A Spain Without a Renaissance
Despite painters and writers such as El Greco, Velazquez, Cervantes and Calderon de la Barca, Spain never had a Renaissance movement in the broad sense of the Italian Renaissance. The wealth Spain gained from her geographic voyages only adorned her Christian civilization, and gave stirring rewards to the genius of her native artists in letters and art; but it never led Spain, as it did Italy and France, to show zeal and effort in reviving that pagan civilization which had adorned the Mediterranean world before and after the birth of Christ, or which had produced in its lap such figures as Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian, Trajan and Hadrian. In truth, the memory of the classical age was heavily burdened by the long struggle of Spanish Christianity against the Moors; all glorious memories were children of that late victory, and so faith in Christianity, which had made the victory possible, remained inseparable from them.
While in other European countries the state was trampling religion under its control, in Spain the church organization grew stronger with every generation, until it could question or ignore the power of the popes even in that age when Spaniards themselves ruled the Vatican. This firm church organization also withstood the pious despotism of Ferdinand, Charles V and Philip II, and then itself came to dominate every aspect of Spanish life. In Spain the Church was almost the sole patron and encourager of all the arts; it set the tunes, named the themes, and put art, like philosophy, into the service of religion. The Spanish Inquisition appointed officers to drive nudity, shamelessness, heresy and impiety from the realm of art and, in return, to prescribe how religious scenes and themes should be shown in sculpture and painting, and to direct Spanish art toward strengthening the foundations and spreading the principles of religion.
The Italian Current
All the same, Italian artistic influence flowed toward Spain. Spain's grip on the papal government, the conquest of Naples by the kings of Spain, the military and political and religious missions of Spaniards in Italy, the lively trade between Spanish and Italian ports, the journeys of Spanish artists such as Damian Forment and the Berruguetes to Italy, and the coming of Italian artists such as Pietro Torrigiano and Leone Leoni to Spain: all these affected the method, decoration and style of Spanish art, though not its spirit and subject; and this more in painting than sculpture, and least of all in architecture. Cathedrals dominated landscapes and cities, as religion dominated life.
Cathedrals and the Plateresque
Travel in Spain was nothing but a pilgrimage from one of these magnificent places of worship to another. The awe-inspiring size, the richness of the interior decoration, the half-lit silence of the naves and the closely packed stonecarving of the porches made the simplicity and poverty of neighboring houses more striking. The tile-roofed, charming houses lay at the feet of those shrines and looked up to them with eager eyes, as to the promise of a better world. The Gothic style still ruled the building of the giant cathedrals begun at Salamanca (1513) and Segovia (1522); but at Granada, Diego de Siloe, son of a Gothic sculptor, built a cathedral whose interior he decorated with classical columns and capitals, adding a classical dome to the original Gothic plan (1525). The Italian Renaissance manner in the palace of Charles V at Granada pushed aside the Gothic style entirely and took its place. Charles reproached the bishop of Cordoba for spoiling the composition of the great mosque of that city by building a Christian church amid its 580 columns (the book's number); but he himself committed an equally painful offense when he pulled down some of the halls and courtyards of the Alhambra to make room for his new building, whose gloomy mass and heavy symmetry might have looked ordinary among similar buildings in Rome, but beside the fragile delicacy and cheerful variety of that Moorish palace seemed badly out of harmony.
The Moorish decorative tradition appeared, in a way, in the civic architecture of the period, known as the "Plateresque" style. The name comes from the fact that this style much resembled the fine, intricate ornament that silversmiths (in Spanish, platero) used abundantly on plates of gold and silver and other objects. In this style, above and at the sides of decorated doorways and windows, intertwined arabesques were made in stone; columns were decorated in the Moorish manner with fluting, scrolls, flowers and foliage in a dreamlike way; and grilles and openwork screens were made with marble leafwork and lichens. The Bishop's Chapel in Madrid, the church of Santo Tomas at Avila and the choir of Cordoba Cathedral were built in this style, and it spread its influence freely to the "Town Hall" of Seville (1526). Portugal borrowed the style and used it in the magnificent doorway of the monastery of Santa Maria at Belem, crammed with fine detail and columns carved with ornament (1517). Charles V brought the Plateresque to the Low Countries and Germany, where its fingerprints remain on the town halls of Antwerp and Leyden and on Heidelberg castle. Philip II found it too heavy with gold and ornament, and under his angry gaze the style died an early death.
Sculptors: Torrigiano, Forment, Berruguete
Spanish sculpture yielded more easily than Spanish architecture to the swollen wave from Italy. Pietro Torrigiano, after his quarrels in Florence and London, took refuge in Seville (1521) and made in terracotta a misshapen Saint Jerome which Francisco Goya, with an unjust judgment, called the finest specimen of modern sculpture. When Torrigiano was paid a small fee for a statue of the Virgin he had made, the artist fell into a rage and broke it, was arrested by the Inquisition, and died in prison, as the story goes.
Damian Forment, who returned from Italy to Aragon, had brought the Renaissance spirit home in the point of his chisel and among his boasts. He called himself a rival of Phidias and Praxiteles, and was accepted at that rank among the people. The church authorities allowed him to carve his portrait and his wife's in the paneled back of an altarpiece he made for the monastery of Monte Aragon. In the altarpiece of plaster-marble for the church of Nuestra Senora del Pilar at Saragossa he designed a relief that mingled Gothic with Renaissance, painting with sculpture, and color with form. Forment spent the thirteen remaining years of his life (1520-1533) building the altarpiece of Huesca Cathedral.
As Pedro Berruguete had ruled Spanish painting half a century before Charles V, his son became the leader of the sculptors of his age. Alonso learned the art of color from his father, then went to Italy and worked in painting with Raphael and in sculpture with Bramante and Michelangelo. When he returned to Spain (1520) he brought with him Michelangelo's tendency to depict figures in states of excitement and violent movement. Charles appointed him court sculptor and painter. At Valladolid for six years he was occupied carving the retable of the church of San Benito el Real. The frame was thirteen and a half by nine meters; today only fragments survive, the most important showing in striking colors Saint Sebastian with blood flowing from his wounds. In 1535 he joined his great rival Felipe de Borgona to carve together the wooden choir stalls of Toledo Cathedral. Here too Michelangelo's style set his hand racing and left the first sign of the dawn of the baroque in Spain. Nearing eighty, he received a commission to raise a monument in the Hospital of San Juan at Toledo in honor of its founder, Cardinal Juan de Tavera. He took his son, also named Alonso, as helper and produced one of the masterpieces of Spanish sculpture, and in the same period died at seventy-five (1561).
Painting: Luis de Morales
Spanish painting, still under the rule of Italy and Flanders, produced no outstanding master in the reign of Charles V. The emperor favored foreign painters and invited Antonis Mor to Spain to paint portraits of the country's notables; and as for himself, he declared that he would let no one but Titian put his likeness on canvas. The only painter of the time whose fame passed beyond Spain was Luis de Morales. The first fifty years of this artist's life passed in poverty and obscurity in Badajoz, as he made his living painting in the churches and chapels of Extremadura. He was fifty-four when Philip II called him to court to paint in the Escorial (1564).
Luis de Morales came into the king's presence in splendid clothes, which at first seemed to the king an improper act on the artist's part; but when he learned that the poor painter had saved all his life to be received one day in proper dress before His Majesty, he was touched. Morales's Christ Carrying the Cross did not please the royal taste, and the painter returned to Badajoz and poverty. A number of his paintings are in the Spanish Society museum in New York, all of them charming; but the best example of his work is the Virgin and Child in the Prado, which carries a little too much of the perfume of Raphael. Philip, passing through Badajoz in 1581, set a belated pension for the artist, and with this income, in bodily weakness and with failing eyes, he lived the five remaining years of his life with a full stomach.
The Crafts
Spanish craftsmen were often artists in every respect except for having a famous name. Spanish lace and leather were without rival in all Europe, and its carpenters had no superiors, so that Theophile Gautier believed Gothic art had nowhere come so close to perfection as in the wooden choir stalls of Toledo Cathedral. Metalworkers brought taste and skill to the metal screens of chapels, window grilles, balcony railings, door hinges and even nails, and made works of art. Goldsmiths and silversmiths turned part of the gold imported from America into ornaments for princes or vessels for the church; their filigree vessels of silver or gold for keeping the sacred bread in particular won world fame. Gil Vicente, not content with the title of greatest dramatist of Portugal and Spain, made a vessel for presenting the sacred bread to the congregation, which was later known as "the masterpiece of the goldsmith's art in Portugal." Francisco de Holanda, who despite his name was a Portuguese, kept the dying art of illumination alive with perfect skill.
An Age of Disorder
On the whole this period of less than half a century, despite the waste and scattering of energies caused by religious revolution, was important and creditable for the prosperity of art. The masters of architecture, sculpture and painting could hardly measure themselves against the giant figures who were shaking all Europe with theology. In truth religion was the tune of the age, and art could only be a secondary note in its train. Yet Rosso, Primaticcio, Lescot, Delorme, Goujon and the Clouets in France, the Berruguetes in Spain, Bruegel in Flanders, Cranach in Germany, and Holbein everywhere formed a list of artists' names very honorable for so turbulent and short-lived an age.
The essence of art lies in order, but then everything was in disorder, not only religion but morals, the social system, and even art itself. Gothic was in its last struggle with the forms of classical art, which was to end in the final defeat of Gothic; and the artist, cut off from the roots of his past, had no choice but to try new experiments; but that could not give him the grandeur gained in the stability fixed in mortar by an age of safety and assurance. In that general chaos, faith too had fallen into doubt and no longer had the power to impose its clear, definite decrees on art. Religious images were attacked and smashed; consecrated themes, which had always inspired creators and beholders of true beauty, lost their influence and effect in stirring genius, admiration or religious faith. And in science the greatest of all revolutions was that the earth was pulled down from its divine throne and made to wander as a small sphere in infinite void, the very sphere whose visit by the Creator had given shape to medieval thought and firmness to medieval art. When, then, would stability return to human society?