Sunshine And Shadow In Spain

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Art is the mirror of life, and a great part of the fascination of old pictures is that in them are reflected the great upheavals of history. We have seen how Florentine art was affected by the preaching first of St Francis of Assisi and afterwards of Savonarola. Now the most formidable antagonists that the Lutheran Reformers had to face, alike in action and in thought, were the Spaniards. The movement of the counter-Reformation originated and flourished in Spain. As the Spaniards in the Middle Ages had battled against the Moors till they won their land for Christianity, so they fought against the paganism of the Roman Church during the sixteenth century and strove with equal determination later against the Reformers, whom they regarded as heretics. The herald of this last battle was Ignatius Loyola, and he and his creation, the Order of the Jesuits, proved to be the most dangerous and powerful adversary of Protestantism.

El Greco’s picture ‘Christ driving the Traders from the Temple,’ in the National Gallery, may be regarded as symbolizing the purification of the Church by Loyola, but it is by his treatment infinitely more than by his choice of subject that El Greco expresses that vein of ‘convulsed mysticism which was the peculiar attribute of Spanish Catholicism. El Greco as he grew older seemed to take delight in distorting natural forms. There is something savage, brutal even, in his art, and his deep earnestness gives grandeur to terrible things. The generally acknowledged masterpiece and most characteristic work by El Greco is his picture in the church of San Tomé in Toledo, in which the members of a knightly order solemnly attend the funeral of Count Orgaz. The corpse is lowered into the ground by two saints, while Christ, Mary, martyrs, and angels hover in the air, and this ‘abrupt union of actual with transcendental’—as Dr Muther puts it—together with the uncanny, slightly exaggerated forms found in parts of the picture, confess a touch of hysteria.

By a curious coincidence the tercentenary of El Greco was celebrated in 1914, at a moment when the whole of Europe was again in a turmoil and minds were full of hatred and thoughts of violence. To a generation excited by war and rumors of war the suppressed violence in El Greco’s pictures was irresistibly attractive. Some very advanced critics and ultra progressive painters found in his neurotic temperament their ideal Old Master. El Greco was reputed to have held that color was of far more importance than form of drawing, and if this belief was once regarded as ‘curious anticipation of modern ideas,’ these ‘modern ideas’ are themselves now out of date, drawing and design being now generally accepted as the foundation of all good art. El Greco’s pictures are far from being formless. Historically and psychologically the paintings of El Greco are of the highest interest; but they are a dangerous model for the art student.

Another foreign artist, who if he did not succeed in expressing the spirit of the time nevertheless influenced Spanish painting considerably, was Sir Anthony More, who, visited Spain, and during his stay there, about 1551-2, set a style of portraiture which served as a model for Coello (1515-90) and other Spanish court-painters.

Sunshine And Shadow In Spain (continued)