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]
CHAPTER II
EARLY SCULPTURE BELONGING TO THE NATIVE IBERIAN, LATIN, BYZANTINE, AND VISIGOTHIC PERIODS
The beginnings of sculpture in Spain take us back to the middle years of the fifth century B.C. It is to this date, about 440 B.C., that the beautiful sculptured bust of the Lady of Elche belongs. The figure was discovered in August 1897 at Elche, one of the most ancient and interesting of the old towns of Spain. Situated in the beautiful ravine of the Vinalapó, twelve miles distant from Alicante, Elche still retains almost unaltered its Arab character. It was the Roman Ilice, and probably the Iberian Helike, where Hamilcar was defeated. The town is especially fortunate in having possessed this treasure, which speaks so splendidly of the power and strength of Spain’s ancient art. This is the earliest and by far the most important of the antique statues of Spain—the one supreme example of primitive Iberian work. But alas! the Lady of Elche has been taken out of Spain and is now in the Louvre at Paris.
It is a stone bust of a woman of life size. The lips and part of the hair still retain traces of red colour. The expressive face, delicate and yet strong, has suffered little. She wears enormous ear pendants of Oriental style, and two great wheels frame her head. Around her neck hangs a Greco-Phœnician necklace, such as women wore from the time of the Peloponnesian War. It is this that fixes the date of the statue. It would seem to be the work of a native artist who was under the combined influences of Greece and Phœnicia. Only a Spanish artist could have thus immortalised the character of Spanish womanhood. Indeed it is this special Spanish quality which is the most interesting feature of this remarkable work. Mr. Havelock Ellis has pointed out the resemblance which the Lady of Elche bears to Velazquez’ “Woman with the Fan.” And this is no fanciful idea. There is a strange likeness in all Spanish art—a likeness which is at once its strength and also its weakness, and which may be traced to the strong and persistent character of this race that has altered so little in the passing of the centuries. It is this marked individuality that speaks even more strongly in Spanish sculpture than in Spanish painting. The Lady of Elche stands for all that is Spain.
Apart from the Lady of Elche no important single example of Iberian art remains to us. Statues have been found, such as the Cirro de los Santos and the Llano de la Consolacion, which certainly were painted. M. Marcel Dieulafoy believes that this was also the case with the statue of a bull facing a bearded man, in the Museum of Valencia; that of the griffin and the anthropoid sarcophagus at Cadiz; and the interesting heads of bulls in bronze, found at Costig, Majorca, which bear some resemblance to the Susian bulls and Grecian bronzes, and, like them, have some parts gilded. Then it will not do to neglect the strange stone figures of bulls scattered in different places in Spain and Portugal, one fine example being in the square of Avila. Little is known as to the origin and purpose of these remarkable examples of Iberian art, but some still bear traces of vermilion colouring. The existence of these works, as well as many other notable fragments in different churches in Spain, prove at least that the native Iberian carver had attained a skill certainly remarkable at this early date.
But then followed, as is so often the case, a long night, of which nothing of special interest is known. The Roman sculptures, which follow chronologically those of the Iberian epoch, are not remarkable in any way. They do not reveal any special character.