The naturalistic tendencies inherent in the national Spanish genius,
which even in the period of Italian mannerism were not to be entirely
denied, bore full fruit at Seville, where Francisco Herrera “the
Old” (1576-1656) was the first entirely to reject the tyranny of the
Italian manner, and with it to a certain extent the tyranny of Church
patronage. He was a man of fiery character, with whom the technique
of his art became a veritable passion. It was left to a painter of a
later century and of another race to proclaim that it does not matter
_what_ you paint, but _how_ you paint; but Herrera’s work at times
almost suggests that he was guided by similar principles, although an
instinctive sense of pictorial fitness saved him from the consequences
to which their unrestricted application might easily lead.
In spite of the repelling fierceness, the fanaticism, the cruelty
of every single face—all of them portraits, no doubt—in the _St.
Basil dictating his Doctrine_ (No. 1706) at the Louvre, in spite of
the essentially Spanish manner in which the design fills the space
(the figures being grouped in horizontal courses right across the
canvas, with very little space above for the sky, and this little
space filled with angels’ heads and with a Holy Ghost as fierce as
the rest of the assembly), there is a noble rhythm of line as well as
of the distribution of light and shade, which proclaims the mind of a
master. The two Saints in the immediate foreground, St. Dominic and
St. Bernard, are cut through at the waist—another favourite device of
Spanish composition, which we have already noticed in the Donors of El
Greco’s _Christ on the Cross_.