altarpiece, “The Descent from the Cross,” is the masterpiece of Pedro
Roldan. The two paintings near the entrance by Juan de Valdés Leal
(1630-1691) are regarded by Herr Schmidt as entitling that artist to
rank as one of the greatest masters of realism of any age. This opinion
is not shared by a recent writer (C. Gasquoine Hartley), who considers
the pictures theatrical, though the execution exhibits a certain
power. “In one of them a hand holds a pair of scales, in which the
sins of the world--represented by bats, peacocks, serpents, and other
objects--are weighed against the emblems of Christ’s Passion; in the
other, which is the finer composition, Death, with a coffin under one
arm, is about to extinguish a taper, which lights a table spread with
crowns, jewels, and all the gewgaws of earthly pomp. The words ‘In Ictu
Oculi’ circle the gleaming light of the taper, while upon the ground
rests an open coffin, dimly revealing the corpse within.” Murillo said
this picture had to be looked at with the nostrils closed. For the two
paintings Valdés received 5740 reals.
Of the eleven pictures painted by Murillo for this church, only six
remain, the others having been carried off by the French. The subjects
are “Moses striking the Rock,” the “Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes,”
the “Charity of San Juan de Dios,” the “Annunciation,” the “Infant
Jesus,” and “St John.” The first picture, depicting, as it does, the
terrible thirst experienced by the Israelites, is known as _La Sed_
(Thirst). Some critics think this is one of the finest of the master’s
productions. As is usual in his compositions, the figures are all
those of ordinary Sevillian types. “The personality of Christ in
the ‘Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes,’” says C. Gasquoine Hartley,
“lacks the force of the ancient prophet, and the work as a whole
is inferior to its companion picture.” The “Charity of San Juan de
Dios”--representing the Saint carrying a beggar with the help of an
angel--is the best and most characteristic of the six paintings. The
“Infant Jesus” and the “St John” are also very fine. For the “San
Juan de Dios” and the “St Elizabeth of Hungary”--_El Tiñoso_--(now at
Madrid) together, Murillo was paid 18,840 reals; for the Moses, 13,300
reals; and for the “Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes,” 15,973 reals.
The last building which may be said to rank as an architectural
monument erected in Seville is the Palacio de San Telmo, now the
residence of the Duc de Montpensier. In the year 1682 the Naval School
of San Telmo was founded on the site of the former palace of the
Bishops of Morocco and the tribunal of the Holy Office. The present
edifice, begun, after plans by Antonio Rodriguez, in 1734, was not
completed till 1796. The palace adjoins the beautiful gardens of the
Delicias. The façade is exceedingly ornate, the decoration being in
the Plateresco style. The general effect is pleasing, but critics have
been unsparing in their denunciations of the structure. It certainly
reflects the debasing influence of the architect Jose Churriguera
(1665-1725), who has given his name (_Churrigueresque_) to one of the
most tawdry and tasteless styles of architecture.
The Archiepiscopal Palace, adjacent to the Cathedral, is also in the
bad style of the later seventeenth century. The interior, however, is
worth visiting for the sake of the noble marble staircase, one of the
finest in the city. Here are three paintings by Alejo Fernandez, an
early seventeenth-century artist, whom Lord Leighton considered “the
most conspicuous among the Gothic painters.”
The Fabrica de Tabacos is a vast building completed in 1757. Apart
from its size, it possesses no architectural interest, and though a
favourite showplace for tourists, does not come within the scope of a
work of this character.
THE PAINTERS OF SEVILLE
BY
ALBERT F. CALVERT AND C. GASQUOINE HARTLEY
In Seville, perhaps to a greater extent than in any city, even in
Spain, the country of passionate individualism, art is the reflection
of the life and temper of the people; and to understand Seville we
must know her painters. As we look at the pictures of the Spanish
primitives, at the emphatic canvases of Juan de las Roelas and
Herrera, for instance; at the realism of Zubarán, or, still more, at
the ecstatic visions of Murillo--as we see them in the old Convento
de la Merced, now the Museo Provincial, in the Cathedral, or in one
or another of the numerous churches in the city, we find the special
spirit of Andalusia.
There is one quality that, at a first glance, impresses us in these
pictures, so different, and yet all having one aim. It is their
profound seriousness. Rarely, indeed, shall we find a picture in which
the idea of beauty, whether it is the beauty of colour or the beauty
of form, has stood first in the painter’s mind; almost in vain shall
we search for any love of landscape, for any passage introduced just
for its own sake. For, let it be remembered, in Andalusia art was
devotional always. “The chief end of art,” says Pacheco, the master of
Velazquez, in his _Arte de la Pintura_, “is to persuade men to piety
and to incline them to God.” Pictures had other purposes to serve
than that of beauty. They were painted for the Church to enforce its
lessons, they were used as warnings, and as a means of recording the
lives of the Saints. In other countries, it is true, painters have
spent their strength in religious art, but almost always we can find as
well as the sacred, some outside motive, some human love of the subject
for itself--for its opportunities of beauty. The intense realism of
these Spanish pictures is a thing apart; these Assumptions, Martyrdoms,
and Saintly Legends were painted with a vivid sense of the reality of
these things by men who felt upon them the hand of God. We know that
Luis de Vargas daily humbled himself by scourging and by wearing a hair
shirt, and Juan Juanes prepared himself for a new picture by communion
and confession. These are two examples chosen out of many. A legend
we read of Don Miguel de Mañara, the founder of the Hospital of La
Caridad, illustrates this dramatic religious sense of Spain. One day
in church Don Miguel saw a beautiful nun, and, forgetful of her habit,
made amorous proposals. She did not speak; instead, she turned to look
at him; whereupon he saw the side of her face which had been hidden
from his eyes: it was eaten away, corrupted by a hideous disease,
so that it seemed more horrible than the face of death. It was such
scenes as this that the Spanish artists chose to paint. But, indeed, it
would be tedious to enumerate the examples which Spain offers of this
curious, often, it would seem to us, corrupted sense of the gloom of
life, carrying with it as one result the passionate responsibility of
art. Always, we feel certain that the Spanish painters felt all that
they express.
And this overpowering, if mistaken, understanding of the presence of
the divine life gave a profound seriousness to human life. The shadow
of earth was felt, not its light; and emotion expressed itself in
an intense seriousness, that is over-emphatic too often--always, in
fact, when the painter’s idea is not centred in reality. This is the
reason why a Spanish painter had to treat a vision as a real scene.
We have pictures horrible with the sense of human corruption--such,
for instance, are the two gruesome canvases of Valdés Leal, in La
Caridad. Again and again is enforced the Catholic lesson of humility,
expressing itself in acts of charity to the poor, so essential an idea
when this life is held as but a threshold to a divine life. We find a
sort of wild delight in martyrdom; a joy that is perfectly sincere in
the scourging of the body. All the Spanish pictures tell stories. Was
not their aim to translate life?--the life of earth and the, to them,
truer life of heaven--and life itself is a story? Their successes in
art are due to this, their failures to the sacrifice of all endeavours
to this aim; a danger from which, perhaps, no painter except Velazquez
quite escaped. He, faultless in balance, in his exquisite statement of
life, expresses perfectly the truth his predecessors had tried for,
but missed, except indeed now and again, in some unusual triumph over
themselves. We find hardly a painter able to free himself from the
traditions of his subject. Only Velazquez, controlled by the northern
strain that mingles with the passion of his Andalusian temper, was
saved quite from this danger of over-statement. And Velazquez does not
belong to Seville, though he was born in the southern city on June 5,
1599, in the house, No. 8, Calle de Gorgoja; though the first years
of his life were spent there, the time of childhood, the few months
of work with the violent Herrera, the five years in the studio of
Pacheco, his master; though--a fact of greater import--his temper was
Andalusian; and though his early pictures--the _bodégones_, so familiar
to us in England, whither so many have travelled through the fortune
of wars--are entirely Spanish in their direct realism. Velazquez
worked contemporaneously with the Realistic movement that quickened
the arts in Seville in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he
worked outside it. This explains the silence of his art in Seville. Of
the pictures of his youth, painted while he was there, none remain,
except one in the Archiepiscopal Palace, “The Virgin delivering the
Chasuble to San Ildefonso”; and the authenticity of this picture has
been denied until very recently, a fact explained by the bad condition
of the canvas. To see the wonderful art of Velazquez you must leave
Seville and visit the Museo del Prado at Madrid. Seville is the home
of religious art. The habit of her painters was serious; in their
profound religious sense, in their adherence, almost brutal at times,
to facts, as well as in those interludes of sensuous sweetness that
now and again, as, for instance in the art of Murillo, burst out so
strangely like an exotic bloom, they reflect the temper of Spain. It
is contended sometimes that these pictures in Seville are wanting in
dignity, wanting in beauty. But are we not too apt to confine beauty to
certain forms of accepted expression? Surely any art that has life; has
dignity, has beauty; and no one can deny that life was the inspiration
of the Andalusian painters.
We must remember these things if we would understand the pictures in
Seville.
But first we find ourselves carried away from the reality and darkness
of life back to a happy childhood of art, as we look at the three
fourteenth-century frescoes of the Virgin--the “Antigua,” in the chapel
named after it in the Cathedral, “Nuestra Señora del Corral” in San
Ildefonso, and “Señora Maria de Rocamador” in San Lorenzo--an art
when the painter, less conscious of life and of himself, was content
to paint beautiful patterns. In these three pictures--all that are
left to us--we see the last of Byzantine art in Spain. The figures,
with long oval faces all of one type, are placed stiffly against a
background of Gothic gold. Look at “Señora Maria de Rocamador,” as she
sits holding the Child upon her knees; while two little angels kneel,
one upon the left, one on the right. She wears a blue robe, partly
covered with a mantle of deep purple, very beautiful with ornaments
of gold and bordered with gold braid. A bent coronet around her head
stands out against the glowing halo; the background is all of gold
woven into a delicate pattern. It is a picture of pure convention in
which is no effort to carry the mind beyond what is actually seen;
it makes its appeal just as so much decoration. This fresco, as well
as the “Antigua” and “Nuestra Señora del Corral,” have been much
repainted--the ill-fortune of so many early Spanish works.
But, in the fifteenth century, a new spirit came into art; and with
the work of Juan Sánchez de Castro the school of Seville may be said
to begin. No knowledge has come down to us of his life; we know only
that he was painting in Seville between 1454 and 1516. In his great
fresco of “San Cristóbal,” that covers the wall near to the main door
in the old Church of San Julian--alas! now spoiled by re-painting and
by the subsequent rotting away of the plaster--we find a different,
human, almost playful treatment of a sacred story. And for the first
time in Seville, we see the special Spanish quality, characteristic
of the whole school from this time to the time of Goya, of rendering a
scene just as the painter supposed it might have happened. “A child’s
dream of a picture,” Mr Arthur Symons has called it. San Cristóbal,
many times the size of life, stretching from floor to ceiling, fills
the whole picture; he leans upon a pine-staff as he supports the Child
Christ upon his shoulders, who holds in his hands a globe of the world
upon which the shadow of a cross has fallen. The other figures, the
hermit and two pilgrims with staves and cloaks, are quite small; they
reach just to the Saint’s knees. And this immense grotesque figure is
painted in all seriousness, as a child might picture such a scene. To
understand the sincerity of the Spanish painter, we must compare his
work with that other fresco of “San Cristóbal,” painted, much later,
by Perez de Alesio, which is in the Cathedral. The Italian picture is
an attempt to illustrate a popular miracle, perfectly unconvincing;
De Castro’s Saint compels us to accept and realise what the painter
himself believed in. This is the difference between them.
In the smaller pictures of Sánchez de Castro that remain to us, such,
for instance, as the panel of the “Madonna with St Peter and St
Jerome,” once in San Julian, but now in the Cathedral, we find him
more bound by convention, less himself. We see the immense debt Spanish
painting owed to Flemish art. And this influence, always so beneficial,
the Northern art being, for reasons of race not possible to state here,
the true affinity of Spain in art, remains, with different and more
certain knowledge, in the “Pietà” of Juan Nuñez, which still hangs
in the Cathedral where it was painted. It meets us again in the fine
and interesting “Entombment” by Pedro Sánchez, a painter of whom we
know nothing, except that his name is given by Cean Bermudez among the
illustrious artists of Spain. The picture may be seen in the collection
of Don José López Cepero, at No. 7 Plaza de Alfaro, the house in which
Murillo is said to have lived. In all three pictures, and in other
work of the same period not possible to mention here, we are face to
face with that special Spanish trait, the pre-occupation with grief,
that is quite absent from the early fourteenth-century Madonnas, as
from the simple child-art of De Castro’s “San Cristóbal.” The shadow
of the Inquisition had fallen; art, the handmaid of the Church, could
express itself no longer in quaint and beautiful symbols. Instead, it
had to force itself to be taken seriously, being occupied wholly with
emphatic statements, its aim an insistence on the relation of human
life to the divine life.
But the joy of life did not die easily.
Juan Nuñez, once, at least, in those pictures in the Cathedral in which
he has painted the archangels Michael and Gabriel quite gaily, their
wings bright with peacock’s feathers, returns to the child-humour of
De Castro. And Nuñez carries us forward to Alejo Fernandez, the most
important painter of this early period, much of whose work remains for
us in the Cathedral and in the old churches of Seville.
Go to the suburb of Triana, and in the Church of Santa Ana there is the
sweetest Madonna and Child, in which we find a new suggestion in the
joy of the Mother in her Babe, a human attitude, making the picture
something more than mere illustration. And we notice a delicate care
for beauty found very rarely in Seville, perhaps never as perfectly as
in the work of this painter. The “Virgen de la Rosa” is the name given
to the picture. The Mother sits enthroned under a canopy of gold, in
a beautiful robe of elaborate pattern, pale gold on brown. She holds
a white rose out to her Child. Typical of Fernandez is this fortunate
use of the flower; typical, too, of his new mood of invention is the
small landscape of rocky and wooded country that fills the distance.
The gracious pose of the Virgin, the beauty in the Child, show an
advance in ease upon earlier pictures. But the other figures, four
angels who guard the Mother, all posed a little awkwardly, suggest
a scheme on whose design the early Byzantine models may have had a
forming influence, though the result is different enough. For Fernandez
understood the very spirit of the Renaissance; he saw life beautifully
and strongly. The attraction of the picture is in its effect of joy, in
the charming way in which it forms a pattern of beautiful colour, and
in its new sense of humanity that carries us beyond the scene itself.
And there are other pictures of Fernandez in Seville: the great
altar-piece in eight sections--one is a copy--that tells the story of
Joseph, Mary, and the Child, in the old Church of San Julian; and there
is a large “Adoration of the Magi,” the “Birth and Purification of the
Virgin,” and the “Reconciliation of St Joachim and St Anne,” all in the
Cathedral--the first in the Sacristía de los Cálices, and three others
in unfortunate darkness, over the Sacristía altar. And if these larger
pictures have not quite the fresh charm of the “Madonna of Santa Ana,”
in each one we find a real 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. Of his life we
know nothing, merely that he came with his brother Juan from Cordova
in 1508, called by the Chapter to work in Seville Cathedral. But it
matters little that his life is unrecorded, for the work that he has
left is his best history.
In these first years of the Sevillian school, when art was sincere and
young, many pictures were painted, all strong work, all interesting,
in lesser or greater measure, to the student, even if not to the art
lover, as showing the growth of a national style. In many cases the
names of the artists are unknown; no painter has left much record of
himself. These pictures, which may be recognised very readily, are
found in the Museo de la Merced, in the Cathedral, and still more in
the churches, the true museums of Seville.
But fashion in art changes, and the sixteenth century witnessed the
manifestation of a new mood in painting, the advent to Spain of the
Italian influences of the Renaissance. This is not the place to speak
of the blight which fell upon art. The distinctively Italian schools
were only an influence of evil in Spain, and the inauguration of
the new manner was the birth of a period of great artistic poverty.
The main desire of the sixteenth-century painters was, as it were,
to wipe the artistic slate. All pictures painted in the old style
were repudiated as barbarous, cast aside as an out-of-date garment.
The country became overrun by third-rate imitators of the Italian
grand style, of Michael Angelo, of Raphael and his followers. The
decorations, as you can still see them, of the Escorial, may be taken
as typical of Italian art as it was transplanted into Spain. All
national art that was not Italian in its inspiration was looked upon as
worthless.
Yet, be it remembered, that the Spanish painters, more perhaps than
the painters of any other school, could imitate and absorb the art
of others without degenerating wholly into copyists. The temper of
the nation was strong. Even now it was not so much a _copying_ of
Italian art, rather it was an unfortunate blending of style which
took away for a time the dignity and strength which is the beauty
of Spanish painting. Thus, Peter van Kempeneer, a Flemish painter,
known better in Spain as Pedro Campaña, who, strangely enough, was
the first to bring the Italian influence to Seville, was inspired
alternately by the Northern and Italian styles; and in such a picture
as his famous “Descent from the Cross,” still in the Sacristía Mayor
of the Cathedral, with its crude colour and extravagant action, we
find him--in an effort, it is said, to imitate Michael Angelo--being
more Spanish than the Spaniards. Indeed, this picture, which made
such strong appeal to Murillo that he chose to rest beneath it in
death, gives us a very curious, left-handed fore-vision, as it were,
of the marvellous work of Ribera. In the large altar-piece, of many
compartments, of the Capilla del Mariscal in the Cathedral, the
first picture painted by Campaña, when, in 1548, he came to Seville,
we see him a realist in the portraits of the donors, painted with
admirable truth; but in the “Purification of the Virgin,” the scene
that fills the lower compartment of the altar, he is Italian and
demonstrative--spectacular movement, meaningless gestures, all done for
effect.
The Italian influence, the _buena manera_ it was called in Seville,
is more insistent in Luis de Vargas, whose painting was contemporary
with that of Campaña. He was the first painter of Seville to submit
himself wholly to Italy, and most often he was inspired by Raphael.
Much of his work has perished; of the once famous frescoes, “his
greatest gift to Seville,” nothing remains except a few colour traces
upon the Giralda Tower. De Vargas, the pupil probably of Perino del
Vagas, brought back as the reward of twenty-eight years of painting in
Italy much craft skill; and his work, as we see it in the “Pietà,” in
Santa Maria la Blanca, in the earlier “Nativity,” and, even more, in
his masterpiece, the popular “La Gamba,” both in the Cathedral, gives
us a borrowed art, academic and emotional. Only in portraiture does
he say what he has to say for himself. The portrait of Fernando de
Contreras, in the Sacristía de los Calices, is a portrait of sincerity
and character, in which is the Spanish insistence on detail, unpleasant
detail even, as in the ill-shaven cheeks rendered with such exact care.
Contrast this portrait with his other pictures, so extravagant, with
such futile gesticulation, to understand how a really capable painter
lost his sincerity, as just then it was lost in all Spanish painting.
In this effort to be Italian, De Vargas’ natural gift of reality, as we
see it, for instance, in the “Christ” of Santa Maria la Blanca, or in
the peasant boy of the Cathedral “Nativity,” was overclouded, mingled
curiously enough with a Raphaelesque sweetness. It was not that this
painter did not realise the scenes that he depicts--yes, and depicts
with passion--do we not know the sincere piety of his life?--but
he used to express them an art that was not his own, an art he was
temperamentally unfitted to understand.
Contemporary with Campaña and De Vargas, the leaders of the Andalusian
Mannerists, worked a band of painters of second, or even third-rate,
talent. Francisco Frutet, like Campaña a Flemish painter who had learnt
his art in Italy, and who came to Seville about 1548, is typical of
these “improvers,” as Pacheco calls them so mistakenly, of the native
art. His best work is his Triptych in the Museo, in which again we see
the same curious mingling of Flemish and Italian types; the Christ,
for instance, recalling the models of Italy, while Simon of Cyrene,
who bends beneath the Cross, is nearer to the Gothic figures. Pedro
Villegas Marmolejo has more interest. His quiet pleasing pictures--one
is in the Cathedral, one in San Pedro--interpret Italian art with more
charm, but still without originality.