The Spanish character has expressed itself in sculpture more forcibly than in painting. In no other country, perhaps, do we find a people whose native taste for carving in wood and stone is so deep-rooted, so essentially an outgrowth of the strong life of the race. To understand the art of Spain you must know her sculpture.

As far back as the prehistoric Iberian period we find traces of a vigorous school of sculpture in Spain, which, though based on Greek and Asiatic sources, yet attained a striking individuality of its own. Professor Pierre Paris of Bordeaux says of these prehistoric carvings that “the figures are simple and virile, while the women are distinguished by dignity of attitude and nobility of face, expressive of deep religious gravity.” The finest example—a supreme type of primitive Iberian sculpture, very fascinating in its curious originality—is the Lady of Elche, the bust in the Louvre, which Pierre Paris, in agreement with Reinach, dates about 440 B.C. Of this wonderful work Pierre Paris writes: “In her enigmatic face, ideal and yet real, in her living eyes, on her voluptuous lips, on her passive and severe forehead, are summed up all the nobility and austerity, the promises and the reticences, the charm and the mystery of woman.... She is above all Spanish, not only by the mitre and the great wheels that frame her delicate face, but by the disturbing strangeness of her beauty. She is indeed more than Spanish: she is Spain itself, Iberia arising still radiant with youth from the tomb in which she has been buried for more than twenty centuries.”[A]

This is true.

Sculpture has always been the most genuinely Spanish of the arts. The Visigoths were attracted to sculpture; and though many of the credited examples they were supposed to have left cannot be accepted, there are a few Visigothic carvings, which bear witness to this predominant expression of character.

Belonging to a later date we find a surprising wealth of carving in wood and stone scattered throughout Spain in the cathedrals, churches, cloisters, and palaces. There is no town in Spain which does not possess some sculptured works.

Spain has given to the world few great sculptors; none of her carvers stand on quite the high level of her most famous painters. Yet, if we except the great names of El Greco, Ribera, Velazquez, and Goya, her sculptors are at least equal in merit with her painters. Damian Forment, Berruguete, Gregorio Hernandez, Juan de Juni, Pedro Millan, MontaÑÉs, Alonso Cano, Roldan, Mena, as well as others, are worthy to take a high place in the temple of Spanish art. And a fact of even greater importance: they have impressed upon their work the national character in a far stronger degree than any of the contemporary painters. It is interesting to note that many of these sculptors were also painters; and, in all cases, their carvings are more distinctly Spanish than their paintings. Almost entirely sculpture escaped from the slough of neo-Italian imitation, which did so much to ruin painting in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Spanish sculpture is finely realistic and imaginative. Sometimes fantastic to extravagance in its naturalness, it is always vigorous, romantic, and religious in the highest degree.

How is it, then, that sculpture is the branch of the national art least known beyond the bounds of the country? Rare indeed are the writers who have made a study of Spanish sculpture. A few good articles on the subject have appeared in France and in Germany; in England none. Even in Spain a quite inadequate attention has been given to this most important branch of the national art. There are, it is true, several excellent monographs, such as the works of D. JosÉ Gestoso y Perez on Pedro Millan, and that of D. Manuel Serrano y Ortega on MontaÑÉs. Then there is the very interesting study by D. JosÉ Marti y Monso on the artists of Valladolid. But these writings were limited to one artist, or to the works of one province. Until recently there was no work treating of Spanish sculpture as a whole, except the Diccionario of Cean Bermudez, a book very excellent, but not free from error, and for the most part unimportant in its critical estimates. Like most Spanish writers, Bermudez praises work because it belongs to his own country, rather than because of its true artistic worth. It is well that this indifference is at an end. A critical study of Spanish carvings, entitled La Statuaire Polychrome en Espagne, finely illustrated with beautiful examples of the best carvings in the Peninsula, has now been written by M. Marcel Dieulafoy. The book was published in Paris in 1908. We would take this opportunity of gratefully acknowledging the help we have gained from this excellent work.

But the question remains unanswered why the carvings of Spain have been treated with such a want of interest. To find the answer it will be necessary to consider briefly the circumstances which determined the special character of Spanish sculpture.

Almost without exception statuary was executed for the religious uses of the Catholic Church. Images were needed to increase the pious fervour of the populace; they were used as altar decorations in the churches; often they were carried in the religious processions; and many of them were credited with miracle-working powers. The one thing necessary for a Spanish statue was that it should be an exact imitation of life; the more realistic the illusion the greater was the power of the statue to fulfil the requirements of the Church.

It will readily be seen that marble—the substance most fitting for the artistic rendering of form—would not comply with these demands. Thus in Spain the classic marble was discarded, while wood and plaster were employed in its place. These substances could be readily coloured, or even covered with canvas resembling stone, and then painted to counterfeit life. Thus out of the religious requirements—which in Spain, so much more than in any other country, decided the expression of art—was developed a natural employment of multi-colouring, whose principle was the diversity of the various materials and the use of the two arts of painting and sculpture in the same work.

This almost universal use of colour—a relic of very ancient art—has really decided the fate of Spanish sculpture. For some centuries public taste was firmly decided in condemning statue colourisation as “an offence against good taste.” It is held that the true purpose of sculpture is to depict form, and that painting an image in relief is barbarous and shows a want of culture, because the sculptor, attentive alone to the beauties of form, should observe the limits set by the material in which he has to work, and should resist the seductions of colour which belong to the painter. Coloured statues have even been compared with the wax figures displayed in shows.

There is much to be said on both sides of the question. We shall not here try to answer it, for to do so would be to anticipate all that we hope to establish of the beauty of the polychrome statuary of Spain. Rather we would ask the reader to look now at the illustrations at the end of this volume. Great works are the only answer that can silence criticism.

Those who have condemned polychrome sculpture have, almost without exception, instanced its worst examples. This is absurd; it is like giving a judgment of painting by the pictures exhibited each year in the Royal Academy of London.

It must be remembered that polychrome statuary is a very ancient art; moreover, it is a perfectly natural and spontaneous development, growing out of the need for intensified expression. It was not an arbitrary practice adopted as “a trick of the trade.” This is important. Those who deny the use of colour to the sculptor have tried to prove that among the Greeks sculpture was anterior to painting, and that in the case of certain statues which we find coloured the painting was an injury added at a later date. This is entirely erroneous, as M. Marcel Dieulafoy proves by referring to the recent excavations made in Greece and Italy. The most ancient of the statues carved by the Greeks were those on which pigments were used. Carved out of wood, which lent itself readily to encrustations of bronze, ivory, and precious stones, as well as of colour, the figures were enriched in this way to give them a closer relation to life. Such was the bas-relief at Olympia in the Treasury of the Megarians, which represents a combat between Herakles and Acheloss, where the figures are carved out of cedar-wood richly embellished with gold; or the group of the Dioscuri, attributed by Pausanias to DÉpoinos and Skyllis, where again the figures were enriched with films of ebony and of ivory placed upon the wood.

When wood gave way to marble and bronze, sculptors still continued the use of encrustation; especially a paste of glass was used to form the eyes of the figures. Often we find a gilded or silver necklace added. Bronzers tinted their statues, and in this way bronze had the aspect of colour. Silver was largely used. A very interesting example is furnished by Silamin of Athens, who, wishing to represent Jocasta in her last hour, silvered the face so skilfully as to give it the pallor of death.

Of even greater interest is a small bas-relief in the St. Angelo Collection in the Museum of Naples. It represents a maiden dressed in a double robe, the under one pale green, the outer one rose-coloured. She wears besides an upper garment of a darker colour and a white fichu bordered with red.

We find this custom of multi-colouring in the work of the greatest masters. We know that Phidias made use of gems and gold to heighten the beauty of his statues. Strabo wrote of his incomparable work in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia: “What adds greatly to its success is that his cousin the painter PanÆus lent his talent in covering certain parts of the statue with brilliant colours, notably the draperies.” How significant is this statement to those who condemn the colouring of statuary!

It is purely arbitrary to maintain that relief and colour may not be united in art. Rather we may agree with M. Homobles when he declares that “the Greeks harmonised colour and form so perfectly that for them in the sixth century painting was a flattened bas-relief, and bas-relief a painting with the paste laid on very thick.” It is the opinion of M. Marcel Dieulafoy, founded, as he tells us, on researches pursued during more than half a century, that “no matter what the material—wood, stone, bronze, marble, terra-cotta—nor the epoch of production, the Hellenes accentuated with coatings and sometimes with coloured enamels the figures in bas-reliefs and alto-reliefs, unless in the case of juxtaposition with other materials of different colour.” Thus we are brought to the conclusion that those who condemn as barbarous the use of colour in statuary must condemn also the statuary of Greece.

Nor was multi-colourisation confined to the Greek sculptors. It was a natural development in the art of carving in every country, arising, as we have seen, out of the desire of the artist to bring his work into a closer relation with life. The Egyptians and the Chaldeans never limited themselves to the use of form in their statues and in their architecture, but sought for ways of rendering colour. The great Asiatic races used enamel as the basis of their decoration. Here we find the origin of the multi-coloured sculpture of Babylon, Assyria, and Susa, and, at a later date, that of Medea and Persia. This art reached Byzantium—a country which gained the highest skill in glass mosaic—and also Rome. Persian artists, following in the train of the conquering Arabs, brought the secrets and methods of their art to many European countries, and among them to Spain and Portugal. The influence spread also from Byzantium, and, in a lesser degree, from Rome, and soon multi-colourisation was universally adopted, and all statues, whether of wood, stone, or copper, were covered with colour.

Centuries passed before a reaction set in. It became a creed of artistic faith that the use of colour to accentuate works in relief was barbarous. The reason of the change is very simple. Many of the ancient coloured statues had lost their colour by lapse of time, and those who saw them were deceived, believing that as they were then, so they had been created. Then pictures came to be painted more frequently, and colour was allowed to them, while form alone was accorded to statuary.

But the tradition of polychrome statuary yet persisted, and at the opening of the Renaissance still fought for life. Italy possessed some great statue colourists in the fifteenth century. We know of coloured statues and bas-reliefs by Donatello, by Mino of Fiesole, by PisÁno of Luca, by della Robbia, and others. Even much later we find examples of the continued use of colour. Such, for instance, are the equestrian statues of the ducal family of Sabbroneta and the groups in the chapels of the Sacromonte at Varullo. It is important to remember that the great masters deplored the abandonment of statue colouring, and, among others, Michael Angelo wrote an instructive and precious letter upon the subject.

Coloured statuary was more persistent in the south than in the north. Flanders, Germany, and afterwards France were converted from the custom. Yet Jan van Eyck collaborated with the sculptor, as did also AndrÉ Beaunevau. The life-size statues which decorate the ChÂteau of Madrid built for Francis I., and those in the Toulouse Museum, taken from the Basilica of St. Sermin, prove that coloured statuary still persisted in the sixteenth century. These last figures are of special interest from their analogy with Spanish polychrome statuary.

It was in Spain that the art of polychrome lived and developed. The finest of her coloured statues were wrought in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and also in the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, a period when the practice was dead in almost all other countries. For this reason, even if for no other, Spanish carvings claim the attention of the student of art. They are the crown of what has been achieved by earlier civilisations.

What was it that kept Spain alone faithful to the old method of using colour as well as form to give life to her statues? First, a respect for tradition which has marked all things in this strong and stubborn race. Then the Spanish carvers were in very close connection with MudÉjar architecture, which was closely allied with the art of Persia, in which colour ruled with such supreme insistence, and whose whole strength lay in ornamentation. But deeper even than these outer reasons was the Spanish character, which expressed itself in their altar carvings and in their statues. The one thing the Spanish artist sought for first was the reality of life; and this life was religious life, for in Spain the divine life was not separate—a thing detached—but a real living part of the human daily life of the people. The painted statues were at once more life-like and spoke a more real language to the people, than figures chiselled in white stone. The statuary of Spain was not wrought, in the first place, to fulfil claims of art, but to satisfy the needs of the people. It is still in the convents and churches of Spain—not in the museums, if we except the museums of Valladolid and Seville—that the masterpieces of polychrome statuary remain. It is there that we must seek them.[B]