The Spirit of Gothic Spain
Spanish architecture, with its persistent Gothic style, shows the medieval spirit well. People did not begrudge the coins that circulated, because those coins helped kings and nobles, in payment of a vow or in pursuit of a religious policy, build great cathedrals, statues and lavishly decorated paintings for their favorite saints and for the Virgin, who was worshipped with such fervor.
The cathedral of Barcelona rose slowly between 1298 and 1448: amid the bustle of small streets, its tall columns, its indistinct doorways and its majestic dome press their chests against the sky, and its cloisters, with their many fountains, still shelter the visitor from the toil and heat of the day. Valencia, Toledo, Burgos, Lérida, Tarragona, Saragossa and León enlarged or repaired and adorned their earlier temples, while at the same time new buildings were laid out in towns like Huesca and Pamplona. The cloister of Pamplona's church is built of white marble and carved with great delicacy, and stands beside the courts of the Alhambra.
Seville and Girona
In 1401 the chapter of Seville cathedral resolved to build a church "so great and beautiful that those who see it in future will think us mad to have built it." The builders demolished the mosque that stood on the site but left its foundations, its pavement and its splendid minaret, the Giralda. Through the whole fifteenth century stone was laid on stone until it became the largest Gothic building in the world; so large that, in Théophile Gautier's phrase, Notre-Dame of Paris could walk upright in its nave. In any case Notre-Dame is perfect, while Seville is vast. Sixty-seven sculptors and thirty-eight painters, from Murillo to Goya, labored to adorn this giant cave of gods.
About 1410 Guillermo Boffiy, a Spanish architect, proposed to the chapter of Girona cathedral that it remove the columns and arches dividing the interior into nave and side aisles and, by building a single vaulted chamber about twenty-two meters wide (the book's figure is garbled), place the walls beneath one roof. This was done, and Girona cathedral now has the widest Gothic vault in Christendom. It was a triumph for engineering and a defeat for art. In the fifteenth century other temples, less astonishing, were built at Perpignan, Manresa, Astorga and Valladolid. Segovia added to its glory in 1472 with a fortress-like cathedral; Sigüenza completed its famous cloister in 1507; Salamanca began a new cathedral in 1513.
In almost every important Spanish city except Madrid there were cathedrals whose exteriors were extraordinarily grand and impressive, and whose dark interiors, which let in little sunlight, drew frightened souls to devotion and piety; yet the bright colors of Spanish painting, the painted carvings, and the gleam of jewels, gold and silver gave them brilliance. These are the dwellings of the Spanish soul, which, for all its flights of pride, bowed in awe.
Palaces and Public Halls
Kings, nobles and cities still had enough money to build costly palaces. Pedro the Cruel, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Charles V rebuilt the Alcázar of Seville, laid out by a Moorish architect in 1181; its repeated rebuilding was done by Moors from Granada, so the palace may be called a half-sister of the Alhambra. Don Pedro Enríquez likewise built in Seville, in the same Saracenic manner, a splendid mansion for the dukes of Alcalá, the House of Pilate (from 1500 on), supposed to copy the house from whose porch Pilate delivered Christ to be crucified. In the great hall at Valencia a gilded chamber was founded for meetings of the local Cortes (1500) which in beauty rivals the great hall of the Doge's Palace in Venice.
Sculpture and Altarpieces
Sculpture was still the servant of architecture and religion, and Spain's churches were full of marble, metal, stone and wooden statues of the Virgin. Piety here took the form of fervent religious faces with ascetic features, which gained in intensity under layers of paint and the darkness and gloom of the naves. The decorated screens behind the altars, carved and painted lattices beyond the altar door, were the pride of Spanish art. Wealthy people, fearing death, left large sums in their wills to gather and keep skilled artisans: designers, carvers, "doradores" who gilded or set the surfaces of a statue or shrine, "estofadores" skilled at painting robes and ornaments, and "encarnadores" who specialized in coloring the bodies of statues in the tints of real flesh. These worked in turn or all together on the same piece.
Behind the main altar of Seville cathedral stands a screen of forty-five compartments that shows the legends and popular stories of Christianity in colored or gilded figures in Gothic style (1483–1519); and in the chapel of St. James at Toledo cathedral the life of Spain's most revered saint is carved in black pine in the same style, painted and gilded.
Tombs
Statues of princes and prelates were also made, but only on the stones of their tombs, which were usually placed in churches and monasteries, since the great regarded such places as the gateway of heaven. Thus Doña Mencía Enríquez, Duchess of Alburquerque, was laid in a tomb of exquisitely carved stone, now in the museum of the Hispanic Society in New York; and Pablo Ortiz made for Toledo cathedral a sumptuous, richly ornamented stone coffin for Don Álvaro de Luna and his wife. In the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores near Burgos, Gil de Siloé designed in the Italian manner a magnificent tomb for the queen's father and mother and brother.
Isabella was so pleased with these royal tombs that when her favorite young page, Juan de Padilla, whom she called "my fool" because he was so bold and reckless, was hit by an arrow in the head and died in the siege of Granada, she commissioned Gil de Siloé again to carve a tomb for him like those of kings, in which to lay the body; and Gil again created a work equal to the best Italian carving of the day.
Foreign Influences
No country's art is as distinctive as Spain's, and none has been so open to foreign influence. First must be mentioned the influence of Moorish art, long established in the peninsula but with roots in the art of Persia and Mesopotamia. Under the Moors came the delicacy of style and the strong love of decoration and fine detail that Spanish art gained, unlike the art of any other Christian country. In the delicate minor arts, where ornament and pattern held a high place, Spain imitated the Saracen masters and never went beyond imitation.
Pottery was wholly in the hands of the Mudéjars, whose only rival in glazed ware was the Chinese, and their colored tiles, especially blue ones, gave splendor to the ceilings, walls, floors, pools and altars of Christian Spain's buildings. The influence of Moorish style and mastery made Spanish fabrics such as velvet and silk lace among the most beautiful woven goods in Christendom. It showed in many fields: in Spanish leatherwork, in the arabesque style of metal grilles, in the vessel for the Eucharistic bread, in the wood carving of altar screens, in choir stalls, and in the arches.
Later influences came from Byzantine painting and then the painting of France, Burgundy, Holland and Germany. Spanish painting and sculpture took their astonishing realism from the Dutch and Germans: the Virgins of Spanish pictures are lean and so strikingly aged as to be believable mothers of the crucified Christ, quite the opposite of Michelangelo's claim that virginity prevents the decay of youth. In the sixteenth century all these influences faded before the triumph of the Italian style across Europe.
Painting
Spanish painting followed this development, but its growth was slow, perhaps because the Moorish artists in this field gave no help or guidance. The Catalan frescoes painted on plaster in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are inferior in design to the prehistoric paintings of the Altamira cave; yet in the fourteenth century the painting trade in Spain was brisk. Thousands of painters worked on great wall paintings and altar screens; some of these works, painted about 1345, have survived better than they deserve. In 1428 Jan van Eyck visited Spain and brought the Flemish school with him. Three years later the king of Aragon sent Luis Dalmau to Bruges to study. On his return Dalmau painted The Virgin of the Councillors, entirely Flemish in style. After that Spanish painters, though still preferring tempera, slowly began mixing their colors with oil.
The period of the pioneers of Spanish painting reached its peak with Bartolomé Bermejo (active until about 1498). He won early fame in 1447 (the book's date) with his painting of Santo Domingo, now hanging in a hall of the Prado. His Saint Engracia, which the Gardner Museum in Boston bought, and his Saint Michael, in Lady Ludlow's collection, almost match the works of Raphael, who appeared a generation later. But better than these two, and perhaps better than all of Bermejo's works, is the Pietà (1490) in Barcelona cathedral, in which Jerome, bald and bespectacled, and the Virgin, dark-faced like Spanish women, are painted with her limp, thin, wasted son in her arms. Behind them the towers and walls of Jerusalem sink into the sky, and at the right is a harsh portrait of Canon Desplà, with unkempt hair and unshaven beard, like a penitent but condemned pirate, which suggests "an ugly and painful conception of humanity." Here the softness and beauty of the Italian style turn into the force and intensity of the Spanish, and realism celebrates its triumph in Spanish art.
From Flemish Style to Italian Influence
The influence of the Flemish style continued through Fernando Gallego, and this style appears in the astonishing Knight of the Order of Calatrava by Michel Sittow, a Flemish painter in Queen Isabella's service. It is one of the most beautiful portraits in the National Gallery in Washington. But after that Italian influence strengthened again through the return of Pedro Berruguete after long study in Italy. There he worked with Piero della Francesca and Melozzo da Forlì and came under their Umbrian influence. When Federico, Duke of Urbino, was looking for painters to decorate his palace, he chose Justus of Ghent and "Pedro the Spaniard." After the duke's death (1482), Pedro brought the Umbrian manner with him to Spain and painted the famous altar screens of the churches of Toledo and Ávila. The pictures at the Louvre, in Berra, at the Prado and in Cleveland that are attributed to him do not confirm his present reputation as the "Velázquez of the Catholic Monarchs," but in design and composition his works surpass all that were created before him in Spain.
Gradually foreign stimuli blended with native genius and prepared the way for the more complete works of Alonso Coello and El Greco in the age of Philip II, and the brilliant triumphs of Velázquez, Zurbarán and Murillo in the seventeenth century, Spain's golden age. Genius is an individual gift of force and will, but also a social inheritance of order and skill built up over time and absorbed during growth and advance. Genius is both born and made.