‘Spain and the Hispanic World’: The Soul of a Culture
A review of ‘Spain and the Hispanic World’, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
We have Archer Milton Huntington to thank for the Royal Academy’s lovely new exhibition. He founded the Hispanic Society of America, a museum and library, in New York City in 1904, and made numerous contributions to the American Geographical Society. During the dark years of the Great Depression, Huntington and his wife also donated large portions of their property for philanthropic and public uses, helping to build museums, create parks, and set up facilities that supported research and education. Huntington was part of that noble tradition of rich Americans who just cannot wait to give away all the money they have earned or, as the case may be, inherited.
It is because the works on display at the ‘Spain and the Hispanic World’ exhibition belonged to Huntington’s Hispanic Society of America and not a formal museum that what we see reflects not a professional’s art historian’s understanding of the Hispanic tradition, but that of a passionate amateur. Which is not to say he lacked taste. His exhibition, whose works date back to 2,000 B.C. and stretch forward to the 20th century, manifests as a living tradition of art, neither completely heterogenous nor homogenous, but seem to be connected one to the next by a single, if you like, many-coloured thread that begins with the Bell Beaker bowls and runs through Celtic, Iberian, Roman and Muslim work. The ruling character of the exhibition, however, is unmistakably Catholic and Christian, which prevailed from the time of the Reconquista, and the expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain.
The ruling character of the exhibition is unmistakably Catholic and Christian.
We encounter more than 150 works as we make our way from room to room in the Royal Academy of Arts. Here we find the tenebrism, the skilful brushwork and the attention to detail of Diego Velásquez; the vivid colour and expressive manner of El Greco. We find Aztec maps, lovely silk textiles, and lacquerware, all dispersed across six or seven rooms. I find myself drawn inexorably to the masters of the Counter-Reformation period—those men who thrived under the patronage of the devout King Philip II. Here we find some of the most intensely spiritual and humbling paintings we are likely to see, paintings that inspire what Michael Oakeshott called the ‘contemplative mode’: paintings in which we lose ourselves.
Among these are Christ Crucified by Velásquez, a haunting oil-on-canvas painting that evokes the chiaraoscuro of Caravaggio. It depicts the dying Christ, in an austere sort of posture, who seems to glow against a black background that draws us in, but out of which He seems to come. Christ’s head is crowned not just with thorns but with a halo; His face rests on his chest. The painting expresses not only pain but lamentation, sadness at His sacrifice, as though He regrets that He must play the Girardian scapegoat who once and for all ends our need to scapegoat the Other, who regrets that He must die so that we may live. And yet, at the same time, his upright pose, the palpable strength in his legs, suggests a dignity that no power on Earth could ever take away.
Saint Jerome cuts a lean and quite surreal figure in the Saint Jerome in Penitence of El Greco. This Doctor of the Church, known for his translation of the Bible into Latin, gazes with a kind of longing into the face of the crucified Christ on his crucifix and beats his own chest with a stone. It is a typical El Greco painting: Jerome’s body is elongated, warped: the brush strokes and soft lines of the surroundings and the torso of the saint create a sense of motion almost, as though both we and Jermone are in a trance. The scene evokes the transience of things—as against the eternal nature of the divine—symbolised by the skull and the hourglass standing the desk.
Saint Jerome cuts a lean and quite surreal figure in the Saint Jerome in Penitence of El Greco.
In his oil painting Calvario at Sagunto, Day’s End, we find something different. It is no less striking, and yet it is striking on account of its palpable serenity. Santiago Rusiñol depicts a quiet moment at close of day at the entrance to the Calvary in the village of Sagunto in Spain. Cypress trees climb towards the heavens; and a single clerical figure clothed in black — conspicuous against the unblemished white of the Calvary — pauses by the opening beneath the cross. This is an image that expresses the stillness and tranquility of faith; and yet it also has a melancholy aspect in that evokes the suffering of Christ.
Here on display in London is something profound: something like the visual artistic soul of a world culture, an optical history of Hispanic faith and feeling spanning close to 4,000 years. It is rare to come upon an exhibition so immersive, so furnished with such riches, oozing so much technical brilliance, creative power and spiritual depth. It is quite something.
