Spanish Religious Art Dazzles New York Exhibit

By Nora Hamerman
Special to the Herald
(From the issue of 5/1/03)

When Napoleon’s armies crossed the Pyrenees to conquer Spain in 1808, they brought with them the hubris of the French Revolution, dedicated to a fanatical faith in a concept of human reason that denied the divinity. The French leaders hoped to obliterate what they called monkish superstition. As elsewhere in their imperial conquests, they plundered numerous artistic treasures of Spain from palaces, convents and churches and carted them back to Paris, where they were displayed in private galleries or at the national Louvre Museum. Typical of the ideology guiding the confiscations, one French official declared: "For too long these masterpieces have been sullied by servitude. It is in the bosom of a free people that the legacy of great men must come to rest."

Some 130 Spanish masterpieces that were in France nearly 200 years ago, and have since been dispersed across the globe, are now gathered at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibition entitled "Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting."

The show opened March 4 and will remain on view until June 8. It includes Spanish paintings which are now spread through museums and private collections from St. Petersburg to Seville, from Dresden to Ottawa, and, as a bonus, it also includes a lot of fine French and American pictures that were inspired by those Spanish originals.

If you are Catholic, and you love sacred art, spare no effort to get to New York before this show closes. You will never get another chance like this. The show captures one of those ironies that history hands to the arrogant. Not only did the conquest of Spain prove a military and political disaster for France, and a shock to the delusions of the virulently anti-Catholic French Revolution and its sympathizers abroad. But Spanish art, so very Catholic in its roots, and hitherto so little known outside the Iberian Peninsula, conquered the imaginations of the artists and art-loving public of Paris.

The great painters of the Spanish Golden Age (roughly 1550-1650), Velazquez, Ribera, Zurbaran and Murillo, impressed the French by their combination of a deep spiritual conviction, and at the same time, a bold style of portraying ordinary people and their surroundings unidealized.

Transcendence Lost

The shock of the French invasion was brilliantly mirrored by the last of the Spanish Old Masters (and first of the great modern artists) Francisco de Goya, who admired the French Enlightenment and whose pictures are also in this exhibition. Horrified, Goya observed at a distance the bloodbath that the Revolution brought to France in 1793, and swept into Spain 15 years later.

When Goya depicted the uprising in Madrid against the French in his huge canvas known as the "Third of May 1808," the central victim among the peasants gunned down by the French troops is portrayed unequivocally as a type of Christ, his arms outstretched in sacrifice. But half a century later, when the French artist Manet quoted Goya’s composition in his own picture based on then-recent history, "The Execution of Maximilian," the reference to Christ was pointedly omitted. (Manet’s picture is in the show, but Goya’s is not. Both are among the most important pictures of the last two centuries.)

Indeed, without in any way detracting from the genius of Manet, when his portraits inspired by Velazquez are set side by side with the originals, as they are in this show, one sees that Manet internalized the formal principles of the older Spanish artist but systematically omitted his transcendant message. In part, this may be due to the fact that when the Spanish pictures were displayed in France, they had lost their original context, especially those art works that were removed from churches where they had been an integral part of worship.

The premise of this exhibition, to show Spanish painting’s influence on French artists and hence on the birth of modern art, is pursued almost to the point of pedantry, but one hardly needs that pretext to be thrilled by no fewer than 14 pictures by or attributed to Velazquez.

Even though Velazquez is better known for secular portraits than for his devotional works, what shines forth from his portraits is a deep conviction that each human individual is created in the image and likeness of God. It is this intense humanity, shared by the powerful pope and the absolute monarch with the lowly dwarf or court jester or street person disguised as an ancient philosopher, that Velazquez projected onto his panels, using his unparalleled mastery of the science of optics and the craft of painting. There never was a greater painter, and not since the Velazquez exhibition at the Metropolitan in 1989 has there been an opportunity to see so much of his work in this country.

Conversely, a contemporary of Velazquez who came to be appreciated in the 19th century after long oblivion was Francisco de Zurbaran, who painted almost nothing but religious pictures. If Velazquez’s secular figures glow with a Christian identity more implied than explicit, Zurbaran’s saints, with their strong colors, corporeal solidity, and dramatic lighting bespeak a spirituality that is ardently Catholic, usually monastic, and yet far from otherworldly.

The last of the Golden Age masters of Spain was Bartolome Esteban Murillo, sometimes described as having made the Immaculate Conception the teaching of the Catholic Church two centuries before the dogma was proclaimed in 1851.

The most glorious of his more than 20 pictures of the Immaculate Conception is called "de Soult" after the French commander who conquered Seville. Marshal Soult exhibited it in his Paris home together with many other Spanish masterpieces he had looted, but it was ultimately returned to Spain, to the Prado Museum, which loaned it to the New York show.

The Soult "Immaculate Conception" originally stood on the high altar of a church, the Venerables Sacerdotes in Seville, a home for retired priests founded in 1660. Uniting the two doctrines of the Assumption of the Virgin and the Immaculate Conception in a single composition, Murillo succeeded in making this image of the Immaculate Conception into a beloved symbol of all the ideas and feelings embodied in the Blessed Virgin as mankind‘s intercessor before God.

From the same church, Soult also carried off another painting in the show, the "Christ Child Distributing Bread to the Priests."

The picture belongs to a museum in Budapest, and so unless you are planning a trip to Hungary sometime soon, do hasten to New York to see this stunning example of Murillo’s talent for turning religious figures into amiable figures of flesh and blood. The bread in the picture looks real enough to eat — a fusion of the act of charity of feeding the elderly priests, and the spiritual bread of the divine Eucharist imparted by Christ himself.

Hamerman is a freelance writer from Northern Virginia.

Copyright ©2003 Arlington Catholic Herald.  All rights reserved.