Even to an ordinary observer it is plain that the old cathedral is well endowed with pictures. The pure olive-faced Madonna, over the nearest and most popular altar, is said to be Murillo's; it may be Velasquez's. She is a mild, meek lady, with a boy in her lap, veritably human in feature. Out of the rich shade of a great old artist's mood cherubs seem to swarm upon them. In the fine gloom of Vespers, when only the face of the Madonna is seen, the religious mildness of this picture is especially venerable. Other altars have many curiosities, more or less associated with art. There is at one a Man of Sorrow, sitting and leaning in wretched plight; at another, a sallow and agonized Redeemer on the cross; and painted statues and crucifixes only less realistic and distressful than these are common throughout the church. The ghostly figure of what may be a dead saint is laid out in wax, as upon a bed, at one shrine, and elsewhere what seems to be a dead Redeemer is altared in a glass case. In the chapel the artistic character of the cathedral is repeated, save that its high altar-columns, its cross-bearing angel, its splendidly-rayed apotheosis of the Blessed Virgin, its statues of Moses and John the Baptist, have a more modern workmanship. The Madonna, in lady-like wax, with a crown upon her head, and holding daintily a babe in her arms, is the principal figure of one of the auxiliary shrines, though not the best specimen of an art in which Mexicans excel, and which, as represented in a black-robed figure of the Mother of Sorrows, is sometimes admirable and religiously effective. These instances, though but a few of the numberless curiosities of wood and wax amid which the painters have found their abiding home, will serve to illustrate the very mixed artistic complexion of the Mexican cathedral. The statues and paintings are of all sorts, colors, and styles. But the shadowy picture of a sad, nunlike face of Our Lady of Sorrows; the quaint-hooded countenance of the Blessed Virgin, apparently wrought in tapestry of the middle ages; or that of our Lord, after he had been scourged, plainly apprise us that the sincerity of art, first consecrated by the church, has become a part of its own consecration. These are sacred pictures, truly. Weary and wretched, his head bound with thorns, our Lord leans in agonized contemplation, while an apostle looks up to him in tears. The elements of this exquisite painting are gloom and pathos developed out of Murillo-like colors and shadows. Another painting, equally reverend, pursues the same theme and mood. To whose genius do we owe them? Perhaps to Velasquez, of whose works the church, it is said, possesses a noble number; perhaps to Cabrera. Who shall decide? One of the fathers or cathedraticos might tell us, but which father and which professor? The condition of topsy-turvy succeeding a revolution is not favorable to the pursuit or the memory of art; and, as we have hinted, the proper rediscovery of Mexican art must be a matter of unselfish and laborious search. Mexico does not, perhaps, even yet know its proper historian.
Yet some thing we do know of Cabrera. The fine head of St. Peter, pointed out to the writer by a padre of San Hypolito, is by him. One of three immense canvases in the sacristy of the cathedral is also his surprising handiwork. It is a pictorial homage to the Pope, wherein the successor of St. Peter, gray and grave, sits on the topmost seat of a ponderous car of triumph, which is pushed by giants of the faith led by heroes and saints. What seems to be the genius of history has a seat in the van, and disporting cherubs hover on flank and rear, while the aged Pope is being ministered to or counselled by a saint or apostle. This picture, perhaps the largest, though not necessarily the best, painted by Cabrera, is very remarkable for its vigor and variety of form. The other great canvases are by Xuarez and Ximenez, both Mexican painters of genius. One represents the victory of Michael celebrated by the angelic powers; the theme of the other appears to be the reception of the Holy Lady in heaven. Pictures of this extensive character are certainly calculated to display the energy of artists, but not always to develop the highest expression of religion. There can be no question of the vigor of these paintings, especially of Cabrera's; but probably we shall have to seek among smaller canvases and less complicated subjects the true masterpieces of Cabrera, Xuarez, and Ximenez. Some years ago they might have been found in the Convent of La Profesa or of St. Dominic, or, perhaps, in the Academy of San Carlos; but where are they now? That academy, once, doubtless, the finest of its kind in America, and still among the best, does contain, it is true, some master paintings by Xuarez, Rodriguez, Joachim, Ludovicus, bearing date after the close of the sixteenth century; but these do not give us assurance of being the best examples of what was done about Cabrera's time. The walls of San Carlos, we may remark in passing, contain a very large, melodramatic descent from the cross by Baltasar de Chaue, and a beautiful Shepherd Boy, by Ingies, whose simplicity recalls the fact that the Lute Player, one of the few genuine Murillos said to be in the country, is in the possession of a Mexican club.
But what of Cabrera? Alas! that the walls of San Carlos should tell us little or nothing; that the padre who guides us through La Profesa knows about as much! The poor muse of painting has been a good-for-nothing these many years, a wretched Cinderella sitting at a ruined hearthstone, or, rather, sweeping up the rubbish in the corridors of confiscated and despoiled convents. La Profesa, however, is an asylum of art. As it now stands, it is a fine old church, whose rigid and antiquated countenance many a praying Mexican woman knows for that of a mother. Nothing of its ample, simple, sturdy architecture has crumbled in the last two centuries. Its plateresco—the "frolic fancy" which sixteenth-century art put upon the front of churches, and of which the façade of the cathedral presents an immense example, entangling cherubs and bewildering saints in the ingenuity of its small sculptures—still remains intact. The apostles are in their niches, and "Nuestro Señor" is invoked in a text cut on the outside walls. Not many years ago, La Profesa was not merely a church, but, as its name indicates, a house for religious women, and that, too, one of the richest and most extensive in Mexico. Many courts, many corridors and fountains, and some pleasant gardens, with eaves-haunting birds to remind one of St. Francis's gossips, the sparrows, were no doubt among the possessions of this convent as of other convents in the capital, from whose now deserted walks and cells one may hear the flow of fountains and the song of birds. But a few corridors of the many that belonged to the house have been left to the church out of a general ruin made necessary for the cutting of a wide street through what was once a vast building or number of buildings. These corridors and the church itself were in 1868 visited by the writer in company with a courteous young padre, but he could learn comparatively little of the unmistakable riches of art deposited there. Who painted the superb heads of the apostles framed in an altar near the sacristy? Cabrera or Velasquez? The padre did not know. As we entered the first of the wide, heavy stone corridors, two old men, looking like pensioners, were saying their prayers aloud before a shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We stood opposite a mammoth scene of the crucifixion, wherein Christ and the thieves are most painfully individualized on the gloom of Calvary. Age and neglect had seemingly eclipsed the larger portion of this canvas, and left no shade of the painter's identity in the mind of our student of the cloister. In another ill-lighted corridor were paintings by Cabrera, Xuarez, Ximenez, Joachim, Correa, Rodriguez, and some others, all Mexicans, it is said, and evidently men of decided gifts. Here was a picture by Xuarez of the Saviour in apparition among the apostles—a presentment in tenderest and most luminous colors of ethereal gentleness. The finest picture in the gallery, entitled St. Luke, might have been by a pupil of Murillo, but really the padre could not tell. Another corridor more neglected than the rest seemed to be a very charnel-room for art—a place for the rags and lumber of unhung, undusted, unrestored pictures. The distracted church has been a sorry sexton for its dead painters. After all, the best efforts are not certain of immunity from the outrages of time and ignorance. Well enough if the great unseen critic applauds.
Nowadays the common visitor to La Profesa searches not at all for Cabrera, but looks at a dome brilliantly painted with scenes from the life of the Saviour by the Spanish Mexican Clavel. Except the dome of Santa Teresa's by Cordero, there is perhaps nothing of the kind, at least in the three principal cities of Mexico, to compare with Clavel's work. Cordero, whose picture of Columbus at court received all the honors of an exhibition in the palace of Prince Poniatowski at Florence, and who has received high encomiums from his brother artists in Italy, is by some regarded the best of existing Mexican artists. Like the two Coras, who, with Tolsa, appear to be the most noted of the sculptors of Mexico, Cordero is a native of the country. To Jose Villegas Coras, who was born in 1713, the city of Puebla owes those statues of our Lord and Our Lady, which one of his admirers declares have a sublimity of expression and a grace in details not easy to find in the best schools of Europe. Jose Zocarias Coras, his nephew, was less an idealist, says his critic, but more faithful to nature, and is distinguished by his sculptures of the "Crucified," in which are exhibited a profound agony. The two statues which crown the towers of the cathedral are also the work of the younger Coras, who died in 1819, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. The work of these men was ill-requited, like so much else in Mexican life and industry. The writer is not able to speak of them upon personal or from a very common knowledge of their sculptures; but it is well to note them here as artists who are thought worthy of a place in that scarce and not too steady literature, Mexican biography. It may serve others who visit Mexico to know that, in the latest phase of art at the capital, Clavel, Rebull, Cordero, and the sculptor Islas, with some others, have distinguished themselves.
Let us now speak freely of Cabrera, the father and master of Mexican art—of him whose pictures are at once so numerous and so scarce, whose fame is so well-founded, yet of whose life so little is known. The first important fact in his biography is, that, like the greatest ruler which the country has produced, its greatest artist was an Indian—a Zapotec Indian, too, from the native country of Benito Juarez, Oaxoca. The next is that, under the patronage of the Archbishop Salinas, he painted those many admirable pieces which are the reproachful glory of his country. According to a modern Mexican writer, Señor Orozco, works of Cabrera may be found in the churches of Mexico and Puebla especially, and in the convents of San Domingo and La Profesa, but we have seen under what circumstances. His masterpieces, if we may credit the intelligent opinion reported by Señor Orozco, are contained in the sacristy of the church at Tasco, where a whole life of the Blessed Virgin is portrayed, the scene of the Nativity being distinguished by its light and freshness of color. The same writer assures us that Cabrera wrote a treatise on the celebrated picture given to the Indian Juan Diego during the Marvellous Apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and in it he concurs with other painters of his day in affirming that the miraculous painting, which he had examined carefully in the light of art, is not the work of human hands. This is the judgment of an Indian artist respecting a wonderful revelation made to one of his race, and, however it may be viewed by those who discredit all supernaturalism of a later date than eighteen hundred years ago, gives the stamp of conviction to the faith of Guadalupe. What the opinion of Cabrera was worth in a question of art, what the artist himself should be worth in the estimation of mankind, is signified to us in the following extraordinary notice of his genius by Count Beltrani, an Italian traveller:
"Some pictures of Cabrera are called American wonders, and all are of eminent merit. The life of St. Dominic, painted by him in the cloister of the convent of that name; the life of St. Ignatius, and the history of the man degraded by mortal sin and regenerated by religion and virtue, in the cloister of La Profesa, present two galleries which in nothing yield to the cloister of Santa Maria la Nueva di Florencia, and the Campo Santo of Pisa. I hazard even saying that Cabrera alone, in these two cloisters, is worth all the artists joined who have painted the two magnificent Italian galleries. Cabrera possesses the outlines of Correggio, the animation of Domenichino, and the pathos of Murillo. His episodes—as the 'Angels,' etc.—are of rare beauty. In my conception, he is a great painter. He was, moreover, an architect and sculptor; in fine, the Michael Angelo of Mexico."
What say our American pilgrims to Italy of this report of an Italian pilgrim in America? Here, then, was an Indian Michael Angelo of whom few artists of the New World know anything whatever. We need not strain an objection that Count Beltrani's dictum may be an exaggeration, for there are not many travellers who care to praise Mexico, and very few to overpraise her—at least, in respect to art. The fact remains that the country which gave birth to Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, perhaps the most remarkable character in all American letters, also had for its native the greatest painter of the New World, and one of the most singularly meritorious in an age when great painters were numerous. In judging of Cabrera, we must fairly consider the time, the place, the elements in which he wrought; for schools, masters, models, emulation, royal encouragement, and proper recompense and fame were all denied to him, in a greater or less degree. Cloistered as a great artist must necessarily be at any time, he would have felt, perhaps, especially abandoned in far-off Mexico in the sixteenth century. That Cabrera did suffer this abandonment the facts of his life attest. Yet, to speak a literal truth, Cabrera has no biography. It is not known when he was born or when he died, and, says a Mexican writer, "we only know that he lived in the eighteenth century by the dates of his paintings." Alas! for fame; alas! for genius!—and this, too, in the eighteenth century! We know more of Shakespeare, more of Lopé, more of Sor Juana, more of Alarcon—he, too, was born in Mexico, yet we know his birthday—than of Cabrera, who could not have died more than a hundred and twenty-five years ago, and respecting whom it was said: "There is hardly a church of the republic which does not contain some work of his distinguished pencil." Alas! for work and worth! How much of all this may have perished or vanished beneath the storms of the last fifty miserable years of Mexican life, overridden by swaggering pronouncers, stolen by intervening robbers, the torch of genius extinguished in the dust raised by defiant nobodies. Yet Cabrera survives, as few artists can, a veritable wreck of matter. Happily for him, it may be, his only biography is in his works; and they are full of life, and of life better than his own, yet in some respects received into it—lives of saints, apostles, angels, the Blessed Virgin, and the Divine Redeemer. Let these speak for his life to men, and commend his work to the unseen Master.
"THE SERIOUS, TOO, HAVE THEIR 'VIVE LA BAGATELLE.'"
Gay world! You may write on my heart what you will
If your laugh-shaken fingers but trace
The dream, or the jest, with that fairylike quill
That ciphers the wood-sorrel's vase!