Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

Yet Ribera, ruffian though he was, is not solely and exclusively a nightmare artist. He could give sweetest and most tranquil color when he chose, as his "Jacob's Dream" here testifies, with the dim gold of its angel-peopled ladder; and for all the spirit of bigotry that clouds his work, there is Catholic fervor in these pictures and masterly truthfulness up to the point where the senses need the interpretation of the soul. There is more than anatomy, too, in these starved old saints; there is the dread of judgment. Ribera depicts supernatural terror, where Goya shows the animal shock of death.

Another Spanish phase appears in Zurbarán. In his most effective work we have not Goya's blood color, nor Ribera's blacks, nor the celestial violets of Juan de Joanes, but the grays of the monastic renunciation, the twilight that is as far from rapture as from anguish. His gowned, cowled, corded figures pass before the eye in the pale tints of the cloister. The shadow of cathedral walls is over them. The Prado has been strangely indifferent to Zurbarán, who is far more fully represented in the galleries of Andalusia; but it has in its baker's dozen two important and characteristic works, both visions of San Pedro Nolasco. In one the entranced saint, whose figure might be carved in stone,—stone on which ray from stained-glass window never fell,—gazes upon an angel, whose vesture, crossed by a dark green scarf, is flushed with the faintest rose. In the second the sombre cell is illuminated for an instant by the apparition of St. Peter the Apostle, head downward, as in his crucifixion, his naked form dazzling against a vague redness of light like a memory of pain.

One glance at a wall aglow with Madonna blues reminds us that Spanish sacred art does not culminate in Ribera nor in Zurbarán. The Christian faith has had almost as pure, poetic, and spiritual an utterance in the land of the Inquisition as in Italy itself. This is not Murillo's hour; it is the triumph of Velázquez and the realists that Spain is celebrating to-day; but none the less it is a joy of joys to walk by the Murillos on the way to the laurelled bust and the crowded sala. These are the pictures that are rather in heaven than earth. Where Mary, divine in her virginal loveliness, is not upborne among the golden clouds, the radiant-plumed angel kneels on her cottage floor and the wings of the descending dove beat whiteness through the air. Here is realism and more. The Mater Dolorosa has those luminous sea-blue eyes of Andalusia, but they tell of holy tears. The Crucified is no mere sufferer, but the suffering Son of God, and the crown of thorns, while dripping blood, haloes his brows with the redemption of the world.

The genius of Velázquez dwelt not above the earth, but upon it, in the heart of its most brilliant life. He was no dreamer of dreams; he "painted the thing as he saw it," and with what sure eyes he saw, and with what a firm and glowing brush he painted! His sala surrounds us at once with an atmosphere of brightness, beauty, elegance, variety, delight. His work is so superb, so supreme, that, like perfect manners, it puts even the humblest of us at our ease. We are not artists, but we seem to understand Velázquez.

Of course we don't. No knight of the palette would admit it for an instant. What can the rabble know of the mysterious compoundings and touchings from which sprang these splendors of color that outshine the centuries? Young men with streaming hair are continually escorting awed-looking señoras about the room, discoursing with dramatic vehemence on the "periods" of the Master's work. As a youth at Seville, they explain, Velázquez had of necessity taken religious subjects, for the Church was the chief patron of art in Andalusia; but his natural bent even then displayed itself in tavern studies and sketches of popular types, as the "Water-seller of Seville" and the "Old Woman Frying Eggs." Of his early religious pieces the archbishop's palace of Seville keeps "San Ildefonso Receiving the Chasuble from the Hands of the Virgin," and the National Gallery of London secured "Christ in the House of Martha," but "The Adoration of the Kings" hangs here at our right as we enter the Velázquez sala. A little stiff, say these accomplished critics, with a suggestion of the dry manner of his master, Pacheco, but bear you in mind that this is the production of a youth of twenty. It is obvious, too, that Andalusians, not celestial visions, served him as models.

A longing to see the Tintorets and Titians, those starry treasures of the dark Escorial, drew him to Madrid at twenty-three. Here he was fortunate in finding friends, who brought his portraits to the notice of Philip IV, a dissolute boy ruled by the Count-Duke Olivares. Youth inclines to youth. Velázquez was appointed painter to the king at the same salary as that paid to the royal barber, and henceforth he had no care in life but to paint. And how he painted! His first portraits of Philip show a blond young face, with high brow, curled mustache, the long Hapsburg chin, and eyes that hint strange secrets. Again and again and again Velázquez traced those Austrian features, while the years stamped them ever more deeply with lines of pride and sin—a tragic face in the end as it was ill-omened in the beginning. But the masterpiece of Velázquez's twenties is "The Drunkards," a scene of peasant revelry where the young are gloriously tipsy and the old are on the point of maudlin tears. Here it is, Los Borrachos, farther to the right. In looking on it one remembers that a contemporary realist, in the Protestant island which has often been so sharp a thorn in Spain's side, likewise crowned the achievement of his springtime by a group of topers, Prince Hal and Falstaff and their immortal crew.

Not the influence of Rubens, who spent nine months in Spain in 1628-29, painting like the wind, nor a visit to the Holy Land of Raphael and Michael Angelo could make Velázquez other than he was. This "Vulcan's Forge," which we see here, painted in Italy, is mythological only in the title. Back he came at the royal summons, to paint more portraits—Philip over and over, on foot, on horseback, half length, full length, all lengths; the winsome Infante Baltasar, as a toddling baby with his dwarf, as a gallant little soldier, hunter, horseman, and in the princely dignity of fourteen, when he had but three more years to live; the sad French queen, the king's brother, the magnificent Olivares, the sculptor Montañes, counts, dukes, buffoons. Within these twenty years Velázquez produced his two most famous works of religious tenor—"Christ Bound to the Column," a "captain jewel" of the London National Gallery, and that majestic "Crucifixion" before which Spaniards in the Prado bare their heads. But the crown of this period is Las Lanzas, or "The Surrender of Breda," which holds the place of honor on the wall fronting the door. It is vivid past all praise, and nobler than any battle scene in its beauty of generosity. The influence of Italy had told especially on Velázquez's backgrounds. The bright, far landscapes opening out beyond his portrayed figures, especially those on horseback,—and his horses are as lifelike as his dogs,—give to the sala an exhilarating effect of free space and wide horizons.

In 1650 he made his second visit to Rome, where he portrayed Pope Innocent X. Nine years of glorious work in Spain remained to him. Still he painted the king, even at his royal prayers, for which there was full need, and the young Austrian queen, who had succeeded the dead mother of the dead Baltasar. On that happy left-hand wall of the sala shines, in all its vigorous grace, the "Mercury and Argos," but if the hundred eyes of Argos are ready to close, their place is supplied by the terrible scrutiny of a row of portraits, embarrassing the boldest of us out of note-taking. How those pairs of pursuing black eyes, sage and keen and mocking, stare the starers out of countenance! The series of pet dwarfs is here, old Æsop, and Menippus, and the sly buffoon, "Don Juan of Austria." Of these two wonder-works, Las Meninas, "The Maids of Honor," has a room to itself, and thus Las Hilanderas, "The Weavers," becomes the central magnet of this returning wall. A saint picture and even a coronation of the Virgin cannot draw the crowds from before this ultimate triumph of the actual—this factory interior, where a group of peasant women fashion tapestries, while a broad shaft of sunshine works miracles in color.

And this, too, is Spanish. Cervantes is as true a facet of many-sided Spain as Calderon, and Velázquez as Murillo. With all the national propensity to emotion and exaggeration, Spaniards are a truth-seeing people. The popular coplas are more often satiric than sentimental. They like to bite through to the kernel of fact, even when it is bitter. Velázquez, with his rich and noble realism, is of legitimate descent.

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