Painting in Spain 1500-1700. - Review - book review

JONATHAN BROWN

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, Pelican History of Art, 1999. 293 pp.; 89 color ills., 239 b/w. $75; $35 paper

Jonathan Brown's Painting in Spain 1500-1700, originally published as The Golden Age of Painting in Spain (Yale University Press, 1991), [1] is a distinguished addition to the Pelican History of Art. The original series of Pelican books aimed to offer abroad overview of established periods and areas of art history and to represent reliably the state of their scholarship; the best ones also complied, as Rudolf Wittkower put it, with "the historian's right and duty to submit to his readers his own vision of the past" (Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, 1958, preface). Brown has fulfilled both sides of this mandate in exemplary fashion with a splendid text and superb illustrations. The apparatus of the book, its footnotes and bibliographies, includes a great deal of information on individual artists and on issues, and provides a trustworthy guide to existing scholarship that is not always easy to find--no simple task considering the boom in publications on Spanish art during the last several decades, parti cularly in Spain. The scholarship is brought up through 1996. This does not encompass the catalogues of the recent blockbuster exhibitions held in Spain to commemorate the death of Philip II (1998, 1999) and the birth of the emperor Charles V (2000), [2] or the commemoration of the birth of Velazquez (1599), which included Jonathan Brown's own exhibition at the Prado. [3] There are also the scholarly congresses that such exhibitions spin off. However, since Pelicans are intended to have a long shelf life, I assume that the second edition will assess the new material, including the newly accepted and stunning Temptation of Saint Thomas Aquinas (with its fiendishly lovely temptress/devil) by Velazquez that Brown included in his exhibition.

Brown also changed the frame of his subject in ways that make his book different from its predecessor in the Pelican series, which was published more than forty years ago. In 1947 when Pevsner commissioned George Kubler and Martin Soria to write Art and Architecture of Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500-1800 (1959), it was an adventure into an enormous, partly uncharted, territory. For scholars who serenely trawled the intellectual lanes between Rome, Florence, Venice and northern ports in France, Flanders, and Germany, the artistic geography of Spain and Portugal--not to mention the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru--was not a serious concern. Even now, the fourteen volumes of Chandler R. Post's toilsome A History of Spanish Painting (1930-66) have made little impact in spite of their still useful scholarship. Soria's approximately one hundred pages and ninety-two illustrations devoted to painting in Spain between 1500 and 1800 in the original Pelican (Part Three, pp. 199-302) must have se emed generous given the scale of the enterprise, but it was not enough to illustrate or more than mention the works, like those of Titian, for example, that were commissioned by the Spanish Habsburgs and were in the royal collections from an early date. (Why Soria failed to illustrate the second most famous Spanish painting of all time, El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz, is simply not understandable.) With more space at his disposal, Jonathan Brown includes non-Spanish artists like Titian, Sofonisba Anguissola, Pellegrino Tibaldi, and Rubens in a fuller account and thus underscores the point, not stressed in Soria, that painting in Spain was part of and not peripheral to developments in the rest of Europe.

Brown clarifies this European character from the outset in his new Chapter 1, "Hispano-Flemish Painting and the Intrusion of the Italian Renaissance 1470-1530," and Chapter 2, "The Renaissance Once Removed 1520-1560." He explores the various ways in which Flemish and Italian painting was received and describes its impact on painters (both foreign and Spanish born) in different regional centers of production like Catalonia, Valencia, and Seville. Not only is it useful to have Flemish and Italian contributions compared on a roughly equal footing, but this allows Brown to begin to describe the character of the hybrid styles that resulted from their interaction. This is especially salutary because a notion of stylistic purity (what style, what culture, was ever pure? What style is not in some sense a hybrid?) still haunts the study of Renaissance art, making it difficult to appreciate the extraordinary paintings of artists like Pedro Berruguete and Juan de Borgona, who were leading painters in Castile in the lat e fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The stylistic hybridity produced through the cross-pollination of different strains of European art runs through the whole of painting in Spain; traditionally, this was taken as a sign of dependence on centers of innovation in Flanders or Italy. As Brown demonstrates throughout his book, however, the mix of sources, influences, and aims in Spain--and the resulting paintings--was always different from place to place and always changing in ways that cannot be accounted for simply by developments in other parts of Europe. This may seem obvious once it is stated, as good ideas so often do. After all, Rubens's visit to Madrid did not produce any painting in the style of Rubens; Caravaggio's influence in Seville (if that is what it was) inspired no Caravaggisti. By making the idea into one of the armatures of his discussion of Spanish painting, however, Brown is able to provide an account that is both complex and fascinating. It covers Spaniards who worked in Italy and returned to Spain (Chapter 2); Italians and n ortherners, as well as Spaniards, who painted for Philip II or were collected by him (Chapter 3, "Church and State: The Reign of Philip II"); foreign painters who stayed on in Madrid (Chapter 5, "Naturalism in Castile and Valencia") and those, like Federico Zuccaro in the late sixteenth century and Rubens in the seventeenth (Chapter 10, "The Presence of Rubens and Titian" and Chapter 11, "Painting in Madrid 1640-1665) who came only briefly but had an immense impact. The situation was different for every artist--whether at the court in Madrid, in cosmopolitan Seville, or in the relative isolation of Estremadura or Valencia--and the outcome depended on the mix of people in a given place at a particular time.

Any reconstruction of the milieux of painting requires painstaking documentation as well as the ability to make some inspired connections. Brown is scrupulous in presenting what is, and what is not, known about these situations. His respect for the variety of historical circumstances and the individuals involved produces a much richer and more interesting account of painting in Spain's golden age than ever before. But flesh and blood painters and their patrons were only part of the story. Brown's Chapter 10 ("Collectors and Collecting") examines the works, mostly by Flemish and Italian artists, in royal and aristocratic collections. Contemporary copies of paintings and both original and reproductive prints, which were numerous in Spain from the early sixteenth century, provided other sources of information about foreign art. Brown notes the presence and impact of prints whenever this can be assessed. [4] The result can be very revealing: when Zurbaran took a theme or a figure directly from a print and put it in a painting, as he did for Saint Peter Nolasco's Vision of the Crucified Saint Peter, the results were visually different from the print and a masterpiece (p. 135). This and the other observations on the use of prints in Spain that appear throughout the text should alert the reader to the fact that some familiar notions in art historical practice are not simple matters. The print source for Zurbaran's painting demands to be examined as a component, not simply a crutch, of the artist's working procedure.

If influence from abroad is characteristic of painting in Spain throughout its history--and Brown makes clear that he believes this is so--then what, if anything, is distinctively Spanish about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painting in Spain? The question of the Spanishness of Spanish art has bothered art historians for a long time, the more so perhaps because popular and even academic culture finds it easy to accept such tokens as the innately Spanish mystical outlook of El Greco (a Greek who arrived in Spain as a fully trained Italian painter in his mid-thirties) or the brutal Spanish realism of Jusepe de Ribera (a Spaniard who spent his entire working life in Italy). Brown is not searching for elusive signs of the national consciousness, but he is interested in the character of painting in Spain; and he has chosen to look instead at distinctive habits of patronage and the artistic programs that characterized its art.

Brown has always been attentive to patronage, and he is especially informative on the Spanish Habsburg court. The Spanish Habsburg kings beginning with Philip II were avid collectors of European painting and the expanding royal collections had, as Brown shows, a crucial impact on the course of painting. Work commissioned for courts is a useful example of how art can belong to an international scene and still be shaped by local conditions. Life at court was not the same all over Europe, but court culture shared many things, which is not surprising considering that their members were mostly all related and kept abreast of each other's tastes and acquisitions. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the patronage in Spain was different.

Brown has written eloquently here and elsewhere about the low status of painting in Spain and about practitioners' efforts to raise the status of their art. By the sixteenth century, much of Europe had accepted the humanist view that great art is produced for those who have the education and sensibility to appreciate it; it is wasted on the ignorant who deserve the contempt they get from artists, as stories about artists from Giotto to Bernini show. The collaboration between patron and painter brings honor and glory to both. The status of painters, as well as the ambitions of their painting, so splendidly realized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, largely follows from this humanist point of view. In Spain, however, this conception can hardly be said to have existed outside the court, and it was exceptional even there. Only Velazquez and his patron, Philip IV, enjoyed anything remotely like the unity of aims and mutual support that was at the center of Rubens's relations with Marie de Medicis or Ber nini's with Urban VIII. Outside the court commissions for portraits and interior decoration, Spanish commissions (as distinct from collecting) were chiefly for religious paintings and portraits. In short, artists and their patrons did not play the same roles in Spain as elsewhere.

Patronage was obviously crucial in shaping the kind of art that artists were asked to produce. Brown does not conceal the limitations of Spanish patronage that he himself describes. There was no real market in Spain for classical mythologies, hence few opportunities for painters to paint nude figures, although such paintings by foreigners were collected; there were few occasions for history painting or large-scale painted wall decoration outside the court-in fact, compared to Italy, there was not much history painting even there. By the seventeenth century, portraiture, still-life, and genre scenes were the staples of secular painting, although there were always a few battle pictures and topographical views, mostly imported, and occasional paintings for triumphal entries and theatrical sets, which have not survived. On the other hand, Brown emphasizes the importance of the Church as the leading patron of the arts throughout the golden age. Spanish society had a prodigious appetite for religious images; because important religious paintings were commissioned by churchmen and lay people for specific sites in churches and religious institutions like convents, monasteries, and charitable foundations, they tended to be ordered from local painters. Thus, religious commissions were the communal focus of artistic ambition and exchange. Given these conditions, it was perhaps inevitable that painters worked out the elements of their visual rhetoric in religious pictures, rather than in mythologies and history paintings, and that they asserted the intellectual substance of their art by creating new relationships between a religious subject and its means of representation. The exclusive focus on religious art was not present everywhere, prestigious as religious commissions always were; and one wishes that Brown had examined the Spanish situation in more detail.

There are other issues that relate paintings in Spain to each other, as well as to pictorial solutions in the rest of Europe. Brown usefully places the development of painting in the context of the reforms of the Council of Trent, which were promulgated in Spain as soon as they were issued in 1563, and the contemporary concern for strict visual orthodoxy. He also signals the relationships between painting and traditional artistic programs. The retable altarpiece, for example, was the most prestigious, the most expensive type of art-and thus the most lucrative for artists--in Habsburg Spain; The fixed, architecturally scaled retablos of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be considered a characteristically Spanish and Portuguese art form that was related but not identical to retable altarpieces in northern Europe. This program affected painting in a number of ways. By the fifteenth century, retablos combined individual paintings, often of different sizes and in large groups, in a fixed architectural f rame that was frequently at full architectural scale. They also increasingly combined painting with full round and relief sculpture that was painted; the sculpture was more important to the altarpiece in Castile in the sixteenth century, while in the later seventeenth century architecture was emphasized over both painting and figural sculpture. A painting in such a setting was not an easel picture as we understand one: a framed painting presented singly to the viewer's attention.

Much, if not most, religious painting in Spain until the seventeenth century was originally part of a retablo and, as Brown notes, was intended to be seen at a distance from the spectator, among other pictures, sculpture, and decorated architecture in the space of a church or chapel. This is seldom discussed or even noted in books on Spanish painting. In the earlier Pelican volume, Soria discussed all paintings as if they were easel pictures. His only illustration of an altarpiece that shows a painting is the High Altar of the Caridad in Seville (Plate 86h), which is discussed in the section on sculpture, although its painting is by Juan Valdes Leal. Brown begins to remedy this situation at the outset. His second illustration of Fernando Gallego's retabloin Trujillo is accompanied by a paragraph on the retablo form; furthermore, he includes seven other illustrations of whole retablos, which span almost his entire history of painting in Spain, ending with Sebastian de Herrera Barnuevo's Earthly Trinity altarp iece in Madrid of ca. 1653-55 (p. 241).

Brown provides a more nuanced and three-dimensional setting in which to view the work of the great masters of easel painting in seventeenth-century Spain. He allows the reader to begin to appreciate the constraints on painters and the difficulties involved in establishing paintings as independent works of art. The Italian preference for an altarpiece focused on one painting did not catch on in Spain. The first important sixteenth-century altarpieces that consist of a single painting are those decorating the forty secondary altars in the basilica of the Escorial, begun in the late 1570s. About the same time, El Greco attempted to give over a major altarpiece to a single image, but he did not succeed. Only in the seventeenth century did a few subjects, like the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and the Christ Crucified, become widely accepted for display as single pictures. Also in the seventeenth century, artists like Zurbaran developed single easel pictures, often combined in thematic or narrative series, to decorate the walls of refectories and cloisters.

Brown has written extensively elsewhere individually on most of the great masters of the golden age of Spanish painting. His monograph on Velazquez appeared in 1986, for example. In keeping with the Pelican tradition, however, he allows each of them space in this book. El Greco (Chapter 4) and Jusepe de Ribera (Chapter 9) have chapters to themselves, which makes sense because they worked independently for the most part in Toledo and Naples respectively Velazquez (Chapter 6; Chapter 7; part of Chapter 11) shares his chapters with other distinguished painters like Carducho and Zurbaran, who also shares other chapters with Murillo (Chapter 12; Chapter 13). This arrangement allows for a more coherent historical sequence and makes it possible to discuss works like the paintings for the Hall of Realms in the Palace of the Buen Retiro, which were executed by various artists, as a single program. All in all, this is the best book on Spanish painting in English and the most balanced general view in any language.

Notes

(1.) I reviewed this earlier: An Eye for Quality," Times Literary Suplement, June 14, 1991, 19. The epilogue of the earlier book is gone, and the first two chapters are expanded and recast; the illustrations in both black and white and color, which are splendid in both books, are also identical, except that they have increased substantially from 290 to 328. The text of twelve of its fourteen chapters is essentially the same.

(2.) The following exhibition catalogues, sponsored by the Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoracion de los Centenarios tie Felipe II y Carlos V and the Patrimonjo Nacional make important contributions to the scholarship on painting, but appeared too late to be included in Brown's book: Felipe II, un monarca y su epoca: La Monarquia Hispanica, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, June 1-Oct. 10, 1998; Felipe II, Los Ingenios y las maquinas, ingneria y obras publicas en la epoca de Felie II, Real Jardin Botanico, CSIC, Pabellon de Villanueva, Madrid, Sept. 10-Nov. 10, 1998, although not concerned with painting has a fascinating essay on dyes and pigments by Ana Roquero, "Materias tintoreas en la epoca de Felipe II," 262-75; Felipe II, El Rey Intimo, Jardin y Naturaleza en el siglo XVI, Palacio del Real Sitio de Aranjuez, Sept. 23-Nov. 23, 1998; Felipe II, un monarca y su epoca: Un Principe del Renacimiento, Museo Nacional del Prado, Oct. 13, 1998-Aug. 10, 1999; Felipe II un monarca y su epoca: Las Tier ras y los Hombres del Rey, Museo Nacional de Escultura, Palado de Villena, Valladolid, Oct. 22, 1998-Jan. 10, 1999; El arte en la corte de los Archiduques Alberto de Austria e Isabel Clara Eugenia (1598-1633): Un reino imaginado, Palacio Real, Madrid, Dec. 2, 1999-Feb. 27, 2000. See also the excellent collection of essays, Felipe II y el arte de su tiempo, Coleccion Debates sobre Arte, Madrid, 1998, with sections organized and edited by Agustin Bustamante Garcia, Alfredo J. Morales Martinez, Alfonso Rodriguez G. de Ceballos, and Fernando Marias.

(3.) Jonathan Brown, ed., Velazquez, Rubens y Van Dyke, pintores cortesanos del siglo XVII, Museo Nacional del Prado, Dec. 17, 1999-Mar. 5, 2000, with essays by John Elliott, Emilie E. S. Gordenker, Alejandro Vergara, and Christopher Brown, as well as by the editor.

(4.) One extraordinary collection was in the library of the Cathedral of Seville during the seventeenth century. See Mark F. P. McDonald, "The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus," Print Quarterly 17, no. 1 (March 2000), 43-46. See also the useful review of Benito Navarrete Prieto, La Pintura andaluza del sigla XVII y sus fuentes grabados, Madrid, 1998, by Susan Stratton-Pruitt, "Painting and Prints in Andalusia." in the same volume. 73-74.

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