enlivened the ennui of the Court in the palace of Buen Retiro. He was also, as an amateur, skilful in drawing and painting. This doubtless helped him to appreciate the merits of Velasquez, who to the world outside of Spain represents the subject of most significance in his life. Philip’s companionship with the artist, five years his elder, which except for the brief intervals in which one or the other of them was traveling, lasted for thirty-seven years, indeed until Velasquez’ death, is the one thing on which the student of history and of art cares to dwell. It has secured for Philip IV a recognition which his political importance would have denied him.

The increasing impotence of the Hapsburg family of Spanish king’s reached its climax in Philip’s son, Charles II. One has but to glance at the latter’s portrait, painted by Juan Carreño, to realise the physical and mental degeneracy that the family type has undergone. The type, as one sees it in Titian’s equestrian portrait of his great-great-grandfather, Charles I of Spain and V of Germany, is already abnormal. The grey eyes, for all their sternness and penetrating character, have a pathetic cast of melancholy; the under jaw protrudes like that of an ape. But the chin is massive, as indicative of force as of ferocity. In Philip II, as he appears in Titian’s portrait in the Prado, the face has lengthened; the eyes have lost their piercing gaze, and while no less melancholy, have an expression of deliberate cruelty. The coarseness of the lower part of the face is displayed in the exaggerated sensuality of the out-turned lower lip, beneath which is a tapering chin, that has a suggestion of blended weakness and petty doggedness. In the equestrian portrait of Philip III, which is supposed to have been painted by Bartolomé Gonzáles and effectively retouched by Velasquez, the monarch’s head is carried a little back, a gesture which extenuates with probable intention the protrusion of the lower part. But the chin is feebly pointed, the under lip pendulous, while the eye suggests an empty vacuity, that is echoed in the mild fierceness of the upcurling moustache. It is a face vain, stupid and not a little commonplace. The last quality, at least, is absent, from the portraits of Philip IV. The face, especially when young, reflects the King’s intrinsic refinement; but its length has become exaggerated, the protruding under-lip and jaw are puffed and fleshy, weakly sensual, while the eyes are apathetic. The expression of the whole is of a nature nearly worn out, that can only be stirred to occasional alertness by the stimulant of trivial excitements. Finally, in Carreño’s portrait of Charles II, (p. 132) appears a total extinction of active faculties, soft sensuousness rather than sensuality, a settled look of apathy and the profound depression of a religious monomaniac.

Charles was scarcely four years old when the death of his father in 1665 made him king of a bankrupt country. It was the policy of the Queen Mother, whose regency was marked by political incompetence and personal amours, to keep her son as childish as possible. And, when he reached his majority at the age of fifteen and supplanted his mother’s influence by that of Don Juan of Austria, the latter also schemed to keep his master in a condition of mental darkness and dependence. Thus Charles was the victim alike of racial degeneracy and of thwarted development. Complete incapacity to govern himself or others was the natural result. He shunned the affairs of state, mildly supported the arts as far as the beggared state of the treasury would permit, and sank into a religious mania that found satisfaction in attending auto-da-fés and prostrating himself in acts of personal penance. Dying childless in 1700, he brought the Hapsburg line to an inglorious conclusion; and the succession passed to a branch of the Bourbon family.

The Crown was offered by the Spanish people to Philip, grandson of Louis XIV. He was the nephew of the late king, being the son of Philip IV’s daughter, Maria Theresa, and Louis XIV. When, however, this marriage was made Louis had expressly renounced all claims to the Spanish throne, both on his own behalf and that of his heirs; and the renunciation had been confirmed by the Cortes. Meanwhile, another sister of Charles II had been married to Leopold, Emperor of Germany. She also had renounced her claim to the Spanish Crown, but the understanding had not been ratified by the Cortes. This afforded a pretext for the Elector of Bavaria, who had married her daughter, to claim the succession in opposition to Philip. A third claimant had been the Emperor Leopold himself, who however, waived his rights in favor of his second son, the Archduke Charles. The dispute had been in progress during the late king’s life, and Louis XIV had made a treaty with England and Holland, recognising the claims of the Elector of Bavaria. When, however, the crown was offered to Philip and accepted on his behalf by Louis XIV, England and Holland made a coalition with Austria and Germany to compel the recognition of the Archduke Charles. Hence the thirteen years’ war of the Spanish succession, in which Marlborough gained a series of victories over the French and Bavarians, the Archduke ravaged the Peninsula, and the English and Dutch fleets preyed on Spanish commerce and captured Gibraltar. Finally, by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714 the succession of Philip V was ratified.

He had been brought up by Louis XIV to be undesirous and incapable of taking part in political affairs. While the country continued to be involved in disastrous foreign wars this roi fainéant amused himself with building a summer palace and laying out gardens, both in the French style. He also imported the French portrait-painter, Van Loo. It must be added, however, that the stock of Spanish painters had been exhausted. Native art, indeed, for the time, was all but dead. It so remained through the thirteen years’ reign of his son, Ferdinand VI, though he tried to galvanize it into official life by inaugurating the Academy of San Fernando. This king was succeeded by his brother Charles III, who had already distinguished himself by his wise rule of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. His portrait by Goya, in the costume of a sportsman, shows him to be a man of awkward build and of homely, though kind and shrewd, face. He proved himself a generous patron of second-rate artists, inviting the German painter, Raphael Mengs and the Venetian, Tiepolo, to his Court; built the present gallery of the Prado and issued an order forbidding the exportation of paintings by the great masters of Spain. He appears to have had some inkling of the genius of Goya, who, however, did not come into prominence until the succession of Charles IV.

Charles IV was an amiable imbecile and his Queen, Maria Luisa, the shameless subject of notorious scandal. One of her favorites, Manuel Godoy, advanced from the rank and file of a regiment of the Guards to the title of Duke of Alcudia, was entrusted with the duties of prime minister. After embroiling the country in successive wars with France and England, he finally attached himself to the cause of Napoleon and favored the latter’s design to place his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. The French entered Spain in 1808 and compelled Charles to abdicate. But in the same year the Spaniards rose against the invaders, and the English came to their assistance. Then followed the Peninsular War, during which Wellington gradually expelled the French troops, but not until they had pillaged the cathedrals and churches and carried off a large number of the finest works of art. For Marshal Soult, with the predatory instincts of an unscrupulous dealer, sent his emissaries ahead of the army. Armed with the “Dictionary of Painters and Paintings” by Cean Bermudez, they identified and attached the most famous canvases, which the Marshal compelled their owners to part with at his own terms. On the conclusion of the war many of these were returned to Spain under the terms of the treaty of peace, but a number of masterpieces had already passed through Soult’s rapacious hands into the public and private galleries of Europe.

This treaty of peace, which restored the Throne to Charles’ son, Ferdinand VII, is the end of the history of Spain so far as it concerns the growth and development and decline of her national art. She has had painters of repute since 1814; but not in sufficient numbers to constitute a school or even a noticeable artistic movement. Under weak and constantly changing governments, controlled by the Church and existing mainly for taxation, her arts, like her commerce and industries dwindled to an almost negligible condition, from which only recently there are indications of recovery.

CHAPTER II

CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH PAINTING

Had the artists of Spain painted for the general public or followed their own bent in the pursuit of beauty, they would doubtless have developed branches of genre and still life painting that might have emulated the work of the Holland artists; for they had a similar love of the intimate beauty of simple things around them. But since they had to reach the masses of the people through the intervention mostly of the Church, which not only commissioned the subject but prescribed its treatment, they achieved their self-expression through religious pictures which had the character of sacred genre. Yet this Spanish brand of genre is inferior to the secular genre of Holland or to the sacred genre of old Flemish religious paintings. It has a quality, perceptible in neither of the latter, of obviousness. Its motive is less surely an æsthetic delight in things of beauty; more evidently influenced by the practical intention of rounding out the story.

I doubt if the student of Spanish painting, particularly if he visits Spain, can escape the feeling that it exhibits a certain oppressive obviousness. How is this to be accounted for? In the first place, surely, by the influence of the Church, ever more intent on making art a handmaid of its own purposes than on developing its own inherent beauties. And, if this was true under the conditions in Italy, where the Church itself was penetrated with Humanism, how much more is it to be expected under those which existed in Spain! But there is another reason, incident to the Spanish character. The latter, as has been suggested in the previous chapter, was the product of a long and heroic struggle on behalf of nationality and the Christian Faith. Among its conspicuous traits, in consequence, were self-consciousness and inflated egoism; traits that, if you consider it, are those of the actor; the necessary groundwork on which he builds his better qualities as an artist.

The Spaniards are a race of actors. The arts in which they have most naturally expressed themselves are those of the drama and the novel of character and action. And this trait similarly affects their painting. It is dramatic, concerned frequently with action, always with characterisation. Meanwhile, self-consciousness and egoism readily yield to the temptation of exaggeration. Spanish literature evaded this weakness because it was left to go its own way and the artistic conscience of the author was permitted to discover for itself a sense of true values. But in the painter’s case the Church intervened and being, so to say, interested in the box-office receipts, compelled him to play to the gallery. It favored sensationalism and encouraged melodrama. The meekness of the martyr must be represented so that the dullest spectator would not miss the moral; the executioner’s hatred of virtue so portrayed that no one could fail to recognise him as a villain; love and devotion must be sentimentalised, and blood, pain and disease so vividly exhibited that the crudest sensibilities would be wrung. Imagination must not be counted upon and suggestion, the subtle road thereto, must be abandoned for the direct and detailed statement. Aim at the crude instincts and make the message obvious!

This Spanish tendency toward the related traits of exaggeration and obviousness is not confined to painting. It appears also in the architecture and sculpture. Foreign architects, for example, were employed in the erection of cathedrals in the Gothic style; but the latter’s noble logic of plan and elevation was disturbed by the innovations which Spanish taste, or lack of it, dictated. Conspicuous among these was the erection of a Coro in the center of the nave; an inclosure walled around, carried to a great height and profusely adorned with sculpturesque ornament. This monstrous choir effectually blocks the view of the high-altar from any spot except the narrow space which separates the two, and also interrupts what should be one of the sublime features of a Gothic cathedral, its endless variety of stately vistas. In every direction the perspective of pillars, arches and vaultings is barred by the tasteless magnificence of the Coro. For the latter, like the Capilla Mayor with its high-altar, is overloaded with excess of ornament. In one case it may be in the “plateresque” style, a network of intricate and minute embellishments that vies with the dainty exuberance of the workers in silver-plate. Elsewhere, it is wantonly “grotesque” or pompously “baroque” or characterised by that orgy of material extravagance, called “Churrigueresque” after the name of the sculptor who introduced it. In this, sculpture has been degraded to the most blatant naturalism; Madonnas clothed like dolls in brocaded gowns; the tragedy of Calvary or the glory of Heaven, presented with figures, background and accessories, painted, posed and set like a theatrical tableau. It is not for a moment suggested that there is no beauty and grandeur in Spanish architecture and sculpture. Yet to one whose taste is attuned to the imaginative spaciousness, sublimity and mystery of pure Gothic or to the inventive refinement of choice Renaissance design, the net impression of a Spanish cathedral is likely to be one of oppression and distaste. And more so, as one analyses the psychological cause of this extravagant display. It seems to be the Spanish instinct to close himself round with interest in what is nearest to him, so that he abandons breadth or height of vision—imagination, in fact—in favor of the immediately present, which he invests with all the fervor of his pent up nature. This leads inevitably to a materialistic point of view and to the baldly naturalistic method; in a word, to the obviousness which we have noted.

Spain, in fact, with its large admixture of Germanic blood, exhibits in its art the trait that affects other races akin to the Teutonic: the German itself, the English and American. She, no more than they, has much sense of beauty in the abstract. The idea that beauty for its own sake is desirable may penetrate the imagination of some artists in all these countries, but is a principle of art in none of them, and by the general public of all is not understood. The usual idea is that painting is primarily the representation of some person, place or thing, and is to be judged by what it represents. The idea that it should contribute to the beauty of life, and that beauty is one of the qualities most needful and desirable in life; that, indeed, properly considered, it should be the ideal of life, is even to-day only slowly dawning upon our comprehension. We still make the ideal of our civilization material progress and the ideal of education the preparation to play a part in it. In a word, our ideal is materialistic; a contradiction of terms, confusing the high issues of life. For, if a man or a nation is to have an ideal it must be something above the necessary matter of life, correlating the spiritual sense to what it conceives of spirit in the universe. It was so that the Greek, learning of Egypt and the Orient, drawing inspiration, in fact, from the deep wells of human consciousness, established his ideal and interpreted it under the symbol of beauty.

For my own part, this difference between the older idea of art and our own, which was shared by Spain, is most illuminatively enforced by the contrast between two of the great architectural monuments of Spain: the Escoriál and the Alhambra. Both are palaces, memorials of the greatest epoch in the history of each race; but one is a palace of the dead and of preparation for death, the other a lordly pleasure house, redolent of the joy of living; the Escoriál is a monument of sternness; the Alhambra a miracle of beauty.

Yet for the student of humanity and of art in relation thereto what a poignant interest attaches to the Escoriál! True, it is the self-expression of one man; but the imagination may not be astray in discovering in it some expression also of the race and its time. For Philip II was so loyal a son of the Church or, if you will, so morbid a victim of the Church’s influence, and that influence was then so rooted in the conscience of the

people, that he was in a large measure representative of them.

Philip was bound by the terms of his inheritance to create a mausoleum for the remains of his father, Charles V. He set about making it a burying place of sufficient dignity for his father, himself and succeeding Catholic Kings. To the mausoleum must be attached a church, and to the latter a monastery, to make perpetual provision for the saying of masses. His father had retired to a monastery after laying down the cares of government. Philip, while still handling the affairs of his vast dominion, would also lead the cloistered life. Meanwhile there were the mundane needs of a court to be considered and Philip himself tempered his asceticism with gallantry, so that a palace must be included. Hence ensued the idea of the Escoriál, wherein life consorts with death and business and pleasure are pursued under the shadow of a judgment to come. Surely a monument to the strangest medley of motives that history can show! Morbid, magnificent!

Architects were employed, but Philip constantly supervised the design. He planned his monument to last forever. Far from the possible vicissitudes of the capital, remote from the petty changes of daily life, he laid its foundations in the bed-rock of the mountains; and built their strength into its walls. With its back to the precipitous wall of the Guadarrama Sierra, it stands a colossal squared mass, facing the undulating vista of tableland. Its facades are severely simple, bare of ornamental detail, proclaiming their monastic purpose; and similarly the interior, as originally planned, was characterised by the dignity of constructional simplicity. The church also, until Luca Giordano at a later period covered the vaultings with flaunting mural paintings, was a unique example of stern austerity; its plan of a Greek cross being uninterrupted by a central coro and the only magnificence permitted being massed about the high-altar. A strange contrast, in fact, the imagination of Philip offered to the art instincts of his people. While they eschewed vistas and rejoiced in extravagance of detail, he was wedded to simplicity and sought a prospect of the widest vision. Yet in his personal life he shrank into narrowness. A private door communicated with a corner seat at the back of the coro, so that unobserved he could join the monks, as one of them, in their devotional routine. While he provided himself with a palace for ceremonial purposes, he actually lived in a tiny suite of meagre rooms, sleeping in a cubicle. Its window opened into the church, commanding a view of the high-altar, where the celebrant as he said mass stood directly above the tombs of the dead kings. This Pantheon of the dead, a low, octagonal chamber with flattened vaultings, lined with shelves on which repose sarcophagi, was originally of extreme simplicity. For the present bastard profusion of sombre ornamentation was added by Philips III and IV.

To-day as one wanders through this vast and silent edifice of the Escoriál it can well seem as if that sanctuary of death, buried beneath the church, is the dead heart, connected by the arteries of its nearly one hundred miles of corridors with the huge organs and spreading limbs of a prodigious leviathan. One has left behind the exhilaration of the air of the Sierras the glorious spaciousness of the outside prospect, and as the artificial vastness closes in about one, the spirit becomes numbed and chill. It is a stupendous Golgotha, a colossal Place of Skulls. Yet we shall be lacking in imagination if we cannot realise that the dead heart once beat and that the ponderous body once enshrined a soul. It may have been a mad soul; certainly it was a proud one, of high exaltation, white to its core with the flame of an intense ideal. None the less was it something of a craven soul, evading the problems of this life, and fearing the life to come; closing its eyes to the light and wrapping itself in the darkness of superstition. It is the soul of one man that was thus enshrined; but in many respects it is revealed as the soul of the Spanish people.

Seen at noonday in summer, the Escoriál stands, shadowless in the sunshine, at the foot of the bare Sierra, looking out over a vista of barren stubble, parched grass and dried up water-courses; an undulating sweep of pallid buff, interrupted sparsely by grey olive bushes; pitilessly inhospitable. But, in the slanting light of the afternoon, the Sierras near and far lose the bleakness of their pinkish buff beneath transparent tones of mauve and lavender, while the harsh nudity of the endless vega becomes clothed in tender veils of variously modulated greys. Even the inexorableness of the granite pile is assuaged, as the shadows creep about its base, the contours and surfaces of its facades melt into iridescent hues and the dome and towers rise up to meet the cooling sky with something of aerial suggestion. Slowly, as the light wanes the Escoriál and its vast setting become to the imagination spiritualised; but the spirit that hovers over them and enters into yours is, if I mistake not, for all its beauty impregnated with sadness, which, as the darkness blots out distance and buries the monastery beneath the gloom of the Sierras, dies into a sense of awe.

And now let us revisit the Alhambra, which enshrines the soul of another race. No colossal formality here, or precision of foot-rule and compass from which the free spirit of the artist’s imagination has been dogmatically barred! On the contrary, the palace of the Moorish kings grew cell to cell by accretion, expressive of an accumulating sense of the power and joy of life, alive with the breath of artistic imagination. It dominates its own hill, looking across, on the one hand, to the protecting barrier of higher hills, and on the other, over a smiling hospitable vega, a far reaching garden of luxuriant fertility. The hill itself is a paradise of refreshment. Its slopes are richly clothed with shade trees and semi-tropical vegetation, embowered in flowers, fragrant with the scents of living growths, musical with the song of birds, the tinkle of tiny runnels, and the plash of fountains and cascades. Set above this scene of ordered wildness, where the license of nature is united to the task of man, stands what is left of the palace of the Arab Sovereigns of Granada.

There is no need to describe its plan of gardens, fountains, courts and corridors, halls of ceremony and suites of living rooms. It is the spirit of the whole that we may try to capture. Here, as in the Mosque of Cordova, the Arab’s love of vistas is revealed; but while the former spreads over a large space, the perspectives of the Alhambra are actually restricted. In their case even more than in the other is created an illusion of distance. The triumph is one not of material emphasis but of artistic suggestion. It was the human imagination, finding its free expression in art, that gave form and fabric to this Oriental dream of beauty. It is a visualised symphony, whose theme is life; the joy of life and beauty that irradiates the joy. And the inspiration is drawn from nature. To those who know the Alhambra it will not sound like freakishness of speech to say, that the imagination of the artist has ensnared a portion of the spirit of beauty which roams at large in the desert and sky and lurks in the silences of woods and gardens; and, because he felt the phenomena of nature in relation to the supreme whole, has captured something of the infinity of the universal and enshrined it in his microcosm of beauty. Also more intimately he has fashioned his invention upon nature; studying her forms and methods and adapting them to the conventions of art. In the endless variety of decorative encrustration with which the wall-spaces, the soffits of the arches and the vaultings of the chambers are embroidered, the motives are drawn from the interlacing of boughs and vines, the rhythm of the brooklet meandering through luxuriant undergrowth of vines and flowers, from the facets of the crystal and the accumulated cells of bees. But they are not interpreted in a naturalistic vein. The Oriental imagination, at its best, rises above naturalistic representation; it accepts the fertilization of nature, but conventionalises the product to conform to the artist’s idea of abstract beauty.

It may be that in the Alhambra he has carried this idealization too far and become too prodigal with its motives. The dainty fabric has little structural dignity; architectonic substance being sacrificed to vistas and surface decoration, while the last may easily be judged too profuse. Yet the Arab, when he chose, was a builder and engineer, continuing the Roman tradition of solid and scientific construction. Even at the Alhambra this fact is attested by the foundations that are rooted in the rock and carried down its precipitous flank, and by the aqueducts which convey water from the neighboring hills to supply the fountains and baths, the sudorific chambers and the system of heating. He faced the necessities and facts of life as they arose, but in the pleasure-house of his soul surrendered himself to the abstract, wrapping himself in contemplation of the beautiful. So he encouraged his artists until their imagination reached its zenith of profuse invention in the so-called “Room of the Two Sisters.”

Above a dado of iridescent glass mosaic the walls are overlaid with a rich lace work as of carved ivory, the interstices of which are colored red and blue. Their surfaces are interrupted by niches, framed with columns and arches of surpassing delicacy. From the four corners, at considerable height project pendentives, converting the square of the room into an octagon from

which springs the domed ceiling. The pendentives are groups of stalactite forms, and the vaulting above is composed of innumerable concave cells. Each differing slightly from the others, they cling together in pendent masses, here projecting like a bunch of swarming bees, there receding into the mystery of a fairy grotto; all the while mounting up the curve of the ceiling, which undulates like a vine yielding to the weight of its grapes; climbing higher and higher in endless frolic of invention until they draw together at the ceiling’s peak. Enough gold still adheres to the myriad facets to suggest to the imagination the mysterious lustre of the ceiling, when it was lighted by a suspended lantern with its clusters of crystal lights. This gem of the Alhambra jewel, the heart of the Harem chambers, opens, as you remember, on one side into an alcove. Through the windows of this appear the tops of cypress trees, which rise from the boskage of pomegranates, roses and oleanders in a little garden court. On the other side, the “Court of the Lions,” once shaded with orange trees, still soothes the ear with the plash of its central fountain and the drip of the tiny jets that spring like rods of silver from the marble pavement of the arcades. A spot, indeed of exquisite sensations; where everything conspires to alternate moods of reverie and poignant stimulation; where the physical senses are rarified, exalted, till perception swims into a sea of subtleties that melts into a dreamy subconsciousness of infinity.

This you may say is a supreme achievement, tainted with weakness. Here the yearning after beauty for its own sake has created such a subtlety and luxuriance of beauty as to suggest that the motive was ornament for the sake of ornament; sense-gratification for indulgence sake; exquisiteness at the cost of living energy. For, while the maze of decoration is ordered with most refined sensibility, it is none the less expressive of inordinate and almost tortured sensuousness. If you adopt this view it is to admit that the Alhambra was a product of the decadence of the Oriental idea; and it is interesting to note how it bred a corresponding decadence in the artistic motives of the Christian conquerors. It was unquestionably from the Arabs that the Spaniard derived his taste for excess. But his racial instinct and his Catholic faith colored the result with a great difference. His sensuous and religious ecstasy found their expression not in abstract symbols but in concrete actualities. They prompted him to take delight in the actual representation of blood and torture and to render his conception of Heaven by means of sculptured figures reposing on marble clouds amid gilded spikes of glory. Gradually, in fact, he degraded his conception to the most obvious kind of perception. He expressed his spiritual ideas in terms of naturalism.

It may seem illogical to invite the reader to be interested in Spanish art and then discourage him by laying bare its weakness. But I believe that every one who visits Spain, where alone the inwardness of Spanish art can be reached, must feel at the outset more or less conscious of these limitations to his interest; that, in fact, he suffers a preliminary discouragement. If so, is it not better to admit it; to accustom oneself to the expectation of temporary disillusionment, in order that one may the sooner get over it and settle down to a just appreciation of the admirable qualities which actually exist in Spanish painting?

CHAPTER III

A PANORAMIC VIEW

Part I: To the End of the Sixteenth Century.

It must not be forgotten that the racial characteristics of Spain and her art, while they preserve a general national uniformity, were modified by the circumstances of different environments. Even before their union by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón presented a noted difference. The former included besides the province of Castile, the other divisions of territory in the northwest of the Peninsula; while Aragón embraced Catalonia and Valencia, the provinces bordering on the Mediterranean, and had extended her authority to the Balearic Isles, Sardinia and Sicily. The geographical distribution tells its own tale: Castile, with her bleak Sierras and wind-swept, sun-parched plains, a region of strenuousness; Aragón, dipping her hot feet in the Mediterranean, her asperities assuaged by influences from over-sea. For, while Castile was early disposed to derive her foreign influences from the Netherlands and Germany, Aragón and especially Valencia drew theirs from Italy. Later, when the union of the entire country was achieved by the conquest of Andalusia and Granada, the climatic conditions of these two provinces and their proximity to the Mediterranean naturally drew them into close relations both with Valencia and Italy. It remains only to mention in the way of anticipation, that the seat of Government, being always in Castile and finally established in Madrid, became a nucleus to which the various influences from other parts of the country were attracted. Thus, while the Schools of Valencia and Andalusia preserved their local characteristics, the School of Castile, which later is more specifically known as the School of Madrid, became under the patronage of the Court more cosmopolitan.

The sources of painting in Spain, as in other countries, are to be looked for, first in illuminated manuscripts and secondly in the remains of mural decorations. The earliest examples of the latter are to be found in the figures of saints which adorn the little church of El Cristo de la Luz in Toledo and in some scenes from the Passion on the vaulting of the chapel of St. Catherine in San Isidoro in Léon. These are attributed to the twelfth century. Later examples of the fourteenth century, exist in Seville, in San Lorenzo, San Ildefonso and the Capella de la Antigua in the Cathedral. The subject of each is the Virgin. In the cathedral, for example, she is represented against a gold diapered background, her robe also being adorned with arabesques of gold. In her right hand she holds a rose and with her left supports the Child, while two angels suspend a crown over her head. The figure of the Father Almighty, rather small in scale, appears above. The flesh is scarcely modeled, and in the case of the Virgin is very tenderly expressed; the draperies, on the other hand, suggesting in their flatness and breadth of treatment a sense of bigness. The influence is clearly Italian and seems to present a union of the feeling of Cimabue and Fra Angelico.

It is with the beginning of the fifteenth century that one reaches sure ground. In 1428, during the reign of Juan II of Castile, the great Flemish painter, Jan Van Eyck, while on a mission to Portugal visited Madrid. His coming aroused in the Spaniards an interest in Flemish art, which resulted in the importation of paintings by Memlinc, Roger van der Weyden, Dierick Bouts, Mabuse and Patinir. The effect of their influence can be studied in the basement galleries of the Prado, where hang anonymous works by painters of the School of Castile during the fifteenth century. A very interesting series of scenes from the life of the Virgin (numbered 2178-2183) exhibits in the angular folds of the draperies and in the architecture a notable Gothic feeling, and have much of the freedom of composition and intensity of sentiment of Van der Weyden. On the other hand in No. 2184, The Catholic Kings with their Families at Prayer Before the Virgin reproduced on page 18, the influence of Memlinc and his period of Flemish art appears. One notes the charming glimpses of landscape, seen through the windows; the almost childlike sweetness of the faces and the truly Flemish love of beautiful detail. This is exhibited in the Virgin’s crimson robe and the rosy-purple gown of the King, both of which are brocaded with designs in raised gold, and in the various accessories, particularly the church in the hand of S. Thomas Aquinas, the lily in that of S. Domingo de Guzman, and the richly decorated throne. On the back of this are curious little impish figures, that recall the weirdly whimsical inventions of Hieronymus Bosch, whose pictures, as later those of his imitator, Peeter Brueghel, were very popular in northern Spain. The figure, kneeling behind the King, is the Inquisitor-General, Tomas de Torquemada; the one behind the Queen represents S. Peter Martyr of Verona.

Ascribed to the end of the fifteenth century is the curiously interesting S. Ursula, reproduced on page 31. The picture forms one of a series of three, of which the first is The Coronation of the Virgin and the third The Temptation of S. Anthony. Escorted by the Pope and by bishops and cardinals, S. Ursula is seen at the head of the procession of eleven thousand virgins who are following her to Rome; but, if the legend is to be believed, will be slaughtered by the Huns near Cologne. With another example, reproduced on page 37, we reach at least the suggestion of a Spanish painter’s name. The Apparition of the Virgin to a Community of Bernardine Monks During a Ceremony of Exorcism is ascribed, though with a query, to Pedro Berruguete. Carl Justi considers that this picture and its companions, illustrating Dominican legends, were by the Burgundian painter, Juan de Borgoña, assisted by Berruguete and another painter named Santos Cruz. To the last is attributed the traces of Peruginesque influence that occur in all the series; in the present example, in the angels surrounding the Madonna. But the chief interest lies in the varied and individual characterization which the artist has given to the heads of the monks and laity. The latter seem of Flemish type, and, if Carl Justi’s attribution is correct, may, together with the architectural perspective have been executed by Juan de Borgoña. On the other hand, Berruguete was probably responsible for the monks, since they approximate to the Spanish type, as may be verified by comparing them with the character studies of this order of brotherhood by Zurbarán (see page 166).

The gradual emergence of the national type in the works of this period is again illustrated in the collection of splendid panels in the Hispanic Museum, New York. Examples 1 to 7 show the Netherlandish influence,

while numbers 8 and 9 represent the commencement of native feeling. Compare, for instance, the face of the woman who kneels on the left of the foreground in S. Gregory Saying Mass with those of the women in the high upright panel of the earlier series. The latter have a Flemish roundness of features and rather dull expression, whereas the face in the Gregory picture, narrows toward the chin and has something of the spiritual intensity which in the next century will be brought to its highest pitch of expression by El Greco. In fact, although Spain borrowed motives and methods from abroad, the inspiration remained her own and imprinted a native character on the product.

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This is still apparent in the art of the sixteenth century when there poured into Spain a steady flow of Italian influence. Its general tendency was to produce a number of so-called “mannerists,” Spanish painters who experimented with and imitated the style of the Italian masters, particularly of the Florentines, Da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. It was a necessary stage through which Spanish art had to graduate in order to acquire facility in drawing, chiaroscuro and the principles of composition. But it is not a period on which the student who is interested in art as a living expression will care to dwell. He will look upon it as probationary and merely preparatory for the later liberty of national and individual expression. Yet he may glance over it and see how even here the yeast of the national genius is fermenting the mass of borrowed and affected manners.

An example of this is afforded by the work of Juan de Juanes, one of the early names of prominence in the School of Valencia. The S. Stephen Conducted to Martyrdom, reproduced on page 44, is an illustration of his style. It forms one of a series, connected with the life of S. Stephen, which is now in the basement galleries of the Prado. It is not difficult to detect in these paintings the influence of Raphael. So noticeable is it, that Cean Bermudez, the chronicler of early Spanish art, assumes that Juanes must have been a pupil of the Florentine master. Subsequent research, however, has discovered that the Valencian painter was not born until 1523, three years after Raphael’s death. However he may have acquired a knowledge of the latter’s style, it is evident what it did for him and, through him, for the other painters of the Valencian school and the closely affiliated school of Andalusia. Comparing this picture with the earlier ones, reproduced in these pages, one observes in it a far more varied, facile and accurate skill in drawing, and that the composition, while it has lost the charm of naturalness, has gained in science. It is organisé, as the French say, a carefully assembled structure of inter-related parts, locked together into an ensemble. On the other hand, to anticipate the sequence of our story, this artificial unity will have to be digested before its principles can be adjusted to the naturalistic presentation which is to be the peculiar quality of Spanish art. Meanwhile we can see the naturalistic tendency already forming. The fine head, immediately behind the Saint’s, is that of a Spanish gentleman of the period. All the heads, in fact, are of local types, and the exaggeration of action in the figures and of emotion in the faces, is characteristic of a nation so dramatically disposed as the Spanish, while the excess of humility in the demeanour of the Saint is characteristic of the devotional attitude of this painter toward his art. For he, like many others among the Spanish artists, is said to have painted only sacred subjects and to have prepared his spirit for the task by partaking of the Sacrament.

Another picture which helps to throw a light upon this period of Italian imitation is the Descent from the Cross by Pedro Campaña (page 51). This painter was born in Brussels in 1503. But, though of Flemish origin, he gained his knowledge of art in Rome, whence he passed to Spain, living in Seville for twenty-four years, until his death in 1580. Thus he was an important factor in the transitionary development of the School of Andalusia. Murillo particularly admired this picture, and at his own request was buried beneath it in the Church of Santa Cruz. When the latter was pulled down, the picture was removed to the Cathedral, where it now hangs in the Sacristy. Its indebtedness to Raphael is apparent in the group of figures at the foot of the Cross, while a Peruginesque influence is suggested in the draperies of the men upon the ladders and in the placing of their figures against the sky. But also evident is the artificiality of the whole. The gestures and expression of the women are affected; quite inadequate is the support which is being given to the Sacred Body, while the attitude of the latter is too obviously regulated with the double intention of securing certain lines in the composition and of introducing the suggestion of forgiveness of the Magdalen. In fact, the chief virtue of the picture seems to be its extremely handsome composition, which must be admitted to have great nobility as well as a fine organic simplicity. The picture, indeed, is an achievement of science; valuable for its enforcement of academic principles; yet, even so, the work, not of a master, but a manneristic imitator.

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It is with more interest than one turns to the work of another artist of this transition period, Luis de Morales. For although he experimented with various motives, his adoption of them seems to have been prompted by his search for the expression of a personally sincere religious fervor. Almost nothing is recorded of his life, beyond the few facts that he was a native of Badajoz, on the frontier of Portugal, and died there in 1586; that, except for a visit to Madrid at the invitation of Philip II he seems to have spent his life in the quiet retirement of his native city, and notwithstanding the estimation in which his pictures were held, reached an old age of poverty. For it is related that the king passing through Badajoz, sent for the artist. The latter, when as a young man he had been summoned to Court, appeared in so sumptuous an attire, that the King remonstrated with him, but was appeased by Morales’ explanation that he donned it in honor of his Majesty. Now, however, he appeared in a condition of extreme destitution. To Philip’s remark: “Morales, you are very old,” the artist replied, “Yes, your Majesty, and very poor.” The king on the spot awarded him a pension of two hundred ducats. “For your dinner,” he said, to which Morales replied, “And for supper, Sire?” The King, so the story goes, accepted the jest and added another hundred ducats a year to the pension. This episode took place in 1581 and it is supposed that Morales at the time of his death, five years later, had reached the age of seventy-seven years.

Nothing is known as to the way in which Morales learned his art, but a comparative study of his various styles suggests that he may have had access to some work or copy of a work of Michelangelo, to some examples of the Milanese School of Leonardo da Vinci and to pictures of the contemporary Flemish and German Schools. The Michelangelesque influence, according to the official notice of this artist in the catalogue of the Prado Gallery, is discernible chiefly in works that are to be found in Badajoz and Lisbon. It would appear that they are distinguished by an exaggeration of manner. A similar trait appears in a Pietá which hangs in the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. The Virgin is seated at the foot of the Cross, supporting the dead body of Christ. The latter is in an attitude of being seated, the arms suspended and the head laid back on the shoulder, immediately below the head of the Virgin. The nude form is as hard as if it were carved in wood, and in contrast to its pallid whiteness are long streams of crimson blood, as glossy and stiff as ribands. In fact, combined with the naturalistic correctness of the drawing the figure has an exaggerated Gothic feeling, while another excess, this time of refinement, appears in the microscopic precision with which the hair of the beard and head is represented. This delicacy, suggestive of the Milanese influence, reappears in the Virgin Caressing the Infant Jesus of the Prado Gallery and the variations of the same theme which may be seen in the Hispanic Museum, New York. Here, however, the meticulous rendering of the little golden chestnut curls which cluster on the heads of the Mother and Child is in accord with the loving, tender regard for refined sweetness of expression that characterises the whole treatment. The Prado also possesses an Ecce Homo; the figure, seen nearly to the waist, nude but for a crimson mantle which covers the shoulders and is fastened on the chest. One of the bound hands holds a reed and a crown of thorns surmounts the head, drops of blood showing on the forehead. The face, with its straight brows and deep-set eyes, long finely chiseled nose, and sensitive mouth, surrounded by a softly growing beard, the whole modeled sensitively with a Milanese subtlety of chiaroscuro, expresses an interesting blend of intellectuality and ecstasy. In this union one may easily discover an essentially Spanish feeling. However the methods may have been borrowed from elsewhere, the sentiment is Castilian of the sixteenth century, a mingling of high-bred nature and spiritual introspection.

Another picture of the Prado, selected for reproduction on page 62, is The Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple. It is an important example, revealing a fuller capacity for ordered composition, in which there is a grandiose dignity, strangely