The Story of Spanish Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

Meanwhile, the spirit of Christian Spain, though broken, was not crushed. Its stronghold was at first the little kingdom of Asturias. Alfonso I not only resisted conquest but wrested back from the Moor the provinces of Galicia and Cantabria. From the northwest fastnesses of the Peninsula commenced the steady pressure southward, which, while it met with many reverses, was never abandoned until the invader had been driven back to Africa. The story in brief is one of gradual consolidation of the Christian power, accompanied by a corresponding disintegration of the Moslem. Léon becomes united with the other provinces and Castile follows suit; while on the other hand the Caliphate of Cordova becomes broken up into several dynasties. Then, while a rival sect, the Almoravides, arrive from Africa and make war on their co-religionists, Alfonso IV of Castile assumes the title of Emperor and captures Toledo and Valencia. Later, the conquests of the Almoravides are wrested from them by other arrivals from Africa, the fanatical sect of the Almohades. Encouraged by this dissension, the Christian states for the first time send their representatives to a national assembly. The first Cortes meets at Burgos. Six years later the Christians suffer defeat, but recover themselves and inflict a heavy blow upon the Moors at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. It is followed by repeated hammering, extending over nearly forty years, until the Moorish power is beaten back and by the year 1251 is confined entirely to the kingdom of Granada.

Then, for the space of two hundred and forty years, there was a comparative lull. Under the enlightened rule of the Nasride dynasty the province of Granada enjoyed a prosperity that invited friendly relations even with the Christians. The wealth derived from its mines, industries and agriculture exceeded that of the ancient Caliphate of Cordova. The period represented, in fact, the Golden Age of Moorish civilization in Spain, the flower and symbol of which remains to-day, though shorn of much of its magnificence, in the still exquisite palace of the Alhambra. So skilfully by treaty and otherwise did the rulers of Granada conciliate the Christians that their reign might have been continued indefinitely, but for two causes: internal dissensions and the fixed idea of Ferdinand and Isabella to fulfil their obligations as Catholic Kings. They lived for the purpose of expelling the infidel, and the rivalry between the two great Moorish tribes, the Zegri and the Abencerrages, gave them the opportunity. It had resulted in the throne being occupied by the youthful weakling, Boabdil. He fell into the hands of Ferdinand and Isabella at the battle of Lucena, and consented to remain neutral while they attacked the coast cities of Granada. Finally they appeared before Granada itself and Boabdil, after a frantic but futile effort to oppose them, was forced into a treaty of peace, by which the city was surrendered. Ten years later the last of the Moors had been expelled from Spain or compelled to be baptised.

Before proceeding with the story it is worth while to consider the effect which this long struggle of seven hundred and eighty years had had upon the Spanish character. In the first place it had fused the nation into one; not by some sudden stroke of patriotic ardor but by a slow and painful process, in which the patriotism had been tested in the forge of adversity, stiffened and tempered on the anvil of endurance and proven by long experiences. Its qualities were trenchant, uncompromising, decisively complete. The Spaniard had become a hero to himself; sufficient in and for himself; realising his superiority and wrapping it about with a mantle of haughty exclusiveness. He had learned to rely upon himself and had justified his confidence by victory, hardly won and dearly bought; he was a Spaniard—verbum sat. But he had been more than patriot; he had been a Paladin of the Faith; a Knight of the Cross; a Soldier of Christendom, Champion of the Holy Catholic Church. The consciousness of this had sustained him in adversity; quickened his strength in hours of vigil, inflamed him to the attack and crowned both victories and defeats with divine glory. An intense passion of spiritual ecstasy burned within him. He was at once a man of action, hard and practical, and a pietistic dreamer, a fanatic and visionary. How this mingling of qualities affected Spanish art, causing it, on the one hand, to be distinctively national and, on the other, a product of naturalistic method and highly pietistic motive will appear in the course of our story.

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It was, perhaps, Spain’s misfortune that her victories over the Moors were not succeeded by a period of settled conditions. For already she had entered upon a career of brilliant enterprise in the arts of peace. Under the patronage of Queen Isabella and of prelates, such as Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo, whose power rivaled that of the Crown, great architectural works were inaugurated and sculptors and painters were drawn from Flanders and Germany to decorate them. Learning was still further encouraged by the founding of a new University at Alcalá de Henares to supplement the famous foundation of Salamanca, and men of letters and artists were welcomed and honored at Court. Among them stand out the names of Pulgar, the first historian of Castile; Cota, the first Spanish dramatist and Rincon, the earliest of the native painters. The sixteenth century, in fact, opened with a brilliant dawn, full of promise for the new nation, if only it might have had leisure to consolidate and develop naturally its resources. But it was drawn almost immediately into the whirl of foreign conquests.

On the one hand it became involved in the affairs of the kingdom of Naples, which was conquered by the Spanish general, Gonsalvo de Cordova; on the other hand, by the bull of the Spanish Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, it was put in possession of all the conquests it might make in the New World. In both cases the immediate results may possibly be considered a boon, but they were followed by consequences disastrous to the nation and the Spanish character. The occupation of Naples brought the country in touch with Italian civilization, then approaching its zenith, but flung it into the vortex of European intrigue and warfare. Wealth began to flow in from the Americas, but at the expense of national demoralization. The conquest of inferior nations, inferiorly equipped with arms of offense and defense, may easily result in cruelty and the general sapping of the truly soldier spirit, while the lust of gold which soon began to inspire it converted these champions of the Faith into brutal buccaneers and plunderers. Further, it sapped the energies of the nation at home. For, why laboriously develop the resources of the country, when a stream of wealth was flowing into it from abroad? National progress, therefore, was checked and in time stifled; while the incoming wealth soon began to go out in prodigal expenditure over useless European wars. It became a mad gamble in which the spiritual qualities of the Spanish character were overwhelmed with the intoxication of power, while its exclusiveness and pride blinded the nation to the inevitable catastrophe.

A fact antecedent to all these causes of national deterioration was that even before the conquest of Granada the Catholic Sovereigns had established the Inquisition. With this devilish engine, operated in the name of God and the Catholic Faith, the Spaniard attempted to check the progress of Europe and effectively crushed his own. In time he expelled from the Peninsula the Jews, who in Spain had been among the foremost in learning and industrial energy; the Moors and finally the Morescoes, the progeny of the Christianised Moors and Spaniards, who had perpetuated the crafts in which the Moors had been so skilled. Enterprise was thus banished and Spain deliberately committed herself to the part of a reactionary against progress. In time England and Holland wrested from her her resources in the New World. She shrank within the limits of her own Peninsula, which had been already drained of initiation and productivity. In time, all that became left to her of her proud possessions was the dogmatic form of the Catholic religion. It had ceased to be spiritual inspiration and passed into a phase of sentimentalism, whence it dwindled to a mere formalism, existing amid irreligion and moral degradation.

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In the last sentence we have anticipated the national prostration of the eighteenth century, following upon the exhaustion of the previous one. It remains to summarise the events which intervened. Ferdinand and Isabella were succeeded by their grandson, Charles I of Spain, better known as the Emperor Charles V of Germany. He was the son of their daughter, Joanna, who had been married to the Archduke Philip of Austria, son of Emperor Maximilian of Germany. Thus Charles brought Spain under the rule of the great Hapsburg family, which even to the present time has provided monarchs for Germany and Austria. Joanna died insane, and the taint of her disease clung to her descendants. Born in Ghent in 1500 and educated in Flanders, Charles I at the death of his father in 1506 inherited the Netherlands. On the death of Ferdinand in 1516 he became King of Spain, and in 1519 was elected Emperor of Germany, the defeated competitor being Francis I of France. The rivalry between these two led to a protracted war, fought out chiefly in Italy, on the possession of which each had fastened his ambition. Francis was made captive at the battle of Pavia in 1527 and forced into a treaty of peace; but the war was renewed two years later and Charles’ troops under the renegade Frenchman, Constable of Bourbon, entered Rome and sacked it, taking the Pope prisoner. This, however, was but an incident in the political game, for Charles, as became a grandson of the Catholic Kings, was a staunch Defender of the Faith, and endeavored to impose it upon his Protestant subjects in Germany and the Netherlands. For the good of their souls he subjected them to the ravages of war and the horrors of the Inquisition, and for the filling of his military chest mulcted them by fines as well as taxation. Then at the age of fifty-five, exhausted in mind and body by his heroic exertions on behalf of Catholicism and his own ambitions, and by his various forms of self-indulgence, he handed over the Imperial Crown to his brother, Ferdinand, and the Kingdom of Spain and his “dear Netherlands” to his son, Philip. He himself, under the plea of caring for his soul’s welfare, retired to the monastery of San Juste, whence he continued to meddle with affairs of State, meanwhile surfeiting his appetites and making a collection of clocks and watches. His bedroom commanded a view of the High Altar of the Church and was decorated with Titian’s Gloria, in which picture the artist has represented the ex-Emperor in a white robe, welcomed by the Virgin at the throne of God; while his hopeful son, Philip, is among the mortals who gaze up devoutly at the imperial apotheosis.

Alas! for Philip; he had the doggedness but not the genius of his father. Meanwhile the times were changing, and he did not know it. Despotism, whether religious or political, no longer was to go unquestioned. What the Netherlands had endured from Charles they refused to submit to from his son. The more so that, while his father had chastised them with whips, he, in the person of the unspeakable Alva, chastised them with scorpions. The United Provinces revolted and the rest of Philip’s life was spent in a vain effort to crush the Dutch patriots and the English who had more or less espoused their cause. Meanwhile the fleets of both countries were sweeping the Spaniards from the high seas. When Philip died in 1598, he left to his son, Philip III, the legacy of a fruitless foreign war, a ruined commerce, and an impoverished treasury. As an enduring monument of himself he left the Escoriál.