Contemporary with Campaña and De Vargas, the leaders of the Andalusian Mannerists, worked a band of painters of second, or even third-rate, talent. Francisco Frutet, like Campaña a Flemish painter who had learnt his art in Italy, and who came to Seville about 1548, is typical of these “improvers,” as Pacheco calls them so mistakenly, of the native art. His best work is his Triptych in the Museo, in which again we see the same curious mingling of Flemish and Italian types; the Christ, for instance, recalling the models of Italy, while Simon of Cyrene, who bends beneath the Cross, is nearer to the Gothic figures. Pedro Villegas Marmolejo has more interest. His quiet pleasing pictures—one is in the Cathedral, one in San Pedro—interpret Italian art with more charm, but still without originality.
And Marmolejo leads us quite naturally to Juan de las Roelas, and in Roelas we have at last a Spanish painter who learnt from Italy something more than mere technical imitation. And in spite of a want of concentration—the accustomed insincerity, the result, it would seem, of a too persistent effort to express his art in the art of Venice, in which city he is thought to have painted, perhaps in the studio of some follower of Titian, he does realise his scenes with something of the old intensity. Roelas anticipates Murillo, not altogether unworthily, giving us, with less originality, but with much sweetness, an expression of that mood of religious sensuousness that is one phase of Spanish painting. Seville is the single home of Roelas;[A] here we may see his pictures in the Cathedral, in the Museum, and in many of the churches. His art is unequal in its merit. In his large compositions often there is confusion—“Santiago destroying the Moors at the Battle of Clavijo,” his picture in the Cathedral, is one instance—spaces are left uncared for, the composition is a little awkward, the brush-work is careless, a fault that is common to much of his work. The “Martyrdom of St Andrew,” in the Museum, is perhaps his most original picture. Here Roelas is a realist. And how expressive of life—Spanish life, are all the powerfully contrasted figures that so truly take their part in the scene depicted. In some of his pictures Roelas gives us the brightest visions. Such is “El Transito de San Isidore,” in the parish church of the saint, a picture in which we see in the treatment of Christ and Mary and the child-angels a manner that seems, indeed, to forestall Murillo; such, too, are the “Apotheosis of San Hermenegildo,” and the “Descent of the Holy Spirit,” both in the church of the Hospital of La Sangre. All three pictures are difficult to see: one is hidden behind the altar, the other two hang at a great height in the church where the light is dim. There are good pictures by Roelas in the University, a “Holy Child,” the “Adoration of the Kings,” and the “Presentation of the Child Christ in the Temple”; and in this last picture, with its soft colour and human gaiety, again we are reminded of Murillo. But a work of perhaps more interest, certainly of more strength, is “St Peter freed from Prison by the Angel,” which is hidden in a side-chapel in the Church of San Pedro. Then, how quiet, with a repose uncommon enough in Spain, is his “Virgin and Santa Ana,” in the Museo de la Merced. The figures—the girl Virgin, her mother, and the angels who crowd the space above them—all have the fairness Roelas gives to women; the soft glow of their flesh is beautiful. Look at the cat and dog that play so naturally in the foreground, beside a work-basket, and what a happy “note” is given by the open drawer, which shows the linen and lace within. Certainly this picture is more Italian than Spanish.
As the years passed, and art in Seville grew older, many painters trod in the steps worn by these others. It is not possible, nor is it necessary, to wait to look at their pictures; too often they exaggerate the faults of the masters they copied, and by a slavish repetition of accepted ideas—the inevitable fault of the age—they weakened still further native art. And, when we come to the next century, which gives us Alonso Cano, sculptor, architect, and painter, described admirably by Lord Leighton as “an eclectic with a Spanish accent,” many of whose facile, meaningless pictures may be seen in Seville, to the much inferior work of the younger Herrera, and to the exaggerated over-statements of Juan de Valdés Leal, in whose art Sevillian painting may be said to die, we realise into what degradation pseudo-Italianism had dragged painting.
But there is a reverse side to the picture. The spirit of Spain was too strong to sleep in an art that was borrowed. Already Luis de Morales, a native of Estremadura, known as “the divine,” on account of the exclusively religious character of the subjects he painted, and of the strange intensity with which he impregnated them, had evolved for himself a sincere expression of Spanish art; already Navarrete, the mute painter of Navarre, had broken from conventions, and taken for himself inspiration from the marvellous pictures of Titian which he had seen at the Escorial; already, Theotócopuli, known better as El Greco, was painting with wonderful genius in Toledo, pictures, so new, so personal, that to-day they command the attention of the world. But Seville does not represent these painters.[B]
It has been the fashion, since the tradition was started by Cean Bermudez, to call Herrera el viejo (1576-1656) “the anticipator of the true Spanish school.” Herrera had a studio in Seville, in which worked many painters, and among them Velazquez, Antonio Castillo y Saavedra, and perhaps Alonso Cano; and it seems certain that he owes his position to-day in large measure to this fact; had he not been for a few months the master of Velazquez his impossible art would remain unknown outside Seville. For the truth is Herrera said nothing that Roelas had not already said better.
His temper was Spanish enough, but his work is without originality, if emphatic and personal in a too vehemently Spanish way. Yet it is worth while to see, yes, and to study, each one of his half-dozen pictures. Even in Seville, Herrera’s work is rare; the “Apotheosis of San Hermenegildo,” and the later, more violent “San Basil,” are in the Museum, where, too, are the less known, but much better, portrait-pictures of apostles and saints; while the “Final Judgment,” his most personal work, is still where it was painted in the darkness of the Parroquina of San Bernado. One quality we may grant to Herrera; he did resist the popular Italian influence. These pictures, sensational as they are, with their hot disagreeable colour—“macaroni in tomato sauce” Mr Ricketts aptly terms it—their mannerism, extravagant contortions and splash brush-work, have little apart from this to recommend them. But you will understand better the esteem Herrera has gained if you will compare his work with the paintings of his contemporaries; the conscientious, academic Pacheco, for instance, the last, and, in himself, the most interesting of the Mannerists, or with Murillo’s master, Juan del Castillo, the worst painter of Seville, whose pictures fill with formal tedium so many buildings in the city. This is why Herrera’s pictures claim notice from the student of Andalusian art to-day: they form a link in the unbroken chain of the national pictures.
Now turn to Zurbarán.
You pass at once into a world of realism, a world in which facts, obvious facts, are set forth with a downright passion of statement that for a moment tricks us; we think we have found life, and, instead, we have the outward form, too monotonously literal, and without suggestion. Upon Zurbarán lies the weight of the sadness of Spain. It is something of this that we realise as we see the thirty or forty of his pictures that are in Seville, gathered together for the most part in the Museo de la Merced, where the light is so much better than it is in the Cathedral and in the churches, though there certainly his pictures seem to be more fittingly at home. Each picture is so true to life, and yet without life. Look at his Saints, all are portraits, faces caught in a mirror that seems to sum up the old world of Spain. Contrast these Saints with the Saints of Murillo. What honesty is here; what singular striving to record the truth. Note the gravity and simplicity of the Scriptural scenes; his conception of the Christ; the intensity of the three renderings of the Crucifixion, in which for once Zurbarán finds a subject suited exactly to his art; then mark how the peasants[C] he depicts are almost startling in their outward nearness to life.
Look especially at the Carthusian pictures in the Museum, “San Hugo visiting the Monks in their Refectory,” the “Virgen de las Cuevas,” and “St Bruno conversing with Pope Urban II.” They are typical of Zurbarán’s special gift. In the first of these three pictures, which is the best, the monks clad in the soft white robes of their order are seated around a table at their mid-day meal. The aged Hugo stands in the foreground, attended by a boy-page; he has come to reprove them for dining upon flesh-meat. His purple vestments give a note of colour in contrast with the white frocks of the brothers. But, as is customary with Zurbarán, colour counts for very little, and atmosphere for less, in this picture in which all care is given to formal outline and exact expression. Once only in the “Apotheosis of St Thomas Aquinas,” also in the Museo, does he give us some of that warm colour he should have learnt from Roelas, whose pupil he is said to have been. This is one reason why his figures, so true to the facts of life, do not live. But no one has painted ecclesiastics and monks quite as Zurbarán has done. His sincerity is annoying almost; for he tells us nothing that we could not have seen for ourselves; we are no nearer than a photograph would bring us to the character of these men. Zurbarán was hardly consciously an artist; and with all his sincerity, his vision was ordinary. He was a recorder and not an interpreter of life, and in gaining reality he has just missed truth.
On coming to the work of Murillo it is quite another phase of the religious sentiment of Spain that we see developed: we gain an over-statement of sweetness, not an over-statement of facts. The spirit in which he painted was happier, more trustful, more personal than was that of Zurbarán; he is more Andalusian and less Spanish, and certainly better equipped as a painter.