The Archiepiscopal Palace, adjacent to the Cathedral, is also in the bad style of the later seventeenth century. The interior, however, is worth visiting for the sake of the noble marble staircase, one of the finest in the city. Here are three paintings by Alejo Fernandez, an early seventeenth-century artist, whom Lord Leighton considered “the most conspicuous among the Gothic painters.”
The Fabrica de Tabacos is a vast building completed in 1757. Apart from its size, it possesses no architectural interest, and though a favourite showplace for tourists, does not come within the scope of a work of this character.
THE PAINTERS OF SEVILLE
By
Albert F. Calvert and C. Gasquoine Hartley
In Seville, perhaps to a greater extent than in any city, even in Spain, the country of passionate individualism, art is the reflection of the life and temper of the people; and to understand Seville we must know her painters. As we look at the pictures of the Spanish primitives, at the emphatic canvases of Juan de las Roelas and Herrera, for instance; at the realism of Zubarán, or, still more, at the ecstatic visions of Murillo—as we see them in the old Convento de la Merced, now the Museo Provincial, in the Cathedral, or in one or another of the numerous churches in the city, we find the special spirit of Andalusia.
There is one quality that, at a first glance, impresses us in these pictures, so different, and yet all having one aim. It is their profound seriousness. Rarely, indeed, shall we find a picture in which the idea of beauty, whether it is the beauty of colour or the beauty of form, has stood first in the painter’s mind; almost in vain shall we search for any love of landscape, for any passage introduced just for its own sake. For, let it be remembered, in Andalusia art was devotional always. “The chief end of art,” says Pacheco, the master of Velazquez, in his Arte de la Pintura, “is to persuade men to piety and to incline them to God.” Pictures had other purposes to serve than that of beauty. They were painted for the Church to enforce its lessons, they were used as warnings, and as a means of recording the lives of the Saints. In other countries, it is true, painters have spent their strength in religious art, but almost always we can find as well as the sacred, some outside motive, some human love of the subject for itself—for its opportunities of beauty. The intense realism of these Spanish pictures is a thing apart; these Assumptions, Martyrdoms, and Saintly Legends were painted with a vivid sense of the reality of these things by men who felt upon them the hand of God. We know that Luis de Vargas daily humbled himself by scourging and by wearing a hair shirt, and Juan Juanes prepared himself for a new picture by communion and confession. These are two examples chosen out of many. A legend we read of Don Miguel de Mañara, the founder of the Hospital of La Caridad, illustrates this dramatic religious sense of Spain. One day in church Don Miguel saw a beautiful nun, and, forgetful of her habit, made amorous proposals. She did not speak; instead, she turned to look at him; whereupon he saw the side of her face which had been hidden from his eyes: it was eaten away, corrupted by a hideous disease, so that it seemed more horrible than the face of death. It was such scenes as this that the Spanish artists chose to paint. But, indeed, it would be tedious to enumerate the examples which Spain offers of this curious, often, it would seem to us, corrupted sense of the gloom of life, carrying with it as one result the passionate responsibility of art. Always, we feel certain that the Spanish painters felt all that they express.
And this overpowering, if mistaken, understanding of the presence of the divine life gave a profound seriousness to human life. The shadow of earth was felt, not its light; and emotion expressed itself in an intense seriousness, that is over-emphatic too often—always, in fact, when the painter’s idea is not centred in reality. This is the reason why a Spanish painter had to treat a vision as a real scene. We have pictures horrible with the sense of human corruption—such, for instance, are the two gruesome canvases of Valdés Leal, in La Caridad. Again and again is enforced the Catholic lesson of humility, expressing itself in acts of charity to the poor, so essential an idea when this life is held as but a threshold to a divine life. We find a sort of wild delight in martyrdom; a joy that is perfectly sincere in the scourging of the body. All the Spanish pictures tell stories. Was not their aim to translate life?—the life of earth and the, to them, truer life of heaven—and life itself is a story? Their successes in art are due to this, their failures to the sacrifice of all endeavours to this aim; a danger from which, perhaps, no painter except Velazquez quite escaped. He, faultless in balance, in his exquisite statement of life, expresses perfectly the truth his predecessors had tried for, but missed, except indeed now and again, in some unusual triumph over themselves. We find hardly a painter able to free himself from the traditions of his subject. Only Velazquez, controlled by the northern strain that mingles with the passion of his Andalusian temper, was saved quite from this danger of over-statement. And Velazquez does not belong to Seville, though he was born in the southern city on June 5, 1599, in the house, No. 8, Calle de Gorgoja; though the first years of his life were spent there, the time of childhood, the few months of work with the violent Herrera, the five years in the studio of Pacheco, his master; though—a fact of greater import—his temper was Andalusian; and though his early pictures—the bodégones, so familiar to us in England, whither so many have travelled through the fortune of wars—are entirely Spanish in their direct realism. Velazquez worked contemporaneously with the Realistic movement that quickened the arts in Seville in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he worked outside it. This explains the silence of his art in Seville. Of the pictures of his youth, painted while he was there, none remain, except one in the Archiepiscopal Palace, “The Virgin delivering the Chasuble to San Ildefonso”; and the authenticity of this picture has been denied until very recently, a fact explained by the bad condition of the canvas. To see the wonderful art of Velazquez you must leave Seville and visit the Museo del Prado at Madrid. Seville is the home of religious art. The habit of her painters was serious; in their profound religious sense, in their adherence, almost brutal at times, to facts, as well as in those interludes of sensuous sweetness that now and again, as, for instance in the art of Murillo, burst out so strangely like an exotic bloom, they reflect the temper of Spain. It is contended sometimes that these pictures in Seville 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 has life; has dignity, has beauty; and no one can deny that life was the inspiration of the Andalusian painters.
We must remember these things if we would understand the pictures in Seville.
But first we find ourselves carried away from the reality and darkness of life back to a happy childhood of art, as we look at the three fourteenth-century frescoes of the Virgin—the “Antigua,” in the chapel named after it in the Cathedral, “Nuestra Señora del Corral” in San Ildefonso, and “Señora Maria de Rocamador” in San Lorenzo—an art when the painter, less conscious of life and of himself, was content to paint beautiful patterns. In these three pictures—all that are left to us—we see the last of Byzantine art in Spain. The figures, with long oval faces all of one type, are placed stiffly against a background of Gothic gold. Look at “Señora Maria de Rocamador,” as she sits holding the Child upon her knees; while two little angels kneel, one upon the left, one on the right. She wears a blue robe, partly covered with a mantle of deep purple, very beautiful with ornaments of gold and bordered with gold braid. A bent coronet around her head stands out against the glowing halo; the background is all of gold woven into a delicate pattern. It is a picture of pure convention in which is no effort to carry the mind beyond what is actually seen; it makes its appeal just as so much decoration. This fresco, as well as the “Antigua” and “Nuestra Señora del Corral,” have been much repainted—the ill-fortune of so many early Spanish works.