Summoned from the cathedral to the court, El Greco painted, by royal command, a large altar-piece, for the church at the Escurial, on the martyrdom of St Maurice; "little less extravagant and atrocious," says our lively author, "than the massacre it recorded." Neither king nor court painters could praise this performance, and the effect of his failure at the Escurial appears to have been his return to Toledo. Here, in 1584, he painted, by order of the Archbishop Quiroga, "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz," a picture then and now esteemed as his master-piece, and still to be seen in the church of Santo Tomé. Warm is the encomium, and eloquently expressed, which Mr Stirling bestows upon this gem of Toledan art. "The artist, or lover of art, who has once beheld it, will never, as he rambles among the winding streets of the ancient city, pass the pretty brick belfry of that church—full of horse-shoe niches and Moorish reticulations,—without turning aside to gaze upon its superb picture once more. It hangs to your left, on the wall opposite to the high altar. Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz, head of a house famous in romance, rebuilt the fabric of the church, and was in all respects so religious and gracious a grandee, that, when he was buried in 1323, within these very walls, St Stephen and St Augustine came down from heaven, and laid his body in the tomb with their own holy hands—an incident which forms the subject of the picture. St Stephen, a dark-haired youth of noble countenance, and St Augustine, a hoary old man wearing a mitre, both of them arrayed in rich pontifical vestments of golden tissue, support the dead Count in their arms, and gently lower him into the grave, shrouded like a baron of Roslin 'in his iron panoply.' Nothing can be finer than the execution and the contrast of these three heads; never was the image of the peaceful death of 'the just man' more happily conveyed, than in the placid face and powerless form of the warrior: nor did Giorgione or Titian ever excel the splendid colouring of his black armour, rich with gold damascening. To the right of the picture, behind St Stephen, kneels a fair boy in a dark dress, perhaps the son of the Count; beyond rises the stately form of a gray friar; to the left, near St Augustine, stand two priests in gorgeous vestments, holding, the one a book, and the other a taper. Behind this principal group appear the noble company of mourners, hidalgos and old Christians all, with olive faces and beards of formal cut, looking on with true Castilian gravity and phlegm, as if the transaction were an every-day occurrence. As they were mostly portraits, perhaps some of the originals did actually stand, a few years later, with the like awe in their hearts and calm on their cheeks, in the royal presence-chamber, when the news came to court that the proud Armada of Spain had been vanquished by the galleys of Howard, and cast away on the rocks of the Hebrides." We make no apology for thus freely quoting from Mr Stirling's pages his description of this picture; the extract brings vividly before our readers at once the merits of the old Toledan painter, and his accomplished biographer and critic. After embellishing his adopted city, not only with pictures such as this, but with works of sculpture and architecture, and vindicating his graceful profession from the unsparing exactions of the tax-gatherers—a class who appear to have waged an unrelenting though intermittent war against the fine arts in Spain—he died there at a green old age in 1625, and was buried in the church of St Bartolemé. Even the painters most employed at the munificent and art-loving court of the second and third Philips, found time to paint for the venerable cathedral. Thus, in 1615, Vincencio Carducho, the Florentine, painted, with Eugenio Caxes, a series of frescoes in the chapel of the Sagrario; and thus Eugenio Caxes, leaving the works at the Pardo and Madrid, painted for the cathedral of Toledo the Adoration of the Magi, and other independent pictures.
Meanwhile the school of El Greco was producing worthy fruit; from it, in the infancy of the seventeenth century, came forth Luis Tristan, an artist even now almost unknown in London and Edinburgh, but whose style Velasquez did not disdain to imitate, and whose praises he was never tired of sounding. "Born, bred, and sped" in Toledo, or its neighbourhood, as Morales was emphatically the painter of Badajoz, so may Tristan be termed the painter of Toledo. No foreign graces, no classical models, adorned or vitiated his stern Spanish style; yet, in his portrait of Archbishop Sandoval, he is said by Mr Stirling to have united the elaborate execution of Sanchez Coello with much of the spirit of Titian. And of him is the pleasant story recorded, that having, while yet a stripling, painted for the Jeronymite convent at Toledo a Last Supper, for which he asked two hundred ducats, and being denied payment by the frugal friars, he appealed with them to the arbitration of his old master, El Greco, who, having viewed the picture, called the young painter a rogue and a novice, for asking only two for a painting worth five hundred ducats. In the same Toledan church that contains the ashes of his great master, lies the Murcian Pedro Orrente, called by our author "the Bassano, or the Roos—the great sheep and cattle master of Spain:" he too was employed by the art-encouraging chapter, and the cathedral possessed several of his finest pictures. But with Tristan and Orrente the glories of Toledan art paled and waned; and, trusting that our readers have not been uninterested in following our brief sketch of the remarkable men who for four hundred years rendered this quaint old Gothic city famous for its artistic splendours, we retrace our steps, halting and perplexed among so many pleasant ways, blooming flowers, and brilliant bowers, to the magnificent, albeit gloomy Escurial, where Philip II lavished the wealth of his mighty empire in calling forth the most vigorous energies of Spanish and of foreign art.
For more than thirty years did the astonished shepherds of the Guadaramas watch the mysterious pile growing under scaffolding alive with armies of workmen; and often, while the cares of the Old World and the New—to say nothing of that other World, which was seldom out of Philip's thoughts, and to which his cruel fanaticism hurried so many wretches before their time—might be supposed to demand his attention at Madrid, were they privileged to see their mighty monarch perched on a lofty ledge of rock, for hours, intently gazing upon the rising walls and towers which were to redeem his vow to St Laurence at the battle of Saint Quentin, and to hand down, through all Spanish time, the name and fame of the royal and religious founder. On the 23d of April 1563, the first stone of this Cyclopean palace was laid, under the direction of Bautiste di Toledo, at whose death, in 1567, the work was continued by Juan de Herrera, and finally perfected by Leoni (as to the interior decorations) in 1597. Built in the quaint unshapely form of St Laurence's gridiron, the Escurial is doubtless open to much severe criticism; but the marvellous grandeur, the stern beauty, and the characteristic effect of the gigantic pile, must for ever enchant the eyes of all beholders, who are not doomed by perverse fate to look through the green spectacles of gentle dulness. But it is not our purpose to describe the Escurial; we only wish to bring before our readers the names and merits of a few of the Spanish artists, who found among its gloomy corridors or sumptuous halls niches in the temple of fame, and in its saturnine founder the most gracious and munificent of patrons. Suffice it, then, to say of the palace-convent, in Mr Stirling's graceful words, that "Italy was ransacked for pictures and statues, models and designs; the mountains of Sicily and Sardinia for jaspers and agates; and every sierra of Spain furnished its contribution of marble. Madrid, Florence, and Milan supplied the sculptures of the altars; Guadalajara and Cuenca, gratings and balconies; Saragossa the gates of brass; Toledo and the Low Countries, lamps, candelabra, and bells; the New World, the finer woods; and the Indies, both East and West, the gold and gems of the custodia, and the five hundred reliquaries. The tapestries were wrought in Flemish looms; and, for the sacerdotal vestments, there was scarce a nunnery in the empire, from the rich and noble orders of Brabant and Lombardy to the poor sisterhoods of the Apulian highlands, but sent an offering of needlework to the honoured fathers of the Escurial."
We could wish to exclude from our paper all notice of the foreign artists, whose genius assisted in decorating the new wonder of the world; but how omit from any Escurialian or Philippian catalogue the names of Titian and Cellini, Cambiaso and Tibaldi? For seven long years did the great Venetian labour at his famous Last Supper, painted for, and placed in the refectory; and countless portraits by his fame-dealing pencil graced the halls and galleries of the Palatian convents. In addition to these, the Pardo boasted eleven of his portraits; among them, one of the hero Duke Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, who has received a second grant of renown—let us hope a more lasting one[17]—from the poetic chisel of Marochetti, and stands now in the great square of Turin, the very impersonation of chivalry, horse and hero alike—����������� �����������.
The magnificent Florentine contributed "the matchless marble crucifix behind the prior's seat in the choir," of which Mr Stirling says—"Never was marble shaped into a sublimer image of the great sacrifice for man's atonement." Luca Cambiaso, the Genoese, painted the Martyrdom of St Laurence for the high altar of the church—a picture that must have been regarded, from its subject and position, as the first of all the Escurial's religious pictures,—besides the vault of the choir, and two great frescoes for the grand staircase.
Pellegrino Tibaldi, a native of the Milanese, came at Philip's request to the Escurial in 1586. He, too, painted a Martyrdom of Saint Laurence for the high altar, but apparently with no better success than his immediate predecessor, Zuccaro, whose work his was to replace. But the ceiling of the library was Tibaldi's field of fame; on it he painted a fresco 194 feet long by 30 wide, which still speaks to his skill in composition and brilliancy in colouring. Philip rewarded him with a Milanese marquisate and one hundred thousand crowns.
Morales, the first great devotional painter of Castile, on whom his admiring countrymen bestowed the soubriquet of "divine"—with more propriety, it must be confessed, than their descendants have shown in conferring it upon Arguelles—contributed but one picture to the court, and none to the Escurial; but in Alonzo Sanchez Coello, born at Benifayrô, in Valencia, we find a famous native artist decorating the superb walls of the new palace. While at Madrid he was lodged in the Treasury, a building which communicated with the palace by a door, of which the King kept a key; and often would the royal Mæcenas slip thus, unobserved by the artist, into his studio. Emperors and popes, kings and queens, princes and princesses, were alike his friends and subjects; but we are now only concerned to relate that, in 1582, he painted "five altar-pieces for the Escurial, each containing a pair of saints." Far more of interest, however, attaches itself to the name and memory of Juan Fernandez Navarete, "whose genius was no less remarkable than his infirmities, and whose name—El Mudo, the dumb painter—is as familiar to Europe as his works are unknown," (vol. i. p. 250.) Born at Logroño in 1526, he went in his youth to Italy. Here he attracted the notice of Don Luis Manrique, grand-almoner to Philip, who procured him an invitation to Madrid. He was immediately set to work for the Escurial; and in 1571 four pictures, the Assumption of the Virgin, the Martyrdom of St James the Great, St Philip, and a Repenting St Jerome, were hung in the sacristy of the convent, and brought him five hundred ducats. In 1576 he painted, for the reception-hall of the convent, a large picture representing Abraham receiving the three Angels. "This picture," says Father Andres Ximenes, quoted by Mr Stirling, (vol. i. p. 255) "so appropriate to the place it fills, though the first of the master's works that usually meets the eye, might, for its excellence, be viewed the last, and is well worth coming many a league to see." An agreement, bearing date the same year, between the painter and the prior, by which the former covenanted to paint thirty-two large pictures for the side altars, is preserved by Cean Bermudez; but El Mudo unfortunately died when only eight of the series had been painted. On the 28th of March 1579 this excellent and remarkable painter died in the 53d year of his age. A few years later, Juan Gomez painted from a design of Tibaldi a large picture of St Ursula, which replaced one of Cambiaso's least satisfactory Escurialian performances.
While acres of wall and ceiling were being thus painted in fresco, or covered by large and fine pictures, the Escurial gave a ready home to the most minute of the fine arts: illuminators of missals, and painters of miniatures, embroiderers of vestments, and designers of altar-cloths, found their labours appreciated, and their genius called forth, no less than their more aspiring compeers. Fray Andrez de Leon, and Fray Martin de Palencia, enriched the Escurial with exquisite specimens of their skill in the arts of miniature-painting and illuminating; and under the direction of Fray Lorenzo di Monserrate, and Diego Rutiner, the conventual school of embroidery produced frontals and dalmatics, copes, chasubles, and altar-cloths, of rarest beauty and happiest designs. The goldsmiths and silversmiths, too, lacked not encouragement in this greatest of temples. Curious was the skill, and cunning the hand, which fashioned the tower of gold and jasper to contain the Escurial's holiest relique,—a muscle, singed and charred, of St Laurence—and no doubt that skill was nobly rewarded.
In 1598, clasping to his breast the veil of Our Lady of Monserrat, in a little alcove hard by the church of the Escurial, died its grim, magnificent founder. He had witnessed the completion of his gigantic designs: palace and convent, there it stood—a monument alike of his piety and his pride, and a proof of the grandeur and resources of the mighty empire over which he ruled. But he appears to have thought with the poet—
"Weighed in the balance, hero-dust
Is vile as mortal clay;"