The Painters of Seville
By
Albert F. Calvert and C. Gasquoine Hartley
In Seville, perhaps to a greater extent than in any city, even in Spain, the country of passionate individualism, art is the reflection of the life and temper of the people; and to understand Seville we must know her painters. As we look at the pictures of the Spanish primitives, at the emphatic canvases of Juan de las Roelas and Herrera, for instance; at the realism of Zubarán, or, still more, at the ecstatic visions of Murillo—as we see them in the old Convento de la Merced, now the Museo Provincial, in the Cathedral, or in one or another of the numerous churches in the city, we find the special spirit of Andalusia.
There is one quality that, at a first glance, impresses us in these pictures, so different, and yet all having one aim. It is their profound seriousness. Rarely, indeed, shall we find a picture in which the idea of beauty, whether it is the beauty of colour or the beauty of form, has stood first in the painter’s mind; almost in vain shall we search for any love of landscape, for any passage introduced just for its own sake. For, let it be remembered, in Andalusia art was devotional always. “The chief end of art,” says Pacheco, the master of Velazquez, in his Arte de la Pintura, “is to persuade men to piety and to incline them to God.” Pictures had other purposes to serve than that of beauty. They were painted for the Church to enforce its lessons, they were used as warnings, and as a means of recording the lives of the Saints. In other countries, it is true, painters have spent their strength in religious art, but almost always we can find as well as the sacred, some outside motive, some human love of the subject for itself—for its opportunities of beauty. The intense realism of these Spanish pictures is a thing apart; these Assumptions, Martyrdoms, and Saintly Legends were painted with a vivid sense of the reality of these things by men who felt upon them the hand of God. We know that Luis de Vargas daily humbled himself by scourging and by wearing a hair shirt, and Juan Juanes prepared himself for a new picture by communion and confession. These are two examples chosen out of many. A legend we read of Don Miguel de Mañara, the founder of the Hospital of La Caridad, illustrates this dramatic religious sense of Spain. One day in church Don Miguel saw a beautiful nun, and, forgetful of her habit, made amorous proposals. She did not speak; instead, she turned to look at him; whereupon he saw the side of her face which had been hidden from his eyes: it was eaten away, corrupted by a hideous disease, so that it seemed more horrible than the face of death. It was such scenes as this that the Spanish artists chose to paint. But, indeed, it would be tedious to enumerate the examples which Spain offers of this curious, often, it would seem to us, corrupted sense of the gloom of life, carrying with it as one result the passionate responsibility of art. Always, we feel certain that the Spanish painters felt all that they express.
And this overpowering, if mistaken, understanding of the presence of the divine life gave a profound seriousness to human life. The shadow of earth was felt, not its light; and emotion expressed itself in an intense seriousness, that is over-emphatic too often—always, in fact, when the painter’s idea is not centred in reality. This is the reason why a Spanish painter had to treat a vision as a real scene. We have pictures horrible with the sense of human corruption—such, for instance, are the two gruesome canvases of Valdés Leal, in La Caridad. Again and again is enforced the Catholic lesson of humility, expressing itself in acts of charity to the poor, so essential an idea when this life is held as but a threshold to a divine life. We find a sort of wild delight in martyrdom; a joy that is perfectly sincere in the scourging of the body. All the Spanish pictures tell stories. Was not their aim to translate life?—the life of earth and the, to them, truer life of heaven—and life itself is a story? Their successes in art are due to this, their failures to the sacrifice of all endeavours to this aim; a danger from which, perhaps, no painter except Velazquez quite escaped. He, faultless in balance, in his exquisite statement of life, expresses perfectly the truth his predecessors had tried for, but missed, except indeed now and again, in some unusual triumph over themselves. We find hardly a painter able to free himself from the traditions of his subject. Only Velazquez, controlled by the northern strain that mingles with the passion of his Andalusian temper, was saved quite from this danger of over-statement. And Velazquez does not belong to Seville, though he was born in the southern city on June 5, 1599, in the house, No. 8, Calle de Gorgoja; though the first years of his life were spent there, the time of childhood, the few months of work with the violent Herrera, the five years in the studio of Pacheco, his master; though—a fact of greater import—his temper was Andalusian; and though his early pictures—the bodégones, so familiar to us in England, whither so many have travelled through the fortune of wars—are entirely Spanish in their direct realism. Velazquez worked contemporaneously with the Realistic movement that quickened the arts in Seville in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he worked outside it. This explains the silence of his art in Seville. Of the pictures of his youth, painted while he was there, none remain, except one in the Archiepiscopal Palace, “The Virgin delivering the Chasuble to San Ildefonso”; and the authenticity of this picture has been denied until very recently, a fact explained by the bad condition of the canvas. To see the wonderful art of Velazquez you must leave Seville and visit the Museo del Prado at Madrid. Seville is the home of religious art. The habit of her painters was serious; in their profound religious sense, in their adherence, almost brutal at times, to facts, as well as in those interludes of sensuous sweetness that now and again, as, for instance in the art of Murillo, burst out so strangely like an exotic bloom, they reflect the temper of Spain. It is contended sometimes that these pictures in Seville are wanting in dignity, wanting in beauty. But are we not too apt to confine beauty to certain forms of accepted expression? Surely any art that has life; has dignity, has beauty; and no one can deny that life was the inspiration of the Andalusian painters.
We must remember these things if we would understand the pictures in Seville.
But first we find ourselves carried away from the reality and darkness of life back to a happy childhood of art, as we look at the three fourteenth-century frescoes of the Virgin—the “Antigua,” in the chapel named after it in the Cathedral, “Nuestra Señora del Corral” in San Ildefonso, and “Señora Maria de Rocamador” in San Lorenzo—an art when the painter, less conscious of life and of himself, was content to paint beautiful patterns. In these three pictures—all that are left to us—we see the last of Byzantine art in Spain. The figures, with long oval faces all of one type, are placed stiffly against a background of Gothic gold. Look at “Señora Maria de Rocamador,” as she sits holding the Child upon her knees; while two little angels kneel, one upon the left, one on the right. She wears a blue robe, partly covered with a mantle of deep purple, very beautiful with ornaments of gold and bordered with gold braid. A bent coronet around her head stands out against the glowing halo; the background is all of gold woven into a delicate pattern. It is a picture of pure convention in which is no effort to carry the mind beyond what is actually seen; it makes its appeal just as so much decoration. This fresco, as well as the “Antigua” and “Nuestra Señora del Corral,” have been much repainted—the ill-fortune of so many early Spanish works.
But, in the fifteenth century, a new spirit came into art; and with the work of Juan Sánchez de Castro the school of Seville may be said to begin. No knowledge has come down to us of his life; we know only that he was painting in Seville between 1454 and 1516. In his great fresco of “San Cristóbal,” that covers the wall near to the main door in the old Church of San Julian—alas! now spoiled by re-painting and by the subsequent rotting away of the plaster—we find a different, human, almost playful treatment of a sacred story. And for the first time in Seville, we see the special Spanish quality, characteristic of the whole school from this time to the time of Goya, of rendering a scene just as the painter supposed it might have happened. “A child’s dream of a picture,” Mr Arthur Symons has called it. San Cristóbal, many times the size of life, stretching from floor to ceiling, fills the whole picture; he leans upon a pine-staff as he supports the Child Christ upon his shoulders, who holds in his hands a globe of the world upon which the shadow of a cross has fallen. The other figures, the hermit and two pilgrims with staves and cloaks, are quite small; they reach just to the Saint’s knees. And this immense grotesque figure is painted in all seriousness, as a child might picture such a scene. To understand the sincerity of the Spanish painter, we must compare his work with that other fresco of “San Cristóbal,” painted, much later, by Perez de Alesio, which is in the Cathedral. The Italian picture is an attempt to illustrate a popular miracle, perfectly unconvincing; De Castro’s Saint compels us to accept and realise what the painter himself believed in. This is the difference between them.
In the smaller pictures of Sánchez de Castro that remain to us, such, for instance, as the panel of the “Madonna with St Peter and St Jerome,” once in San Julian, but now in the Cathedral, we find him more bound by convention, less himself. We see the immense debt Spanish painting owed to Flemish art. And this influence, always so beneficial, the Northern art being, for reasons of race not possible to state here, the true affinity of Spain in art, remains, with different and more certain knowledge, in the “Pietà” of Juan Nuñez, which still hangs in the Cathedral where it was painted. It meets us again in the fine and interesting “Entombment” by Pedro Sánchez, a painter of whom we know nothing, except that his name is given by Cean Bermudez among the illustrious artists of Spain. The picture may be seen in the collection of Don José López Cepero, at No. 7 Plaza de Alfaro, the house in which Murillo is said to have lived. In all three pictures, and in other work of the same period not possible to mention here, we are face to face with that special Spanish trait, the pre-occupation with grief, that is quite absent from the early fourteenth-century Madonnas, as from the simple child-art of De Castro’s “San Cristóbal.” The shadow of the Inquisition had fallen; art, the handmaid of the Church, could express itself no longer in quaint and beautiful symbols. Instead, it had to force itself to be taken seriously, being occupied wholly with emphatic statements, its aim an insistence on the relation of human life to the divine life.
But the joy of life did not die easily.
Juan Nuñez, once, at least, in those pictures in the Cathedral in which he has painted the archangels Michael and Gabriel quite gaily, their wings bright with peacock’s feathers, returns to the child-humour of De Castro. And Nuñez carries us forward to Alejo Fernandez, the most important painter of this early period, much of whose work remains for us in the Cathedral and in the old churches of Seville.
Go to the suburb of Triana, and in the Church of Santa Ana there is the sweetest Madonna and Child, in which we find a new suggestion in the joy of the Mother in her Babe, a human attitude, making the picture something more than mere illustration. And we notice a delicate care for beauty found very rarely in Seville, perhaps never as perfectly as in the work of this painter. The “Virgen de la Rosa” is the name given to the picture. The Mother sits enthroned under a canopy of gold, in a beautiful robe of elaborate pattern, pale gold on brown. She holds a white rose out to her Child. Typical of Fernandez is this fortunate use of the flower; typical, too, of his new mood of invention is the small landscape of rocky and wooded country that fills the distance. The gracious pose of the Virgin, the beauty in the Child, show an advance in ease upon earlier pictures. But the other figures, four angels who guard the Mother, all posed a little awkwardly, suggest a scheme on whose design the early Byzantine models may have had a forming influence, though the result is different enough. For Fernandez understood the very spirit of the Renaissance; he saw life beautifully and strongly. The attraction of the picture is in its effect of joy, in the charming way in which it forms a pattern of beautiful colour, and in its new sense of humanity that carries us beyond the scene itself.
And there are other pictures of Fernandez in Seville: the great altar-piece in eight sections—one is a copy—that tells the story of Joseph, Mary, and the Child, in the old Church of San Julian; and there is a large “Adoration of the Magi,” the “Birth and Purification of the Virgin,” and the “Reconciliation of St Joachim and St Anne,” all in the Cathedral—the first in the Sacristía de los Cálices, and three others in unfortunate darkness, over the Sacristía altar. And if these larger pictures have not quite the fresh charm of the “Madonna of Santa Ana,” in each one we find a real understanding of beauty, and with it the Spanish gift of presenting the sacred stories as drama, just as the painter felt it all must have happened. Each figure in these scenes has life, has character. No lover of Spanish painting can afford to neglect any picture of Fernandez, and no estimate of the early art of the country can be true that does not include his work. Of his life we know nothing, merely that he came with his brother Juan from Cordova in 1508, called by the Chapter to work in Seville Cathedral. But it matters little that his life is unrecorded, for the work that he has left is his best history.
In these first years of the Sevillian school, when art was sincere and young, many pictures were painted, all strong work, all interesting, in lesser or greater measure, to the student, even if not to the art lover, as showing the growth of a national style. In many cases the names of the artists are unknown; no painter has left much record of himself. These pictures, which may be recognised very readily, are found in the Museo de la Merced, in the Cathedral, and still more in the churches, the true museums of Seville.
But fashion in art changes, and the sixteenth century witnessed the manifestation of a new mood in painting, the advent to Spain of the Italian influences of the Renaissance. This is not the place to speak of the blight which fell upon art. The distinctively Italian schools were only an influence of evil in Spain, and the inauguration of the new manner was the birth of a period of great artistic poverty. The main desire of the sixteenth-century painters was, as it were, to wipe the artistic slate. All pictures painted in the old style were repudiated as barbarous, cast aside as an out-of-date garment. The country became overrun by third-rate imitators of the Italian grand style, of Michael Angelo, of Raphael and his followers. The decorations, as you can still see them, of the Escorial, may be taken as typical of Italian art as it was transplanted into Spain. All national art that was not Italian in its inspiration was looked upon as worthless.
Yet, be it remembered, that the Spanish painters, more perhaps than the painters of any other school, could imitate and absorb the art of others without degenerating wholly into copyists. The temper of the nation was strong. Even now it was not so much a copying of Italian art, rather it was an unfortunate blending of style which took away for a time the dignity and strength which is the beauty of Spanish painting. Thus, Peter van Kempeneer, a Flemish painter, known better in Spain as Pedro Campaña, who, strangely enough, was the first to bring the Italian influence to Seville, was inspired alternately by the Northern and Italian styles; and in such a picture as his famous “Descent from the Cross,” still in the Sacristía Mayor of the Cathedral, with its crude colour and extravagant action, we find him—in an effort, it is said, to imitate Michael Angelo—being more Spanish than the Spaniards. Indeed, this picture, which made such strong appeal to Murillo that he chose to rest beneath it in death, gives us a very curious, left-handed fore-vision, as it were, of the marvellous work of Ribera. In the large altar-piece, of many compartments, of the Capilla del Mariscal in the Cathedral, the first picture painted by Campaña, when, in 1548, he came to Seville, we see him a realist in the portraits of the donors, painted with admirable truth; but in the “Purification of the Virgin,” the scene that fills the lower compartment of the altar, he is Italian and demonstrative—spectacular movement, meaningless gestures, all done for effect.
The Italian influence, the buena manera it was called in Seville, is more insistent in Luis de Vargas, whose painting was contemporary with that of Campaña. He was the first painter of Seville to submit himself wholly to Italy, and most often he was inspired by Raphael. Much of his work has perished; of the once famous frescoes, “his greatest gift to Seville,” nothing remains except a few colour traces upon the Giralda Tower. De Vargas, the pupil probably of Perino del Vagas, brought back as the reward of twenty-eight years of painting in Italy much craft skill; and his work, as we see it in the “Pietà,” in Santa Maria la Blanca, in the earlier “Nativity,” and, even more, in his masterpiece, the popular “La Gamba,” both in the Cathedral, gives us a borrowed art, academic and emotional. Only in portraiture does he say what he has to say for himself. The portrait of Fernando de Contreras, in the Sacristía de los Calices, is a portrait of sincerity and character, in which is the Spanish insistence on detail, unpleasant detail even, as in the ill-shaven cheeks rendered with such exact care. Contrast this portrait with his other pictures, so extravagant, with such futile gesticulation, to understand how a really capable painter lost his sincerity, as just then it was lost in all Spanish painting. In this effort to be Italian, De Vargas’ natural gift of reality, as we see it, for instance, in the “Christ” of Santa Maria la Blanca, or in the peasant boy of the Cathedral “Nativity,” was overclouded, mingled curiously enough with a Raphaelesque sweetness. It was not that this painter did not realise the scenes that he depicts—yes, and depicts with passion—do we not know the sincere piety of his life?—but he used to express them an art that was not his own, an art he was temperamentally unfitted to understand.
Contemporary with Campaña and De Vargas, the leaders of the Andalusian Mannerists, worked a band of painters of second, or even third-rate, talent. Francisco Frutet, like Campaña a Flemish painter who had learnt his art in Italy, and who came to Seville about 1548, is typical of these “improvers,” as Pacheco calls them so mistakenly, of the native art. His best work is his Triptych in the Museo, in which again we see the same curious mingling of Flemish and Italian types; the Christ, for instance, recalling the models of Italy, while Simon of Cyrene, who bends beneath the Cross, is nearer to the Gothic figures. Pedro Villegas Marmolejo has more interest. His quiet pleasing pictures—one is in the Cathedral, one in San Pedro—interpret Italian art with more charm, but still without originality.
And Marmolejo leads us quite naturally to Juan de las Roelas, and in Roelas we have at last a Spanish painter who learnt from Italy something more than mere technical imitation. And in spite of a want of concentration—the accustomed insincerity, the result, it would seem, of a too persistent effort to express his art in the art of Venice, in which city he is thought to have painted, perhaps in the studio of some follower of Titian, he does realise his scenes with something of the old intensity. Roelas anticipates Murillo, not altogether unworthily, giving us, with less originality, but with much sweetness, an expression of that mood of religious sensuousness that is one phase of Spanish painting. Seville is the single home of Roelas;A here we may see his pictures in the Cathedral, in the Museum, and in many of the churches. His art is unequal in its merit. In his large compositions often there is confusion—“Santiago destroying the Moors at the Battle of Clavijo,” his picture in the Cathedral, is one instance—spaces are left uncared for, the composition is a little awkward, the brush-work is careless, a fault that is common to much of his work. The “Martyrdom of St Andrew,” in the Museum, is perhaps his most original picture. Here Roelas is a realist. And how expressive of life—Spanish life, are all the powerfully contrasted figures that so truly take their part in the scene depicted. In some of his pictures Roelas gives us the brightest visions. Such is “El Transito de San Isidore,” in the parish church of the saint, a picture in which we see in the treatment of Christ and Mary and the child-angels a manner that seems, indeed, to forestall Murillo; such, too, are the “Apotheosis of San Hermenegildo,” and the “Descent of the Holy Spirit,” both in the church of the Hospital of La Sangre. All three pictures are difficult to see: one is hidden behind the altar, the other two hang at a great height in the church where the light is dim. There are good pictures by Roelas in the University, a “Holy Child,” the “Adoration of the Kings,” and the “Presentation of the Child Christ in the Temple”; and in this last picture, with its soft colour and human gaiety, again we are reminded of Murillo. But a work of perhaps more interest, certainly of more strength, is “St Peter freed from Prison by the Angel,” which is hidden in a side-chapel in the Church of San Pedro. Then, how quiet, with a repose uncommon enough in Spain, is his “Virgin and Santa Ana,” in the Museo de la Merced. The figures—the girl Virgin, her mother, and the angels who crowd the space above them—all have the fairness Roelas gives to women; the soft glow of their flesh is beautiful. Look at the cat and dog that play so naturally in the foreground, beside a work-basket, and what a happy “note” is given by the open drawer, which shows the linen and lace within. Certainly this picture is more Italian than Spanish.
As the years passed, and art in Seville grew older, many painters trod in the steps worn by these others. It is not possible, nor is it necessary, to wait to look at their pictures; too often they exaggerate the faults of the masters they copied, and by a slavish repetition of accepted ideas—the inevitable fault of the age—they weakened still further native art. And, when we come to the next century, which gives us Alonso Cano, sculptor, architect, and painter, described admirably by Lord Leighton as “an eclectic with a Spanish accent,” many of whose facile, meaningless pictures may be seen in Seville, to the much inferior work of the younger Herrera, and to the exaggerated over-statements of Juan de Valdés Leal, in whose art Sevillian painting may be said to die, we realise into what degradation pseudo-Italianism had dragged painting.
But there is a reverse side to the picture. The spirit of Spain was too strong to sleep in an art that was borrowed. Already Luis de Morales, a native of Estremadura, known as “the divine,” on account of the exclusively religious character of the subjects he painted, and of the strange intensity with which he impregnated them, had evolved for himself a sincere expression of Spanish art; already Navarrete, the mute painter of Navarre, had broken from conventions, and taken for himself inspiration from the marvellous pictures of Titian which he had seen at the Escorial; already, Theotócopuli, known better as El Greco, was painting with wonderful genius in Toledo, pictures, so new, so personal, that to-day they command the attention of the world. But Seville does not represent these painters.B
It has been the fashion, since the tradition was started by Cean Bermudez, to call Herrera el viejo (1576-1656) “the anticipator of the true Spanish school.” Herrera had a studio in Seville, in which worked many painters, and among them Velazquez, Antonio Castillo y Saavedra, and perhaps Alonso Cano; and it seems certain that he owes his position to-day in large measure to this fact; had he not been for a few months the master of Velazquez his impossible art would remain unknown outside Seville. For the truth is Herrera said nothing that Roelas had not already said better.
His temper was Spanish enough, but his work is without originality, if emphatic and personal in a too vehemently Spanish way. Yet it is worth while to see, yes, and to study, each one of his half-dozen pictures. Even in Seville, Herrera’s work is rare; the “Apotheosis of San Hermenegildo,” and the later, more violent “San Basil,” are in the Museum, where, too, are the less known, but much better, portrait-pictures of apostles and saints; while the “Final Judgment,” his most personal work, is still where it was painted in the darkness of the Parroquina of San Bernado. One quality we may grant to Herrera; he did resist the popular Italian influence. These pictures, sensational as they are, with their hot disagreeable colour—“macaroni in tomato sauce” Mr Ricketts aptly terms it—their mannerism, extravagant contortions and splash brush-work, have little apart from this to recommend them. But you will understand better the esteem Herrera has gained if you will compare his work with the paintings of his contemporaries; the conscientious, academic Pacheco, for instance, the last, and, in himself, the most interesting of the Mannerists, or with Murillo’s master, Juan del Castillo, the worst painter of Seville, whose pictures fill with formal tedium so many buildings in the city. This is why Herrera’s pictures claim notice from the student of Andalusian art to-day: they form a link in the unbroken chain of the national pictures.
Now turn to Zurbarán.
You pass at once into a world of realism, a world in which facts, obvious facts, are set forth with a downright passion of statement that for a moment tricks us; we think we have found life, and, instead, we have the outward form, too monotonously literal, and without suggestion. Upon Zurbarán lies the weight of the sadness of Spain. It is something of this that we realise as we see the thirty or forty of his pictures that are in Seville, gathered together for the most part in the Museo de la Merced, where the light is so much better than it is in the Cathedral and in the churches, though there certainly his pictures seem to be more fittingly at home. Each picture is so true to life, and yet without life. Look at his Saints, all are portraits, faces caught in a mirror that seems to sum up the old world of Spain. Contrast these Saints with the Saints of Murillo. What honesty is here; what singular striving to record the truth. Note the gravity and simplicity of the Scriptural scenes; his conception of the Christ; the intensity of the three renderings of the Crucifixion, in which for once Zurbarán finds a subject suited exactly to his art; then mark how the peasantsC he depicts are almost startling in their outward nearness to life.
Look especially at the Carthusian pictures in the Museum, “San Hugo visiting the Monks in their Refectory,” the “Virgen de las Cuevas,” and “St Bruno conversing with Pope Urban II.” They are typical of Zurbarán’s special gift. In the first of these three pictures, which is the best, the monks clad in the soft white robes of their order are seated around a table at their mid-day meal. The aged Hugo stands in the foreground, attended by a boy-page; he has come to reprove them for dining upon flesh-meat. His purple vestments give a note of colour in contrast with the white frocks of the brothers. But, as is customary with Zurbarán, colour counts for very little, and atmosphere for less, in this picture in which all care is given to formal outline and exact expression. Once only in the “Apotheosis of St Thomas Aquinas,” also in the Museo, does he give us some of that warm colour he should have learnt from Roelas, whose pupil he is said to have been. This is one reason why his figures, so true to the facts of life, do not live. But no one has painted ecclesiastics and monks quite as Zurbarán has done. His sincerity is annoying almost; for he tells us nothing that we could not have seen for ourselves; we are no nearer than a photograph would bring us to the character of these men. Zurbarán was hardly consciously an artist; and with all his sincerity, his vision was ordinary. He was a recorder and not an interpreter of life, and in gaining reality he has just missed truth.
On coming to the work of Murillo it is quite another phase of the religious sentiment of Spain that we see developed: we gain an over-statement of sweetness, not an over-statement of facts. The spirit in which he painted was happier, more trustful, more personal than was that of Zurbarán; he is more Andalusian and less Spanish, and certainly better equipped as a painter.
Murillo forms part of your life while you are in Seville, he is more or less around you everywhere; and though to some of us, perhaps not unjustly, he is a painter we have tried in vain to love, he does express in a special way the very aspect of the southern city he himself loved with such single devotion. This is why we like him so much better in Seville than we are able to do anywhere else. His pictures repeat the full life of Andalusia—its religious emotion, its splendour, its poverty, its stark contrasts, its rich sense of life; and his colours are the same colours that we see in the landscape, warm and deep, the soft, hot light of southern Spain. You don’t visit the Museum, La Caridad, the Cathedral, and the churches to see his pictures as a change of amusement from the streets; you go because they renew the same atmosphere, and offer a reproduction of so much that surrounds you.
No one has ever painted ecstasy with quite the facility of Murillo. And in the Museum, where the Capuchin Series and other famous pictures are gathered, you can learn all that is essential to his art; his happy Saints swim before you in mists of luscious colour; cherubs flutter around as they minister to beggars clad in rags carefully draped; Virgins, garbed in the conventional blue and white, their feet resting upon the crescent moon, vanish into luminous vapour, their robes rustle in the air, and their sun-lighted faces repeat the very complexion of Seville. Murillo had neither the power nor the desire to idealise his models. His Saints—St Francis of Assisi, St Felix of Cantalicio, St Anthony, St Thomas of Villanueva—and how many more? are men such as may be seen to-day in the streets of Seville; all are alike, the name alone differs. His Madonnas are peasants whose emotions are purely human. More perhaps than any painter Murillo’s work is personal—he translated the divine life and made it his own common human life—the fault is that his personality is not interesting. And seeing these pictures, and, even more, his other work—pictures hanging still in the churches for which they were painted, where they seem to share in the pervading religious emotion and to take their part in the life of the building—the “Vision of St Anthony of Padua” in the Baptistery of the Cathedral, for instance, or the great pictures of La Caridad; you will understand how Murillo came to be idolised in Spain; how his pictures held, for a time, the admiration of Europe; and how to-day he has ceased to interest a world that has grown older and seeks, above all, the truth.
Murillo was impelled by a desire for realism. There is much of the spirit and manner of Zurbarán in his early pictures: “San Leandro and San Buenaventura,” two early “Virgins and the Child,” and the “Adoration of the Shepherds,” all in the Museum, are examples. The same careful characterisation meets us in the much later “Last Supper” of Santa Maria la Blanca, his most truthful Scriptural scene. Then his portraits, such as those of SS. Leandro and Isidore in the Sacristia Mayor of the Cathedral, or that of St Dorothy in the Sacristia de los Cálices, are serious studies after nature. Once or twice in his landscapes we find a sincerity that surprises us. But a painter must be judged by the main output of his art. And the truth is that, with a natural gift that certainly was great, added to unusual facility, Murillo’s personality was commonplace. His self-assurance amazes us. His emotion, neither profound nor simple, but always perfectly satisfied, perfectly happy, exactly fitted him to give voice to the common sentiments of his age. He did create a sort of life, but his compositions are the work of his hand rather than of his soul. All his Saints, his Madonnas—pose unthinkingly in the subtly interwoven light he knew so well how to paint, living only in the moment which their conventionalised attitudes perpetuate. You do not realise them as personalities greeting you from the canvas like the intense, painful faces of El Greco, or the wonderful creations of Velazquez; if you remember them at all it is part of a pleasing picture. This is the reason why these religious idylls have lost so much of their meaning; their over-statement of sweetness cloys. Murillo gives us one aspect of Andalusia; it was left for El Greco, Ribera, Velazquez, and Goya to interpret Spain to the world.