by Will Durant
The picture of Spanish art, to be fair in spite of brevity, would have to enumerate and celebrate its minor glories: the gratings, screens, and gates in iron or bronze; the woodwork on many a reredos, and such choir stalls as those carved by Pedro de Mena for the cathedral of Málaga; the lamps, crosses, chalices, pyxes and tabernacles wrought in silver or gold, like the world-famous custodias of Juan de Arfe; the figurines in wood, ivory, alabaster, or bronze; the embroideries and brocades that graced altars and women; the enameled glass of Barcelona, and Talavera’s tin-glazed wares.
In painting, before Velázquez, the Church was almost the sole patron and arbiter. The somber passion of Spanish theology and piety, reflecting, perhaps, the gloomy crags and the burning heat of the terrain, allowed little humor, lightness, or elegance in treating themes, banished the nude, frowned upon portraits and landscapes, and encouraged a harsh realism that stressed the frightening rather than the comforting phases of the faith; pictures were to instill the creed and burn it into the soul with flaming imagery and monastic severity. At last the painters themselves saw visions and claimed divine inspiration. Philip II rivaled the Church as a patron of painters, but the subjects remained religious; when nobles commissioned paintings they usually obeyed the same rule; only with Velázquez and Philip IV did secularization begin. Some foreign influences entered to modify this ecclesiastical influence. Carducci and Zuccaro and some eighteen other Italians brought a softer mood into Spanish art; Anthonis Mor came from Flanders in 1572; Spanish painters visiting the Low Countries were touched by the spirit of Vandyck; and the exuberant Rubens himself, sweeping down upon Madrid in 1603, begged the native artists to look at life rather than death.
Besides the four masters who dominated Hispanic painting in this age there were many of milder fire: Alonso Sánchez Coello, who made portraits, in Flemish style, of Philip II’s Infante Don Carlos and Infanta Isabel; Coello’s pupil Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, who left us a somber Felipe II4 and a powerful St. Augustine; Francisco de Ribalta, whose tenebroso style of light surrounded by darkness appears in The Sick St. Francis Comforted by an Angel; and Francisco Pacheco, who taught Velázquez, gave him a daughter in marriage, and expounded the principles of Spanish painting in his Arte de la pintura (1649). “The chief end of art,” he wrote, “is to persuade men to piety and incline them to God.”5 In 1611 he visited El Greco in Toledo and condemned the Greek’s pictures as crueles borrones—rough sketches.6 Let us see.
II EL GRECO: 1548?–1614
In Crete, where he was born, he called himself Kyriakos Theotokopoulos—i.e., the Lord’s divine son; in Italy he was called Domenico Teotocopulo; in Spain Domingo Teotocópuli; he signed himself, in Greek letters, Domenikos Theotokopoulos; time has shortened him to El Greco, the nickname given him in Spain. We know nothing of his life in Crete. His ancestors may have emigrated to Crete from Constantinople after the Moslem conquest of that Greek city (1453); in any case he could feel in Crete, as later in Venice, the austere influence of Byzantine mosaics. In his day Crete belonged to Venice; not unnaturally the young artist, hearing of painting’s heyday there, took ship in excited hopefulness to the lagoons, and probably joined the large colony of Greeks in that cosmopolitan capital. He studied under Titian for two or more years, admired Tintoretto’s art of grouping figures in a crowded picture, and may have caught Veronese’s flair for rich and colorful robes. He copied famous paintings with patient humility in Venice, Reggio Emilia, Parma, and Florence, and he arrived in Rome not long after Michelangelo’s death (1564).
The first definite notice we have of him is in a letter written at Rome November 16, 1570, by Giulio Clovio to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese:
There has arrived in Rome a young man from Candia, a pupil of Titian, who is, I think, a painter of rare talent…. He has painted a portrait of himself which is admired by all the painters in Rome. I should like him to be under the patronage of your revered lordship, without any other contribution to his living than a room in the Farnese Palace.7
The Cardinal consented, and El Greco rewarded Clovio with a masterly portrait.8 When talk arose about the nudes in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Domenico offered, if the whole picture were taken down, to replace it with another just as good and better clothed.9 His standing with Roman artists fell. Some Spanish prelates in Rome told him that Philip II was looking for painters to decorate the Escorial. In 1572 he moved to Spain, shaking the dust of Rome from his shoes, but taking on his brush something of the distortions of Italian mannerism.
We have no record of him thereafter till 1575, when we find him both designing and adorning the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, the ecclesiastical capital of Spain. For its altar he painted the magnificent Assumption of the Virgin that now holds so prominent a place in the Chicago Art Institute—partly modeled on Titian’s Assunzione in the Frari at Venice, and still in the Italian style of healthy youthful forms and majestic old heads. For the cathedral at Toledo he painted (1577) a famous Espolio de las vestiduras del Señor—despoiling of the garments of the Lord. A commission appointed to judge the picture complained that the tunic of Jesus was too glaringly red, and that the women at the lower left—the three Marys—were out of place there, since the Scriptures said they had looked on from afar; nevertheless the judges prophetically pronounced the painting “inestimable, so great is its value.”10 One of the Marys was the painter’s mistress, Doña Jerónima de las Cuevas, whose sad and lovely face appears in most of El Greco’s Virgins. Despite his loyalty to her and the Church he never married her; this was not an old Spanish custom, but one long sanctified in artists’ studios.
A writer of the next generation, José Martínez, described Domenico as already confident of immortality:
He settled in … Toledo, introducing such an extravagant style that to this day nothing has been seen to equal it; attempting to discuss it would confuse the soundest minds…. He gave it to be understood that there was nothing superior to his works…. His nature was extravagant like his painting…. He used to say no price was high enough for his works, and so he gave them in pledge to their owners, who willingly advanced him what he asked for them…. He was a famous architect, and very eloquent in his speeches. He had few disciples, as no one cared to follow his capricious and extravagant style, which was only suitable to himself.11
Toward 1580 Philip II sent for El Greco and asked him to paint St. Maurice and the Theban Legion. After four years of labor the artist presented the result to the King. Philip found the grouping of the figures too confused; the picture was paid for but not accepted, and El Greco returned grieving to Toledo, which, so far as we know, he never left again. It was just as well, for now he was free to be his mystic self.
As if in revenge, he painted for the Church of Santo Tomé (1586) his most famous picture, one of the high points of pictorial art. The contract stipulated that he should show the clergy commemorating the tradition that saints had descended from heaven to bury Don Gonzalo Ruiz, Count Orgaz; St. Stephen and St. Augustine (in episcopal vestments) were to be shown lowering the body to the tomb, amid a reverent assemblage of notables; and over these figures the heavens, opening, were to reveal the Son of God in glory. All this was done to the letter, and much more, for almost every head is a finished portrait, the robes are a marvel of gold and green and white, the demascened armor of the Count gleams with light; and, for good measure, behind St. Stephen may be seen El Greco himself. The masterpiece of this masterpiece is the bearded, mitered head of St. Augustine. Or should we prefer the handsome corpse? Or the lovely face of St. Stephen? Or the bald priest reading the burial service? Or El Greco’s eight-year-old son Jorge Manuel proudly holding a torch and letting a handkerchief emerge from his pocket to display El Greco’s signature? In Francisco de Pisa’s History of Toledo (1612) we read what we should have surmised: this Burial of Count Orgaz “is one of the very finest [paintings] in all Spain. Men come from foreign lands to see it, with especial admiration; and the people of Toledo, far from tiring of it,
continually find in it new matter to gaze at. In it may be seen, realistically portrayed, many of the illustrious men of our time.”12 However, the parish council haggled over the fee; the hot-tempered Greek took the matter to court, won his case, and received two thousand crowns.
He had no dearth of commissions now. He had found himself; he no longer thought of Titian or Tintoretto; and he could experiment with the elongation of forms, not because he suffered any defect of eyesight, but probably because he felt that he might in this way symbolize the spiritual exaltation of his figures—bodies stretched out by heaven-seeking souls. In the St. Andrew and St. Francis of the Prado this emaciation seems unintelligible unless we consider such symbolism, and recall Gothic statuary slenderized for architectural limitations. All is forgiven when we come to the St. Ildefonso painted for the Caridad Hospital at Illescas; here in the reverend spirit, the absorbed mind, the ascetic face, the thin white hairs, and the delicate hands of the medieval archbishop is one of El Greco’s profoundest conceptions. “This one picture would repay the journey to Spain.”13
We do not gather, from the little we know about El Greco’s life, that he was Hispanically pious; he seems to have inclined to pleasure rather than sanctity. When he painted The Holy Family for the Tavera Hospital he endowed the Virgin with sensual beauty, not maternal dedication. The Crucifixion is anatomically erudite but emotionally cold; Grünewald felt that tragedy far more deeply. In his religious pictures El Greco is at his best in the incidental portraits—as of himself, with white beard and bald head, in The Pentecost. In a city crowded with ecclesiastics he had no difficulty in getting powerful personalities to sit for him: his friend the Trinitarian Paravicino (Boston), with a face half scholar, half Inquisitor; or the Grand Inquisitor himself, Cardinal Niño de Guevara (New York)—not quite as good as Velázquez’ imitation portrait of Innocent X. El Greco himself surpassed it in The Cardinal of Tavera, whose gaunt face, all bones and somber eyes, express again the artist’s conception of ecclesiastical consecration. But the best of all the portraits are of the brothers Covarrubias: one, Antonio, secular, grizzled, disillusioned, weary, forgiving; the other, Diego, in priestly garb, but looking much more worldly, more humorous, quite well adjusted. Only a few Rembrandts and Titians, and Raphael’s Julius II, excel these profound studies.
They are among the treasures gathered in the Casa del Greco Museum at Toledo. There, too, is the Plan of Toledo, in which the artist surveys, as from a cloud, the whole city and its encompassing hills. He represented it again, late in his life, in the View of Toledo under stormy skies (New York)—an impressionist picture utterly disdaining realist accuracy. By 1600 “the Greek” had become one of the town’s most famous citizens, known to all for his proud and capricious spirit, a mystic with a taste for money, occupying twenty-four rooms in an old palace, hiring musicians to play for him at his meals, gathering about him the intellectuals of Toledo, and honored as an “eminent philosopher.”14 About 1605 he painted what is presumed to be his self-portrait (New York)—bald, gray, almost haggard. In 1611 Pacheco found him too weak to walk. Though he still kept his twenty-four rooms, he could not pay his debts; the city council repeatedly voted him substantial sums. He died in 1614, aged seventy-three.
His standing in the world of art has been a posthumous adventure. Góngora wrote a sonnet eulogy, and Velázquez recognized his genius, but his strange art inspired no imitation, founded no school. By 1650 he was lost in the glare of Velázquez’ fame. For two centuries he was almost forgotten. Then Delacroix rediscovered him, Degas, Manet, and Cézanne took a lead from his rendering of moods; van Gogh and Gauguin saw in him their own progenitor. In 1907 Julius Meier-Graefe’s Spanish Journey raised El Greco far above Velázquez to the highest place in Spanish painting. Such oscillations of fame are precarious, being subject to “the wild vicissitudes of taste.”15 But El Greco will remain for many centuries to come a stimulating example of an artist who reached beyond objects to ideas and feelings, and beyond bodies to souls.
III. ZURBARÁN: 1598–1664
After El Greco, for a generation, Spanish painting marked time with lesser men, who did their best and disappeared. Then, almost simultaneously, Francisco de Zurbarán and Diego Velázquez flooded Spain with great art. During thirty years these two served as complements to each other: Zurbarán painting like a monk frightened into adoration and near to God, Velázquez prospering in the world and close to his King.
Zurbarán was baptized at Fuente de Cantos, in southwestern Spain, November 7, 1598, son of a shopkeeper successful enough to send him to develop his talent in Seville. After two years of study he signed his first dated picture (1616), an Immaculate Conception which should have ruined his career. A year later he moved to Llerema, fifteen miles from his birthplace. The neighborhood was dotted with convents, churches, and hermitages, from which Francisco took his modest commissions and his inspirations. There he married Maria Pérez, nine years his senior, in order to legitimize his child; she died after giving him two more. In 1625 he married a widow ten years his senior, but with a charming dowry; by her he had six children, of whom five died in childhood. After her death he married a prosperous widow; she gave him six children, of whom five died in childhood. Love labored to keep a step ahead of death.
In art his creative period began with a contract to paint, in six months, twenty-one pictures for the Dominican Monastery of San Pablo el Real at Seville (1626). Having completed this assignment, Zurbarán appears to have visited Madrid and felt the influence of Velázquez. Heretofore his paintings had reflected the dark and massive style of Caravaggio, and perhaps of Ribera; now he added to his rugged naturalism a new subtlety of shadows and a refinement of finish. Soon thereafter we find him in Seville, painting twenty-two immense canvases for the Mercedarian monks—the Order of Our Lady of Mercy, devoted to ransoming captive Christians. The four pictures that remain from this group are not masterpieces; but memorable is a boyish face in one of them, perhaps the artist’s son Juan. Seville must have liked these paintings, for in 1629 it officially asked Francisco to make his home there—”Seville would be honored … considering that the art of painting is one of the major embellishments of the state.”16 Zurbarán consented.
In 1630, for the Franciscan Church of San Buenaventura, he painted some of his greatest works. One is St. Bonaventura Pointing St. Thomas Aquinas to the Crucifix: the great theologian—unfortunately a Dominican—is gently admonished that religion consists not in philosophical theory but in the contemplation of Christ. This—the theme picture of Zurbarán’s art—was stolen from Spain by Marshal Soult (1810), found its way into the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, and was destroyed in the Second World War. Another in the series, St. Bonaventura on His Bier, also taken by Soult, was sold to the Louvre in 1858 and is still there; the four figures at the left are masterly. Still finer is The Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas, which Zurbarán painted for a Dominican college in Seville; the mind passes in astonishment from one profound face to another—Ambrose, Gregory, Jerome, Augustine, Charles V. However, Jerónimo Velázquez was paid six times as much for the frame as Zurbarán for the picture.
Moving on to the Carmelite Church of San Alberto (1630), the busy painter showed St. Francis absorbed in humble devotion, and St. Peter Thomas, a monk wrinkled and haggard with waiting for Paradise. Returning to the Mercedarian monastery (1631), he painted some of its most revered monks; among these portraits is the magnificent Fray Pedro Machado. The year 1633 was hectic with commissions: twelve Apostles for a church in Lisbon, three pictures for the Carthusians at Seville, and ten for the Chapel of St. Peter in the great cathedral; one of these, St. Peter Repentant, still in its original place, is a striking essay in realism, perhaps remembering Ribera.
Zurbarán was now in such wide demand that he delegated much of his work to his aides. For the Monastery of Guadalupe in Estremadura he painted The Temptation of St. Jerome, in which the head and the hands of the saint are technical wonders, and the gentle ladies playing music hardl
y deserve to have their temptations resisted. Even from Peru and Guatemala orders came; one series of Apostles went to Lima, another to Antigua; and to Mexico City went Christ at Emmaus, picturing the risen Christ as a hale and happy peasant at a meal. Some of these canvases were done in haste or by proxy, and Zurbarán had to sue Lima for his fee.
From 1645 his ascendancy at Seville was challenged by the young Murillo, who supplied churches and convents with such tender illustrations of the Christian story that the demand for Zurbarán’s disconcerting realism sharply declined. The older artist tried to soften his terrors, and for a time he strove to rival Murillo in pious and domestic sentiment, as in The Virgin and Child with St. John (now in San Diego, California); but this new style was uncongenial to his art and mood. He moved to Madrid (1658) to repair his fortunes, but Philip IV, himself penniless, found nothing better for him to do than to decorate a hunting lodge. Velázquez was kind to him, but suddenly Velázquez died. Zurbarán outlived his friend and his fame.
His reputation hardly surmounted the Pyrenees until Napoleon’s generals took a fancy to Zurbarán’s monumental monks and somber saints and kidnaped some of them to France. When the Spanish monasteries were secularized in 1835 more of his work came to Paris, and in 1838 King Louis Philippe opened in the Louvre a Spanish Gallery with four hundred paintings, of which eighty were ascribed to Zurbarán. Our present taste finds his range too narrow and monastic, his spirit too gloomy and entranced. We miss in him the ragamuffins of Murillo and the philosophers and pretty princesses of Velázquez. And yet there is in his work a solid sincerity, a depth of dedication, a power of color and form, that lift him beyond the realm of transient preferences and ensure his place in the remembrance of men.