The Story of Spanish Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

It is always interesting and usually illuminating to picture the historical background out of which the arts of a country have been gradually evolved. But in the case of Spanish painting it is essential. For the art of Spain was, bone and spirit, a part of the Spanish character, shaped and inspired as the latter had been by the racial, historical and geographical conditions out of which it was moulded. Without taking all this into account one cannot understand, much less appreciate sympathetically, the consistently individual character of this school of painting.

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In the first place one must realise the meaning of the fact that Spain is a mountainous country; not only separated from the rest of Europe, but divided against itself by precipitous barriers. They run in a general way from West to East: abrupt colossal walls of volcanic origin, with a grand sweep of bulk, jagged in sky-line and frequently piled with the chaotic debris of glacial moraines. These are the watersheds of rivers that refuse services to navigation; foaming to flood in the rainy season, shrinking in the drought to sluggish pools amid the rocky bed. They intersect tracts of country that vary from narrow valleys, where cultivation huddles in cherished pockets of soil, to broadly stretching vegas, tablelands and plains, from which by unremitting toil generous harvests may be obtained. Here the vistas are of magnificent extent, circling round one in far reaching sweeps of boldly undulating country, rimmed by nobly designed stretches of smoothly beveled foothills that form advance-posts of the ultimate barrier of the sierras.

It is a little country, only three times the size of England, contracted within itself by natural restrictions, yet planned by nature on a big scale; one that affects the imagination, prompting even more than mountainous countries usually have done to independence, individualism and hardihood. It is a country that seems made for fighting; where a handful of resolute men could maintain themselves tenaciously against enormous odds. In the past they did it in actual warfare; to-day in the pacific fight which this hardy population perpetually keeps up against the extremes of climatic conditions. Though for the most part they still use the agricultural implements that Tubal Cain devised, they have inherited from the Roman and Moorish occupation a system of irrigation and of terracing that puts to shame the happy go lucky methods of farming in many countries which consider themselves superiorly enlightened. The necessary preoccupation with their immediate surroundings and the exclusion from outside influence, early made of this people a nation of individualists, realists and conservatives. So inbred did these qualities become that when the Spaniard mixed with the outer world, as he did particularly in his conquest of the Spanish Main and in his wars with Europe, it was but to become more fixed in his conservatism at home. When he borrowed from abroad, as in his art, it was but to shape and color the acquired impression to his own individualistic and realistic attitude toward life.

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The earliest inhabitants of the Peninsula are known as Iberians; with whom about 500 B.C., a branch of the Celtic family became amalgamated. These Celtiberians remained in undisputed possession of the country, until they were drawn into the vortex that was stirred by the rivalry of Rome and Carthage. The latter had planted colonies along the south coast, and gradually extended her authority into the interior, dealing as was her wont in a spirit of suspicion and brutality with the natives. The Romans, hot on the trail of their traditional foe, at first suffered decisive reverses. Then it was that Scipio the Younger offered himself to the Senate and People of Rome as general of the war. His father and uncle had been slain in battle in Spain; he desired to avenge their deaths and to crush the enemies of Rome. Though only twenty-four years of age he had the genius of a military leader and of a statesman. While putting heart into the shattered ranks of the Roman veterans and leading them victoriously against the Carthaginians, he adopted towards the Spaniards a policy of confidence and conciliation which won them over to a loyal acceptance of the Roman rule. A similar policy was practised by Suetonius in later years, when Spain had become the battle ground of the rival factions with which Rome was torn. It was continued by Julius Cæsar when he fought out his fight with Pompey on Spanish soil, and later by Augustus when, having become ruler of the Roman world, he completed pacifically the conquest of Spain.

Henceforth Spain was the most favored, loyal and prosperous province of the Empire. At first the Roman veterans, retiring from military service, married Spanish women and settled down as farmers, introducing gradually the order and scientific method for which the Romans are so justly celebrated. The settled conditions, fertility of the soil, and the beauty of the country in time attracted the wealth and culture of the Capital. Spain became, like “The Province” in the South of France, a field for capitalistic enterprise as well as a resort for those who leaned toward a life of refined leisure. She throve in the arts and sciences and became enriched with some of the finest evidences of the Roman genius for engineering. Her wheatfields fed the proletariat of the Capital and her sons reinforced the ranks of statesmen and men of letters. She became, in the finest sense of the word, more Roman than Italy herself. This period of splendid prosperity lasted for four hundred years, until it was submerged, like the rest of Roman civilization, by the flood of Gothic invasion.

The branch of the German family which overran Spain was that of the Visigoths, who maintained an ascendency and a line of kings for two hundred years. But, although the enervation caused by provincial luxury had rendered the Celtiberian-Roman an easy victim to the vigorous onslaught of the northern race, he was sufficiently tenacious of the original spirit of the mountaineer and of the acquired love of order to avoid the chaos and prostration that overtook the rest of the Empire, and reasserted his instinct for amalgamation. The blend, which ensued and became the Spanish race as it is known to later history, is characteristically represented in the language that was gradually evolved. For this, though overlaid with Northern forms, remains at root Roman. In this hybrid race the Spanish element proved itself to be the most pronounced and enduring. Its conservatism, a phase of the independence and exclusiveness that we have already noted, was conspicuously revealed in the great Arian Controversy which threatened the integrity of the Western Church. The Visigoths alone of all the Germanic family, renounced the “heresy.” Reccared, their king, received in consequence the title of the first Catholic Sovereign of Spain. How resolutely subsequent sovereigns clung to this distinction and their subjects conformed to the political and religious obligations that it entailed is one of the most notable features of Spanish history. It seriously affected the national life, its attitude toward other nations and the development and character of Spanish art.

Meanwhile the mingling of blood could not save the Visigothic kingdom from the fate that attended all the Germanic governments which had been established on the ruins of the Empire. It proved no exception to the tendency to disintegrate and thus presented an easy prey to the onslaughts of united Islam.

In less than a hundred years after the death of Mohammed the Moslem faith had spread from Arabia through Syria and Asia Minor to Persia and India, while Westward it had overrun Egypt and penetrated along the northern shore of Africa to the Pillars of Hercules. Hence in 711 A.D. it crossed into Spain. While the leaders, under the generalship of Musa, viceroy of the Omayyad Caliphate of Damascus, were all Arabs, they had enlisted in their army the warlike tribes of Mauritania, the ancient kingdom now represented by Morocco and Algeria. Hence the name of Moors (Mauri) which distinguishes the invaders of Spain. Twenty years sufficed to make them masters of the Peninsula, the little northwestern country of Asturias alone retaining its independence. Twenty years later disintegration crept also into the ranks of the conquerors. Abd-er-Rahman established an independent caliphate in Cordova. His ambition was to raise it to a position in the Western world such as was held by Bagdad, Damascus and Delhi in the East; furthermore to make Cordova the Mecca of the faithful in the West. Thus was begun by this Caliph the Mesquita or chief Mosque, which under succeeding Caliphs was enlarged and beautified until it became a fitting monument of the ideals of Islam in its period of most splendid pride and noblest enlightenment. For nearly three hundred years Cordova was the center of an ordered government, which not only fostered the refinement of the arts and crafts in the cities and spread its network of highly organised agricultural labor throughout the country districts, but also a University of philosophy and science that made it the resort of scholars, not only Moslem but Christian. Cordova, in fact, played a conspicuously brilliant part in that phase of the Moslem ascendency which is apt to be overlooked; its share in perpetuating and advancing the Hellenic culture, which otherwise might have been lost in the Dark Ages succeeding the fall of the Roman Empire.