"For the learned and the lettered," says a Spanish author in
the reign of Philip IV., "written knowledge may suffice; but
for the ignorant, what master is like Painting? They may read
their duty in a picture, although they cannot search for it in
books."
"What we are all attempting," said Sir Joshua Reynolds, "to do
with great labour, Velazquez does at once."
None of the great schools of painting is so scantily represented in the
National Gallery as the Spanish, although the works in this room by its
greatest master, Velazquez, are of exceptional excellence in quality
and of exceptional interest as illustrating the progress of his art.
The deficiency in Spanish pictures is not peculiar to London. "Spain,"
said Sir David Wilkie, "is the Timbuctoo of artists." The Spanish
School of painters and their history are still only half explored, and
can only be fully studied in Spain itself. "He who Seville (and Madrid)
has not seen, has not seen the marvels great" of Spanish painting.[34]
There are, however, enough examples of the school here to make some few
general remarks desirable. The first point to be noticed is this, that
all the painters represented in the room (with two or three exceptions)
are nearly contemporary. The period 1588-1682 covers all their lives.
They are four of the chief painters of Spain, and they all reach
a high level of technical skill. This fact suggests at once the
first characteristic point in the history of the Spanish School. It
has no infancy.[35] It sprang full-grown into birth. The reason of
this was its Italian origin. The art of painting, except as purely
decorative, was forbidden to the Moors; and it was only in 1492,
when the banner of Castile first hung on the towers of the Alhambra,
that the age of painting, as of other greatness, began for Spain.
But the very greatness of Spain led to Italian influence in art.
The early Spanish painters nearly all found means of going to Italy
(Theotocopuli,--1122--was born there in 1548), and the great Italian
painters were constantly attracted to the Spanish court.
But though Spanish art sprang thus rapidly to perfection under foreign
influence, it was yet stamped throughout with a thoroughly distinctive
character. In the first place the proverbial gravity of the Spaniard
is reflected also in his art. Look round this room, and see if the
prevailing impression is not of something grave, dark, lurid. There
is here nothing of the sweet fancifulness of the early Florentines,
nothing of the gay voluptuousness of the later Venetians. 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. As the Church was in Spain, so had art to be--monastic,
severe, immutable. "To have changed an attitude or an attribute would
have been a change of Deity." Pacheco, the master of Velazquez, was
charged by the Inquisition to see that no pictures were painted likely
to disturb the true faith. Angels were on no account, he prescribed,
to be drawn without wings. The feet of the Blessed Virgin were on no
account to be exhibited, and she was to be dressed in blue and white,
for that she was so dressed when she appeared to Beatrix de Silva,
a Portuguese nun, who founded the order called after her. One sees
at once how an art, working under such conditions as these, would be
likely to lose free play of fancy. And then, lastly, one may note
how the Spanish church tended also to make Spanish art intensely
naturalistic. Pictures were expected to teach religious dogmas and to
enforce mystical ideas. But, in the inevitable course of superstition,
the symbol passed into a reality. This was more particularly the case
with statues. Everything was done to get images accepted as realities.
To this day they are not only painted but dressed: they have, like
queens, their mistress of the robes. This idea of art--as something
which was not to appeal to the imagination, but was to pass itself off
as a reality--inevitably extended also to Spanish painting. How far it
did so is best shown in a story gravely related by Pacheco. A painter
on a high scaffold had just half finished the figure of the Blessed
Virgin when he felt the whole woodwork on which he stood giving way.
He called out in his horror, "Holy Virgin, hold me," and straightway
the painted arm of the Virgin was thrust out from the wall, supporting
the painter in mid-air! When a ladder was brought and the painter got
his feet on it, the Virgin's arm relapsed and became again only a
painting on the wall. One need not go farther than this story to see
the origin of the realistic character of Spanish art, or to understand
how Murillo, although often the most mystic of all painters in his
conceptions of religious subjects, was also the most naturalistic in
his treatment of them (see W. B. Scott: _Murillo and the Spanish School
of Painting_).
--> _We now pass into Rooms XVI. and XVII., where pictures of
the French School are hung._
[Illustration]