by Will Durant
Fame is a fashion. We tire of wearing old admirations on our pens, and find it exhilarating to discard worn idols from our fancy, to take down the dead mighty from their seats, and to put on the praises of new gods, blown up by our originality or exhumed by some fresh renown. There is no telling how great Velázquez will seem when the vanes of taste veer again.
V. MURILLO: 1617–82
There was a time, in our believing youth, when Murillo’s Immaculate Conception of the Virgin stood as high in repute as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna; now none so poor to do it reverence. The decline of Christian faith in Europe and America has taken half their beauty from pictures that we thought inherently beautiful. Murillo is one victim of that denudation.
But first a courtesy to Alonso Cano. A strange man—priest, duelist, painter, sculptor, architect. Born in Granada, he migrated to Seville, studied painting (beside Velázquez) with Pacheco and sculpture with Montañes. He designed, carved, and painted retables for the College of San Alberto and the Church of Santa Paula, where he competed successfully against Zurbarán. For the church of Lebrija he carved religious statuary that drew students from foreign lands to admire and imitate. He fought a duel, severely wounded his adversary, fled to Madrid, and won the protection of Olivares through the intercession of Velázquez. His paintings in and near the capital earned him a court appointment. In 1644 his wife was found murdered in bed; he accused his servant, but was himself charged with the crime. Again he fled from success; he hid in a remote monastery, was found, arrested, tortured; bore all pains without admitting guilt; was freed, and began again. In 1651, aged fifty, he returned to Granada, where he became a priest and a canon of the cathedral, and made for it statues, paintings, a lectern, and a portal of such excellence that his arrogance found pardon. Commissioned by the royal auditor in Granada to model a statue of St. Anthony of Padua, he finished it to the satisfaction of the official, who, however, haggled about the price. Cano asked one hundred doubloons ($3,200?). “How many days has it taken you?” the official asked. “Twenty-five,” said Cano. “Then,” said the auditor, “you esteem your labor at four doubloons a day?” “You are a bad accountant, for I have been fifty years learning to make such a statue as this in twenty-five days.” “And I have spent my youth and my patrimony on my university studies, and now, being auditor of Granada, a far nobler profession than yours, I earn each day a bare doubloon.” “Yours a nobler profession than mine!” cried the sculptor. “Know that the King can make auditors of the dust of the earth, but that God reserves to Himself the creation of an Alonso Cano”; and at once, in fury, he smashed the statue to bits.37 For a time it was thought that the Inquisition would imprison him, but Philip IV protected him, and Cano continued to paint pictures and carve statues—nearly all religious—that moved admirers of his multiple genius to call him the Michelangelo of Spain. He spent his earnings as fast as they came, usually in charities, and grew old in such poverty that the cathedral chapter had to vote funds for his relief. On his deathbed he rejected the crucifix offered him, because, he said, it was badly carved.
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was quite another man—modest, gentle, pious, the idol of his pupils, the beloved of his competitors, the cornucopia of charity. Seville, then the metropolis of Spanish art, saw his birth in 1617, the last of fourteen children. He studied painting under Juan de Castillo, but, as his parents died poor when he was fourteen, the orphan earned his bread by painting coarse and hasty pictures for a weekly fair. Hearing that Philip IV was kind to artists, he made his way to Madrid(?), where, according to an uncertain tradition,38 Velázquez befriended him, lodged him in his own home, secured his admission to the royal galleries, and encouraged him to study the works of Ribera, Vandyck, and Velázquez.
However, we find him in 1645 again at Seville. A Franciscan monastery there had offered a resistible sum for seven large pictures; established artists scorned the fee; Murillo agreed to it, and produced his first masterpiece, The Angels’ Kitchen?39 showing angels coming from heaven, bringing food, cooking it, laying tables, and feeding the pious in a famine; Murillo, though he tried to follow the masculine style of Ribera and Zurbarán, told the story with his own turn for tender sentiment. This picture and The Death of Santa Clara40 made the artist’s fame; half of literate Seville came to admire, and commissions mounted. As these were nearly all ecclesiastical, Murillo poured out Virgins, Holy Families, and saints in happy profusion, peopling the Christian legends with such fair women, handsome men, charming gamins, rosy colors, and mystic atmosphere that Catholic Europe warmed to him as the most lovable expositor of the most lovable creed.
So fed, Murillo, aged thirty, ventured into marriage, filled his home with the noise, quarrels, and delight of nine children, and labored for them contentedly till his death. The cathedral chapter paid him ten thousand reals for the St. Anthony of Padua that still hangs there. A story suspiciously recalling a legend told of Zeuxis,41 but printed eleven years before Murillo’s death, assures us that birds flying into the cathedral tried to perch on the lilies in the picture, and pecked at the fruit.42
Though his subjects were nearly all religious, he made them human rather than ecclesiastical. If all Roman Catholic Europe took to its heart the many copies he sent out of his Immaculate Conception of the Virgin43 it was not only because they celebrated a theme especially dear to Spain and that age, but because it enthroned womanhood in a cloud of idealism and sanctity. The lovely and modestly sensual women of Andalusia inspired The Madonna of the Rosary,44 The Gypsy Madonna,45 and the darkly beautiful Holy Family with the Bird.46
And who has painted children better? The Prado Annunciation shows us a girl just entering her teens, diffident and delicate, the very chef-d’œuvre of life. For the many forms in which Murillo pictured Christ as a child, he found models in the pretty children around him in his home and his street; probably it was they who interested him, rather than the set theme; and he painted them as charmingly as any bambini of the Italian Renaissance. If he could not squeeze children into his religious pictures he painted them independently. The Haus der Kunst in Munich has a wall full of them: boys throwing dice, boys eating melons as a bearable way of washing their faces, a boy munching bread while his mother picks lice from his hair. A Boy Leaning out of a Window47 makes it plain that money and happiness have quarreled and parted; let him be A Boy with a Dog,48 and the world is his oyster. In the Beggar Boy of the Louvre the idealist painter takes leave of the supernatural, looks at life on earth, and finds it lovable even in rags. In his realism Murillo is still the idealist.
He lived, as he painted, without tragedy, except at the very end. Climbing a scaffold to finish a painting in a church at Cádiz, he lost his footing, fell, and ruptured himself so severely that poisoning set in, and soon the favorite son of all Andalusia died (1682), so suddenly that he could not complete his will. Over his tomb, by his instructions, were inscribed his name, a skeleton, and two words, Vive moriturus—”Live as though about to die.”
Through two centuries his reputation remained high for those who cared more for what a picture said than for how it said it. Napoleon’s generals spread his fame by stealing his works and selling them as legitimate loot. Incompetent copyists multiplied his paintings and stirred criticism to question his art. He knew the technique of his trade, but his range was too restricted by his success with the Church; he lent himself too readily to the feminine and sentimental side of life; and what began by being beautiful became, through stereotyped repetition, unimpressively pretty. His saints looked up to heaven so persistently that when Europe turned from heaven it lost sight of Murillo. For the same reason it lost sight of Spanish painting in general after 1680. While Europe debated Christianity, Spain clung to her medieval heritage, and not till Goya would her art startle the world again.
During Murillo’s life a hundred fatal factors ended the Century of Gold. Gold itself, and its foreign quest, were factors: the youth and vigor of Spain broke from the prison of the Peninsula to explore and exp
loit the Americas; and the gold they sent back corrupted Spanish life, encouraged sloth, raised prices, or fell into Dutch or Genoese bottoms carrying Spanish trade. The government hoarded the precious metals, debased the currency, expelled the productive Moriscos, multiplied and sold offices, taxed everything to the point of economic apathy, and squandered wealth in martial expeditions and court extravagance while industry languished, unemployment spread, commerce dwindled, population shrank, and cities decayed. The narrowly aristocratic government lost all dignity, put collection boxes in the streets, and solicited money from door to door to finance its domestic incompetence and its foreign defeats.49 Spanish armies garrisoning Sicily, Naples, and Milan, forcing their way through New World jungles and wilderness, wasting themselves in the Thirty Years’ War, fighting a losing battle against the incredible pertinacity of the Netherlands, drained away the human and material resources of a small, half-arid and mountainous state shackled by its boundaries in a sea controlled by commercial competitors and naval enemies. Only the monasteries and the churches remained, clinging to their enormous, inalienable, untaxable properties, and multiplying monks in costly idleness. While religion appeased poverty with promissory notes on Paradise, stifled thought, and invited Spain to live on its past, France and England rewarded industry, captured commerce, and entered the future. Adjustment to a changing environment is the essence of life, and its price.
* * *
I. All Spanish pictures mentioned in this chapter are in the Prado unless otherwise stated.
II. Pareja, after years of preparing Velázquez’ brushes, colors, and palettes and watching his mind and work, secretly used the materials himself, and finally painted so well that Philip IV, having mistaken one of Pareja’s canvases for a Velázquez, freed him; nevertheless Juan remained as a scholar and servant in the artist’s family till his own death.27
CHAPTER XIII
The Duel for France
1559–74
I. THE RIVAL FORCES
AS long as he fears or remembers insecurity, man is a competitive animal. Groups, classes, nations, and races similarly insecure compete as covetously as their constituent individuals, and more violently, as knowing less law and having less protection; Nature calls all living things to the fray. In the broil of Europe between the Reformation (1517) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), this collective competition used religion as a cloak and a weapon for economic or political ends. When, after a century of struggle, the combatants laid down their arms, Christianity barely survived among the ruins.
France suffered first and recovered first; her “religious wars” of 1562 to 1594 were to her what the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) was to be to Germany, and the Civil Wars (1642–48) to England. When Henry II died in a tragic joust (1559) and his fifteen-year-old son succeeded him as Francis II, the nation had been led to bankruptcy by the long contest between the Hapsburgs and the Valois kings. The gross annual revenue of the government was then 12,000,000 livres; the public debt was 43,000,000. Many magistrates had been unpaid for four years past. The French people could not be persuaded to pay taxes.1 A financial crash threw Lyon into economic chaos in 1559. The flow of American silver and gold through Spain and Portugal into France depreciated the currency, inflated prices, and set on foot an angry race between wages and prices, in which no one gained but the informed and speculative financiers. In 1567 and 1577 the government tried by edict to fix maxima for prices and wages, but the economic scramble overrode the laws,2 and inflation went on, perhaps as an impious way to pay for pious wars. The only prosperous organization in the country was the Catholic Church, with its 94,000 ecclesiastics (in 1600), its 80,000 nuns, its 70,000 monks or friars, its 2,500 Jesuits, its august cathedrals and stately episcopal sees, its extensive and well-cultivated lands. A third—some said two thirds—of the riches of France belonged to the Church.3 Behind the religious wars lay the desire to retain or obtain this ecclesiastical wealth.
Fortunately for the Church, Charles de Guise, who had been made Cardinal of Lorraine at thirty-five, was now chief minister to Francis II. The ducal family of the Guises took its name from their castle near Laon, but had its main seat in Lorraine, which had only recently been absorbed into France. The Cardinal was handsome, of alert intelligence and decent life, a good administrator, eloquent in Latin, French, and Italian; but his taste for wealth and power, his suave duplicity, his readiness to persecute dissent and avenge opposition, his courageous retrenchment of governmental outlays, made him enemies in almost every class. His older brother, Francis, Duke of Guise, had already earned renown in strategy and battle and was now minister of war; but as the national bankruptcy counseled peace, Francis had to nurse his ambitions in a galling idleness. He loved glory, fine raiment, and cavalier display, but his courtly manners and grace of person and carriage made him the idol of Catholic France. He was intolerant of heresy and proposed to exterminate it by force.4 He and his brother were convinced that if France, like Germany and England, adopted Protestantism, the Church would be near its end, and France would lose the religious ardor that had supported its social order and its national unity. In defense of their faith and their power the Guises braved many perils, suffered premature death, and shared responsibility for the harrowing of France.
The Huguenots were no longer a small and helpless minority of French Protestants led and inspired by Calvin from Geneva, but a spreading doctrinal and social revolt against the Church. Calvin reckoned them to be 10 per cent of the French people in 1559;5 Michelet estimated their numbers to have doubled by 1572.6 They had centers in every province from Dauphiné to Brittany, above all in southwest France, where, three centuries back, the Albigensian heresy had met with apparent extermination. Despite the repressive legislation of Francis I and Henry II, they held their prayer meetings, fed on solemn sermons preaching predestination, issued a fire of pamphlets on the abuses of the Church and the tyranny of the Guises, and held a general synod in Paris (May 26, 1559) under the very nose of the King. They professed loyalty to the French monarchy, but they organized on republican lines the regions where they prevailed. Like any persecuted minority, they formulated a temporary ideology of liberty, but they agreed with the Catholics that the state should enforce the “true religion” throughout France. Their ethical theory was stricter than the time-relaxed code of their enemies; they avoided dancing, fancy dress, and the theater; and they denounced with indignation the morals of the court, where, as Jeanne d’Albret told her son, “it is not the men who invite the women, but the women who invite the men.”7
The Queen Mother, Catherine de Médicis, thought that in both parties “religion is a cover which serves merely to mask ill will … and yet they have nothing less than religion in their hearts.”8 She may have put it too strongly, but unquestionably social and economic factors underlay the religious strife. The peasantry remained Catholic; it had no material stake in the contest, and saw no substitute in a stern predestinarian Protestantism for the comforting myths and festival alleviations provided by the ancient faith. The proletariat, small numerically but big with revolt, denounced its employers, and gave a sympathetic hearing to “the Reform” as promising some change; and as in the England of the Lollards and the Puritans and the Germany of the Peasants’ War, the Gospel became a textbook of revolution.9 The middle classes too gave ear to the courageous preachers that Geneva trained and sent to France. The businessmen, who at the great fairs met prosperous Germans, Englishmen, and Swiss, noted the successful alliance of these merchants with Protestant rulers and ideas. They had long suffered contumely under bishops and barons disdainful of commerce and tied to feudal ways; they learned with pleasure and envy that Calvin was well disposed toward business and finance, and that he gave a share to the laity in the control of morals and the church. They resented ecclesiastical wealth and tithes, and feudal tolls on trade. They could not forgive the monarchy for subjecting to the central government the municipal communes that had for centuries been their political preserve.10 Even b
ankers smiled on the Huguenots, who raised no eyebrows at the taking of interest, upon which the Church had immemorially frowned, though lately winking a solemn theological eye.
Many nobles were taking up the rebel cause. They too were unreconciled to the centralization of power in a unified state. They must have heard of territorial German princes who, in league with Protestantism, had been able to defy emperors and popes, and had enriched themselves with the spoils of the Church. What if these doughty Huguenots could serve as a timely tool for chastening and subordinating the king? The nobles controlled the fields, the crops, and the peasantry of France, they organized and led her regiments, they held her fortresses, they governed her provinces. If the Reform won the aristocracy it would have a nation-wide power at its back. Already in 1553 the Cardinal of Lorraine had warned Henry II that the nobility were defecting to the Huguenots. In Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, Anjou, Maine, Saintonge, by 1559, nobles were openly leading the Huguenot revolt.
Proud Bourbon families had not forgiven the ruling Valois dynasty for driving Charles, Duke of Bourbon, to treason and an early death (1527); nor did they relish their exclusion from the French government by the clannish Guises, whom they looked upon as foreigners from a Lorraine that was far more German than French. Louis I de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, descended from King Louis IX, was of royal blood, far superior in rank to the Guises; he joined the Huguenots, and died in the attempt to rise to power on the wave of their faith. His brother, Antoine de Bourbon, titular King of Navarre—but actually ruling only the province of Béarn, in southwest France—played on the Huguenot side for a while, largely under the influence of his wife, Jeanne d’Albret. Jeanne was the aggressive daughter of the gentle Marguerite of Navarre, who had remained outwardly orthodox in deference to her brother, Francis I, but had protected many a heretic and Huguenot. As the mother had represented the Renaissance in love of life and poetry, so Jeanne exemplified the role and the character of women in the French Reformation—fervent in their religion to the point of intolerance, rearing and dedicating their children to carry on the holy war to death or victory. She brought up her famous son, the future Henri Quatre, to every Spartan and Puritan virtue, and did not live to see him revert to the lax gaiety of the Renaissance. She must have admired intensely Gaspard de Coligny, for he was all that she idealized: a nobleman in title and character, a prudent but loyal leader of the Huguenot cause, a stern soldier-statesman whose blameless morals shamed the gilded infidelities of the court.