THE SPANISH SCHOOL
THOUGH numerically by no means imposing, the Spanish pictures at the Louvre form an exceedingly interesting section of the great French national collection, comprising, as they do, characteristic examples of the art of practically all the most prominent figures in the evolution of Spanish painting. Compared with the schools of Italy and Flanders, that of Spain was tardy in its development and very much dependent upon foreign influences. The activity of Flemish and Italian masters in Spain—we need only mention Starnina, Dello Delli, Rubens, Luca Giordano—and the visits of several eminent Spanish masters to Italy, could not fail to leave their clear mark on the art of the Peninsula, the renaissance of which was almost entirely due to the stimulus received from abroad. The short visit of Jan van Eyck to Portugal in 1429 also had a profound influence on the art of the Peninsula. But the local conditions, the strict rule of the Church and the tyranny of the Inquisition, the stiff ceremonial of the Court,—the only rival of the Church in the patronage of the arts,—and especially the sombre, passionate character of the Spanish race,—all helped to transform the imported styles into an art of definite national stamp, an art that is marked by sombreness, asceticism, dramatic intensity, and deep religious feeling. Throughout it is dominated by realistic tendencies and rude strength rather than by the striving for grace and beauty and rhythm which characterise Italian art.
LUIS DE DALMAU
The Louvre is fortunate in possessing an authentic and extremely important, though badly restored, altarpiece by Ludovico Luis de Dalmau, the first Spanish painter whose personality emerges definitely from the obscurity of the Gothic period in Spain. Dalmau was a Catalan who flourished about the middle of the fifteenth century, and who, although not a direct pupil of the Van Eycks, shows such close affinity with their style that certain modern critics are inclined to ascribe to him, with insufficient reason, certain pictures, like the Fountain of Living Water at the Prado, by the heads and founders of the Bruges school. In spite of the different types and the increased angularity of the drapery folds in Dalmau’s Enthronement of St. Isidore (No. 1703a), this Eyckian influence is clearly traceable in the Louvre picture, which shows the Virgin enthroned under a Gothic canopy wearing a crown of typically Spanish form, and handing the pallium to the saintly Bishop of Seville, who kneels on the left. Further back on the same side are four angels with the episcopal insignia. The group is balanced on the right by St. Anthony the Hermit in the foreground, and SS. Catherine, Margaret, Agatha, Odilia, and Apollonia grouped around the throne. The picture was originally in a church at Valladolid, and was bought for the Louvre at the Bourgeois sale at Cologne in 1904 for £3025.
LUIS MORALES
We need not here pay attention to the few unimportant pictures by unknown early Spanish masters in the collection, and may pass on to Luis Morales, called “El Divino” (“The Divine”) (1509–1586), who was born at Badajoz, and worked at Toledo, when the whole Spanish school was already addicted to the Italian mannerisms introduced by Berreguete and other native artists trained in Rome. Morales, however, remained faithful to the tradition of his own country, and was essentially a painter of those religious subjects which enabled him to follow the national bent for the sombre and tragic—the sufferings of Christ and of the Virgin, and similar themes. The Christ carrying the Cross (No. 1707) is a typical instance of the tragic intensity of his conception. All the suffering of the Saviour is expressed in His drawn features and His heavy, swollen eyelids. The picture is not dated, but was evidently painted before 1564, in which year the master was called to the Escorial and, while in the service of Philip ii., to a great extent lost his individual style in the imitation of the Italians, that was probably forced upon him by the taste of his patrons.
EL GRECO
We now come to one of the most interesting figures in the history of Spanish painting—Dominico Theotocopuli, better known as “El Greco” (1548–1614), from the country of his birth. Born in Crete about 1548, El Greco entered at a very early age the studio of Titian in Venice. This at least we know from a letter written by Clovio from Rome in 1570, without which, if we were to judge from the master’s early style, we should be forced to the conclusion that he acquired his art from Tintoretto, and more particularly from Jacopo da Ponte, to whom several of his earliest works in private collections were formerly, and in some cases are still, ascribed. He went to Rome in 1570, and after five or six years took up his abode at Toledo, his first dated picture in that city, the scene of his chief activity, bearing the date 1577. Between that year and his death in 1614, his extant works illustrate the gradual evolution of his art, the change of his Italian into a typically Spanish manner, the rapid acquisition of a very personal style, and the straining of that personal style to extreme mannerism. The notes and flashes of rare, cold, almost acid, but always harmonious, colour lend a peculiar distinction to El Greco’s work. His predilection for long, narrow faces and slender, emaciated bodies led him in his declining years to extravagant exaggeration; the ecstatic passionate action and gesture of his figures reveal contortion and frenzy. As a portrait painter El Greco is second only to Velazquez in the school of his adopted country. His biographer, Señor Cossío, has called him “a painter of souls,” because he had that intense power of penetration which perceives and retains at a glance the sum total of a person’s traits of character.
El Greco’s conception of portraiture enters largely into his pictures at the Louvre, from which we must exclude as an imitation by an inferior hand the St. Francis and a Novice (No. 1729a). It is certainly an important feature in the large Christ on the Cross, with Two Donors, one of the comparatively recent acquisitions, which still hangs on a screen in Gallery XV. This great altarpiece has little of the master’s fierce passion and lightning flashes of colour. The expression of the two Donors, Diego and Antonio Covarrubias, who are seen to the waist at the foot of the Cross, does not go beyond normal pious devotion; and the Saviour seems rather to stand with spread arms than to hang on the Cross with all the weight of His characteristically elongated body. A leaden grey dominates the whole colour scheme. The composition is singularly empty and simple for a master who seemed to have a perfect horror of empty spaces. The picture, which is fully signed, must have been painted soon after El Greco’s arrival at Toledo (and not, as Sñr. Cossío thinks, between 1590 and 1600), since one of the Donors, the priest Diego Covarrubias, died in 1577.