Part 14
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.
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.
RIBERA
Ribera, though born near Valencia, where he received his early education in the painter’s art in the studio of Ribalta, was still young in years when he left his native land for Italy, never to return. Studying and working at Rome, Parma, and Naples, he was so strongly influenced by Caravaggio, and to a minor extent by Correggio, that, taking also into account his long domicile, there is some justification for those who treat him as belonging to the Italian school of Naturalists. The most prominent feature of his art is the violent and abrupt contrasting of brilliant lights with very deep and heavy shadows, which enforces the almost cruel dramatic intensity of his scenes of torture, convulsions, and suffering. In this use of chiaroscuro he was a true follower of Caravaggio, but Ribera, even where he is most Italian, never denies his Spanish nationality and the teaching of his first master.
Nowhere are his racial characteristics more pronounced than in the admirable character-study, in the La Caze Room, of a grinning beggar-boy who suffers from an infirmity from which the picture derives its popular name, _The Club-foot_ (No. 1725). The boy is standing in bold silhouette against a clouded sky. He shoulders his crutch like a gun, and carries in his left hand a sheet of paper with the inscription—DA MIHI ELEMOSINAM PROPTER AMOREM DEI.
If _The Club-foot_ is scarcely typical of the qualities that are generally associated with Ribera’s art, the Louvre owns two thoroughly characteristic examples of his more violent manner, of his dramatic use of sharply contrasted light and shade, in _The Entombment_ (No. 1722) and _St. Paul the Hermit_ (No. 1723), which bears on a stone the signature
JUSEPE DE RIBERA ESPAGNOL P.F.
In _The Entombment_ the master-hand is revealed by the superb breadth with which the limp yet weighty body of the Saviour is painted. It is not modelled in all its plastic roundness, but cut into sharp flat passages of light and shadow, the plastic relief being suggested by the perfection of the anatomical drawing and foreshortening. Poignant grief is expressed in the faces of St. Joseph of Arimathæa, the Virgin Mary, St. John, and Nicodemus, who surround the body, the head of which is supported by St. Joseph. The same subject is treated with less masterly authority in _The Entombment_ (No. 1725A), which can only be accepted as a school picture.
The ascetic fervour tinged with a sense almost of cruel pleasure in self-inflicted suffering, with which Ribera loved to invest his semi-nude figures of emaciated saints, hermits, and martyrs, will be found in the _St. Paul the Hermit_. The picture was bought in 1875 for £252.
Without loss of realistic power, and without affectation or conscious striving for prettiness, Ribera shows more human tenderness and gentle emotion in _The Adoration of the Shepherds_ (No. 1721), a picture signed and dated on a stone in the right-hand corner,
_Juse Ribera español Academico romano, F. 1650._
In accordance with the nature of the subject he has here refrained from making use of abrupt light and shade, the whole scene being enveloped in a warm glow. The types are not idealised, but are apparently faithful portraits of their respective models. Very similar to the central group in this canvas, but more sonorous in its depth of colour, from which gleam forth the strong lights, is the _Virgin and Child_ (No. 1724) in the La Caze Room. The four pictures of _Philosophers_ (Nos. 1726-1729), likewise in the La Caze Bequest, which the official Catalogue gives to Ribera, are certainly not by that master. It has been suggested that they may be the work of Ribera’s facile and versatile pupil, Luca Giordano (“Fa Presto”), but the poor quality of these paintings scarcely justifies even this attribution. They were formerly in the collection of General Mazzavedo.
Ribera had a romantic career, rising as he did from absolute penury to almost despotic power as a member of a triumvirate that would brook no competition in Naples and would shrink from no means to further their schemes. Nothing is known as to how he died. He disappeared in 1656, and probably found his death in the depths of the sea.
VELAZQUEZ
The Catalogue of the Louvre collection contains an imposing list of seven works by the king of Spanish painters. Critical examination of these pictures will, however, result in the elimination of all but two that figure in the list. Velazquez, who was destined to stamp his great personality on a whole generation of Spanish painters, but whose art was little known in Northern Europe previous to the Peninsular War, has exercised a paramount influence on modern art. He was born of noble descent at Seville in June 1599. Although originally destined for another profession, he showed such talent for art that he was allowed to enter the studio of Francisco Herrera, of whose realistic tendencies and rugged strength we have already had occasion to speak.
From his studio he passed into that of the cultured and erudite Francisco Pacheco, whose artistic achievement at its best was far in advance of his professed academic principles. Summoned to Madrid in 1623 by the powerful Count Duke of Olivarez, Velazquez entered the service of King Philip IV. Velazquez became his favourite Court Painter, received other important offices and emoluments, and after his return from his second visit to Italy in 1651—the first visit had taken place in 1629—he was appointed _Aposentador del Rey_, a post which approximately corresponds with that of Court-Marshal. He died on the 6th of August 1660, from the results of fatigue and overwork in supervising the arrangements for the betrothal of the Infanta Maria Teresa to Louis XIV. at the Palace on the Isle of Pheasants, at Irun.
With the exception of the early _bodegones_ of his student-years and a few rare excursions into the realm of religious and mythological composition, Velazquez’s life-work, as conditioned by the patronage of the king and the Court, was practically confined to portraiture. His unrivalled greatness in this sphere is due to the perfect clearness of his vision, which made him grasp the person or scene before his eyes at a single glance, and transpose his impression to canvas with undisturbed directness and completeness, and with an apparent disregard of the means of expression. There is dignity and soberness in all his portraits; perfect spacing; noble, firm contour; complete unity of all the parts produced by the sense of ambient atmosphere. And never is there the slightest hint of trick of hand, or mannerism, or painting by recipe. Each picture is the result of close observation, recorded with admirable directness and honesty. This supreme master of the painter’s technique seemed to pay no attention to technique—or, at least, the result is invariably so significant and so absorbingly interesting that the spectator, unless he approaches the picture with deliberate intention to probe its secret, never thinks of the technical means by which life so convincing has been breathed on to the canvas.
[Illustration: PLATE XXV.—VELAZQUEZ
(1599-1660)
SPANISH SCHOOL
No. 1731.—PORTRAIT OF THE INFANTA MARGARITA
(Portrait de l’infante Margarita Maria)
The Infanta, who appears to be about four years of age, is wearing a white robe embroidered with black. She is seen standing at half length, her right hand on the arm of a chair.
Painted in oil on canvas.
Inscribed:—“LINFANTE MARGUERITE.”
2 ft. 3¾ in. × 1 ft. 11½ in. (0·70 × 0·59.)]
THE INFANTA
In the Louvre collection there is but one picture from which it is possible to judge the greatness of Velazquez’s art. That picture is the deservedly famous and often-copied portrait of the little _Infanta Margarita_ (No. 1731, Plate XXV.), which has rightly been placed in the Salon Carré among the proudest possessions which the Gallery can boast. The little princess, who was born in 1651, the first child of Mariana of Austria, is here depicted at the age of about four, so that the date of the portrait may safely be assumed to be about the year 1655, and not 1659, as suggested by M. Lafenestre. She is dressed in a white robe with black lace trimmings. A pink ribbon is tied on her right side to her soft light golden hair, which falls in curls to her shoulders; her right hand rests upon a chair, whilst the left, the fingers of which have been repainted owing to the addition of a narrow strip of canvas at the bottom, holds a flower. On the top the words LINFANTE MARGVERITE are painted in heavy block letters across the whole width of the canvas. This picture, in which childlike ingenuousness is so happily blended with quaint dignity, and in which even the forbidding ugliness of the dress of the period cannot destroy the little princess’s grace and doll-like charm, Velazquez has surely left to the world one of the most entrancing portraits of lovable childhood that is to be found in the whole history of art.
MARIANA OF AUSTRIA
The other unquestionably authentic work by the master at the Louvre is to be found in the La Caze Bequest. It is catalogued as _Portrait of the Infanta Maria Teresa, afterwards Queen of France_ (No. 1735), but is in reality a portrait of _Queen Mariana of Austria_, the mother of the Infanta Margarita Maria. Mariana was married to Philip IV. as his second wife in 1649, at the age of fourteen. Velazquez was at that time in Italy, so that the duty of painting her first portrait for the royal bridegroom fell to the Court Painter’s son-in-law and chief pupil, Juan Bautista del Mazo (1610-1667).
The portrait at the Louvre was, if we may judge from the apparent age of the child-queen as she is here represented, painted in 1651, when Velazquez had returned from his second Italian journey and when Mariana was sixteen years of age. It was probably a preliminary study from life for the larger portrait in the Vienna Gallery. This admirable portrait is another artistic triumph over unfavourable conditions imposed by the hideousness of contemporary female attire, although the forehead has been spoilt by clumsy repainting. The coiffure in particular, a cascade of false hair, bows, jewels, and feathers, is more suggestive of some exotic idol or fetish than of a human being. In 1863, before the judgment of a tasteless age, which gave Velazquez a position far below the then absurdly overrated Murillo, was revised, this portrait of Mariana appeared at the Viardot sale and failed to realise more than £200!
COPIES AND SCHOOL PICTURES
Two other portraits in the La Caze Room are attributed to Velazquez. One of these, a _Portrait of Philip IV._ (No. 1733) at the age of about fifty, is unquestionably a wholly uninspired and fairly modern copy of the head in the Prado (No. 1080). The other, a _Portrait of a Young Woman_ (No. 1736), is an extremely feeble imitation of the superficial aspect of Velazquez’s manner—so bad in drawing, especially in the attachment of the nose to the face, that it is difficult to accept Señor Beruete’s attribution of this picture to Juan Carreño de Miranda (1614-1685), an able painter of the Madrid school. M. Henri Rodolphe Elissa, who exposed the “Tiara of Saitaphernes” forgery, has asserted that he can prove both the _Philip IV._ and the _Young Woman_ to be the work of the Spanish painter Escosura, who died in the last decade of the nineteenth century. There appears to be no reason to doubt his assertion. The head of Philip, more than the other picture, appears to be nineteenth-century work.
The _Portrait of Philip IV., King of Spain, in Hunting Costume_ (No. 1732), with a gun in his right hand and a dog sitting by his side, in a landscape background, is only a contemporary copy of a very similar picture in the Prado, to which it is vastly inferior in execution. It is true that in the Prado picture the king’s hat is on his head, whilst in the Louvre version, which is probably by Mazo, he carries it in his left hand. It is, however, possible to detect in the Prado portrait clear evidence of a pentimento, from which it can be seen that here, too, the hat was originally in the same position as in the Louvre canvas. Presumably Velazquez subsequently made the alteration; but the copy was executed at an earlier date.
THE “MEETING OF THIRTEEN PEOPLE”
There have been great divergences of opinion concerning the strange little painting representing a _Meeting of Thirteen People_ (No. 1734) on a hill. It was formerly known as _A Meeting of Artists_, because two of the Spanish cavaliers depicted in the group were believed to represent Velazquez and Murillo. Lauded at first as one of Velazquez’s masterpieces by those who were carried away by the truly extraordinary beauty of the pearly, opalescent colour harmony and the atmospheric quality of the painting, the little picture has lately been as violently abused for its “poor design, weak execution, and commonplace arrangement.” As a matter of fact the arrangement is anything but commonplace, and the picture has great qualities of technique which will always be the delight of professional artists. It is moreover admirably varied in gesture and action, even if it has certain weaknesses which render impossible its unqualified attribution to Velazquez. Here we have clearly an excellent example of his son-in-law and imitator, J. B. del Mazo. If any proof were needed for this attribution, it will be found in the figure on the extreme left of the composition. Both his legs are slanting forward so much that his centre of gravity plumbs behind his heels. It would really be impossible to maintain this posture, which, though it offends against the laws of gravity, is to be found in quite a number of Mazo’s pictures, as, for instance, in the small figure of Olivarez (?) in the middle distance on the right in the Duke of Westminster’s _Don Baltazar Carlos in the Riding School_, in the portrait of _Don Baltazar Carlos_ at The Hague, and in the second boy in _The Family of Mazo_ at the Vienna Gallery.
The soundly painted _Portrait of Don Pedro de Altamira, Doyen of the Chapel Royal at Toledo, afterwards Cardinal_ (No. 1737), inscribed on the background “ÆT 54 DV, 1633,” is a good character-study of an energetic and rather worldly-looking Church dignitary, but does not appear to be either by Velazquez or one of his immediate followers.
There is in the Spanish section of the Louvre another superbly painted, but very problematic, _Head of a Man_ (No. 1747), which, on no more plausible grounds than an accidental likeness to one of the figures in _The Forge of Vulcan_, has by some critics been believed to be by Velazquez. The rich impasto and the careful finish of the painting are utterly unlike Velazquez’s manner; nor does the picture appear to be of his period. But whoever may be its author, it is one of the most remarkable paintings in this section of the Louvre.
MURILLO