Spanish Art the Reflection of the Spanish Temperament—The Great Buildings of Spain—Spanish Gothic—Its Realistic Naturalness, its Massiveness and Extravagance—The Churches, the Real Museums of Art Treasures—Polychrome Sculpture—Spanish Painting—Its Late Development—Its Special Character—Its Strength, its Dramatic and Religious Character.

To understand Spain you must know her architecture, her sculpture, and her pictures. For in Spain, perhaps to a greater extent than in any country, art is the reflection of the life and temper of the people. And this is true although the essential ideas of her art in building, in carving, and in painting, have all been borrowed from other nations. It is the distinctive Spanish gift to stamp with the seal of her own character all that she learns from without.

The first, as it has remained the strongest, expression in art of this people was in building and in sculpture, which gave opportunity for emphasis to their special dramatic temperament. We must go back to Rome for another country that has spoken in its buildings with the same overwhelming force.

The cathedrals which arose in the period of the nation’s greatest prosperity were the chief point of attraction—the theatre, the centre, of all life. They were built for the honour of God, but also for the enjoyment of the people themselves; religion was joyful, popular—democratic, one might say. All the exuberant life garnered by Hispano-Arab culture lives in the Spanish buildings. Here Roman, Byzantine, and Arab art have passed, and also the Mudejar, the Gothic, and the Renaissance—in fact, all the styles of Europe. For this reason there is no native school of architecture. Spain possesses few pure Gothic, Romanesque, or Renaissance buildings.

But it is just this complexity which gives to the Spanish buildings their special character. The Spanish artists, though they lacked creative genius, were no base imitators; they sought to combine, and they gave to the temples they had to construct that massive, strong, and exuberant spirit that was in harmony with their own temperament. In such a cathedral, for instance, as that of Burgos we find vigour and joyous exuberance rather than reserve and beauty—a confused richness that has a flavour of brutality almost. The sombre Gothic can be traced in the older portions of the building, but everywhere it has been seized upon by the restless fancy of later workers. Spanish architecture is like the Spanish manners. The Spaniard can use a floridity of expression that would be ridiculous in England.

Choir stalls in the Mosque, Cordova

The carving and moulding of wood and stone and iron in the fifteenth century had reached a high level of accomplishment. And although none of the world’s famous sculptors have been Spaniards, the amount of strong and beautiful carvings to be found in every part of the Peninsula is amazing; in no country can they be surpassed. Every great church and cloister contains carvings in wood—a material chosen by the Spaniards for the freedom and facility it gave for expression—which are treasures of delight. The immense and amazing retablos and the carved walnut-wood choir-stalls which every great church contains cannot be matched elsewhere. It is a pity that these characteristic works are hardly known; they are the basis of all Spanish art. In no country in Europe can be seen more wonderful carvings than on the monumental tombs of such cathedrals as Toledo, Zamora, and Leon. Again, the ironwork church screens, notably those of the cathedrals of Seville, Granada, and Toledo, cannot be surpassed. In these works, with their dramatic conceptions, finding expression in a wealth of interesting details, never without the tendency to over-emphasis of statement which marks the art of this people, the Spanish character speaks. Æsthetic sensibility is almost always absent; the art here is vigorous and romantic, frankly expressive, with a kind of childlike, almost grotesque, naturalism that shows a realistic grasp of all things, even of spiritual things. I recall the polychrome sculpture of this people; the images of the anguished Virgin, in which sorrow is carried to its utmost limit of expression; the bleeding heads of martyred saints, such, for instance, as those terrible yet moving heads of the Baptist by Alonso Cano at Granada, or the poignantly lifelike polychrome carvings of the Crucified Christ by MontaÑes, Gregorio Hernandez, Juni Juanes, and other sculptors, which are seen in many churches, and which are carried in procession in the Easter pasos at Seville and elsewhere, images in which all the details of the Passion are emphasized with an emotional delight in the presentment of pain. And when I think of these images I understand the bull-fight.

Burgos CathedralUntil the fifteenth century painting found no home in Spain. Placed as she is almost midway between the art centres of Flanders in the North and of Italy in the South, Spain has geographically a position of equipoise between these conflicting art influences. But this balance of influence was modified by the bent of the Spanish character, and the true affinity of Spain in art has always been with the Flemings. No one can doubt this who has a knowledge of the Spanish Primitives. The art of Spain is Northern in its literalness, in its dramatic force, and deep and singular gravity.

Jan van Eyck in 1428 visited Portugal and Spain, and, incited by the brilliant reception accorded to the great Flemish master, other enterprising Netherland painters flocked to the Peninsula. From this time the native artists gave their attention to painting, and on this Flemish foundation arose a really capable group of painters. The essential ideas in the pictures of these early masters are all borrowed; but, though Flemish in their inspiration, they yet retain an attractive Spanish personality of their own. The Spanish painters, more perhaps than the painters of any other school, have imitated and absorbed the art of other nations without degenerating into copyists.

Residence of the Mexican Minister, Madrid

But this development of a national art on the basis of Flemish influence was not of long duration, and before the fifteenth century closed the newly-born Spanish school was rudely disturbed by the introduction into Spain of the Italian influences of the Renaissance. The building of the Escorial brought a crowd of artists from Italy—not the great masters, for they were no longer alive, but pupils more or less mannered and decadent. Spain was overrun with third-rate imitators of the Italian grand styles, of Michael Angelo, of Raphael, and their followers. This is not the place to speak of the blight which fell upon the native painters. The distinctive Italian schools were an influence for evil, fatal to the expression of the true genius of the people; for the deep-feeling, individualistic temper of the Spaniards could not be reconciled with the spirit of Italy.

But the Spanish temper is strong. The native painters used Renaissance forms, but they never worked in the Renaissance spirit. And it was not long before Spanish artists were turning to Venice, where they found a new inspiration in an art suited to their temperament in its methods, and in its spirit. El Greco, who had received his first inspiration from Tintoretto, the mighty master of the counter-Reformation, came as a liberating force to Spain. The torch he had lighted at Tintoretto’s fire burnt in Toledo with splendid power. El Greco is the first great Spanish painter.

And the seventeenth century witnessed in the art of the Spanish school one of those surprising outbursts of successful life that meet us now and again, in every department of enterprise, in this land of fascinating contradictions, which give so strange a denial to the usual limit of her attainment. It was the century of Velazquez and Murillo, of Ribera and Zurbaran. In Velazquez, Spanish painting gained its crown of achievement.

In the period after his great inspiration, imitation seemed inevitable to his successors. Spanish painting apparently was dead. Yet it was just in this time of degradation that the Spanish school was surprised suddenly by the remarkable art of Goya. Again a great personality filled the Spanish art stage, forcing a reversal of judgment. We forget the usual level of the period’s achievement; we remember only Goya. With him, once more, we are face to face with a new force in art. Spain challenges the world again; and she gives it its most personal, its most daring genius.

Such, in briefest outlines, is the history of Spanish painting.

The Old Aqueduct, known as “El Pueute,” of Trajan, Segovia

It will be seen that Spain is not an art-lover’s paradise. There has never been a time when the accomplishment of the Spanish school is really comparable to what the Italian and Flemish schools have achieved. Spain is not a land of great painters. Murillo has sunk to the rank of a second-rate master; Ribera and Zurbaran are yet hardly known outside Spain. El Greco, Velazquez, Goya—these are the only really great names; and Velazquez towers as much above his fellow-artists as Cervantes above his fellow-novelists. Spain’s claim to the world’s attention in the arts, as also in literature, rests upon the accomplishment of individuals more than upon the general average of her work. It is the result of that personal quality—the predominance of character—which rules every department of Spanish achievement. It still lives in the vigorous and characteristic Spanish painters of to-day—such, for instance, as Zuloaga, Anglada-Camarasa, and Sorolla, artists who take high rank among European painters.

It is often contended that Spanish paintings, if we except the works of the masters El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya, are wanting in dignity, wanting in beauty. But are we not too apt to confine beauty to certain forms of accepted expression? Surely, any art that interprets life has beauty; and no one can doubt, who knows the Spanish pictures, that life was the inspiration of these painters.

The main gallery in the Museo Del Prado, Madrid

The Spanish character speaks in every Spanish picture. There is one quality, which at a first knowledge will impress the careful observer, in all these pictures, which, though different, all have one aim—it is their dramatic seriousness. Rarely do you meet with a picture in which the idea of beauty, whether it be the beauty of colour or the beauty of form, has stood first in the painter’s mind. Almost in vain will you search for any love of landscape, for any passage of beauty introduced for its own sake. Pictures of Passion scenes, of Assumptions, of martyrdoms and saintly legends, were painted with a vivid belief in the reality of these things, by men who felt the presence of the Divine life as a part of human life. To see these pictures in which homely details are introduced into the most sacred themes is to understand the Spaniard’s easy familiarity with his religion.

This is the reason why the Spanish painters always treat a vision as a real scene, and why, too, they present religious and saintly characters by Spanish models. There is a Spanish picture by Zurbaran in the National Gallery of London; it is entitled “St. Margaret.” You look at the picture; you see a Spanish lady, her face powdered, as was the fashion; an embroidered saddle-bag hangs on one arm, in the other hand she holds a rosary. She is dressed in the picturesque Andalusian costume. I always smile when I look at this picture, it is so truly Spanish. The incongruity of clothing saintship in the garb of fashion would not be evident to Spanish Zurbaran; he could not see a saint, therefore he painted a woman, but in accordance with the custom of the day he called her a “saint.”

All the Spanish pictures tell stories. The successes of her painters are due to this aim; their failures, to the sacrifice of beauty of ideal to this—a danger from which, perhaps, no painter except Velazquez quite escaped. He alone, faultless in the balance of his exquisite vision, was saved quite from this danger of overstatement. It is the special gift of the whole school, from the time of the early painters of Andalusia to the time of Goya, to present a scene just as the painter supposed it might have happened. Was not their aim to translate life—the life of earth and the truer life of heaven? And to the Spaniard, we must remember, life was always dramatic.

The Cross by the Wayside, Granada

We find a sort of wild delight in martyrdom, as, for instance, in the pictures of Ribera—a joy that is perfectly sincere in pain and in the scourging of the body. There are pictures horrible with the sense of death and human corruption. Again and again is enforced the Catholic lesson of humility, expressing itself in acts of charity to the poor, such as exists to-day in the custom of the washing of feet at the Easter celebrations in Seville. There is a childlike sincerity in these pictures which compels us to accept and realize what the painter himself believed in.

I recall the pictures of Zurbaran in the museum of Seville, pictures which carry you into a world of realism, a world in which visions are translated into the facts of life, set forth with a childlike simplicity of statement. Each picture is a scene from the life of old Spain. What honesty is here, what singular striving to record the truth! (The word “truth” is used in a restricted sense. Zurbaran understood nothing of the inner suggestiveness of art; to him art meant facts, not vision.) The peasants in his religious scenes are almost startling in their outward resemblance to life. How simple is his rendering of the Scriptural scenes, his conceptions of the Christ! With what poignant reality he depicts the Crucifixion, a subject exactly suited to his art! His saints are all portraits, faces caught in a mirror, the types of old Spain. No one has painted saints as Zurbaran has done. Before his saints gained their sanctity they must have struggled as men; and as we look at the cold, strong faces we come to know the spiritual instinct that belongs to every true Spaniard.

Among the Spanish priests to-day, and especially in those living in the country districts of Castile, the observant stranger will see the types represented in Zurbaran’s pictures. In the faces of these men, as, indeed, in their whole appearance, there is a profound asceticism, a sort of energy concentrated in a white heat of devotion. I have never seen the same type in Italy, or among the priests of any country. But often when watching a Spanish priest, in the services of the Church or walking alone on the roads, I have felt that I understood the meaning of the phrase, “This man has embraced religion.”

To all the Spanish painters art was serious—a matter of heaven, not of earth. Each painter was conscious of the presence of the Divine life, giving seriousness as well as joy to earthly life. It is this which gives Spanish painting a special interest to the student of Spain. In their ever-present religious sense, in their adherence, almost brutal at times, to facts, as well as in those interludes of sensuous sweetness which now and again, as, for instance, in the facile and pleasing art of Murillo, burst out so strangely like an exotic bloom, the Spanish pictures reflect the temper of Spain.

No one can understand Spanish painting who does not know the Spanish character. I think, too, that nothing reveals to the stranger more truly the Spanish character, which is at once so simple and yet so difficult, in its apparent contradictions, to comprehend, as a knowledge of the art of her painters.