Murillo forms part of your life while you are in Seville, he is more or less around you everywhere; and though to some of us, perhaps not unjustly, he is a painter we have tried in vain to love, he does express in a special way the very aspect of the southern city he himself loved with such single devotion. This is why we like him so much better in Seville than we are able to do anywhere else. His pictures repeat the full life of Andalusia—its religious emotion, its splendour, its poverty, its stark contrasts, its rich sense of life; and his colours are the same colours that we see in the landscape, warm and deep, the soft, hot light of southern Spain. You don’t visit the Museum, La Caridad, the Cathedral, and the churches to see his pictures as a change of amusement from the streets; you go because they renew the same atmosphere, and offer a reproduction of so much that surrounds you.
No one has ever painted ecstasy with quite the facility of Murillo. And in the Museum, where the Capuchin Series and other famous pictures are gathered, you can learn all that is essential to his art; his happy Saints swim before you in mists of luscious colour; cherubs flutter around as they minister to beggars clad in rags carefully draped; Virgins, garbed in the conventional blue and white, their feet resting upon the crescent moon, vanish into luminous vapour, their robes rustle in the air, and their sun-lighted faces repeat the very complexion of Seville. Murillo had neither the power nor the desire to idealise his models. His Saints—St Francis of Assisi, St Felix of Cantalicio, St Anthony, St Thomas of Villanueva—and how many more? are men such as may be seen to-day in the streets of Seville; all are alike, the name alone differs. His Madonnas are peasants whose emotions are purely human. More perhaps than any painter Murillo’s work is personal—he translated the divine life and made it his own common human life—the fault is that his personality is not interesting. And seeing these pictures, and, even more, his other work—pictures hanging still in the churches for which they were painted, where they seem to share in the pervading religious emotion and to take their part in the life of the building—the “Vision of St Anthony of Padua” in the Baptistery of the Cathedral, for instance, or the great pictures of La Caridad; you will understand how Murillo came to be idolised in Spain; how his pictures held, for a time, the admiration of Europe; and how to-day he has ceased to interest a world that has grown older and seeks, above all, the truth.
Murillo was impelled by a desire for realism. There is much of the spirit and manner of Zurbarán in his early pictures: “San Leandro and San Buenaventura,” two early “Virgins and the Child,” and the “Adoration of the Shepherds,” all in the Museum, are examples. The same careful characterisation meets us in the much later “Last Supper” of Santa Maria la Blanca, his most truthful Scriptural scene. Then his portraits, such as those of SS. Leandro and Isidore in the Sacristia Mayor of the Cathedral, or that of St Dorothy in the Sacristia de los Cálices, are serious studies after nature. Once or twice in his landscapes we find a sincerity that surprises us. But a painter must be judged by the main output of his art. And the truth is that, with a natural gift that certainly was great, added to unusual facility, Murillo’s personality was commonplace. His self-assurance amazes us. His emotion, neither profound nor simple, but always perfectly satisfied, perfectly happy, exactly fitted him to give voice to the common sentiments of his age. He did create a sort of life, but his compositions are the work of his hand rather than of his soul. All his Saints, his Madonnas—pose unthinkingly in the subtly interwoven light he knew so well how to paint, living only in the moment which their conventionalised attitudes perpetuate. You do not realise them as personalities greeting you from the canvas like the intense, painful faces of El Greco, or the wonderful creations of Velazquez; if you remember them at all it is part of a pleasing picture. This is the reason why these religious idylls have lost so much of their meaning; their over-statement of sweetness cloys. Murillo gives us one aspect of Andalusia; it was left for El Greco, Ribera, Velazquez, and Goya to interpret Spain to the world.
THE OLD ROMAN CITY.
Moor and Spaniard have, between them, effaced almost all traces of the ancient Hispalis or Romula, the little Rome; but the sister-city of Italica, early deserted by man, has been dealt not too harshly with by time. Its remains—a Spanish league to the north-west of Seville—still attract the artist and the archæologist. There, where the wretched hamlet of Santi Ponce now stands, was in the dim past the Iberian village of Sancios. Scipio the Elder, after his long and victorious campaign, passed this way, and selected the spot as a place of rest and refreshment for his war-worn veterans. “Relicto utpote pacata regione valido præsidio, Scipio milites omnes vulneribus debiles in unam urbem compulit, quam ab Italia Italicam nominavit,” says Appian. Señor de Madrazo remarks that this must have been the first Latin-speaking town founded outside Italy. It was not at first a municipium, but a place for meeting and council of the Roman citizens. The municipal status it owed to Augustus. Subsequently, its citizens petitioned to be classed as a colony of Rome.
The colony proved not unworthy of the great capital. Hence sprang the illustrious line of the Ælii, and most of the eminent Roman Spaniards who conferred such lustre on the early Empire are believed to have been natives of the place. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that the citizens should have preferred a nominal dependence on the Mother City to the quasi-independence of a provincial municipality. But Italica never seems to have been a city in the modern sense of the word. Excavations have revealed extremely few remains of private habitations or bazaars. The only vestiges are those of great public monuments—temples, palaces, amphitheatres, baths. The Emperors seem to have delighted to embellish this small town with ornaments quite out of proportion to its size and population, and it is clear that it never was a serious rival to its older neighbour, Hispalis.
Its downfall, like its history, is mysterious. Leovigild occupied it while besieging Seville, which was held by his son, Hermenigild. Later on, the Arabs are said to have demolished it almost completely, and to have carried off numerous statues, columns, and blocks of masonry to serve in the construction and adornment of the neighbouring city. Then Italica disappeared from history. Earthquakes finished the work of ruin, and the scattered stones went to the making of the miserable village of Santi Ponce—a name which some derive from that of San Geroncio, a Bishop of Italica in early times.
The amphitheatre is now all that remains to attest the erstwhile splendour of the darling colony of the Ælii. It is a melancholy and yet a pretty spot, approached through olive plantations. Some of the walls are still standing, and enable us to determine the dimensions, which are stated at 291 feet length and 204 feet breadth. You may still see the Podium or stone platform, whereon the civic dignitaries sate, and the upper tiers appropriated to the populace. You may pass down the vomitoria, through which the spectators streamed, glutted with the sight of blood, and penetrate to the dens and chambers, wherein gladiators and wild beasts were confined before the combat. Italica is more a place to muse in than to explore. The place has long since been rifled of all its treasures. Extensive ruins of what was believed to have been the palace of Trajan existed down till the great earthquake of 1755, and all that was spared were three statues preserved in the Museo Provincial or Picture Gallery.
Close to the ruins is the convent of San Isidoro del Campo, founded in 1301 by Don Alonso Perez de Guzman, as a place of sepulture for him and his family. The establishment was peopled first by the Cistercians, later by the Hermits of St Jerome. The edifice presents the appearance of a fortified abbey of the Middle Ages, though not without traces of Mudejar influence. The church is Gothic, and divided into two naves, united by a transept, and constituting each a distinct church. One of these structures was built by the hero of Tarifa, Guzman the Good, and contains his tomb and that of his wife, together with a fine retablo by Montañes; the other, founded by the hero’s son, Don Juan Alonso Perez de Guzman, contains his tomb, marked by a fine recumbent figure, and that of Doña Urraca Osorio, burnt by order of Pedro the Cruel. In the cloisters of the convent are some mural paintings of the fifteenth century, which though much damaged repay inspection.
With the excursion to Italica the traveller should combine a visit to the Cartuja, more properly called Santa Maria de las Cuevas. It lies close to the suburb of Triana. The monastery was founded in the first decade of the fifteenth century, at the instance of the great Archbishop Gonzalo de Mena, and became the burying-place of the Ribera family, whose magnificent tombs are now to be seen in the University Church. Of the original structure only a little antique chapel remains. The refectory, chapter-hall, and cloisters all date from a restoration effected by the first Marqués de Tarifa in the sixteenth century. The building became, in 1839, the seat of the pottery manufacture of the (then) English firm of Pickman & Co. The establishment has produced some fine porcelain, and is worth inspection by all those interested in the ceramic art. Pottery has been associated from time immemorial with this locality and the adjoining suburb of Triana, and it will be remembered that the patron saints of Seville, Justa and Rufina, were, according to tradition, potters by trade.