The Story of Spanish Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

To this period is attributed the Crucifixion in the Louvre (p. 70) to which allusion has been already made. Let us note afresh the infinite calm of the Saviour’s form as characteristic of this period of spiritual calm in the artist’s own genius. By this time, also, we are better able to judge the introduction of the two worshippers in the lower foreground. They were probably included of necessity, representing the donor and the priest of the Church for which this picture was painted. But they also introduce that touch of naturalism, dear to the Spanish imagination; and the artist has made them contributary to his conception of the scene as a vision. It is a vision of the holy scene which these men of his own time are contemplating and the contrast of their reality lends to the vision an increased abstraction.

Also to this period chiefly belong the many Annunciations and Holy Families. Of the latter we have a fine example in the Hispanic Museum, New York, which recalls with certain modifications that of the Prado. In all these subjects the type of Madonna is drawn from the people. But it is not left in its stolid plainness as by Velasquez in his Adoration of the Kings, or sentimentalised as by Murillo. By El Greco it has been rarified, purged alike of grossness and earthly emotion; in fact, spiritualized. We may also assign to this period the small Santiago of the Metropolitan Museum, New York; exquisitely choice in its tonal scheme of blue, slightly relieved by dull ochre yellow, yet virile in handling and inspired by an exalted purity of imagination.

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To the artist’s latest period belongs another picture in the Metropolitan Museum, The Nativity. It is the product of a newly awakened ardor, such as characterises the most important work of El Greco’s closing life. The participants in the event are lowly folk; the Mother a girl of the people; the shepherds large-modeled, shrewdly featured peasants. But all are possessed with the exaltation of the moment; their naiveté and crudity are caught up in a frenzy of amazement. In the darkness of the night the scene is all aflame with spiritual incandescence. How marvellously the light and obscurity are interwoven! What a strange diversity of plastic forms and subtlety of sober coloring are wrought into the composition! Strangeness is certainly the first impression one experiences; then, following it, a realisation of intense inspiration and of masterful creativeness. One is in the presence of the unusual, of a great imaginative spirit.

Similarly ecstatic is the vision of The Coming of the Holy Ghost in the Prado. At the top, the Dove in Glory; under it, a horizontal row of figures, the Virgin in the center, the heads of all tipped with flame; down below, two figures, leaning back and gazing up at the Divine Glory. Some recollection of the old Titianesque crimsons and blues appears, but nothing of their mundane qualities. The whole conception is one of passionate receptivity toward the illumination from on high. The final expression of tempestuous energy appears in the Death of Laocoon and His Son in San Telmo, Seville and in the Apocalypse, or as it has been wrongly called, The Sacred and Profane Love, owned by the artist, Señor Zuloaga.

El Greco had pupils but left no followers. Some of his pupils, Luis Tristan, for example, and his son, George Manuel, learned to imitate his manner sufficiently closely to have caused confusion in the attribution of certain pictures. But El Greco’s style was so directly the product of his own intellectuality, sensitive and passionate æsthetic imagination and highly wrought soul, that it could not be absorbed in its integrity by others. But his art influenced no less a master than the great Velasquez. We have noted that the latter borrowed from the Toledan artist his composition for the Coronation of the Virgin and may add the debt which his portrait of Innocent X appears to owe to El Greco’s Don Fernando Nino de Guevara. It was however in the matter of color that the influence is most marked. Velasquez adopted, as Señor de Beruete says, “certain silver-grey tints in the coloring of the flesh, the use of special carmines and a greater freedom of execution in the draperies, fabrics and other accessories.” These same qualities, and the intellectuality and abstraction of his conception and style have begun to affect some modern artists. The most notable example was the late Paul Cézanne, whose work, in turn, is exerting a potent influence on others. Meanwhile El Greco’s pictures, until recent years known only to a few connoisseurs, are being sought for and treasured by collectors and museums.

Meanwhile, by the young painter of to-day El Greco should be studied closely. For the modern age in every development of life is beginning to demand intellectuality, and in painting particularly a greater degree of subtlety and abstract suggestion. The quality of expression is growing more and more to be the test by which the artist of the present and the future will be judged. El Greco, in all these respects is a master to be followed; not in the way of imitation, but for the sake of the principles involved in his conception of a subject and its technical rendering, and also because he will help to an understanding of other great artists of expression, such as Michelangelo, Giotto, the nameless artists of the Byzantine period and the known and unknown masters of Buddhistic art.

CHAPTER VI
VELASQUEZ

WHILE El Greco gave expression to the soul of Spanish chivalry and religion, Velasquez embodied in its highest form the racial love of naturalism. More than this, he stands above all other naturalistic painters in truth of representation.

He is usually called a realist. But modern thought is investing this term with a meaning that differentiates it from naturalism. Its use of the word is akin to the philosophic meaning of realism, which recognises the reality not only of the species or individual but also of the genus, and considers the individual as a phase of the universal process which causes it. Modern thought, in fact, applies the word realist to one who views the particular in relation to the horizon at the back of it, to the universal process of which it is a temporary manifestation. Thus it calls Ibsen a realist, because, for example, in “A Doll’s House,” he treats Nora and her husband as phases of the universal problem of marital relations. On the contrary, the playwright who presents merely a cross-section of life, characters and incidents that are true to life but are not treated in relation to the large horizon of ideas, governing our principles of living, it calls a naturalist. The distinction is a vital one and so clarifying to thought and understanding,