Through Spain to the Sahara

by Matilda Betham-Edwards

To understand a great religious painter like Murillo, one must have some sympathy with the age in which he lived, and the public which was his patron. He was eminently the painter of the people, from the time of his unlettered and humble boyhood, when he sold little pictures of Virgins and Christs at a few rials the dozen in the streets of Seville, to the last years of his long, independent, prosperous, honoured life. It must be remembered that the Inquisition kept a strict surveillance on artists, their works and their patrons; and that Velasquez is almost an exception in his divergence from the only fair field open to all, an exception impossible perhaps except to a royal favourite. Murillo’s more plastic genius accommodated itself to the circumstances surrounding it, and the result is, these marvels of colour and celestial expression, that realize the spirit of the time at once.

Whilst Velasquez may be said to have embodied in his works the aristocratic spirit of the most aristocratic age of Spain, and Murillo the purely devotional, Zurbaran may be called the painter of the ascetic, and Ribera, better known as Spagnoletto, of the Inquisitorial. Amateurs will not, I think, care much for Ribera’s pictures, except in so far as they show the cruel side of the same religion that in Murillo’s hands was so sweet and lovely. Ribera, or, as he has been called, “this cruel forcible imitator of ordinary ill-selected nature,” may be well studied at Madrid. Here you have every form and fashion of suffering and repulsive humanity, such, as Ford said, could be conceived by a bull-fighter, and please a people whose sports are blood and torture; and if for the sake of the powerful in drawing, and the wonderful mastery of light and shadow, you can contemplate those terrible subjects one after the other, you will have more powers of endurance and more passion for art than the present writer. This Spanish Caravaggio, who obtained his name of lo Spagnoletto, the little Spaniard, when he was a begging student in the streets of Rome, lived so much in Italy, and had such a passion for the great Italian masters, Correggio and Caravaggio, whom he studied, that, except in Madrid, one hardly thinks of him as a Spaniard at all. His busy and afterwards prosperous life was mostly spent at Naples, then a province of Spain, though the greater part of his pictures have been recovered by his native country; but it was not a life to look into so fearlessly as that of Velasquez or Murillo, and one gladly turns alike from the master and his work to others less painful.

Zurbaran has left no story. Like so many of the greatest Spanish painters, he arose from the humblest ranks, and that is almost all one knows of him. But he was a very great artist, and his pictures have the same historic interest as those of Murillo, portraying, as they do, a distinct phase of Catholic Spain. Indeed, a French critic has gone so far as to say that if by a miracle the remembrance of Spain were effaced from the universal human mind; and if we were ignorant of her moral and religious history, such pictures as these of Murillo, Zurbaran, Ribera, and Herrera, would lose half their worth. It is quite certain that Zurbaran’s pictures do owe much of their interest to the ascetic element prevailing in them, however far we may be from accepting the above conclusion. He saw a monk, and painted a monk introspectively, as no one else could do; and every one will do well to study his pictures, the finest of which are at Seville, and very few of which are at Madrid. They portray the austere element of the same religion which Murillo made so enticing with visions of light, loveliness, and colour. These three masters, Murillo, Ribera, and Zurbaran, may be said to express and eliminate the three vital principles of Romanism, such as men like Loyola and women like St. Theresa had made it, namely, ecstatic vision, torture, and asceticism. It seems as if in Spain the Trinity must stand or fall together.

The schools of Spanish art are generally divided into three, the Castilian, the Valencian, and the Sevillian; properly speaking, the kingdom of Aragon possessed another, though little known. Gallegos, who introduced the style of Van Eyck and Albert Dürer; Moralès, whose Ecce Homos and Madonna Dolorosas are scattered all over Spain; El Mudo, the dumb, who brought from Italy something of the rich Venetian colouring; El Greco, who was at once an architect, a sculptor, and a painter, “truly Spanish, unequal and eccentric,” and whose “streaky lights,” as Mr. Stirling says, “are sharper than Toledo blades;”—may be said to represent the school of Castile; whilst that of Valencia, the most effeminate and superstitious province of Spain, is represented by Ribaeta, the disciple of L. Carracci and Domenichino, and Ribera, Orrente, the Bassano of Spain. Then we come to Seville, the capital of sunny, many-gifted Andalusia. The school of Seville boasts of other honourable names before we come to its greatest—Velasquez, Murillo, and Zurbaran. There was Herrera, the first master of Velasquez; Pacheco, his second master and afterwards father-in-law, not only a painter of some pretensions, but a learned writer on art,—“coldly correct and classically dull in whatever he did,” says a critic; but let that pass. There was Pablo de Cespedes, also famous for achievements of pen and pencil; Juan de las Ruelas, the worthy pupil of Correggio and Giorgione, whose pictures are only to be seen in Andalusia. Alonzo Cano, alike architect, sculptor, and painter, whose passion for art was so strong, that on his dying bed he impatiently put a crucifix from his lips because it was badly carved.

What a splendid muster-roll is this! Who will not be tempted to come and judge for himself? The works of many of these artists, however, are only to be seen in the churches and convents of their native provinces, where they remain “hanging like golden oranges on their native boughs.”

But before leaving Madrid, you must give a little time—not too much, since it is so precious—among “these acres of canvas,” to the fantastic and not pleasing pictures of Goya, the last Spanish painter of any note, who died in 1828, at the age of eighty-six. Goya has been compared to Hogarth for his quality of humour; to Callot, for imagination; to Rembrandt, for vigour of execution, elsewhere to Velasquez and to Reynolds; but his pictures are so characterised by a sort of Hoffman-like revelling in the weird and the impossible, that it is difficult to understand and like them. Like Ribera he bids you sup on horrors.

And after this survey of all the Spanish painters, how much remains yet to see! Here are grand pictures of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, of Michel-Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, of Domenichino,—indeed, of all the Italian, Flemish, and French masters, and amongst so much to see, the only fear is of seeing nothing.

Our principal object in coming to Madrid was Velasquez, who is to be studied nowhere else, and we therefore saw many other pictures imperfectly. Other travellers may be less circumscribed as to time, and fortunate are they who, having leisure, can support the rarefied air of Madrid long enough to do justice to the greatest picture-gallery in the world. It is not only the greatest but the best-arranged, the quietest and the most comfortable. You leave your carriage at the door and stroll in for an hour or so. All is quiet, and silent, and orderly as in a church; the rooms are unadorned and perfectly lighted; the pictures are never hidden by crowds of copyists; the place is never crowded or noisy; and after contemplating your favourite pictures or picture for a time, you leave the gallery, not tired and blinded by too many impressions, but refreshed and invigorated with a calm intellectual enjoyment that is as good and simple as it is deep and lasting.