Sculpture in Spain

by Albert Frederick Calvert

After the middle of the sixteenth century a change came, or rather, a further step was taken in the use of Italian forms, and a style was evolved which may be said with sufficient accuracy to correspond to the developed Renaissance of Italy.

Gaspar Becerra was now the most prominent sculptor in Spain. Like Berruguete, whose rival and true successor he was, he received his artistic training in Italy; like him, too, he was a painter and architect as well as sculptor. It is said that Becerra worked in the studio of Michael Angelo, but Vasari, whose pupil he was, does not count him among the disciples of the great Florentine. He was born at Baeza, a small town in the kingdom of Jaen, in 1520. He was still quite young when he went to Italy. In Rome he gained a position of importance working under the leadership of his master, Vasari, and under Daniele da Volterra in the Trinita de Monti, decorating in the Cancelleria. His skill in drawing, especially the human figure, was great, and he furnished the plates for Valverde’s “Anatomy,” printed in Rome in 1554. We know also that he was married in Rome in 1556. Five years later he returned to Spain, and like his predecessor he became painter and sculptor to Philip II. Becerra worked at the decoration of the Pardo palace, and painted frescoes in the Alcazar of Madrid, which were destroyed in the fire of 1734; in addition he designed, sculptured, and painted the altar-screen of the Convent of Dèscalzas Reales in the same city, working for the Infanta Doña Maria, while for the Queen, Doña Isabel de la Paz, he sculptured the statue of Nuestra Señora de la Solitude, which is worshipped in the chapel of the Minime fathers. This position as Court artist caused Becerra’s services to be eagerly sought, and carvings and paintings of his will be found at Zamora, Valladolid, Zaragoza, Burgos, Salamanca, and elsewhere. His masterpiece, and his last work, is the retablo in the Church of Astorga, on which he worked from 1550 to 1569. He died at Madrid in 1571, when still young and in the height of his activity and power.

The merit of Becerra’s work is a feeling for ideal beauty, unusual in Spain, united with dignity and, to some degree, with strength. All his sculptures are in the style of Michael Angelo; and this has led to a confusion between his carvings and those of Berruguete. But this is a mistake. Berruguete, though a follower of Michael Angelo, was Spanish with a strong national accent, while Becerra was an Italian, completely renouncing the national traditions in favour of Renaissance forms. For this reason his work is far less important than that of his predecessor; it also opened the road for the degeneration of native sculpture. Becerra made the study of Michael Angelo and the antique the substitute for a study of nature, and possessing a happy knack of pleasing the eye, he was content to be an imitator, and therefore added nothing to Spanish sculpture.

A good example of Becerra’s art, and his best single carving, is the small polychrome bas-relief of St Jerome in the Desert (Plate 123) in the side altar of the Capilla del Condestable at Burgos. There are several copies of this statue, for, like many imitators, Becerra repeated his works; one, in white marble, is in the Church of San Pedro at Huesca. On account of its likeness to the St. Jerome, M. Marcel Dieulafoy attributes to Becerra the statue of the prophet Elias in Santo Tomás at Toledo, the church that contains the masterpiece of El Greco. The retablo at Astorga, Becerra’s most important work, is an imposing erection, much praised in Spain. The effect is pleasing, but a closer examination leaves the spectator unsatisfied; the statues and carvings are all modelled on Renaissance types, and are without individuality. Still this retablo must not be neglected; it is a good example of estofado sculpture.

Contemporary with Berruguete worked Juan de Juni, who carried the Michael Angelo following to its furthest and most exaggerated development. Little is known about this artist; even his nationality is uncertain, some accounting him a Spaniard, others an Italian, or even a Fleming. Bermudez thinks he was an Italian. But though a pupil and close imitator of Michael Angelo, Juni, if not born in Spain, became a Spaniard by temperament and adoption, as the style of his work proves. In his carvings we find that search for expression at any cost, leading to exaggerated gestures and an over-accentuation of detail, as for example in depicting the sorrows of the Christ by gaping wounds and the presence of blood—by which the Spanish artists sought to give dramatic reality to their religious representation. It is this that has caused Juni to be so highly estimated in Spain.

The details of Juni’s life are fragmentary and contradictory. For long he was said to have been born during the second half of the sixteenth century, and to have died at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In reality he lived earlier, and was born in 1507, while he died at Valladolid in April 1577. We hear of him first about the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Archbishop of Portugal summoned him from Rome to superintend the building and decoration of the Episcopal palace at Oporto. This he did, as well as constructing other buildings in the city. Afterwards he went to Osuna, then to Santoyo, and finally to Valladolid, where he settled, and remained until his death.

Juni has left a great amount of work, and his statues and bas-reliefs, always easily recognised, will be found in the churches and convents of Osuna, Segovia, Valladolid, Santoyo, Aranda de Douro, and Salamanca. His best-known altar-screen is the Descent from the Cross in Segovia Cathedral (Plate 124). In this surprising work we have well displayed both the qualities and defects of Juni’s talents. Instead of the decoration being carried out in compartments, the carvings are in isolated groups, a change in construction which was the greatest service that Juni rendered to Spanish sculpture. The figures are all life-size; the finest is that of the Christ, which has real dignity, and is without exaggeration. The agitation and grief of the Virgin and the holy women is too much emphasised, while the attitudes of the fantastically attired soldiers placed on either side are so accentuated that one is left with a consciousness of insincerity. The dramatic power becomes theatrical and unreal. Contrast this Descent from the Cross with Berruguete’s rendering of the same scene in San Geronimo at Granada, and this becomes abundantly evident. The restraint in the latter work is strength, while Juni’s scene, with its over-acclamation, ends in weakness. But in Spain the Segovia screen is highly treasured. It is brilliantly coloured. We have no proof that Juni himself polychromed his statues, but we know that he was a painter of great talent, and the harmony which exists between his models and the colouring seems to prove that he must have superintended the polychrome. Documentary evidence shows that in some cases, at any rate, the colourisation was done in his studio, under his direction, and that he himself painted the faces, the hands, and the feet of his figures.

The same model of the Segovia Christ can be recognised in another work of Juni’s, the Burial of Christ, executed for the Convent of San Francesco at Valladolid, and now in the city museum (Plate 125). Here we have an even stronger example of Juni’s art, in which the conception of woe is depicted with greater extravagance, and with what appears to us as futile exaggeration of the details of sorrow. Death is shown with startling reality in the body of the Christ, which is rigid with the muscles already contracted, and the reality is carried further by the colouring; the limbs and the face are mottled with livid stains. Blood flows from the wounds, which are laid open. The body is horrible with the sense of human corruption. The figures of the Virgin, St. John, and the Magdalen all express passionate and over-emphatic sorrow. But the work is perfectly sincere; to doubt this is to misunderstand the nature of Spanish art. It is the quality that meets us so often; a too dramatic, too emphatic effort to realise a scene exactly as it happened.

Another carving in the same style, with the same faults and the same qualities, is the Virgin of the Swords in the monastery Capilla de Nuestra Señora de las Agustinas, also at Valladolid. It must be remembered that these works can be appreciated only by the student who understands Spanish art. Certainly Juni is more Spanish than Italian.

Juan de Juni opened the way for his successor Gregorio Hernandez, the sculptor who may be said to have inherited, and afterwards personally expressed, all that his predecessors had accomplished. For the great difference between Juni, Becerra, and even Berruguete and the great master of Galicia is that they, in greater or less degree, were content with imitation, while he, warned possibly by their extravagances, studied nature with patient care, and said what he had to say for himself, and in this way he purged the plastic art of scholastic mannerisms. This is why Gregorio Hernandez occupies the most important position in the history of Northern Spanish sculpture.