CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH PAINTING
Spanish Painting, so far as it represents a school, is singularly
limited in scope and rigidly circumscribed. This is due partly to the
racial character, self-centered and conservative, out of which it grew:
partly also, to the influences that immediately shaped its growth. For
it developed under the patronage of the Crown and the Church. Nor were
these, in theory or in practice, antagonistic to each other. The Church
was the embodiment, the Crown the defender, of the Faith: the efforts of
both being united to preserve the Faith against the inroads alike of
Humanism and Protestantism. Hence the art of Spain, while it might be
incidently concerned with portraiture, discovered its essential
characteristics as the exponent of Bible story and Saintly lore and as
an exhortation to faith and pious living. Its home was the sacred
edifice, where it embellished walls, vaultings, and ceilings, or
presided in the ceremonial altar-piece. Its language for the most part
was that of the vernacular; the sacred imagery being translated into the
idiom of common knowledge, its mysteries into expressions of common
experience. It was in consequence a naturalistic art.
Had the artists of Spain painted for the general public or followed
their own bent in the pursuit of beauty, they would doubtless have
developed branches of genre and still life painting that might have
emulated the work of the Holland artists; for they had a similar love of
the intimate beauty of simple things around them. 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; more evidently influenced by the
practical intention of rounding out the story.
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! But there is another
reason, incident to the Spanish character. 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 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.
It is dramatic, concerned frequently with action, always with
characterisation. 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; the executioner’s hatred of virtue so
portrayed that no one could fail to recognise him as a villain; love and
devotion must be sentimentalised, and blood, pain and disease so vividly
exhibited that the crudest sensibilities would be wrung. Imagination
must not be counted upon and suggestion, the subtle road thereto, must
be abandoned for the direct and detailed statement. Aim at the crude
instincts and make the message obvious!
This Spanish tendency toward the related traits of exaggeration and
obviousness is not confined to painting. It appears also in the
architecture and sculpture. Foreign architects, for example, were
employed in the erection of cathedrals in the Gothic style; but the
latter’s noble logic of plan and elevation was disturbed by the
innovations which Spanish taste, or lack of it, dictated. Conspicuous
among these was the erection of a Coro in the center of the nave; an
inclosure walled around, carried to a great height and profusely adorned
with sculpturesque ornament. This monstrous choir effectually blocks the
view of the high-altar from any spot except the narrow space which
separates the two, and also interrupts what should be one of the sublime
features of a Gothic cathedral, its endless variety of stately vistas.
In every direction the perspective of pillars, arches and vaultings is
barred by the tasteless magnificence of the Coro. For the latter, like
the Capilla Mayor with its high-altar, is overloaded with excess of
ornament. In one case it may be in the “plateresque” style, a network of
intricate and minute embellishments that vies with the dainty exuberance
of the workers in silver-plate. Elsewhere, it is wantonly “grotesque” or
pompously “baroque” or characterised by that orgy of material
extravagance, called “Churrigueresque” after the name of the sculptor
who introduced it. In this, sculpture has been degraded to the most
blatant naturalism; Madonnas clothed like dolls in brocaded gowns; the
tragedy of Calvary or the glory of Heaven, presented with figures,
background and accessories, painted, posed and set like a theatrical
tableau. It is not for a moment suggested that there is no beauty and
grandeur in Spanish architecture and sculpture. Yet to one whose taste
is attuned to the imaginative spaciousness, sublimity and mystery of
pure Gothic or to the inventive refinement of choice Renaissance design,
the net impression of a Spanish cathedral is likely to be one of
oppression and distaste. And more so, as one analyses the psychological
cause of this extravagant display. 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. She, no more than they, has
much sense of beauty in the abstract. The idea that beauty for its own
sake is desirable may penetrate the imagination of some artists in all
these countries, but is a principle of art in none of them, and by the
general public of all is not understood. The usual idea is that painting
is primarily the representation of some person, place or thing, and is
to be judged by what it represents. The idea that it should contribute
to the beauty of life, and that beauty is one of the qualities most
needful and desirable in life; that, indeed, properly considered, it
should be the ideal of life, is even to-day only slowly dawning upon our
comprehension. We still make the ideal of our civilization material
progress and the ideal of education the preparation to play a part in
it. In a word, our ideal is materialistic; a contradiction of terms,
confusing the high issues of life. For, if a man or a nation is to have
an ideal it must be something above the necessary matter of life,
correlating the spiritual sense to what it conceives of spirit in the
universe. It was so that the Greek, learning of Egypt and the Orient,
drawing inspiration, in fact, from the deep wells of human
consciousness, established his ideal and interpreted it under the symbol
of beauty.
For my own part, this difference between the older idea of art and our
own, which was shared by Spain, is most illuminatively enforced by the
contrast between two of the great architectural monuments of Spain: the
Escoriál and the Alhambra. Both are palaces, memorials of the greatest
epoch in the history of each race; but one is a palace of the dead and
of preparation for death, the other a lordly pleasure house, redolent of
the joy of living; the Escoriál is a monument of sternness; the Alhambra
a miracle of beauty.
Yet for the student of humanity and of art in relation thereto what a
poignant interest attaches to the Escoriál! True, it is the
self-expression of one man; but the imagination may not be astray in
discovering in it some expression also of the race and its time. For
Philip II was so loyal a son of the Church or, if you will, so morbid a
victim of the Church’s influence, and that influence was then so rooted
in the conscience of the
[Illustration: S. URSULA SPANISH SCHOOL, XV CENTURY
THE PRADO]
people, that he was in a large measure representative of them.
Philip was bound by the terms of his inheritance to create a mausoleum
for the remains of his father, Charles V. He set about making it a
burying place of sufficient dignity for his father, himself and
succeeding Catholic Kings. To the mausoleum must be attached a church,
and to the latter a monastery, to make perpetual provision for the
saying of masses. His father had retired to a monastery after laying
down the cares of government. Philip, while still handling the affairs
of his vast dominion, would also lead the cloistered life. Meanwhile
there were the mundane needs of a court to be considered and Philip
himself tempered his asceticism with gallantry, so that a palace must be
included. Hence ensued the idea of the Escoriál, wherein life consorts
with death and business and pleasure are pursued under the shadow of a
judgment to come. Surely a monument to the strangest medley of motives
that history can show! Morbid, magnificent!
Architects were employed, but Philip constantly supervised the design.
He planned his monument to last forever. Far from the possible
vicissitudes of the capital, remote from the petty changes of daily
life, he laid its foundations in the bed-rock of the mountains; and
built their strength into its walls. With its back to the precipitous
wall of the Guadarrama Sierra, it stands a colossal squared mass, facing
the undulating vista of tableland. Its facades are severely simple,
bare of ornamental detail, proclaiming their monastic purpose; and
similarly the interior, as originally planned, was characterised by the
dignity of constructional simplicity. The church also, until Luca
Giordano at a later period covered the vaultings with flaunting mural
paintings, was a unique example of stern austerity; its plan of a Greek
cross being uninterrupted by a central coro and the only magnificence
permitted being massed about the high-altar. A strange contrast, in
fact, the imagination of Philip offered to the art instincts of his
people. While they eschewed vistas and rejoiced in extravagance of
detail, he was wedded to simplicity and sought a prospect of the widest
vision. Yet in his personal life he shrank into narrowness. A private
door communicated with a corner seat at the back of the coro, so that
unobserved he could join the monks, as one of them, in their devotional
routine. While he provided himself with a palace for ceremonial
purposes, he actually lived in a tiny suite of meagre rooms, sleeping in
a cubicle. Its window opened into the church, commanding a view of the
high-altar, where the celebrant as he said mass stood directly above the
tombs of the dead kings. This Pantheon of the dead, a low, octagonal
chamber with flattened vaultings, lined with shelves on which repose
sarcophagi, was originally of extreme simplicity. For the present
bastard profusion of sombre ornamentation was added by Philips III and
IV.
To-day as one wanders through this vast and silent edifice of the
Escoriál it can well seem as if that sanctuary of death, buried beneath
the church, is the dead heart, connected by the arteries of its nearly
one hundred miles of corridors with the huge organs and spreading limbs
of a prodigious leviathan. One has left behind the exhilaration of the
air of the Sierras the glorious spaciousness of the outside prospect,
and as the artificial vastness closes in about one, the spirit becomes
numbed and chill. It is a stupendous Golgotha, a colossal Place of
Skulls. Yet we shall be lacking in imagination if we cannot realise that
the dead heart once beat and that the ponderous body once enshrined a
soul. It may have been a mad soul; certainly it was a proud one, of high
exaltation, white to its core with the flame of an intense ideal. None
the less was it something of a craven soul, evading the problems of this
life, and fearing the life to come; closing its eyes to the light and
wrapping itself in the darkness of superstition. It is the soul of one
man that was thus enshrined; but in many respects it is revealed as the
soul of the Spanish people.
Seen at noonday in summer, the Escoriál stands, shadowless in the
sunshine, at the foot of the bare Sierra, looking out over a vista of
barren stubble, parched grass and dried up water-courses; an undulating
sweep of pallid buff, interrupted sparsely by grey olive bushes;
pitilessly inhospitable. But, in the slanting light of the afternoon,
the Sierras near and far lose the bleakness of their pinkish buff
beneath transparent tones of mauve and lavender, while the harsh nudity
of the endless vega becomes clothed in tender veils of variously
modulated greys. Even the inexorableness of the granite pile is
assuaged, as the shadows creep about its base, the contours and
surfaces of its facades melt into iridescent hues and the dome and
towers rise up to meet the cooling sky with something of aerial
suggestion. Slowly, as the light wanes the Escoriál and its vast setting
become to the imagination spiritualised; but the spirit that hovers over
them and enters into yours is, if I mistake not, for all its beauty
impregnated with sadness, which, as the darkness blots out distance and
buries the monastery beneath the gloom of the Sierras, dies into a sense
of awe.
And now let us revisit the Alhambra, which enshrines the soul of another
race. No colossal formality here, or precision of foot-rule and compass
from which the free spirit of the artist’s imagination has been
dogmatically barred! On the contrary, the palace of the Moorish kings
grew cell to cell by accretion, expressive of an accumulating sense of
the power and joy of life, alive with the breath of artistic
imagination. It dominates its own hill, looking across, on the one hand,
to the protecting barrier of higher hills, and on the other, over a
smiling hospitable vega, a far reaching garden of luxuriant fertility.
The hill itself is a paradise of refreshment. Its slopes are richly
clothed with shade trees and semi-tropical vegetation, embowered in
flowers, fragrant with the scents of living growths, musical with the
song of birds, the tinkle of tiny runnels, and the plash of fountains
and cascades. Set above this scene of ordered wildness, where the
license of nature is united to the task of man, stands what is left of
the palace of the Arab Sovereigns of Granada.
There is no need to describe its plan of gardens, fountains, courts and
corridors, halls of ceremony and suites of living rooms. It is the
spirit of the whole that we may try to capture. Here, as in the Mosque
of Cordova, the Arab’s love of vistas is revealed; but while the former
spreads over a large space, the perspectives of the Alhambra are
actually restricted. In their case even more than in the other is
created an illusion of distance. The triumph is one not of material
emphasis but of artistic suggestion. It was the human imagination,
finding its free expression in art, that gave form and fabric to this
Oriental dream of beauty. It is a visualised symphony, whose theme is
life; the joy of life and beauty that irradiates the joy. And the
inspiration is drawn from nature. To those who know the Alhambra it will
not sound like freakishness of speech to say, that the imagination of
the artist has ensnared a portion of the spirit of beauty which roams at
large in the desert and sky and lurks in the silences of woods and
gardens; and, because he felt the phenomena of nature in relation to the
supreme whole, has captured something of the infinity of the universal
and enshrined it in his microcosm of beauty. Also more intimately he has
fashioned his invention upon nature; studying her forms and methods and
adapting them to the conventions of art. In the endless variety of
decorative encrustration with which the wall-spaces, the soffits of the
arches and the vaultings of the chambers are embroidered, the motives
are drawn from the interlacing of boughs and vines, the rhythm of the
brooklet meandering through luxuriant undergrowth of vines and flowers,
from the facets of the crystal and the accumulated cells of bees. But
they are not interpreted in a naturalistic vein. The Oriental
imagination, at its best, rises above naturalistic representation; it
accepts the fertilization of nature, but conventionalises the product to
conform to the artist’s idea of abstract beauty.
It may be that in the Alhambra he has carried this idealization too far
and become too prodigal with its motives. The dainty fabric has little
structural dignity; architectonic substance being sacrificed to vistas
and surface decoration, while the last may easily be judged too profuse.
Yet the Arab, when he chose, was a builder and engineer, continuing the
Roman tradition of solid and scientific construction. Even at the
Alhambra this fact is attested by the foundations that are rooted in the
rock and carried down its precipitous flank, and by the aqueducts which
convey water from the neighboring hills to supply the fountains and
baths, the sudorific chambers and the system of heating. He faced the
necessities and facts of life as they arose, but in the pleasure-house
of his soul surrendered himself to the abstract, wrapping himself in
contemplation of the beautiful. So he encouraged his artists until their
imagination reached its zenith of profuse invention in the so-called
“Room of the Two Sisters.”
Above a dado of iridescent glass mosaic the walls are overlaid with a
rich lace work as of carved ivory, the interstices of which are colored
red and blue. Their surfaces are interrupted by niches, framed with
columns and arches of surpassing delicacy. From the four corners, at
considerable height project pendentives, converting the square of the
room into an octagon from
[Illustration: THE APPARITION OF THE VIRGIN? PEDRO BERRUGUETE TO
BERNARDINE MONKS
THE PRADO]
which springs the domed ceiling. The pendentives are groups of
stalactite forms, and the vaulting above is composed of innumerable
concave cells. Each differing slightly from the others, they cling
together in pendent masses, here projecting like a bunch of swarming
bees, there receding into the mystery of a fairy grotto; all the while
mounting up the curve of the ceiling, which undulates like a vine
yielding to the weight of its grapes; climbing higher and higher in
endless frolic of invention until they draw together at the ceiling’s
peak. Enough gold still adheres to the myriad facets to suggest to the
imagination the mysterious lustre of the ceiling, when it was lighted by
a suspended lantern with its clusters of crystal lights. This gem of the
Alhambra jewel, the heart of the Harem chambers, opens, as you remember,
on one side into an alcove. Through the windows of this appear the tops
of cypress trees, which rise from the boskage of pomegranates, roses and
oleanders in a little garden court. On the other side, the “Court of the
Lions,” once shaded with orange trees, still soothes the ear with the
plash of its central fountain and the drip of the tiny jets that spring
like rods of silver from the marble pavement of the arcades. A spot,
indeed of exquisite sensations; where everything conspires to alternate
moods of reverie and poignant stimulation; where the physical senses are
rarified, exalted, till perception swims into a sea of subtleties that
melts into a dreamy subconsciousness of infinity.
This you may say is a supreme achievement, tainted with weakness. Here
the yearning after beauty for its own sake has created such a subtlety
and luxuriance of beauty as to suggest that the motive was ornament for
the sake of ornament; sense-gratification for indulgence sake;
exquisiteness at the cost of living energy. For, while the maze of
decoration is ordered with most refined sensibility, it is none the less
expressive of inordinate and almost tortured sensuousness. If you adopt
this view it is to admit that the Alhambra was a product of the
decadence of the Oriental idea; and it is interesting to note how it
bred a corresponding decadence in the artistic motives of the Christian
conquerors. It was unquestionably from the Arabs that the Spaniard
derived his taste for excess. But his racial instinct and his Catholic
faith colored the result with a great difference. His sensuous and
religious ecstasy found their expression not in abstract symbols but in
concrete actualities. They prompted him to take delight in the actual
representation of blood and torture and to render his conception of
Heaven by means of sculptured figures reposing on marble clouds amid
gilded spikes of glory. Gradually, in fact, he degraded his conception
to the most obvious kind of perception. He expressed his spiritual ideas
in terms of naturalism.
It may seem illogical to invite the reader to be interested in Spanish
art and then discourage him by laying bare its weakness. But I believe
that every one who visits Spain, where alone the inwardness of Spanish
art can be reached, must feel at the outset more or less conscious of
these limitations to his interest; that, in fact, he suffers a
preliminary discouragement. If so, is it not better to admit it; to
accustom oneself to the expectation of temporary disillusionment, in
order that one may the sooner get over it and settle down to a just
appreciation of the admirable qualities which actually exist in Spanish
painting?