Comparison of the two Donors’ faces with their portraits by the same master in the Toledo Library can leave no doubt as to their identity. The Christ on the Cross was offered by the deputy Isaac Pereire of Prades (Pyrenées-Orientales) to the local parish church, but was refused and hung in the Palais de Justice at Prades, whence it was removed to the Mairie in 1904, and finally sold to the Louvre in 1908 for £1000. The picture measures 8 ft. 8 in. by 5 ft. 8 in.
The St. Louis of France and a Page (No. 1729b), which was formerly wrongly catalogued as King Ferdinand the Catholic, is a more typical example of El Greco’s management of colour. The boldly painted armour is identical with that of the St. Martin on horseback, at Toledo. The probable date of the picture, which was bought in 1904 at the high price of £2800, is between 1594 and 1600.
By El Greco’s favourite pupil and assistant, Luis Tristan (1586–1640), is the realistic half-figure of St. Francis of Assisi (No. 1730). A more scientific classification of the works by the Toledo painters has reversed Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell’s judgment that Tristan had all the virtues and none of the faults of his master. He was in reality a mediocre imitator of El Greco, without a spark of his master’s genius and without any of his distinction.
THE SCHOOL OF SEVILLE
The naturalistic tendencies inherent in the national Spanish genius, which even in the period of Italian mannerism were not to be entirely denied, bore full fruit at Seville, where Francisco Herrera “the Old” (1576–1656) was the first entirely to reject the tyranny of the Italian manner, and with it to a certain extent the tyranny of Church patronage. He was a man of fiery character, with whom the technique of his art became a veritable passion. It was left to a painter of a later century and of another race to proclaim that it does not matter what you paint, but how you paint; but Herrera’s work at times almost suggests that he was guided by similar principles, although an instinctive sense of pictorial fitness saved him from the consequences to which their unrestricted application might easily lead.
In spite of the repelling fierceness, the fanaticism, the cruelty of every single face—all of them portraits, no doubt—in the St. Basil dictating his Doctrine (No. 1706) at the Louvre, in spite of the essentially Spanish manner in which the design fills the space (the figures being grouped in horizontal courses right across the canvas, with very little space above for the sky, and this little space filled with angels’ heads and with a Holy Ghost as fierce as the rest of the assembly), there is a noble rhythm of line as well as of the distribution of light and shade, which proclaims the mind of a master. The two Saints in the immediate foreground, St. Dominic and St. Bernard, are cut through at the waist—another favourite device of Spanish composition, which we have already noticed in the Donors of El Greco’s Christ on the Cross.
ZURBARÁN
Considerable though it be, Herrera’s artistic achievement does not constitute his chief claim to fame; for his name will ever be best known as that of the first master of the greatest of all Spanish painters, Don Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez. But before discussing the pictures by, or catalogued under the name of, Velazquez at the Louvre, we must consider the work of two other painters of the Naturalistic school: Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1661) and José de Ribera, called “Lo Spagnoletto” (1588–1656). Zurbarán, a pupil of the Sevillan Juan de las Roelas, was essentially a painter of church pictures, his favourite subjects being types of monks and scenes of monkish life. There is something so sincere and convincing in his unrelenting realism, that even his pictures of rapturous ecstasy and strongly emphasised emotion impress one as truthful renderings of types observed by the artist in the streets and churches of monastic Seville. The sombre passion with which his subjects are instinct is reflected by his colour and masterly chiaroscuro. Zurbarán became Court Painter to Philip iv. in or before 1633, in which year he added the words “Pintor del Rey” to his signature on one of his pictures; and in this capacity he painted at Madrid his only known secular pictures, a series of ten Scenes from the History of Hercules.
Two admirable pictures from his brush figure in the Louvre Catalogue as St. Peter Nolasque and St. Raymond de Peñafort (No. 1738) and The Funeral of a Bishop (No. 1739). As a matter of fact they represent two scenes from the life of St. Bonaventura: The Saint presiding at a Chapter of Minor Brothers, and The Funeral of St Bonaventura. The second of these companion pictures which were originally in a convent at Seville is particularly striking for the unconventionality of its composition, the strong character of the heads, and the masterly treatment of the chiaroscuro. Note again the placing of the heads almost in a horizontal line right across the canvas, and the anxious avoidance of empty spaces. The third picture that stands to Zurbarán’s name is the figure of A Lady of Fashion in the Character of St. Apollonia (No. 1740), a work of not very striking merit.