his pell-mell of horrors; "extravagant and bizarre" are the adjectives
he employs (said of most painters whose style is unfamiliar or out of
the beaten track). In the Baptism of Christ he finds a depraved
energy, a maleficent puissance; but the ardent colours, the tonal
vivacity, and the large, free handling excite the Frenchman's
admiration. Justi avers that Greco's "craving for originality
developed incredible mannerisms. In his portraits he has delineated
the peculiar dignity of the Castilian hidalgos and the beauty of
Toledan dames with a success attained by few." R.A. Stevenson devotes
to him a paragraph in his Velasquez. Referring to the influence of El
Greco upon the greater painter, he wrote: "While Greco certainly
adopted a Spanish gravity of colouring, neither that nor his modelling
was ever subtle or thoroughly natural... Velasquez ripened with age
and practice; Greco was rather inclined to get rotten with facility."
Mr. Ricketts says that "his pictures might at times have been painted
by torchlight in a cell of the Inquisition." Richard Ford in his
handbook of Spain does not mince words: "Greco was very unequal... He
was often more lengthy and extravagant than Fuseli, and as leaden as
cholera morbus." Ritter speaks of his "symphonies in blue minor"
(evidently imitating Gautier's poem, Symphony in White-Major). In
Havelock Ellis's suggestive The Soul of Spain there is mention of
Greco--see chapter Art of Spain. Ellis says: "In his more purely
religious and supernatural scenes Greco was sometimes imaginative, but
more often bizarre in design and disconcerting in his colouring with
its insistence on chalky white, his violet shadows on pale faces, his
love of green. [Mr. Ellis finds this 'predilection for green'
significant as anticipating one of the characteristics of the Spanish
palette.] His distorted fever of movement--the lean, twisted bodies,
the frenzied, gesticulating arms, the mannerism of large calves that
taper down to pointed toes--usually fails to convince us. But in the
audacities of his colouring he revealed the possibilities of new
harmonies, of higher, brighter, cooler keys." The Count Orgaz burial
scene at Toledo Mr. Ellis does not rank among the world's great
pictures.
There is often a depressing morbidity in Greco; Goya is sane and
healthy by comparison. Greco's big church pieces are full of religious
sentiment, but enveloped in the fumes of nightmare. Curious it was
that a stranger from Greece should have absorbed certain not
particularly healthy, even sinister, Spanish traits and developed them
to such a pitch of nervous intensity. As Arthur Symons says, his
portraits "have all the brooding Spanish soul with its proud
self-repression." Señor Cossio sums up in effect by declaring that
Venice educated Greco in his art; Titian taught him technique;
Tintoretto gave him his sense of dramatic form; Angelo his virility.
But of the strong personality which assimilated these various
influences there is no doubt when confronted with one of his canvases,
every inch of which is signed El Greco.
"VELASQUEZ"
Why so well-known and authoritative a work as Velasquez, by Aureliano
de Beruete, should have been so long in reaching America is a puzzle
when you consider the velocity with which the Atlantic Ocean is
traversed by so many mediocre books on art. The first Spanish edition
of the Beruete monograph appeared about 1897; the same year saw it in
French, and from the latter tongue it was translated into English by
Hugh E. Poynter in 1906. Señor Beruete is considered with reason as
the prime living authority on the great Spanish realist, though his
study is not so voluminous as that of Carl Justi. The Bonn professor,
however, took all Spain for his province. Velasquez and His Times is
the title of his work, the first edition of which came out in 1888,
the second in 1903. Beruete (whose portrait by Sorolla was one of that
master's most characteristic pictures at the recent Hispanic Society
exhibition in New York) is not at odds on many points with Justi; but
more sceptical he is, and to R.A.M. Stevenson's list of Velasquez
pictures, two hundred and thirty-four, Beruete opposes the
comparatively meagre number of eighty-nine. He reduces the number of
sketches and waves away as spurious the Velasquez "originals" in
Italy, several in the Prado, the very stronghold of the collection;
and of the eleven in that famous cabinet of the Vienna Imperial
Museum--to which we went as to a divine service of eye and soul--he
allows only seven as authentic. The portrait of Innocent X in the
Doria palace, Rome, is naturally a masterpiece, as is the bust
portrait of the same subject at the Hermitage, St. Petersburg; but the
Boston Museum full-length of Philip IV is discredited as a copy, only
the Prince Don Baltasar Carlos Attended by a Dwarf being admitted in
the company of the true Velasquezes.
Of the "supposed portrait of Cardinal Pamphili," a real Velasquez, now
hanging in the Hispanic Society, 156th Street, Beruete writes: "In the
winter of 1902 there appeared in Paris a bust portrait of a cardinal
brought from Italy by Messrs. Trotty & Co., which had been alluded to
by Professor A. Venturi of Rome in _L'Art_. It is life size,
representing a person about thirty years of age in the dress of a
cardinal, with smiling face and black hair, moustache and pointed
beard, good carriage and a touch of levity not in keeping with the
dignity and austerity of a prince of the Church. The beretta and cape,
of a fine red colour, the latter painted in a uniform tone and without
a crease, harmonise with the roseate hue of the features, and the
plain gray background. Every detail reveals the hand of Velasquez, and
it can be classed without hesitation among the characteristic works of
his second style. It is on that ground that I make mention of it here.
However, in Rome, at the house in which this picture was found, it was
held to be the portrait of Cardinal Pamphili, nephew of Innocent X,
who according to Palomino was painted in Rome by Velasquez at the same
time as the Pontiff, that is in 1650."
Beruete believes Palomino was wrong in declaring that Velasquez
painted the young cardinal in Rome; Madrid was the likelier city. The
style proves an earlier date than 1650. The cardinal withdrew from the
cardinalate after three years, 1644-47 > and married. The portrait was
acquired by the American artist the late Francis Lathrop. Stevenson
grants to the Metropolitan Museum a fruit-piece by Velasquez. Not so
Beruete. J. H. McFadden of Philadelphia once owned the Doña Mariana of
Austria, second wife of Philip IV, in a white-and-black dress, gold
chain over her shoulder, hair adorned with red bows and red-and-white
feather, from the Lyne-Stephens collection in the New Gallery,
1895--and is so quoted by Stevenson; but he sold the picture and
Beruete has lost track of it.
Whereas Stevenson in his invaluable book studies his subject broadly
in chapters devoted to the dignity of the Velasquez technique, his
colour, modelling, brushwork, and his impressionism, Beruete follows a
more detailed yet simpler method. Picture by picture, in each of the
three styles--he adopts Justi's and Stevenson's classification--he
follows the painter, dealing less with the man than his work. Not that
biographical data are missing--on the contrary, there are many pages
of anecdotes as well as the usual facts--but Beruete is principally
concerned with the chronology and attribution of the pictures. He has
dug up some fresh material concerning the miserable pay Velasquez
received, rather fought for, at the court of Philip, where he was on a
par with the dwarfs, barbers, comedians, servants, and other
dependants of the royal household.
The painter has been criticised for his attachment to the king; but as
he was not of a religious nature and did not paint religious pieces
with the gusto of his contemporaries, the court was his only hope of
existence; either court or church. He made his choice early, and while
we must regret the enormous wasting of the hours consequent upon the
fulfilment of his duties as a functionary, master of the revels, and
what not, we should not forget how extremely precarious would have
been his lot as a painter without royal favour in the Spain of those
days. He had his bed, board, house, and though he died penniless--his
good wife Juana only survived him seven days--he had the satisfaction
of knowing that he owed no man, and that his daughter had married his
pupil Mazo. Velasquez was born at Seville in 1599; died at Madrid,
1660. His real name was Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez. He was a
Silva--for the "de" was acquired from the king after much pettifoggery
on the part of that monarch with the prognathic jaw--and he was of
Portuguese blood. He signed Velasquez--a magic grouping of letters for
the lovers of art--though born as he was in Spain his forefathers came
from Portugal. The mixed blood has led to furious disputes among
hot-headed citizens of the two kingdoms. As if it much mattered.
Velasquez's son-in-law, by the way, Juan Mazo, was the author of a
number of imitations and forgeries. He was a true friend of the
picture-dealers.
Velasquez belonged to that rare family of sane genius. He was
eminently the painter of daylight and not a nocturnal visionary, as
was Rembrandt. Shakespeare, who had all the strings to his lyre, had
also many daylight moments. Mozart always sang them, and how blithely!
No one, not Beethoven, not Raphael, not Goethe--to name three widely
disparate men of genius--saw life as steadily as the Spaniard. He is a
magnificent refutation of the madhouse doctors who swear to you that
genius is a disease. Remember, too, that the limitations of Velasquez
are clearly defined. Imagination was denied to him, asserts Beruete;
he had neither the turbulent temperament of Rubens nor possessed the
strained, harsh mysticism of El Greco--a painter of imagination and
the only painter allowed by Beruete to have affected the Velasquez
palette. In a word, Velasquez was a puzzling comminglement of the
classic and the realist. He had the repose and the firm, virile line
of the classics, while his vision of actuality has never been
surpassed. The Dutch Terburg, Vermeer, Van der Helst, Frans Hals saw
as vividly the surfaces of things material; the last alone was the
match of Velasquez in brushwork, but not Rembrandt recorded in his
Anatomy Lesson the facts of the case as did Velasquez.
Señor Beruete wittily remarks that Los Borrachos (The Topers) of
Velasquez is the truer anatomy lesson of the two. A realist, an
impressionist, as Stevenson has it, the Spaniard was; but he was also
something more. He had a magic hand to define, the rendering of the
magical mystery of space and atmosphere. Grant that he was not a
colourist in the sense the Venetians were, or Rubens, yet how much
more subtle, more noble, more intellectual, is his restricted tonal
gamut. Those silver-grays, resonant blacks, browns, blues, and reds
sing in your memory long after you have forgotten the tumultuous
golden waves breaking upon the decorative coasts of Rubens. We are
constrained to question the easy way Beruete and other critics deny
the attributes of imagination and poetry to Velasquez. There is,
perhaps, a more sublimated poetry in his pictures than in the obvious
religious and mythological and allegorical set pieces of Rubens,
Murillo, and how many others. His realism did not run to seed in the
delineation of subject. He was as natural as Cervantes--the one great
man of Spain who may be compared to him--and he saw the larger
patterns of life, while never forgetting that the chief function of a
painter is to paint, not to "think," not to rhapsodise, not to be
"literary" on canvas. His cool, measuring eye did more than record
sordid facts. He had a sort of enraptured vision of the earth as
beautiful, the innocence of the eye we encounter in children only.
Stevenson rages at those who say that Velasquez was not a
colourist--and Beruete is of them, though he quotes with considerable
satisfaction the critical pronouncement of Royal Cortissoz (in
_Harper's Magazine_, May, 1895) that Las Meninas is "the most perfect
study of colour and values which exists."
The truth is, Stevenson, Cortissoz, and Beruete are all three in the
right. That Velasquez, when in Rome, studied the pictures there; that
he didn't care for Raphael; that he had very much admired the
Venetians, Titian, Tintoretto; that he had admired Rubens, with whom
he associated daily on the occasion of the Flemish master's visit of
nine months to Madrid--these are truths not to be denied. Beruete
claims that the Rubens influence is not to be seen in Velasquez, only
El Greco's. Every object, living or inanimate, that swam through the
eyeballs of the Spaniard--surely the most wonderful pair of eyes in
history--was never forgotten. His powers of assimilation were
unexcelled. He saw and made note of everything, but when he painted
his spectators saw nothing of any other man, living or dead. Was not
the spiritual impulse missing in this man? He couldn't paint angels,
because he only painted what he saw; and as he never saw angels he
only painted mankind. Life, not the "subject," appealed to him. He had
little talent, less taste, for the florid decorative art of Rubens and
the Venetians; but give him a simple, human theme (not pretty or
sentimental) and he recreated it, not merely interpreted the scene; so
that Las Meninas, The Spinners (Las Hilanderas), the hunting pictures,
the various portraits of royalty, buffoons, beggars, outcasts, are the
chronicles of his time, and he its master psychologist.
Beruete says that Ribera more than Zurbaran affected Velasquez; "El
Greco taught him the use of delicate grays in the colouring of the
flesh." Hot, hard, and dry in his first period (Borrachos), he becomes
more fluid and atmospheric in the Breda composition (The Lances), and
in the third period he has attained absolute mastery of his material.
His salary at the court was two and sixpence a day in 1628. Even Haydn
and Mozart did better as menials. Yet some historians speak of the
liberality of Philip IV. An "immortal employee" indeed, as Beruete
names his idol. Luca Giordano called Las Meninas the "theology of
painting." Wilkie declared that the Velasquez landscapes possessed
"the real sun which lights us, the air which we breathe, and the soul
and spirit of nature." "To see the Prado," exclaims Stevenson, "is to
modify one's opinion of the novelty of recent art." To-day the
impressionists and realists claim Velasquez as their patron saint as
well as artistic progenitor. The profoundest master of harmonies and
the possessor of a vision of the real world not second to Leonardo's,
the place of the Spaniard in history will never be taken from him.
Velasquez is more modern than all the moderns; more modern than
to-morrow. That sense of the liberation of the spirit which Mr.
Berenson is fond of adducing as the grandest attribute of the Space
Composers, Raphael and the rest, may be discovered in Las Meninas, or
in The Spinners, space overhead, with mystery superadded. The brumous
North was the home of mysticism, of Gothic architecture. The note of
tragic mystery was seldom sounded by the Italians. Faith itself seems
more real in the North. It remained for Rembrandt to give it out in
his chords of _chiaroscuro_. And is there more noble, more virile
music in all art than The Surrender of Breda?
Mr. Berenson refers only once to Velasquez and then as an "impersonal"
painter. As a counterblast to his theory of impersonality let us quote
a few lines from R.A.M. Stevenson's Velasquez (that most inspiring of
all art monographs): "Is it wonderful," he asks, "that you can apply
Morelli's principles of criticism to the Pre-Raphaelite Italian
schools; that you can point to the thumbs, fingers, poses of the head,
ovals of the face and schemes of colour that the painters learned by
heart, and can even say from whom they learned? The later Venetians
broke away, and when you come to Velasquez the system holds good as
little as it can in our own day." But this charge holds good for many
painters of the Renaissance, painters of patterns. Velasquez, like the
great prose-master of France, Gustave Flaubert, is always in
modulation. No two canvases are rhythmically alike, except in the
matter of masterfulness. He, too, was a master of magnificent prose
painting, painting worth a wilderness of makers of frozen mediæval
patterns. Mr. Henry B. Fuller, the author of the Chevalier di
Pensieri-Vani, once spoke of the "cosy sublimity" in Raphael's Vision
of Ezekiel; one might paraphrase the epigram by describing the
pictures of Velasquez as boxed-in eternities. Dostoïevsky knew such a
sensation when he wrote of "a species of eternity within the space of
a square foot." But there are many connoisseurs who find evidences of
profounder and more naïve faith in the angular loveliness of the
Flemish Primitives than in all the religious art of Italy or Spain.
GOYA
I
Goya was a Titan among artists. He once boasted that "Nature,
Velasquez, and Rembrandt are my masters." It was an excellent
self-criticism. He not only played the Velasquez gambit in his
portraits, the gambit of Rembrandt in his sombre imaginative pieces,
but he boldly annexed all Spain for his sinister and turbulent art. He
was more truly Spanish in the range and variety of his performances
than any Spanish-born painter since Velasquez. Without the sanity,
solidity, nobility of Velasquez, whose vision and voice he never
possessed; without the luscious sweetness of Murillo, whose sweetness
he lacked, he had something of El Greco's fierceness, and much of the
vigour of Ribera. He added to these influences a temperament that was
exuberant, fantastic, morose, and pessimistic yet humorous, sarcastic,
sometimes melting, and ever masterful. He reminds one of an
overwhelming force. The man dominates the painter. A dozen comparisons
force themselves upon you when the name of Goya is pronounced: comets,
cataracts, whirlwinds, and wild animals. Anarch and courtier, atheist
and decorator of churches, his "whole art seems like a bullfight,"
says Richard Muther. One might improve on this by calling him a subtle
bull, a Hercules who had read Byron. "Nature, Velasquez, and
Rembrandt!" cries MacColl in a too brief summary. "How inadequate the
list! Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Legion had a hand in the teaching."
Goya incarnated the renaissance of old Spain and its art. Spanish art
has always come from without, for its foundations were northern and
Flemish. The Van Eycks and Van der Weyden were studied closely; Jan
Van Eyck visited Madrid. The Venetian influence was strong, and El
Greco his life long, and a pupil of Titian as he was, this gloomy
painter with the awkward name of Theotocopoulo endeavoured to forget
his master and became more Spanish than the Spanish. Ribera,
emotional, dramatic, realistic, religious, could sound the chords of
tenderness without the sentimentalism of Murillo. Goya stems more from
Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa than from any of his predecessors, except
Velasquez. The presence of Tiepolo, the last of the Venetians, in
Spain may have influenced him. Certainly Raphael Mengs, the "Saxon
pedant," did not--Mengs associated with Tiepolo at Madrid. It is in
company with the bravos of the brush, Caravaggio and Rosa, that Goya
is closely affiliated. We must go to Gustave Courbet for a like
violence of temperament; both men painted _con furia_; both were
capable of debauches in work; Goya could have covered the walls of
hell with diabolic frescoes. In music three men are of a like ilk:
Berlioz, Paganini, Liszt. Demoniacal, charged with electric energy,
was this trinity, and Goya could have made it a quartet.
But if Spain was not a country of original artists--as was Italy, for
example--she developed powerful and astounding individualities.
Character is her _leit motìv_ in the symphony of the nations. The rich
virility and majestic seriousness of her men, their aptitudes for war,
statesmanship, and drama, are borne out in her national history.
Perhaps the climate plays its part. Havelock Ellis thinks so. "The
hard and violent effects, the sharp contrasts, the strong colours, the
stained and dusky clouds, looking as if soaked in pigment, may well
have affected the imagination of the artist," he writes. Certainly the
landscapes of Velasquez could not be more Spanish than they are; and,
disagreeing with those who say that he had no feeling for nature, the
bits of countryside and mountain Goya shows are truly peninsular in
their sternness. It may be well to remark here that the softness of
Tuscany is not to be found in the lean and often arid aspects of
Spain. Spain, too, is romantic--but after its own fashion. Goya
revived the best traditions of his country's art; he was the last of
the great masters and the first of the moderns. Something neurotic,
modern, disquieting, threads his work with devilish irregularity. He
had not the massive temper of Velasquez, of those men who could paint
day after day, year after year, until death knocked at their ateliers.
As vigorous as Rubens in his sketches, Goya had not the steady, slow
nerves of that master. He was very unequal. His life was as disorderly
as Hals's or Steen's, but their saving phlegm was missing. In an
eloquent passage--somewhere in his English Literature--Taine speaks of
the sanity of genius as instanced by Shakespeare. Genius narrowly
escapes nowadays being a cerebral disorder, though there was Marlowe
to set off Shakespeare's serene spirit, and even of Michael Angelo's
mental health and morals his prime biographer, Parlagreco, does not
speak in reassuring terms. Goya was badly balanced, impulsive, easily
angered, and not slow to obey the pull of his irritable motor centres
when aroused. A knife was always within reach. He drove the Duke of
Wellington from his presence because the inquisitive soldier asked too
many questions while his portrait was being blocked out. A sword or a
dagger did the business; but Wellington returned to the studio and, as
Mr. Rothenstein tells us, the portrait was finished and is now at
Strathfieldsaye. A sanguine is in the British Museum. His exploits in
Rome may have been exaggerated, though he was quite capable of eloping
with a nun from a convent, as is related, or going around the top of
the Cecilia Metella tomb supported only by his thumbs. The agility and
strength of Goya were notorious, though in a land where physical
prowess is not the exception. He was picador, matador, banderillero by
turns in the bull ring. After a stabbing affray he escaped in the
disguise of a bull-fighter.
If he was a _dompteur_ of dames and cattle, he was the same before his
canvas. Anything that came to hand served him as a brush, an old brown
stick wrapped up in cloth, a spoon--with the latter he executed that
thrilling Massacre, May 2, 1808, in the Prado. He could have painted
with a sabre or on all fours. Reckless to the degree of insanity, he
never feared king or devil, man or the Inquisition. The latter reached
out for him, but he had disappeared, after suffering a dagger-thrust
in the back. When on the very roof of his prosperity, he often slipped
downstairs to the company of varlets and wenches; this friend of the
Duchess of Alba seemed happier dicing, drinking, dancing in the
suburbs with base-born people and gipsies. A _genre_ painter, Goya
delighted in depicting the volatile, joyous life of a now-vanished
epoch. He was a historian of manner as well as of disordered souls,
and an avowed foe of hypocrisy.