At least a century and a half before Holbein was limning the burly frame and gorgeous dress of bluff King Hal, and creating at once a school and an appreciation of art in England, were the early painters of Spain enriching their magnificent cathedrals, and religious houses, with pictures displaying as correct a knowledge of art, and as rich a tone of colour, as the works of that great master. There is something singular and mysterious in the contrast afforded by the early history of painting in the two countries. While in poetry, in painting on glass, in science, in manufactures, in architecture, England appears to have kept pace with other countries, in painting and in sculpture she appears always to have lagged far behind. Gower, Chaucer, Friar Bacon, William of Wyckham, Waynfleete, the unknown builders of ten thousand churches and convents, the manufacturers of the glass that still charms our eyes, and baffles the rivalry of our Willements and Wailes, at York and elsewhere—the illuminators of the missals and religious books, whose delicate fancy and lustrous tints are even now teaching our highborn ladies that long-forgotten art—yielded the palm to none of their brethren in Europe; but where and who were our contemporaneous painters and sculptors? In the luxurious and graceful court of Edward IV., who represented that art which Dello and Juan de Castro, under royal and ecclesiastical patronage, had carried to such perfection in Spain? That no English painters of any note flourished at that time, is evident from the silence of all historical documents; nor does it appear that foreign artists were induced, by the hope of gain or fame, to instruct our countrymen in the art to which the discoveries of the Van Eycks had imparted such a lustre. It is true that the desolating Wars of the Roses left scant time and means to the sovereigns and nobility of England for fostering the arts of peace; but still great progress was being made in nearly all those arts, save those of which we speak; and, if we remember rightly, Mr Pugin assigns the triumph of English architecture to this troublous epoch. Nor, although Juan I., Pedro the Cruel, and Juan II., were admirers and patrons of painting, was it to royal or noble favour that Spanish art owed its chiefest obligations. The church—which, after the great iconoclastic struggle of the eighth century, had steadily acted on the Horatian maxim,
"Segnius irritant animos demissa per aures,
Quam quæ sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus"—
in Spain embraced the young and diffident art with an ardour and a munificence which, in its palmiest and most prosperous days, that art never forgot, and was never wearied of requiting. Was it so in England? and do we owe our lack of ancient English pictures to the reforming zeal of our iconoclastic reformers? Did the religious pictures of our Rincons, our Nuñez, and our Borgoñas, share the fate of the libraries that were ruthlessly destroyed by the ignorant myrmidons of royal rapacity? If so, it is almost certain that the records which bewail and denounce the fate of books and manuscripts, would not pass over the destruction of pictures; while it is still more certain that the monarch and his courtiers would have appropriated to themselves the pictured saints, no less than the holy vessels, of monastery and convent. It cannot, therefore, be said that the English Reformation deprived our national school of painting of its most munificent patrons, and most ennobling and purest subjects, in the destruction of the monasteries, and the spoliation of churches. That the Church of England, had she remained unreformed, might, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have emulated her Spanish or Italian sister in her patronage of, and beneficial influence upon, the arts of painting and sculpture, it is needless either to deny or assert; we fear there is no room for contending that, since the Reformation, she has in any way fostered, guided, or exalted either of those religious arts.
In Spain, on the contrary, as Mr Stirling well points out, it was under the august shadow of the church that painting first raised her head, gained her first triumphs, executed her most glorious works, and is even now prolonging her miserable existence.
The venerable cathedral of Toledo was, in effect, the cradle of Spanish painting. Founded in 1226 by St Ferdinand, it remained, to quote Mr Stirling's words, "for four hundred years a nucleus and gathering-place for genius, where artists swarmed and laboured like bees, and where splendid prelates—the popes of the Peninsula—lavished their princely revenues to make fair and glorious the temple of God intrusted to their care." Here Dolfin introduced, in 1418, painting on glass; here the brothers Rodrigues displayed their forceful skill as sculptors, in figures which still surmount the great portal of that magnificent cathedral; and here Rincon, the first Spanish painter who quitted the stiff mediæval style, loved best to execute his graceful works. Nor when, with the house of Austria, the genius of Spanish art quitted the Bourbon-governed land, did the custodians of this august temple forget to stimulate and reward the detestable conceits, and burlesque sublimities, of such artists as the depraved taste of the eighteenth century delighted to honour. Thus, in 1721, Narciso Tome erected at the back of the choir an immense marble altar-piece, called the Trasparente, by order of Archbishop Diego de Astorgo, for which he received two hundred thousand ducats; and thus, fifty years later, Bayeu and Maella were employed to paint in fresco the cloisters that had once gloried in the venerable paintings of Juan de Borgoña. At Toledo, then, under the auspices of the great Castilian queen, Isabella, may be said to have risen the Castilian school of art. The other great schools of Spanish painting were those of Andalusia, of Valencia, and that of Arragon and Catalonia; but, for the mass of English readers, the main interest lies in the two first, the schools that produced or acquired El Mudo and El Greco, Velasquez and Murillo. The works of the two last-mentioned artists are now so well known, and so highly appreciated in England, that we are tempted to postpone for the present any notice of that most delightful part of Sir Stirling's book which treats of them, and invite our readers to trace the course of art in that stern old city to which we have already referred, Toledo.
Before the grave had closed upon the cold remains of Rincon, Juan de Borgoña had proved himself worthy of wielding the Castilian pencil, and, under the patronage of the great Toledan archbishop, Ximenes de Cisneros, produced works which still adorn the winter chapter-room of that cathedral. These are interesting not only as specimens of art, but as manifestations of the religious ��������� of Spain at the commencement of the sixteenth century: let Mr Stirling describe one of the most remarkable of these early paintings:—"The lower end of the finely-proportioned, but badly-lighted room, is occupied by the 'Last Judgment,' a large and remarkable composition. Immediately beneath the figure of our Lord, a hideous fiend, in the shape of a boar, roots a fair and reluctant woman out of her grave with his snout, as if she were a trufle, twining his tusks in her long amber locks. To the left are drawn up in a line a party of the wicked, each figure being the incarnation of a sin, of which the name is written on a label above in Gothic, letters, as 'Soberbia,' and the like. On their shoulders sit little malicious imps, in the likeness of monkeys, and round their lower limbs, flames climb and curl. The forms of the good and faithful, on the right, display far less vigour of fancy." So the good characters in modern works of fiction are more feebly drawn, and excite less interest, than the Rob Roys and Dirk Hattericks, the Conrads and the Manfreds. Nor was Toledo at this time wanting in the sister art of sculpture: while the Rincons, and Berruguete, and Borgoña, were enriching the cathedral with their pictures and their frescoes, Vigarny was elaborating the famous high altar of marble, and the stalls on the epistle side. In concluding his notice of Vigarny, "the first great Castilian sculptor," Mr Stirling gives a sketch of the style of sculpture popular in Spain. Like nearly all the "Cosas d'Espana," it is peculiar, and owes its peculiarity to the same cause that has impressed so marked a character on Spanish painting and Spanish pharmacopeia—religion.
Let not the English lover of the fine arts, invited to view the masterpieces of Spanish sculpture, imagine that his eyes are to be feasted on the nude, though hardly indecent forms of Venuses and Apollos, Ganymedes and Andromedas.
Beautiful, and breathing, and full of imagination, indeed, those Spanish statues are—"idols," as our author generally terms them; but the idolatry they represent or evoke is heavenly, not earthly—spiritual, not sensuous. Chiselled out of a block of cedar or lime-wood, with the most reverential care, the image of the Queen of Heaven enjoyed the most exquisite and delicate services of the rival sister arts, and, "copied from the loveliest models, was presented to her adorers sweetly smiling, and gloriously apparelled in clothing of wrought gold." But we doubt whether any Englishman who has not seen can understand the marvellous beauty of these painted wooden images. Thus Berruguete, who combined both arts in perfection, executed in 1539 the archbishop's throne at Toledo, "over which hovers an airy and graceful figure, carved in dark walnut, representing our Lord on the Mount of Transfiguration, and remarkable for its fine and floating drapery."
Continuing our list of Toledan artists, "whose whole lives and labours lay within the shadow of that great Toledan church, whose genius was spent in its service, and whose names were hardly known beyond its walls," (vol. i. p. 150,) we come to T. Comontes, who, among other works for that munificent Alma Mater, executed from the designs of Vigarny the retablo (reredos) for the chapel "de los Reyes Nuevos," in 1533. It was at Toledo that El Mudo, the Spanish Titian, died, and at Toledo that Blas del Prado was born. When in 1593 the Emperor of Morocco asked that the best painter of Spain might be sent to his court, Philip II. appointed Blas del Prado to fulfil the Mussulman's artistic desires: previous to this, the chapter of Toledo had named him their second painter, and he had painted a large altar-piece, and other pictures, for their cathedral. But perhaps the Toledan annals of art contain no loftier name than that of El Greco. Domemis Theotocopuli, who, born, it is surmised, at Venice in 1548, is found in 1577 painting at Toledo, for the cathedral, his famous picture of The Parting of our Lord's Garment, on which he bestowed the labour of a decade, and of which we give Mr Stirling's picturesque description.
"The august figure of the Saviour, arrayed in a red robe, occupies the centre of the canvass; the head, with its long dark locks, is superb; and the noble and beautiful countenance seems to mourn for the madness of them who 'knew not what they did;' his right arm is folded on his bosom, seemingly unconscious of the rope which encircles his wrist, and is violently dragged downwards by two executioners in front. Around and behind him appears a throng of priests and warriors, amongst whom the Greek himself figures as the centurion, in black armour. In drawing and composition, this picture is truly admirable, and the colouring is, on the whole, rich and effective—although it is here and there laid on in that spotted streaky manner, which afterwards became the great and prominent defect of El Greco's style."