The Crown was offered by the Spanish people to Philip, grandson of Louis XIV. He was the nephew of the late king, being the son of Philip IV’s daughter, Maria Theresa, and Louis XIV. When, however, this marriage was made Louis had expressly renounced all claims to the Spanish throne, both on his own behalf and that of his heirs; and the renunciation had been confirmed by the Cortes. Meanwhile, another sister of Charles II had been married to Leopold, Emperor of Germany. She also had renounced her claim to the Spanish Crown, but the understanding had not been ratified by the Cortes. This afforded a pretext for the Elector of Bavaria, who had married her daughter, to claim the succession in opposition to Philip. A third claimant had been the Emperor Leopold himself, who however, waived his rights in favor of his second son, the Archduke Charles. The dispute had been in progress during the late king’s life, and Louis XIV had made a treaty with England and Holland, recognising the claims of the Elector of Bavaria. When, however, the crown was offered to Philip and accepted on his behalf by Louis XIV, England and Holland made a coalition with Austria and Germany to compel the recognition of the Archduke Charles. Hence the thirteen years’ war of the Spanish succession, in which Marlborough gained a series of victories over the French and Bavarians, the Archduke ravaged the Peninsula, and the English and Dutch fleets preyed on Spanish commerce and captured Gibraltar. Finally, by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714 the succession of Philip V was ratified.
He had been brought up by Louis XIV to be undesirous and incapable of taking part in political affairs. While the country continued to be involved in disastrous foreign wars this roi fainéant amused himself with building a summer palace and laying out gardens, both in the French style. He also imported the French portrait-painter, Van Loo. It must be added, however, that the stock of Spanish painters had been exhausted. Native art, indeed, for the time, was all but dead. It so remained through the thirteen years’ reign of his son, Ferdinand VI, though he tried to galvanize it into official life by inaugurating the Academy of San Fernando. This king was succeeded by his brother Charles III, who had already distinguished himself by his wise rule of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. His portrait by Goya, in the costume of a sportsman, shows him to be a man of awkward build and of homely, though kind and shrewd, face. He proved himself a generous patron of second-rate artists, inviting the German painter, Raphael Mengs and the Venetian, Tiepolo, to his Court; built the present gallery of the Prado and issued an order forbidding the exportation of paintings by the great masters of Spain. He appears to have had some inkling of the genius of Goya, who, however, did not come into prominence until the succession of Charles IV.
Charles IV was an amiable imbecile and his Queen, Maria Luisa, the shameless subject of notorious scandal. One of her favorites, Manuel Godoy, advanced from the rank and file of a regiment of the Guards to the title of Duke of Alcudia, was entrusted with the duties of prime minister. After embroiling the country in successive wars with France and England, he finally attached himself to the cause of Napoleon and favored the latter’s design to place his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. The French entered Spain in 1808 and compelled Charles to abdicate. But in the same year the Spaniards rose against the invaders, and the English came to their assistance. Then followed the Peninsular War, during which Wellington gradually expelled the French troops, but not until they had pillaged the cathedrals and churches and carried off a large number of the finest works of art. For Marshal Soult, with the predatory instincts of an unscrupulous dealer, sent his emissaries ahead of the army. Armed with the “Dictionary of Painters and Paintings” by Cean Bermudez, they identified and attached the most famous canvases, which the Marshal compelled their owners to part with at his own terms. On the conclusion of the war many of these were returned to Spain under the terms of the treaty of peace, but a number of masterpieces had already passed through Soult’s rapacious hands into the public and private galleries of Europe.
This treaty of peace, which restored the Throne to Charles’ son, Ferdinand VII, is the end of the history of Spain so far as it concerns the growth and development and decline of her national art. She has had painters of repute since 1814; but not in sufficient numbers to constitute a school or even a noticeable artistic movement. Under weak and constantly changing governments, controlled by the Church and existing mainly for taxation, her arts, like her commerce and industries dwindled to an almost negligible condition, from which only recently there are indications of recovery.
CHAPTER II
CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH PAINTING
SPANISH Painting, so far as it represents a school, is singularly limited in scope and rigidly circumscribed. This is due partly to the racial character, self-centered and conservative, out of which it grew: partly also, to the influences that immediately shaped its growth. For it developed under the patronage of the Crown and the Church. Nor were these, in theory or in practice, antagonistic to each other. The Church was the embodiment, the Crown the defender, of the Faith: the efforts of both being united to preserve the Faith against the inroads alike of Humanism and Protestantism. Hence the art of Spain, while it might be incidently concerned with portraiture, discovered its essential characteristics as the exponent of Bible story and Saintly lore and as an exhortation to faith and pious living. Its home was the sacred edifice, where it embellished walls, vaultings, and ceilings, or presided in the ceremonial altar-piece. Its language for the most part was that of the vernacular; the sacred imagery being translated into the idiom of common knowledge, its mysteries into expressions of common experience. It was in consequence a naturalistic art.
Had the artists of Spain painted for the general public or followed their own bent in the pursuit of beauty, they would doubtless have developed branches of genre and still life painting that might have emulated the work of the Holland artists; for they had a similar love of the intimate beauty of simple things around them. But since they had to reach the masses of the people through the intervention mostly of the Church, which not only commissioned the subject but prescribed its treatment, they achieved their self-expression through religious pictures which had the character of sacred genre. Yet this Spanish brand of genre is inferior to the secular genre of Holland or to the sacred genre of old Flemish religious paintings. It has a quality, perceptible in neither of the latter, of obviousness. Its motive is less surely an æsthetic delight in things of beauty; more evidently influenced by the practical intention of rounding out the story.
I doubt if the student of Spanish painting, particularly if he visits Spain, can escape the feeling that it exhibits a certain oppressive obviousness. How is this to be accounted for? In the first place, surely, by the influence of the Church, ever more intent on making art a handmaid of its own purposes than on developing its own inherent beauties. And, if this was true under the conditions in Italy, where the Church itself was penetrated with Humanism, how much more is it to be expected under those which existed in Spain! But there is another reason, incident to the Spanish character. The latter, as has been suggested in the previous chapter, was the product of a long and heroic struggle on behalf of nationality and the Christian Faith. Among its conspicuous traits, in consequence, were self-consciousness and inflated egoism; traits that, if you consider it, are those of the actor; the necessary groundwork on which he builds his better qualities as an artist.
The Spaniards are a race of actors. The arts in which they have most naturally expressed themselves are those of the drama and the novel of character and action. And this trait similarly affects their painting. It is dramatic, concerned frequently with action, always with characterisation. Meanwhile, self-consciousness and egoism readily yield to the temptation of exaggeration. Spanish literature evaded this weakness because it was left to go its own way and the artistic conscience of the author was permitted to discover for itself a sense of true values. But in the painter’s case the Church intervened and being, so to say, interested in the box-office receipts, compelled him to play to the gallery. It favored sensationalism and encouraged melodrama. The meekness of the martyr must be represented so that the dullest spectator would not miss the moral; the executioner’s hatred of virtue so portrayed that no one could fail to recognise him as a villain; love and devotion must be sentimentalised, and blood, pain and disease so vividly exhibited that the crudest sensibilities would be wrung. Imagination must not be counted upon and suggestion, the subtle road thereto, must be abandoned for the direct and detailed statement. Aim at the crude instincts and make the message obvious!
This Spanish tendency toward the related traits of exaggeration and obviousness is not confined to painting. It appears also in the architecture and sculpture. Foreign architects, for example, were employed in the erection of cathedrals in the Gothic style; but the latter’s noble logic of plan and elevation was disturbed by the innovations which Spanish taste, or lack of it, dictated. Conspicuous among these was the erection of a Coro in the center of the nave; an inclosure walled around, carried to a great height and profusely adorned with sculpturesque ornament. This monstrous choir effectually blocks the view of the high-altar from any spot except the narrow space which separates the two, and also interrupts what should be one of the sublime features of a Gothic cathedral, its endless variety of stately vistas. In every direction the perspective of pillars, arches and vaultings is barred by the tasteless magnificence of the Coro. For the latter, like the Capilla Mayor with its high-altar, is overloaded with excess of ornament. In one case it may be in the “plateresque” style, a network of intricate and minute embellishments that vies with the dainty exuberance of the workers in silver-plate. Elsewhere, it is wantonly “grotesque” or pompously “baroque” or characterised by that orgy of material extravagance, called “Churrigueresque” after the name of the sculptor who introduced it. In this, sculpture has been degraded to the most blatant naturalism; Madonnas clothed like dolls in brocaded gowns; the tragedy of Calvary or the glory of Heaven, presented with figures, background and accessories, painted, posed and set like a theatrical tableau. It is not for a moment suggested that there is no beauty and grandeur in Spanish architecture and sculpture. Yet to one whose taste is attuned to the imaginative spaciousness, sublimity and mystery of pure Gothic or to the inventive refinement of choice Renaissance design, the net impression of a Spanish cathedral is likely to be one of oppression and distaste. And more so, as one analyses the psychological cause of this extravagant display. It seems to be the Spanish instinct to close himself round with interest in what is nearest to him, so that he abandons breadth or height of vision—imagination, in fact—in favor of the immediately present, which he invests with all the fervor of his pent up nature. This leads inevitably to a materialistic point of view and to the baldly naturalistic method; in a word, to the obviousness which we have noted.