Part 15

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.

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

By far the best represented of all the masters at the Spanish school is Bartolomé Estéban Murillo (1618?-1682). He was born at Seville, of poor parents, and studied as a boy under Juan del Castillo. Forced before he had reached manhood to gain his livelihood, he took to manufacturing artistically worthless devotional pictures on saga-cloth, for sale at the weekly fairs in the poor quarter of Seville. This early practice of rather mechanical production, and the habit, acquired by necessity, of working to please the public, clung to him in after life and are responsible for much that the modern mind finds distasteful in his art—a certain sickly sentimentality that often takes the place of real sentiment, and an artificiality of arrangement even where the types are realistic renderings of the people among whom he spent his days.

With his small savings from the proceeds of his crude popular pictures Murillo proceeded to Madrid, where Velazquez assisted him by deed, advice, and example, though the two artists were probably never in the relation of master and pupil. After about two years thus profitably spent at Madrid, Murillo returned to Seville, where he continued to work until his death in 1682, and rose to the very summit of fame and popularity. At his best Murillo was a colourist of great charm and a technician of the rarest skill. His art is most admirable where he adheres most closely to the realistic tradition of his country. It is scarcely to be credited that the same hand which produced so many vaporous and vapid Madonnas is responsible for a picture painted with such superb breadth and incisive vigour as _The Young Beggar_ (No. 1717), which is almost worthy of the brush of Velazquez in his Sevillan period. The decidedly unsavoury subject is made acceptable by the consummate artistry of the treatment.

“THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION”

It is not, however, to pictures of this type that Murillo owed his widespread popularity. Generations of enthusiastic admirers have stood in silent awe before his large painting of _The Immaculate Conception_ (No. 1709, Plate XXVI.), which is certainly one of the best of innumerable versions of the same subject—the Virgin standing on a crescent moon, with ecstatic gaze, and hands pressed to her breast, and surrounded by swarms of joyous angel-children—painted by Murillo to meet an apparently insatiable demand. There is something of real ecstasy in this conception. To find a similar _morbidezza_ of pigment one must turn to certain famous works by Andrea del Sarto: it is a quality which is generally conspicuously absent from Spanish painting and which, if carried a step farther, as it sometimes was carried by Murillo, would result in fuzzy vapidness. This famous picture has the distinction of being the most costly purchase ever made for the Louvre, the price paid for it at the Marshal Soult sale in 1852—that is many years before American competition had established the vastly enhanced standards of value which now prevail—being as much as 615,300 fr., or £24,612.

Apparently of earlier date is the other version of the same subject at the Louvre. This _Immaculate Conception_ (No. 1708) is not painted in the same spirit of exaltation as the version just described, but has a happy passage of realistic character-painting in the six kneeling figures on the left. On the right two angels carry a scroll with the inscription IN PRINCIPIO DILEXIT EAM. The picture was painted in 1656-57 for the Church of Santa Maria la Blanca at Seville, and was carried off to France, with many other of the master’s works, by Marshal Soult.

THE “BIRTH OF THE VIRGIN”

Another picture that formed part of the loot taken by Napoleon’s general and was taken in 1855 from his son, the Duke of Dalmatia, in liquidation of a debt of £6000, is _The Birth of the Virgin_ (No. 1710). The National Gallery in London owns a small preliminary study for this painting, which was executed in 1655 for Seville Cathedral. The centre is occupied by a beautifully disposed group of four women and four winged heavenly visitors attending to the Infant’s bath; in the background on the left St. Anne, raised in her bed, is receiving visitors, and on the right are seen two attendants airing linen at a fireplace. The strange assemblage, in which the earthly and the heavenly are without incongruity brought into such close contact that one of the boy-angels is actually occupied with a dog, is completed by another four angels floating in the air above the Infant. In composition, distribution of light and shade, and in harmonious blending of mellow colour this picture ranks among Murillo’s highest achievements. According to Cean Bermudez, the roundness, beauty of shape, and rosy complexion of the waiting-woman’s arm in the foreground “excited the jealous envy of the ladies of Seville.” It is interesting to note that before its acquisition by the Louvre the _Birth of the Virgin_ was brought to England in 1823, when the owners vainly tried to find a purchaser.

“THE ANGELS’ KITCHEN”