Sculpture in Spain

by Albert Frederick Calvert

The Northern influences of Flanders and Germany, though far-reaching in their effects on Spanish sculpture, were not long-lived, and in the last decade of the fifteenth century they gave way to a new influence from Italy. Always responsive to newly imported art methods, her architecture, sculpture, and painting were invaded by the forms of the Italian Renaissance, and thanks to the flourishing condition of architecture and sculpture, and to a taste refined by the busy practice of these arts, the new influence found not only a willing, but an intelligent following. The Renaissance influences were not harmful to architecture and sculpture as they were to the sister art of painting. For one reason, both architecture and sculpture were much more advanced at this period than was painting. Then the new elements of taste made their way slowly, and the old influences remained active side by side with the new.

But it must be remembered that in Spain the Renaissance was never a movement from within; rather its causes were external and political. In 1504 Naples had been conquered by Spain, and at the same time the Sicilies had become an appanage of the House of Aragon. Many Spaniards of position were attracted to Italy to take part in the wars, and with them travelled native artists. At the same time Italian artists came to Spain. Another influence was the close relation which at this time existed between Spain and Rome. Then a thriving trade communication arose between the cities of the two countries, and especially was this so between the prosperous harbours of Barcelona and Genoa. The impulse of art is curiously interbound with economic causes; interchange of trade inevitably results in interchange of culture.

The charm of the new style arose from its novelty; it inspired imitation and suggested new theories of art. It found an expression chiefly in the direction of decoration, where the old sumptuousness was united with elegance and delicacy of execution. Thus the Renaissance entered Spain by numerous channels. We find many Spanish nobles employing Italian workmen to decorate their palaces; for instance, Rodrigo de Mendoza entrusted the ornamentation of the castle of Calahorra to Genoese workmen in 1510. Italian marble-cutters were occupied in the production of sumptuous monumental tombs, of which some were carved at Genoa, while a still greater number were executed in Spain by Lombard and Florentine artists summoned thither for the purpose. The mural monument of Archbishop Mendoza in Seville Cathedral was executed by Miguel of Florence about 1509, and by him too is the terra-cotta relief over the Puerta del Perdon, representing the Expulsion of the Money-changers from the Temple and the Annunciation, between the large figures of St. Peter and St. Paul. The monument of P. González de Mendoza in the Capilla Mayor of Toledo Cathedral, with the Madonna in the lunette, is absolutely Florentine, and is perhaps the work of Andrea Sansovino. The Marquis de Tarifa, while on a journey to Palestine in 1520, ordered at Genoa the tomb-monuments of his parents, Enriquez and Catalina de Ribera, the richest examples of Renaissance sculpture, which are in the University Church of Seville. The altar of the Capilla de Exalas, in the cathedral of the same city, which was erected by del Río in 1539, is also of Genoese workmanship. The new style was adopted in decorative sculptures applied to doorways, façades, windows, &c.; there are numerous examples, and especially is this so in the Cathedral of Toledo, which furnishes a museum of Renaissance work.

The Italian teaching was further assisted by the settlement in Spain of a family of Italian artists, Leone Leoni, Pompeo his son, and Michael the grandson, who for three generations were employed by Charles V. and Philip II. They carved for the Escorial statues of the Emperor, of Philip II., and members of the royal family, as well as the bas-reliefs of the retablo of the high altar, which Herrera had designed, and two groups in gilt-bronze placed under the tribunes to the right and left of the altar. In addition these artists executed many statues in bronze and in marble for the churches and royal palace. These works, by reason of their purity of line and beauty, exercised a beneficial and widespread influence on the native sculptors. Cean Bermudez, in Spain, unites with Vasari, in Italy, in praising the Leoni family.

One of the first Spanish artists to frequent the schools of Italy, where he is wrongly stated to have been a pupil of Donatello, was Damian Forment, a native of Valencia, who lived and worked in the fifteenth and first third of the sixteenth centuries. Donatello died in 1466, and as Forment returned to Spain in 1509, when still young, he could not have been the pupil of the great Italian. But whoever was his master, he was a great artist, the most famous of the Aragonese sculptors, and his works are the purest examples of the new Italian taste. That he esteemed himself we know, for he calls himself “the rival of Phidias and Praxiteles”; while the fact that he was allowed the unusual privilege of inserting life-size medallions of himself and his wife at the base of his great altar-screens at Zaragoza and Huesca shows how high a place he held in the popular estimation.

There are four altar-screens which are known certainly to be the work of Damian Forment, but of these only two are important. The first in date is the retablo of the Virgen del Pilar at Zaragoza (Plate 74), which was begun in 1509, the year in which Forment returned from Italy, and was finished eleven years later, in 1520. It has three large bas-reliefs, surrounded by a framing, and placed under a series of pinnacles and divided by pilasters, while above is a predilla containing seven small groups. In the centre of the three large groups is an exquisitely fine Annunciation of the Virgin, and on either side are the Birth and the Purification. Injudicious washings have ruined the polychrome, and no traces of colour remain except on two figures placed on the right and left of the altar. From these we can judge how fine the polychrome must once have been. It is interesting to note that while the bas-reliefs and statues, with their beautiful forms and great delicacy, so different from the realistic emaciated types of the late Gothic artists, show very clearly the influence Forment had experienced from his study of the Italian masters; in the architectural decorations he remained faithful to Gothic traditions. This mingling of styles is what we must expect in Spain; it is at once the interest and the weakness of her art. Nor was Forment alone in thus clinging to the old forms, while at the same time using the new. We find the same crossing of influences in the work of all the native artists, and in this way the Spanish Renaissance retained in sculpture a certain native style of its own.

Damian Forment’s second important retablo, which was executed for the celebrated Abbey of Mount Aragon, and is now in the parish church of Huesca, is entirely Italian in sentiment and in execution. It has a sensuous charm, such as is seen in scarcely any other work of Spanish art.

Forment began the screen in 1520, worked at it for thirteen years, and died, so tradition tells us, almost at once after its completion. Like the Zaragoza altar-screen, it is of alabaster. It is in three registers, and is adorned with bas-reliefs of the Bearing of the Cross, the Crucifixion, and the Descent from the Cross. Between these bas-reliefs and on the pilasters, crowned with elegant pinnacles, are figures of women of incomparable beauty and grace. Some of the figures show traces of colour, but here also the polychrome has been destroyed by washings. The medallions of Forment and his wife are on the base of the altar.

The two remaining altar-screens of Forment are less important. San Pablo at Zaragoza has a retablo carved in wood, which, though designed by Forment, was probably carried out by his pupils. It was executed about the years 1516-1520. The second altar-screen is in the parish church of Velula de Ebro.

Besides these works, the retablo in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, a small town twelve miles west of Najara, has been attributed to Forment. But this is a mistake. Not only the style of the carvings but the records of the date of the work prove that it cannot be by Damian Forment. The confusion has arisen from its author having the name of Forment; he seems to have been an important imagerio, or image-maker. We owe the clearing up of this error to M. Marcel Dieulafoy, to whose admirable work we once more gratefully acknowledge our debt.