, in a shooting-jacket, at picnics, and
actually on his knees at his prayers! We wonder if Velazquez ever grew
tired of that vacant face with its contented smirk, or if in that loyal
age the smile of royalty was not always the sunshine of the court?
There is a most instructive study of faces in the portraits of the
Austrian line. First comes Charles V., the First of Spain, painted by
Titian at Augsburg, on horseback, in the armor he wore at Muhl-berg, his
long lance in rest, his visor up over the eager, powerful face,--the eye
and beak of an eagle, the jaw of a bull-dog, the face of a born ruler, a
man of prey. And yet in the converging lines about the eyes, in the
premature gray hair, in the nervous, irritable lips, you can see the
promise of early decay, of an age that will be the spoil of superstition
and bigotry. It is the face of a man who could make himself emperor and
hermit. In his son, Philip II., the soldier dies out and the bigot is
intensified. In the fine portrait by Pantoja, of Philip in his age,
there is scarcely any trace of the fresh, fair youth that Titian painted
as Adonis. It is the face of a living corpse; of a ghastly pallor,
heightened by the dull black of his mourning suit, where all passion and
feeling have died out of the livid lips and the icy eyes. Beside him
hangs the portrait of his rickety, feebly passionate son, the
unfortunate Don Carlos. The forehead of the young prince is narrow and
ill-formed; the Austrian chin is exaggerated one degree more; he looks a
picture of fitful impulse. His brother, Philip III., we have just seen,
fair and inane,--a monster of cruelty, who burned Jews and banished
Moors, not from malice, but purely from vacuity of spirit; his head
broadens like a pine-apple from the blond crest to the plump jowls.
Every one knows the head of Philip IV.,--he was fortunate in being the
friend of Velazquez,--the high, narrow brow, the long, weak face, the
yellow, curled mustache, the thick, red lips, and the ever lengthening
Hapsburg chin. But the line of Austria ends with the utmost limit of
caricature in the face of Charles the Bewitched! Carreno has given us an
admirable portrait of this unfortunate,--the forehead caved in like the
hat of a drunkard, the red-lidded eyes staring vacantly, a long, thin
nose absurd as a Carnival disguise, an enormous mouth which he could not
shut, the under-jaw projected so prodigiously,--a face incapable of any
emotion but fear. And yet in gazing at this idiotic mask you are
reminded of another face you have somewhere seen, and are startled to
remember it is the resolute face of the warrior and statesman, the king
of men, the Kaiser Karl. Yes, this pitiable being was the descendant of
the great emperor, and for that sufficient reason, although he was an
impotent and shivering idiot, although he could not sleep without a
friar in his bed to keep the devils away, for thirty-five years this
scarecrow ruled over Spain, and dying made a will whose accomplishment
bathed the Peninsula in blood. It must be confessed this institution of
monarchy is a luxury that must be paid for.
We did not intend to talk of politics in this room, but that line of
royal effigies was too tempting. Before we go, let us look at a
beautiful Magdalen in penitence, by an unknown artist of the school of
Murillo. She stands near the entrance of her cave, in a listening
attitude. The bright out-of-door light falls on her bare shoulder and
gives the faintest touch of gold to her dishevelled brown hair. She
casts her eyes upward, the large melting eyes of Andalusia; a chastened
sorrow, through which a trembling hope is shining, softens the somewhat
worldly beauty of her exquisite and sensitive face. Through the mouth of
the cave we catch a glimpse of sunny mountain solitude, and in the rosy
air that always travels with Spanish angels a band of celestial
serenaders is playing. It is a charming composition, without any depth
of sentiment or especial mastery of treatment, but evidently painted by
a clever artist in his youth, and this Magdalen is the portrait of the
lady of his dreams. None of Murillo's pupils but Tobar could have
painted it, and the manner is precisely the same as that of his Divina
Pastora.
Across the hall is the gallery consecrated to Italian artists. There are
not many pictures of the first rank here. They have been reserved for
the great central gallery, where we are going. But while here, we must
notice especially two glorious works of Tintoret,--the same subject
differently treated,--the Death of Holofernes. Both are placed higher
than they should be, considering their incontestable merit. A full light
is needed to do justice to that magnificence of color which is the pride
of Venice. There are two remarkable pictures of Giordano,--one in the
Roman style, which would not be unworthy of the great Sanzio himself, a
Holy Family, drawn and colored with that scrupulous correctness which
seems so impossible in the ordinary products of this Protean genius; and
just opposite, an apotheosis of Rubens, surrounded by his usual
"properties" of fat angels and genii, which could be readily sold
anywhere as a specimen of the estimate which the unabashed Fleming
placed upon himself. It is marvellous that any man should so master the
habit and the thought of two artists so widely apart as Raphael and
Rubens, as to produce just such pictures as they would have painted upon
the same themes. The halls and dark corridors of the Museum are filled
with Giordano's canvases. In less than ten years' residence in Spain he
covered the walls of dozens of churches and palaces with his fatally
facile work. There are more than three hundred pictures recorded as
executed by him in that time. They are far from being without merit.
There is a singular slap-dash vigor about his drawing. His coloring,
except when he is imitating some earlier master, is usually thin and
poor. It is difficult to repress an emotion of regret in looking at his
laborious yet useless life. With great talents, with indefatigable
industry, he deluged Europe with paintings that no one cares for, and
passed into history simply as Luca Fa Presto,--Luke Work-Fast.
It is not by mere activity that great things are done in art. In the
great gallery we now enter we see the deathless work of the men who
wrought in faith. This is the grandest room in Christendom. It is about
three hundred and fifty feet long and thirty-five broad and high. It is
beautifully lighted from above. Its great length is broken here and
there by vases and statues, so placed between doors as nowhere to
embarrass the view. The northern half of the gallery is Spanish, and the
southern half Italian. Halfway down, a door to the left opens into an
oval chamber, devoted to an eclectic set of masterpieces of every school
and age. The gallery ends in a circular room of French and German
pictures, on either side of which there are two great halls of Dutch and
Flemish. On the ground floor there are some hundreds more Flemish and a
hall of sculpture.
The first pictures you see to your left are by the early masters of
Spain,--Morales, called in Spain the Divine, whose works are now
extremely rare, the Museum possessing only three or four, long,
fleshless faces and stiff figures of Christs and Marys,--and Juan de
Juanes, the founder of the Valentian school, who brought back from Italy
the lessons of Raphael's studio, that firmness of design and brilliancy
of color, and whose genuine merit has survived all vicissitudes of
changing taste. He has here a superb Last Supper and a spirited series
of pictures illustrating the martyrdom of Stephen. There is perhaps a
little too much elaboration of detail, even for the Romans. Stephen's
robes are unnecessarily new, and the ground where he is stoned is
profusely covered with convenient round missiles the size of Vienna
rolls, so exactly suited to the purpose that it looks as if Providence
sided with the persecutors. But what a wonderful variety and truth in
the faces and the attitudes of the groups! What mastery of drawing, and
what honest integrity of color after all these ages! It is reported of
Juanes that he always confessed and prayed before venturing to take up
his pencils to touch the features of the saints and Saviours that shine
on his canvas. His conscientious fervor has its reward.
Across the room are the Murillos. Hung together are two pictures, not of
large dimensions, but of exquisite perfection, which will serve as fair
illustrations of the work of his youth and his age; the frio and the
vaporoso manner. In the former manner is this charming picture of
Rebecca at the Well; a graceful composition, correct and somewhat severe
drawing, the greatest sharpness and clearness of outline. In the
Martyrdom of St. Andrew the drawing and the composition are no less
absolutely perfect, but there hangs over the whole picture a luminous
haze of strangeness and mystery. A light that never was on sea or land
bathes the distant hills and battlements, touches the spears of the
legionaries, and shines in full glory on the ecstatic face of the aged
saint. It does not seem a part of the scene. You see the picture through
it. A step further on there is a Holy Family, which seems to me the
ultimate effort of the early manner. A Jewish carpenter holds his
fair-haired child between his knees. The urchin holds up a bird to
attract the attention of a little white dog on the floor. The mother, a
dark-haired peasant woman, looks on the scene with quiet amusement. The
picture is absolutely perfect in detail. It seems to be the _consigne_
among critics to say it lacks "style." They say it is a family scene in
Judaea, _voila tout._ Of course, and it is that very truth and nature
that makes this picture so fascinating. The Word was made flesh, and not
a phosphorescent apparition; and Murillo knew what he was about when he
painted this view of the interior of St. Joseph's shop. What absurd
presumption to accuse this great thinker of a deficiency of ideality, in
face of these two glorious Marys of the Conception that fill the room
with light and majesty! They hang side by side, so alike and yet so
distinct in character. One is a woman in knowledge and a goddess of
purity; the other, absolute innocence, startled by the stupendous
revelation and exalted by the vaguely comprehended glory of the future.
It is before this picture that the visitor always lingers longest. The
face is the purest expression of girlish loveliness possible to art. The
Virgin floats upborne by rosy clouds, flocks of pink cherubs flutter at
her feet waving palm-branches. The golden air is thick with suggestions
of dim celestial faces, but nothing mars the imposing solitude of the
Queen of Heaven, shrined alone, throned in the luminous azure. Surely no
man ever understood or interpreted like this grand Andalusian the power
that the worship of woman exerts on the religions of the world. All the
passionate love that has been poured out in all the ages at the feet of
Ashtaroth and Artemis and Aphrodite and Freya found visible form and
color at last on that immortal canvas where, with his fervor of religion
and the full strength of his virile devotion to beauty, he created, for
the adoration of those who should follow him, this type of the perfect
Feminine,--
"Thee! standing loveliest in the open heaven! Ave Maria! only Heaven and
Thee!"
There are some dozens more of Murillo here almost equally remarkable,
but I cannot stop to make an unmeaning catalogue of them. There is a
charming Gypsy Fortune-teller, whose wheedling voice and smile were
caught and fixed in some happy moment in Seville; an Adoration of the
Shepherds, wonderful in its happy combination of rigid truth with the
warmest glow of poetry; two Annunciations, rich with the radiance that
streams through the rent veil of the innermost heaven,--lights painted
boldly upon lights, the White Dove sailing out of the dazzling
background of celestial effulgence,--a miracle and mystery of theology
repeated by a miracle and mystery of art.
Even when you have exhausted the Murillos of the Museum you have not
reached his highest achievements in color and design. You will find
these in the Academy of San Fernando,--the Dream of the Roman Gentleman,
and the Founding of the Church of St. Mary the Greater; and the powerful
composition of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, in her hospital work. In the
first, a noble Roman and his wife have suddenly fallen asleep in their
chairs in an elegant apartment. Their slumber is painted with curious
felicity,--you lower your voice for fear of waking them. On the left of
the picture is their dream: the Virgin comes in a halo of golden clouds
and designates the spot where her church is to be built. In the next
picture the happy couple kneel before the pope and expose their high
commission, and outside a brilliant procession moves to the ceremony of
the laying of the corner-stone. The St. Elizabeth is a triumph of genius
over a most terribly repulsive subject. The wounds and sores of the
beggars are painted with unshrinking fidelity, but every vulgar detail
is redeemed by the beauty and majesty of the whole. I think in these
pictures of Murillo the last word of Spanish art was reached. There was
no further progress possible in life, even for him. "Other heights in
other lives, God willing."