The sacred made awesome
This was an exhibition that could never have happened before. Just imagine how statues and paintings that have been in Spanish churches and monasteries for the last four hundred years could be extracted from their pedestals or retablos in front of which devotees have been praying all their lives. The paint from some of the sculptures may have even faded and acquired a glossy patina from the millions of reverential hands that have rubbed them regularly through the centuries. But thanks to the cooperation of ecclesiastical and civil institutions in Spain, a selection of pieces was temporarily lent for “The Sacred Made Real,” a landmark exhibition just concluded at The National Gallery in London and now ongoing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Another reason why the masterpieces of Baroque religious sculpture and paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries have never been given a proper exhibit is because of what National Gallery director Nicholas Penny refers to as “a disdain with which the Enlightenment regarded these devotional works of art as objects of superstitious veneration, a disdain that was often mingled with the Protestant distaste for Mariolatry and martyrs.”
When we viewed the works of art in the exhibit, we realized how such superstitious veneration and virtual idolatry was inevitable. The polychromed sculptures were so lifelike and the paintings so palpable that each piece could easily begin to have a life of its own instead of just being a bridge to the divine, as they were meant to be.
Realism was actually prevalent in painting throughout 17th century Europe. In Italy, Caravaggio’s masterful chiaroscuro transformed his depictions of Biblical episodes into dramatic “tableau vivants” which the faithful could easily empathize with. Such works were sanctioned by the church as a necessary stimulation for the senses and a jolt for the soul. During the Spanish Counter-Reformation, religious patrons of the Carthusian, Dominican and Franciscan orders challenged painters and sculptors to make the sacred as realistic as possible in order to inspire Christian devotion and the emulation of saints. To make sculpture realistic, polychromy, a painstaking, specialized process of painting and finishing, was necessary. It was a practice more widespread in Spain than in the rest of Europe where the medieval tendency to paint sculpture had been superseded by the Italian Renaissance preference for plain marble and bronze.
The realism that resulted in Spain was also much starker because of the importance given to hyper-real polychrome sculptures as part of their religious and cultural heritage. Xavier Bray, curator of the exhibit, observes, “In their original context such sculptures, whether positioned on altars and lit by candles or processed through the streets on religious feast days, would have had a strong impact not only upon the faithful but also on painters’ visual imaginations.”
To this day, at the famous Lenten festivities in Seville, a paso (a float, the counterpart of our native carozza) is carried on the shoulders of 30, to astounding effect. “The movement of the paso as it sways from side to side endows the sculpture with a disconcerting sense of life, as if the streets of Seville had suddenly turned into the streets of Jerusalem.” It’s no wonder then that painters such as Francisco de Zurbarán would be influenced by such sculptures for their work. In Zurbarán’s case, since he also had experience in painting sculptures, there was a stronger tendency to contrive an illusion of three-dimensionality on a flat panel. His 1627 painting, “Christ on the Cross,” created for a small oratory in the Dominican friary of San Pablo in Seville, has such an amazing three-dimensionality that the Spanish historian and painter Antonio Palomino reported how “everyone who sees it and does not know believes it to be sculpture.”
Painting and sculpture, in fact, had such a complex and reciprocal relationship in Spain during this period. Although the two arts were somehow distinct at an institutional level, in practice there was an interdependence between them. The production of religious sculptures was governed by different guilds, the Guild of Carpenters for the sculptors and the Guild of Painters for the painters who polychromed them. Sculptors would carve their sculptures and gesso them in white but were not allowed to paint them. Only a specially trained pintor de ymagenería, a painter of religious imagery, could paint these figures. But even if there were two sets of hands working on a piece, the final outcome had to be perfect and appear as lifelike as possible, making both sculptor and painter dependent on each other’s skills. The form produced by the sculptor had to be clearly defined while the painter had to respect the undulations of the surface that he was painting. In some contracts that polychromers had to sign for a commission, there were even stipulations saying that under no circumstances should they “cover or overwhelm the shapes and forms of the sculpture.”
Of course, a harmonious relationship always worked to the advantage of both sculptor and painter, resulting in some very successful partnerships, the most celebrated one being that of Juan Martínez Montañés and Francisco Pacheco in Seville. Montañés was held in such high esteem by his contemporaries that they called him “el dios de la madera” (“the god of wood”). Pacheco, famously known as the teacher and father-in-law of Velázquez, was a succesful painter in his own right and ran a painting and polychromy workshop. He also wrote Arte de la Pintura, a treatise on sculpture and painting in Seville which emphasized the use of color in giving life to sculpture and discussed the technique of painting flesh tones or encarnacíon, (incarnation or literally made flesh), as well as facial expressions.
Their life-size sculpture of St. Francis Borgia, the Jesuit who died in 1572 and was beatified in 1624, is a masterful merging of classicism with realism. Holding a skull on the left hand and a cross on the other, it conveys a great sense of emotion as the face expresses humility while meditating on the fragility of life and the vanity of worldly power. Pacheco employed a mate or matt technique of encarnacíon which involved a simple coat of glue-size followed by unpolished gesso and white lead which was sanded down and then applied with a color priming for the flesh. The polimento or glossy version of encarnacíon was more complicated: lead white and pigments had to be ground with an oil medium or a light clear varnish, then applied over the white gessoed surface which had to be polished with a dampened glove leather or a veriga (pig’s bladder) and varnished. Pacheco did not like polimento, though, not because it was time consuming but because its reflection of light was distracting and did not mimic the true quality of human flesh. He used it only for inferior works of sculpture so as to diminish their defects.
For St. Francis Borgia, Pacheco created darker flesh tones and facial features which look like a natural tan on leathery skin. Subtle brown shading was used to emphasize cheekbones and bring out veins and lines around the eyes and flecks of white were added to the irises for a more realistic effect. He eschewed the use of real hair for eyelashes which he said spoiled sculpture, preferring to use “strokes of color smoothly blended together.” Even the use of glass eyes was rejected, dismissing it as a technique that was a conjurer’s deception and not artistic representation. As a final touch to bring the sculpture to life, an egg-white varnish was applied on the eyes, making them sparkle.
The division of labor between sculpture and painting inevitably produced a strain in relationships between the two fields. Sculptors were becoming frustrated by the fact that they had to turn over their work to professional painters and were therefore unable to see their creation through to completion, not to mention that this disbarred them from getting the full financial reward for the commission. (Sculptors were considered more like craftsmen rather than artists, with the painters given more importance in bringing the pieces to life.) Eventually, sculptors like Montañés thought of subcontracting to a painter who would be paid one-quarter of the total fee, with the rest kept by him since he was responsible for overseeing the whole project. This, of course, was contested by Pacheco and members of the Painters’ Guild, leading to heated debates and lawsuits. Later on, artists like Alonso Cano would take examinations and get licenses from both guilds so that they can do both the sculpting and painting.
With this development, a completely new style of realism was developed by the artists who rejected Pacheco’s concepts. The polychromy became more strident and expressive and they started employing all the aids which Pacheco was against — glass for eyes and tears, real hair for eyelashes, bull horn for finger and toe nails, ivory for teeth — producing the most hyper-realistic sculpture to date. Gregorio Fernández, famous for the gruesome nature of his work, even used tree bark with red pastose paint to simulate the effect of coagulating blood for his “Dead Christ.” Pedro de Mena’s Ecce Homo (1673) is just as gory. Done in half-length format, the tortured Christ is scarred and bloody, with bound hands held poignantly before him, and looking at the viewer directly as though confronting him about the horror of what was done to him. The effect is so intense because of the way the sculpting and polychromy were done, a marked change from the more subtle style of Pacheco’s. Another work by De Mena, “Mary Magdalene Meditating on the Crucifixion” (1664), is another tour de force, showing Magdalene in a moment of intense prayer before the crucifix in her hand. Her pose is dynamic, with one foot stepping forward, her right hand clutching her chest, and her face filled with empathy for Christ’s suffering. Twisted wicker, covered with gesso and painted a rich chestnut, was used for her flowing hair and her face and arms were polychromed with amazingly naturalistic flesh tones.
Although it was commonly observed that sculptures, with their popular appeal as well as official approval, were largely the model for many religious paintings, it could be said that the reverse was also true where paintings could be the model for sculptures as in the case of Pedro de Mena’s statue of Saint Francis (1663) which was similar to a Zurbarán painting of the same subject done in 1640. This shows that religious painting in Spain had come into its own instead of just emulating sculpture: It had its own unique power of creating atmosphere and rendering the impalpable features of the real world. The St. Francis figure is based on the legend that when the saint’s tomb at Assisi was opened in the presence of Pope Nicholas V in 1449, they discovered his body to be miraculously preserved and standing upright. This event was depicted in drawings showing the Pope and his retinue examining the wounds on Saint Francis’ feet and illuminating the crypt with a burning torch like archeologists in an Egyptian tomb. Zurbarán, on the other hand, isolated the figure of St. Francis in a stark, dark background with his towering presence filling the frame and a stream of light dramatically illuminating one side of his body.
The severity of the composition recreates the eeriness of the event and brings the viewer straight into the sepulcher, face to face with the uncorrupted body of the saint who is looking heavenward in deep contemplation. The image was so powerful that De Mena was challenged to create a sculpture which turned out to be one of his most realistic and arresting pieces, despite the fact that it was only three feet tall. The piece from the Toledo cathedral was an object of such great veneration that many succeeding sculptures of St. Francis were based on it and became cult figures in many churches and chapels even up to two centuries later.
With the special relationship of painting and sculpture in Spain, creating both mutual dependency and rivalry, there was the inevitable “paragone” or comparison between the two. In Italy, the merits of the two art forms had been debated on since the 15th century. Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari, and Leon Battista Alberti were among the first to argue that painting was superior to sculpture because it required the intellect more than just physical labor. In 17th century Spain, the controversy of the Montañés commission bypassing the painters’ guild resulted in Pacheco’s writing a treatise asserting his belief in the superiority of painting over sculpture, stating that “the application of color revealed the passions and concerns of the soul with great vividness” and that painting was “the most universal, most delightful, most spiritual, most useful of all the arts.”
In any case, this protracted debate and comparison could only work for the better, creating innovations in both fields and artists in both disciplines aspiring to perfect their craft. It should be noted, however, that in the case of religious art in Spain, the dedication to craft was made stronger by the devotion and religious fervor of artists. Some artists like Gregorio Fernández have been known to fast and pray intensely before and during a work in progress, even flagellating themselves as an aid to create these realistic pieces. Pedro de Mena supposedly never accepted a pupil in his atelier without first inquiring into his birth and Christian blood. In other words, the religious themes they depicted were very much part of their lives, and the strength of their religious beliefs made the practice of their art even more intense. If they tried to make a creation as realistic as possible, hyper-realistic even, it was because they wanted it to represent something beyond reality, something other than the object itself. It was this driving force that ultimately produced the awe-inspiring masterpieces we view today.
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“The Sacred Made Real” is ongoing at the National Gallery of Art, Washington till May 31. Visit www.nga.gov.
