El Greco
BY
Albert F. Calvert and C. Gasquoine Hartley
Domeniko Theotokopuli,A known to us to-day as El Greco, was the first great painter of Spain, and in his strange and fascinating art, the Spanish School compels for the first time the attention of the world. And El Greco was not Spanish. He was born in Crete, it would seem about the year 1548, and died at Toledo in 1614. Learning his art in Venice, in his early manner he is a pure Venetian, owing much to the work of the Bassani, and more to the inspiration of Tintoretto, but in Toledo he became Spanish and himself, developing there a manner in which the special temper of the race finds an expression passionate enough, not equalled again, indeed, until the advent of Goya.
There will always be some men imaginative, entirely personal, who, like El Greco, seek to express themselves, and in so doing, quite unwittingly probably, express the life of their age. Having the interpretative—creative would perhaps be the truer word—genius, their work becomes, as it were, a mirror, which reflects not the man alone, but the circumstances that have formed his life. For, after all, what the artist does is to use up what he has seen.
This is why El Greco seems to chronicle for us our impressions of Toledo, and of Spain.
Surely no other painter has lived in a city in such strong agreement with his spirit. Think of the place—wind-swept, heat-dried, extraordinarily austere, yet flushed with colour, ochre-red shading to unusual greens; heaped upon its rocky throne above the yellow flowing Tagus, its rugged silhouette straight cut against a sky hard and clear as enamel; and, beyond, the sierra like a great brown sea in which it all stands as an island starting from the waves. A suggestion of strenuousness seems to linger everywhere, a spirit, personal and keen, cruel almost as the sword-blades the city fashions. The very buildings, placed upon the crags beneath the great hulk of the Alcazar, repeat this impression, they rise in sharp upward and downward lines like an arrangement of swords, and make their appeal by the strange strength of their aspect. The streets are a tortuous net of steep-rising passage-ways. A city strongly itself that has suffered no change, fantastic as a city seen in a dream.
Yes, to those who know Toledo, the impression of the character of the city upon El Greco will bring no surprise. His art corresponds perfectly with its setting. Everywhere his work is around you, for El Greco is one of those painters who has but a single home. He built churches and other buildings—the classic façade of the Ayuntamiento, for instance, was modelled on his design; he carved statues, he painted pictures, there are canvases of his in the museum, in the cathedral, and in many of the churches. And in all this mass of work, it is the living force behind it that is the first impression that you gain; a kind of driving power that fascinates you, just as Toledo fascinates you, by reason of its power. El Greco was a painter able to create—that is the secret of it all. And, be it remembered, the artist does not find his matter straight from the springs of his brain, what he is able to see he sets down, and that is all. His art is great in exact measure as it is able to transfer this vision from him to us. In this way El Greco, to whom vision seems to have been the whole of life, does in his pictures transfer to us the entire impression of Toledo, so that it is difficult to speak of his art without making Toledo the refrain.
And as we wait with his pictures and note, after the first surprise has left us, the qualities of the work, throughout they confirm this. The very form of his composition is moulded upon Toledo. Just as its buildings cluster around the Alcazar, almost as bees swarming about their queen, so he groups everything around a central figure. Never, after he came to Toledo, did El Greco use Italian backgrounds. And in his long, lithe figures, so fantastic in their hard outlines, sometimes we catch that suggestion of the sword that haunts Toledo. Then when we come to more tangible things, we find to-day El Greco’s models in the dark peasants of Toledo. Nowhere else can we quite believe in the reality of those coldly fervent, self-absorbed, ecstatic men, who greet us with such fascination from his canvases, their lean, long profiles suggesting again that aspect of a sword.
Then, El Greco’s colour was drawn from the landscape around him. And colour, if we may credit the truth of the conversation recounted by Pacheco, was to him the one quality in painting, form, drawing, all else, being of secondary significance. This, too, was learnt in Toledo, where colour has an allurement—illusive and insistent. Toledo it was showed him the existence of cold tones, and the fascination of its greys and livid greens led him to anticipate modern colour, at a time when every one else was painting warm tonalities. In the Convent of San Juan de los Reyes, now the Museo Provincial, is that ‘Bird’s-Eye View of Toledo,’ the picture in which we have a portrait of George Manuel Theotokopuli, El Greco’s son. At first you will be astonished, it is the strangest landscape in the world. But wait with the picture—always the danger with El Greco is that you will not linger enough. The painter who sees for himself must be studied, not dismissed as he who but sets down the common vision of things. And El Greco does give us the real Toledo in this fantastic landscape. Do you doubt this? Then go when night falls upon the city to some such vantage-point as the Puerta del Cambón, where beneath the dome of the evening sky you will see Toledo, heaped roof against roof, tower against tower. You will forget the strangeness of the picture’s statement, as you come to see that it is just this effect that El Greco has caught. Now you will recognise the reality of those bluish whites, those tones of green that surprised you, and, in gladness, you will yield to the truth, the beauty—are not the two the same?—of the painter’s vision, and avow how much he has taught you to see.
Always El Greco’s pictures leave an impression of their own upon the spectator; and this is the test of vital work. It is personality that counts in art. Whether he paints the visible truth of outward things, as in his portraits—that wonderful series in the Prado, for instance, in which he startles us with his revelation of his model—or pure fancies of the mind, as ‘The Vision of Philip II.,’ in the Escorial, a picture that would seem to have no conscious reference to things seen, one feels that he had something definite to express. And although his style at first may have been formed largely on that of the great Venetian painters, of Tintoretto especially—a “sort of shorthand of the Venetian,” Mr. Ricketts calls it—in all his pictures there is but one personality—that of himself. At the back of his art was a force of passionate character—unbalanced? Yes! capricious and arbitrary; a tyrannical need that compelled expression. But in spite of his singular conventions and, from a theorist’s point of view, the strangeness and exaggeration of his qualities, he does convey his meaning, splendidly effective, if not the best. And because of this intensity of vision we have those pictures of exaggerated statement that give credit to the fable of the painter’s madness, such as the ‘St. John the Baptist,’ in the Hospital San Juan Bautista, a picture which many have found ugly, while the few see in its new conception a striving for personal utterance, and find many things in its suggestion.
El Greco stumbled in his methods maybe, never in his purpose, which was, it would seem to us, the significance of movement. All his strange skill, the power of his imagination, his new knowledge of colour and light, are used in this service, to bring home to us the vision of movement that everywhere he saw. Even in his portraits it is this that holds us. There is something more in them than the outward likeness; there is a power of reaching to and showing us the unquiet spirit within. He makes his portraits live and speak. This quality is present in all his work. Every picture is built up by its effect; and this effect is movement—life. By concentrating on a particular passage, by a contempt for detail and peddling accuracy, he directs our minds to this principal thing. His interest, as it were, compels ours; he realises his vision and makes us share in his imagination.
But it may be said that in many of these pictures the effect is forced; in the ‘St. Maurice,’ the rejected altar-piece of the Escorial, for instance, in the ‘Baptism of Christ’ and the ‘Descent of the Holy Spirit,’ in the Prado, and in many pictures in Toledo, easily recognised, in which realities are replaced by a series of conventions. It is not necessary to wait to particularise examples. Certainly one does not see in the pictures of other painters those greens, those ashen whites and crimsons, those livid blacks; El Greco’s use of colour is unusual and his own. Light is not used as he uses it, as a quantity for emotional appeal; those faces, so elongated or contracted, and with such extravagant expressions, those figures with hard anatomical outlines, do not correspond with life as we see it. Yes, this is true. But look longer at these pictures.... Well, would it be possible to gain their effects without the defects? If things are forced out of harmony it is for the sake of “telling strongly.” All this search for expression is done quite consciously. El Greco throughout was strong enough to be true to himself and to his imagination. He knew that no system of art is final, that the achievements of artists are, in truth, the stones wherewith the Temple of Art is built. Imagination does not see commonplaces. And we recall the statement of Blake—he, too, a painter of visions of the mind: “He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.”
El Greco might have said these words.
And the man? There is a portrait Domeniko Theotokopuli has left of himself now in the Museum of Seville. In it we see the long, striking profile, with its large, strong nose, restless eyes and straight mouth, cruel slightly, framed by the great white ruff that forms such fitting setting to the fine head. The forehead is high, the dark hair scant upon the temples. We may read in the face, and still more in the perfectly shaped hands—the left holds a square palette upon which are the five primary colours, white, black, yellow-ochre, vermilion, and lake, the colours he used most frequently—the fastidiousness of the artist, the instinct for beauty; we may read a peculiar suggestion of mysticism and ardour; self-assertion, too, and impatience—both wait in those long, nervous fingers. It is a face of genius, but of a kind restless, unbalanced, decadent perhaps. And we understand the driving energy that burned to fever, so that at times the balance was lost between the painter’s aim and the result, and we realise that the work of such a man must be introspective, experimental, neurotic.
We know nothing almost of El Greco’s life, and if external happenings were all, the most original painter of Spain would remain an unexplained personality. His very name is uncertain, and contemporary writers, disregarding the Theotokopuli, speak of him as Domeniko Greco. We do not know the year in which he was born, for the information given by Palomino in “El Museo” must certainly be questioned, no register of his birth as yet having been found among the Cretan archives, or in the parochial books of the Greek colony in Venice, the city in which it seems certain that he lived—a pupil, we may well think, of Tintoretto, rather than of Titian; and this in spite of the letter of his friend and compatriot the miniature-painter, Clovio,B in which Clovio speaks of the young Greek painter’s skill, tells of his coming to Rome, and, after commending him to the patronage of the Cardinal Nepote Farnese, refers to his having learnt his art from the greatest Venetian. But the testimony of his work gives more truth than this statement; his early pictures, their authorship so long unknown, again and again have been attributed to Tintoretto, to Bassano, to Veronese even, never to Titian.
That El Greco was a Cretan we know by his signature, always in Greek, on many pictures, Λομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος Κρήσεποίει—the ‘San Maurice,’ in the Escorial, is one. And again, when called, in 1582, by the Tribunal of the Inquisition to act as interpreter in the case of a Cretan accused of being a Morisco, he describes himself as “Domeniko Theotokopuli, native of Candia, painter, resident in Toledo,” as we learn from a document discovered by Señor Cossio, to whose research, and to that of Señor Foradada and of Señor de Beruete, we owe the few discovered facts of El Greco’s life.
We know that Domeniko Greco came to Toledo some time before 1577, and in that year he was at work in the convent of Santo Domingo el Antigua, where the Church was built and its statues carved by him, and where he painted the screens of the fine retablo; that further, he would seem never to have left Toledo; that he married there, and had a son, George Manuel, who was architect and sculptor to the cathedral from 1628 to his death in 1631, and also a daughter, whose portrait figures in several pictures—in ‘Christ Despoiled of his Vestments,’ in the cathedral, for one; that he died in Toledo, and was buried in Santo Domingo el Antigua on April 7, 1614C —and that is about all. We have record of much work—Toledo still has more than fifty Grecos—and there were pictures painted for the small town of Illescas, and also for Madrid. We read of two lawsuits, one undertaken to compel the Cathedral Chapter to pay in full for the ‘Expolio,’D the second to vindicate the painter’s right to sell his pictures without paying the tax levied upon merchandise. These lawsuits, his pictures, with their dates and signatures, certain contracts and receipts, are the few facts to be reported.
It would seem that this strange, self-contained life wished to be silent; for it is perhaps not too fanciful to read this meaning into that answer given by El Greco when asked, in connection with the writ served on him for the ‘Expolio,’ whether he had been brought to Toledo to paint the retablo of Santo Domingo: “I am neither bound to say why I came to this city nor to answer the other questions put to me.” Here we gain hints of certain very real traits of character.
And, if the facts of his life are meagre enough, we can find suggestions of this same temper, silent, yet passionate, in that visit of Pacheco to the Toledan painter when he was old, in 1611, of which we have spoken before. Pacheco tells us that El Greco was a student of many things, a writer on art, a great philosopher given to witty sayings, a sculptor and architect as well as a painter. He writes of much work that he saw, and speaks in particular of a cupboard in which were models in clay of each picture El Greco had finished. The two painters talked on many subjects, of colour and its supreme quality in painting, of Michael Angelo and his failure as a colourist. But in all the account of Pacheco, always so minutely laborious, it is significant to note in one sentence the impression he formed of Domeniko Greco: “He was in all things as singular as in his painting.”
Nor will it do to overlook the testimony of Giuseppe Martinez, whose “Practical Letters on the Art of Painting,” though not printed until 1866, were written a century before. He too speaks of Domeniko Greco as of extravagant disposition, and in proof recounts that he engaged musicians to play to him that he might “enjoy an additional luxury during meals.” The prudent Aragonese condemns this “too much ostentation,” but we capture again some fresh clues and hints of this strangely effective personality—a fanatic of life, a fanatic of painting.
But we have not settled the account of genius when we have called it unusual, fanatic, or decadent. It is the solution of the dull that genius is extravagant consciously. El Greco can have had no desire, no power, to repeat the easy, the commonplace. If strange, exaggerated even, his art is without a trace of affectation. When he painted a vision he felt it natural to symbolise his idea in the way that he did. In colour, in form, he painted only what his imagination saw, gaining in colour fresh harmonies for himself, and a new suggestion of movement in his imaginative compositions, to which our imagination must find answer.
El Greco understood all nature as a Living Presence; his art was a series of experiments to express this. And every one must be struck with the peculiar development of this special personality in his art from stage to stage—stages that with sufficient accuracy may be divided into three periods.
The first is the pupil’s search for truth; the Venetian stage, in which we find a consciousness of tradition, showing itself in the still-fettered design, in the attitudes of the figures, in the use of warm colour, in a flowing quality in the paint, and, especially perhaps, in the landscape backgrounds, so Venetian with palaces and marble-paved piazzas; yet mingled with all this tradition is an emphatic personality, an ardour of expression, very difficult to define, seen in such early pictures as ‘The Blind Man,’ in the Parma Gallery, or ‘The Cardinal,’ in the National Gallery, both painted before 1577. Over the whole Venetian period the influence of Tintoretto is obvious; while the portraits of these years recall in their method the work of the Bassani; and of the pre-Spanish pictures, as, for instance, the ‘Cleansing of the Temple,’E now in the possession of the Countess of Yarborough, and the replica of the same subject on a small scale, in the Cook collection at Richmond, Surrey, a picture of real beauty that testifies to El Greco’s skill in miniature—these, and many other works, were thought until quite recently to be the work of the Venetians, the first being attributed to Paul Veronese, the latter to Tintoretto, and this in spite of their marked character.
And the Venetian influence remained in the first years in Toledo. It is seen in the beautiful Virgin in the early ‘Assumption,’ painted for the central altar-screen of Santo Domingo el Antigua, but now in the Prado.F But the chief work of this period is the ‘Christ Despoiled of His Vestments,’ still in the sacristy of the cathedral in Toledo, for which it was painted in 1577. Here, perhaps, in the fine simplicity of the grouping, in the dignity of the inspired head of the Saviour, in the rich and strong colour and in the vivid light and shade, we have the best results of all El Greco learnt in Venice. But even in this beautiful picture we see the development, or rather the co-existence, of his two styles: on the one hand carefully and thoroughly worked-out qualities, a balanced art remembered from Venice, but with it all a power that was his own, that seized the elements in the picture and gave them life—his life. And again, we have in the excessive height of the Christ, in the hands of many of the figures in this picture and in the ‘Assumption,’ first hints of the special conventions with which the name of El Greco is certainly most associated.
We come to the second stage, in which the painter, forgetting tradition, seeks to set down his vision in his own way; it is the period of experiment, as we see it first in the ‘St. Maurice,’G painted in 1581, that strange picture, rejected, as we may so well believe, by Philip II., who, misunderstanding, as many have done since, the intensity of feeling that animates the work, attributed its exaggerated expression to madness. Here, and in other pictures of this time, in the seizing ‘Vision of Philip II.’ and in the ‘St. John the Baptist’ in particular, we have splendid examples of imaginative work. Maybe the details are impossible, perhaps absurd—many have found them so—but for others the inspiration of the painter triumphs, and the longer they gaze at these visions the more they are impelled. For, be it remembered, the idea should be the starting-point in all imaginative pictures, and should control both the design and its treatment, and these Greco’s are splendid in this respect. Whether the imagination is exaggerated and perverted in wilful experiment, whether from an uncertain technical equipment, or whether it is, as we would think, the natural and true expression of intense dramatic vision, it is not easy to say. Who shall decide whether to call these mad pictures or visions that breathe the sublime? That is a question hard to answer in much of El Greco’s characteristic work. Perhaps the truth is that we dislike too readily what we do not easily understand. El Greco goes back to first principles and speaks in symbols with which we are not familiar. Those spectres of human kind that surprise us in so many of his pictures in Toledo, in those in the Prado, as well as in these two in the Escorial, do not suggest life as we see it; but they are inspired—they do convey his meaning. This painter’s method is a real enigma; he essayed surprising effects by separating colour into its original values; he used light as a means of emotional appeal, giving us sometimes most delicate harmonies, sometimes discordant contrasts. Domeniko Greco had to teach his world to see what he saw, and in this way he came, it may seem to some, to over-emphasise what to him was truth.
And his third stage was a fevered expression of his imaginative vision. We have entered a new world of extraordinary restlessness, the restlessness that must exist when spirit struggles from the bonds of the flesh. Toledo, the ardent arid city, burnt fiercely in El Greco’s blood, and, more and more, he seems to have felt that it was not enough to record facts; to have cared less to give æsthetic pleasure; but that the object of his art should be to clothe abstract ideas with life. It is something of all this that we find in his later pictures. In each there is emphasis—or, if you like, exaggeration—of statement; in the ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ in San José, for instance, a picture that in a strange, left-handed way carries us forward to the picture by Velazquez H on the same subject. The exaggeration is equally visible in the ‘Assumption’ in San Vicente, more beautiful, and the most interesting of these rare visions, a picture in which we have movement—the very sensation of a figure passing through the air as we have, perhaps, in no other picture. It is even stronger in the group of pictures in Madrid, the ‘Baptism,’ the ‘Descent of the Holy Spirit,’ the ‘Resurrection,’ and the ‘Christ Dead in the Arms of God’; it meets us again in the ‘St. Joseph with the Child Jesus,’ and in the ‘Virgin and Child with Saints Justa and Gertrude,’I both in San José, the church that is the museum of so much of the master’s work—pictures all similar in their intense sentiment; while emphasis burns to a white flame of ardent expression in the famed ‘St. John the Baptist,’ the wonderful picture of which we have spoken already. It is there, too, in the ‘Christ Crucified,’ one in the Prado, one in San Nicolas, surely the most terrible realisation possible of that scene of sacrifice, in which the agony of spirit so outweighs the agony of the flesh, and sky and earth seem to take their share in the struggle.
It is impossible to translate the effect of these animated religious pictures into words. El Greco was not content to embody the old myths in fresh forms, but he gave fresh forms to the ideas that are, as it were, the soul of each myth—that which lives when the form of the stories change. Even in his pictures with few figures, such for instance, as the ‘Mary and Jesus,’ in San Vicente, the ‘St. Francis,’ of which there are four replicas in Toledo, or that earlier picture, a beautiful rendering of a difficult theme, ‘La Veronica,’ one of the series painted for the Santo Domingo el Antigua in 1575-76, we have this exaggeration. Then, sometimes, exaggeration, which in each picture, after all, only emphasises the idea, disappears altogether, and we are given figures of singular beauty, as the ‘San Martin,’ in San José, or the really fine Madonnas—dark, oval-faced angels that surprise us at times with a beauty of type we hardly expect from El Greco. But, as a rule, in the pictures of this period, roughly marked by the painting of that experimental picture the ‘St. Maurice,’ there is this intensity of expression; and especially we find a new, and often strange, use of colour; colour, as well as form, being used as a means of dramatic statement, with a result that to many is exaggeration. For El Greco learnt first, perhaps, from the Venetians, and afterwards certainly in Toledo, many new possibilities of colour—that it has a quality that speaks, and further that the appeal of a picture depends first of all on the tone of its colour. It is for this reason he used colour as a means of emotional appeal; it was another quality by which to convey his idea to the world. For El Greco held truly that the province of art is to interpret, not to imitate. Every development of his art seems to have come from his own mind, hardly at all from the work of other painters; from the first he was true to his ideals. And always his pictures seem to be more the work of his soul than of his hand; which, in other words, is to say that he was greater as an artist than as a painter.
Domeniko Greco, like so many of the painters of Spain, was great in portraiture; and some of his portraits, such as those of Antonio Covarrubias and of Juan de Alava, in the Museo de San Juan de Los Reyes, that of Cardinal Tavera, in the Hospital de Afuera, the whole series in the Prado, and many others not possible to name, are as fine portraits as have ever been done in the world. In his earliest portraits even, in that of Julio Clovio, in the Museum of Naples, or that of ‘A Student,’ a portrait, it well may be, of the young painter himself, we have the qualities of his later work; always it is the spirit of his model that he seeks.
And this inward interpretation of life is seen, too, in that picture which is accounted rightly the most interesting, though not perhaps the most typical, of his work, ‘The Burial of Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz,’ still in the Church of Santo Tomé, where it was painted in 1584. Look at this gallery of living portraits, all the life of Toledo—the life of Spain—is reflected back from those ardent faces. In St. Augustine, splendid in ecclesiastical robes, is the magnificent opulence of the Catholic Church; in the livid face of the dead count, in the cowled monk and two priests is the fervid piety of a people who have felt themselves in mystical communion with God; in the young, warm beauty of St. Stephen and the lovely acolyte is the full joy and rich colour of Spain; and lastly, in the long line of mourners who stand behind the group of the principal figures, and where the painter’s own nervous face is the sixth portrait counting from the right side, you have types unchanged in Castile to-day. And how individual is the rendering of the upper section of the picture in which Christ awaits in the heavens the spirit of the dead saint. Yes, this picture is one of the greatest pictures in Spain; it is always interesting.
While the names of Murillo and Velazquez are inseparably linked in the history of Art as Spain’s immortal contribution to the small band of world-painters, the great Court-Painter to Philip IV. has ever received the lion’s share of public attention. Many learned and critical works have been written about Murillo, but whereas Velazquez has been familiarised to the general reader by the aid of small, popular biographies, the niche is still empty which it is hoped that this book will fill.
In this volume the attempt has been made to show the painter’s art in its relation to the religious feeling of the age in which he lived, and his own feeling towards his art. Murillo was the product of his religious era, and of his native province, Andalusia. To Europe in his lifetime he signified little or nothing. He painted to the order of the religious houses in his immediate vicinity; his works were immured in local monasteries and cathedrals, and, passing immediately out of circulation, were forgotten or never known.
The various exhibits with which the writer illustrates his narrative are reproduced to the number of nearly 400 on art paper, and the selection of weapons and armour has been made with a view not only to render the series interesting to the general reader, but to present a useful text book for the guidance of artists, sculptors, antiquaries, costumiers, and all who are engaged in the reproduction or representation of European armoury.
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME
THE ESCORIAL
A HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT OF THE SPANISH ROYAL PALACE, MONASTERY AND MAUSOLEUM. ILLUSTRATED WITH PLANS AND 278 REPRODUCTIONS FROM PICTURES AND PHOTOGRAPHS
The Royal Palace, Monastery, and Mausoleum of El Escorial, which rears its gaunt, grey walls in one of the bleakest but most imposing districts in the whole of Spain, was erected to commemorate a victory over the French in 1557. It was occupied and pillaged by the French two and a-half centuries later, and twice it has been greatly diminished by fire; but it remains to-day, not only the incarnate expression of the fanatic religious character and political genius of Philip II., but the greatest mass of wrought granite which exists on earth, the leviathan of architecture, the eighth wonder of the world.
In the text of this book the author has endeavoured to reconstitute the glories and tragedies of the living past of the Escorial, and to represent the wonders of the stupendous edifice by reproductions of over two hundred and seventy of the finest photographs and pictures obtainable. Both as a review and a pictorial record it is hoped that the work will make a wide appeal among all who are interested in the history, the architecture, and the art of Spain.
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME
TOLEDO
A HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT OF THE “CITY OF GENERATIONS,” WITH 510 ILLUSTRATIONS
The origin of Imperial Toledo, “the crown of Spain, the light of the world, free from the time of the mighty Goths,” is lost in the impenetrable mists of antiquity. Mighty, unchangeable, invincible, the city has been described by Wörmann as “a gigantic open-air museum of the architectural history of early Spain, arranged upon a lofty and conspicuous table of rock.”
But while some writers have declared that Toledo is a theatre with the actors gone and only the scenery left, the author does not share the opinion. He believes that the power and virility upon which Spain built up her greatness is reasserting itself. The machinery of the theatre of Toledo is rusty, the pulleys are jammed from long disuse, but the curtain is rising steadily if slowly, and already can be heard the tuning-up of fiddles in its ancient orchestra.
In this belief the author of this volume has not only set forth the story of Toledo’s former greatness, but has endeavoured to place before his readers a panorama of the city as it appears to-day, and to show cause for his faith in the greatness of the Toledo of the future.
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME
SEVILLE
A HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT, WITH 300 ILLUSTRATIONS
Seville, which has its place in mythology as the creation of Hercules, and was more probably founded by the Phœnicians, which became magnificent under the Roman rule, was made the capital of the Goths, became the centre of Moslem power and splendour, and fell before the military prowess of St. Ferdinand, is still the Queen of Andalusia, the foster-mother of Velazquez and Murillo, the city of poets and pageantry and love.
Seville is always gay, and responsive and fascinating to the receptive visitor, and all sorts of people go there with all sorts of motives. The artist repairs to the Andalusian city to fill his portfolio; the lover of art makes the pilgrimage to study Murillo in all his glory. The seasons of the Church attract thousands from reasons of devotion or curiosity. And of all these myriad visitors, who go with their minds full of preconceived notions, not one has yet confessed to being disappointed in Seville.
The author has here attempted to convey in the illustrations an impression of this laughing city where all is gaiety and mirth and ever-blossoming roses, where the people pursue pleasure as the serious business of life in an atmosphere of exhilarating enjoyment.
The excellence of the Madrid gallery is the excellence of exclusion; it is a collection of magnificent gems. Here one becomes conscious of a fresh power in Murillo, and is amazed anew by the astonishing apparition of Velazquez; here is, in truth, a rivalry of miracles of art.
The task of selecting pictures for reproduction from what is perhaps the most splendid gallery of old masters in existence, was one of no little difficulty, but it is believed that the collection is representative, and that the letterpress will form a serviceable companion to the visitor to The Prado.
This volume is the third and abridged edition of a work which the author was inspired to undertake by the surpassing loveliness of the Alhambra, and by his disappointment in the discovery that no such thing as an even moderately adequate illustrated souvenir of “this glorious sanctuary of Spain” was obtainable. Keenly conscious of the want himself, he essayed to supply it, and the result is a volume that has been acclaimed with enthusiasm alike by critics, artists, architects, and archæologists.
In his preface to the first edition, Mr. Calvert wrote: “The Alhambra may be likened to an exquisite opera which can only be appreciated to the full when one is under the spell of its magic influence. But as the witchery of an inspired score can be recalled by the sound of an air whistled in the street, so—it is my hope—the pale ghost of the Moorish fairy-land may live again in the memories of travellers through the medium of this pictorial epitome.”
In a Series such as this, which aims at presenting every aspect of Spain’s eminence in art and in her artists, the work of Domenico Theotocópuli must be allotted a volume to itself. “El Greco,” as he is called, who reflects the impulse, and has been said to constitute the supreme glory of the Venetian era, was a Greek by repute, a Venetian by training, and a Toledan by adoption. His pictures in the Prado are still catalogued among those of the Italian School, but foreigner as he was, in his heart he was more Spanish than the Spaniards.
El Greco is typically, passionately, extravagantly Spanish, and with his advent, Spanish painting laid aside every trace of Provincialism, and stepped forth to compel the interest of the world. Neglected for many centuries, and still often misjudged, his place in art is an assured one. It is impossible to present him as a colourist in a work of this nature, but the author has got together reproductions of no fewer than 140 of his pictures—a greater number than has ever before been published of El Greco’s works.
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VELAZQUEZ
A BIOGRAPHY AND APPRECIATION. ILLUSTRATED WITH 142 REPRODUCTIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS OF HIS MOST CELEBRATED PICTURES
Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez—“our Velazquez,” as Palomino proudly styles him—has been made the subject of innumerable books in every European language, yet the Editor of this Spanish Series feels that it would not be complete without the inclusion of yet another contribution to the broad gallery of Velazquez literature.
The great Velazquez, the eagle in art—subtle, simple, incomparable—the supreme painter, is still a guiding influence of the art of to-day. This greatest of Spanish artists, a master not only in portrait painting, but in character and animal studies, in landscapes and historical subjects, impressed the grandeur of his superb personality upon all his work. Spain, it has been said, the country whose art was largely borrowed, produced Velazquez, and through him Spanish art became the light of a new artistic life.
The author cannot boast that he has new data to offer, but he has put forward his conclusions with modesty; he has reproduced a great deal that is most representative of the artist’s work; and he has endeavoured to keep always in view his object to present a concise, accurate, and readable life of Velazquez.
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ROYAL PALACES OF SPAIN
A HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT OF THE SEVEN PRINCIPAL PALACES OF THE SPANISH KINGS. PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED
Spain is beyond question the richest country in the world in the number of its Royal Residences, and while few are without artistic importance, all are rich in historical memories. Thus, from the Alcazar at Seville, which is principally associated with Pedro the Cruel, to the Retiro, built to divert the attention of Philip IV. from his country’s decay; from the Escorial, in which the gloomy mind of Philip II. is perpetuated in stone, to La Granja, which speaks of the anguish and humiliation of Christina before Sergeant Garcia and his rude soldiery; from Aranjuéz to Rio Frio, and from El Pardo, darkened by the agony of a good king, to Miramar, to which a widowed Queen retired to mourn: all the history of Spain, from the splendid days of Charles V. to the present time, is crystallised in the Palaces that constitute the patrimony of the Crown.
The Royal Palaces of Spain are open to visitors at stated times, and it is hoped that this volume, with its wealth of illustrations, will serve the visitor both as a guide and a souvenir.
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VALLADOLID, OVIEDO, SEGOVIA, ZAMORA, AVILA AND ZARAGOZA
A HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT, WITH 390 ILLUSTRATIONS
The glory of Valladolid has departed, but the skeleton remains, and attached to its ancient stones are the memories that Philip II. was born here, that here Cervantes lived, and Christopher Columbus died. In this one-time capital of Spain, in the Plaza Mayor, the fires of the Great Inquisition were first lighted, and here Charles V. laid the foundation of the Royal Armoury, which was afterwards transferred to Madrid.
More than seven hundred years have passed since Oviedo was the proud capital of the Kingdoms of Las Asturias, Leon, and Castile. Segovia, though no longer great, has still all the appurtenances of greatness, and with her granite massiveness and austerity, she remains an aristocrat even among the aristocracy of Spanish cities. Zamora, which has a history dating from time almost without date, was the key of Leon and the centre of the endless wars between the Moors and the Christians, which raged round it from the eighth to the eleventh centuries.
In this volume the author has striven to re-create the ancient greatness of these six cities, and has preserved their memories in a wealth of excellent and interesting illustrations.
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LEON, BURGOS AND SALAMANCA
A HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT, WITH 462 ILLUSTRATIONS
In Leon, once the capital of the second kingdom in Spain; in Burgos, which boasts one of the most magnificent cathedrals in Spain, and the custodianship of the bones of the Cid; and in Salamanca, with its university, which is one of the oldest in Europe, the author has selected three of the most interesting relics of ancient grandeur in this country of departed greatness.
Leon to-day is nothing but a large agricultural village, torpid, silent, dilapidated; Burgos, which still retains traces of the Gotho-Castilian character, is a gloomy and depleting capital: and Salamanca is a city of magnificent buildings, a broken hulk, spent by the storms that from time to time have devastated her.
Yet apart from the historical interest possessed by these cities, they still make an irresistible appeal to the artist and the antiquary. They are content with their stories of old-time greatness and their cathedrals, and these ancient architectural splendours, undisturbed by the touch of a modernising and renovating spirit, continue to attract the visitor.
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MADRID
A HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT OF THE SPANISH CAPITAL, WITH 450 ILLUSTRATIONS
Madrid is at once one of the most interesting and most maligned cities in Europe. It stands at an elevation of 2,500 feet above the sea level, in the centre of an arid, treeless, waterless, and wind-blown plain; but whatever may be thought of the wisdom of selecting a capital in such a situation, one cannot but admire the uniqueness of its position, and the magnificence of its buildings, and one is forced to admit that, having fairly entered the path of progress, Madrid bids fair to become one of the handsomest and most prosperous of European cities.
The splendid promenades, the handsome buildings, and the spacious theatres combine to make Madrid one of the first cities of the world, and the author has endeavoured with the aid of the camera, to place every feature and aspect of the Spanish metropolis before the reader. Some of the illustrations reproduced here have been made familiar to the English public by reason of the interesting and stirring events connected with the Spanish Royal Marriage, but the greater number were either taken by the author, or are the work of photographers specially employed to obtain new views for the purpose of this volume.
The last of the old masters and the first of the moderns, as he has been called, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is not so familiarised to English readers as his genius deserves. He was born at a time when the tradition of Velazquez was fading, and the condition of Spanish painting was debased almost beyond hope of salvation; he broke through the academic tradition of imitation; “he, next to Velazquez, is to be accounted as the man whom the Impressionists of our time have to thank for their most definite stimulus, their most immediate inspiration.”
The genius of Goya was a robust, imperious, and fulminating genius; his iron temperament was passionate, dramatic, and revolutionary; he painted a picture as he would have fought a battle. He was an athletic, warlike, and indefatigable painter; a naturalist like Velazquez; fantastic like Hogarth; eccentric like Rembrandt; the last flame-coloured flash of Spanish genius.
It is impossible to reproduce his colouring; but in the reproductions of his works the author has endeavoured to convey to the reader some idea of Goya’s boldness of style, his mastery of frightful shadows and mysterious lights, and his genius for expressing all terrible emotions.
Footnotes
A This spelling of his name resembles most that used by himself.
B The exact contents are as follows:
“Al Card. Farnese—Viterbo.
“A’ di 16 di Nouembre, 1570.
“E’ capitato in Roma un giouane Candiotto discepolo di Titiano, che á mio giuditio parmi raro nella pittura; e fra l’altre cose egli ha fatto un ritratto da se stesso, che fa stupire tutti questi Pittori di Roma. Io vorrei tratenerlo sotto l’ombra de V.S. Illma. et Revma. senza spesa altra del vivere, ma solo de una stanza nell Palazzo Farnese per qualche poco di tempo, cioé per fin che egli si venghi ad accomodare meglio. Pero La prego et supplico sia contenta di scrivere al Conte Lodovico suo Maiordomo, che lo provegghi nel detto Palazzo di qualche stanza ad alto; che V.S. Illma. fará un’ opera virtuosa degna di Lei, e io gliene terro obligo. Et le bascio con reverenza le mani.
“Di V.S. Illma. et Revma. humilissimo servitore.
“Julio Clovio.”
C The record of his burial, discovered by Señor de Beruete in the register of the parish church of Santo Tomé, is brief: “Libro de entierros de Santo Tomé de 1601-1614, en siete del Abril del 1614 falescio Domeniko Greco. No hizo testamento, recibo los sacramentos, en teroso en Santo Domingo el Antigua.”
D Two judges were appointed to settle the dispute, which arose from the introduction of the three Marys into the picture. The Chapter objected to their presence. El Greco’s defence was characteristic enough—What did it matter? and, besides, the women were a long way off. The judges disagreed; whereupon the dispute was settled by Alezo de Montoyo as follows:
“Having seen the said painting which has been executed by the said Domeniko, and the appraisements of the judge appointed by both parties, and other persons who understand the said painting, its execution and admirable finish; and the reasons which the said judges have given; and seeing that the said painting is one of the best that I have seen; and that, if it were to be estimated for all its valuable qualities, it would be valued at a much higher sum, which but few would care to pay for it; but, in view of the nature of the times and the price paid generally for the paintings of great artists in Castile; and in view of, and taking into consideration all the above and all other points that were necessary, I find that I must order, and I do order, that for the said painting the said Garcia de Loaysa, in the name of the said Holy Church, shall give and pay to the said Domeniko Theotokopuli three thousand and five hundred reals: and above this sum the said Domeniko Theotokopuli cannot ask, nor must he ask, for anything more for the said painting; and as regards the judges for the said workers, they say that it is improper for the Marys to be introduced into the story; as regards this I am sending the declaration of it to some theologians versed in such matters, that they may decide upon it.”
E This is another rendering of the same picture; and still another is in the collection of Señor de Beruete, Madrid.
F This picture passed into the collection of the Infanta Doña Isabel Farnese, and is now in the Museo del Prado. The ‘Assumption’ in the Church of Santo Domingo el Antigua is a poor copy of the original picture.