View the scanned original illustrations
Yet it is in this supreme gathering together of forces that Spain, before its sleep and in a last proud effort, lifted up its great isolated figure. "The Lances" and the portraits of the king and queen are the adieu to her age of strength. Now that Spain is vanquished everywhere, the grandiloquent '"historical painters" and the manufacturers of heroic portraits are to multiply. Before Velasquez, only one man, because that man was a painter, de Mayno, had known how to subordinate the anecdote represented to the plastic poem which the contemplation of the forms and the sense of the fleeting harmonies of the space of Spain impose on those who neither affirm nor demonstrate before they have used their eyes. After Velasquez, only one man, because that man was a painter, Carreño de Miranda, still had the power to arrest the fall of the spoiled princes, the morose infantas, and the monsters of luxury, in order to continue that history which is made only by those who see and those who create. He shows us protruding jaws, lifeless eyes, hanging lips, monastic robes—the refuge of men of broken will, and of the shadows of grandeur; malicious dwarfed women stifled in fat, misshapen heads, and faces of crime and of horrible simplicity; after that there was nothing. Goya will not come until a century has passed, and then as a kind of miracle. The other followers of Velasquez, his son-in-law del Mazo, the brothers Rizi, and Claudio Coello are good, honest practitioners, of vulgar nature, and heavy, coarse, or too clever in workmanship. Murillo is not a great painter, because he is of a low mind.
Yet it is in this supreme gathering together of forces that Spain, before its sleep and in a last proud effort, lifted up its great isolated figure. "The Lances" and the portraits of the king and queen are the adieu to her age of strength. Now that Spain is vanquished everywhere, the grandiloquent '"historical painters" and the manufacturers of heroic portraits are to multiply. Before Velasquez, only one man, because that man was a painter, de Mayno, had known how to subordinate the anecdote represented to the plastic poem which the contemplation of the forms and the sense of the fleeting harmonies of the space of Spain impose on those who neither affirm nor demonstrate before they have used their eyes. After Velasquez, only one man, because that man was a painter, Carreño de Miranda, still had the power to arrest the fall of the spoiled princes, the morose infantas, and the monsters of luxury, in order to continue that history which is made only by those who see and those who create. He shows us protruding jaws, lifeless eyes, hanging lips, monastic robes—the refuge of men of broken will, and of the shadows of grandeur; malicious dwarfed women stifled in fat, misshapen heads, and faces of crime and of horrible simplicity; after that there was nothing. Goya will not come until a century has passed, and then as a kind of miracle. The other followers of Velasquez, his son-in-law del Mazo, the brothers Rizi, and Claudio Coello are good, honest practitioners, of vulgar nature, and heavy, coarse, or too clever in workmanship. Murillo is not a great painter, because he is of a low mind.
He
justifies the decision taken by Velasquez in his leaving Seville and by
Zurbarán in his returning to his Estremadura. The bigoted and soft atmosphere
of the enriched city of Andalusia wore upon the nerves and transformed the most
virile beings into sensual women. Herrera is still too savage to allow himself
to be impressed, but Montañés possesses no more than a hollow energy. Alonso Cano,
his pupil and the studio companion of Velasquez and Zurbarán, is a bombastic
painter, and a soft and enervated sculptor, warped by his morbid desire to
erect effigies of ascetics with whom he associates pale flames and tender
colors, in order to emphasize his effects. The streets smell of incense and
rice powder, of lemon flowers and sensuality. The Jesuit is at his ease there;
he controls the heart through all the senses. Murillo, through his desolating
painting, overwhelms Ribera. His sick and his virgins are professionals. The
beggar is always picking his fleas, and the Mother of God always has her eyes
raised to heaven and her hands crossed on her heart. He prostitutes his gifts
as a painter. Certainly, he expresses the questionable devotion of the city
where, on saints' days, idols are carried about, dressed up, and covered with
false jewels. But he submits in a cowardly way. His sensuality is awakened only
amid too-heavy perfumes and in semidarkness. He spoils everything around him.
Valdés Leal, full of his Cordova, a burning city where the Guadalquivir trails,
over sand and rock, a few narrow streams of stagnant water, forgets the somber
splendor of his visions in order to listen to him. For he is insinuating,
sanctimonious, and sugary. His pictures are full of ambiguous shadows and of
spurious light. He has certainly wandered around the city on the evenings of
feast days at the hour most favorable for a glimpse, through the haze of the
tapers and the censers, of the pink and yellow façades. He has often seen, in
the nave of the cathedral all ruddy with lights, couples kissing on the lips,
in the shadow of the pillars, at the moment when the Host is raised. The blood
of the bulls has sent its smoke toward his nostrils, mingled with the odor of
pepper and oil on black hair in which pinks have been entwined. But he has not
felt the tragic joy and the distress of the monotonous rhythms of the dance of
voluptuousness whose beat is followed interminably by the guitar and the
clapping of hands. When a Christ on the Cross all smeared with blood is carried
by, he has not heard, in the depth of his soul, how the song of a girl rises
up, the sobbing, nasal plaint, infinite, arid, ardent, and sad as the desert.
He did
not understand secret Spain. And when one knows the misery of Spain after his
time, one cannot explain to oneself how the man who, in a half century of
frenzied improvisations, sketched the most living physiognomy of that strange
land, could come more than a hundred years afterward. Goya was from Aragon, to
be sure, a province off the great routes and less exhausted, the place where
the sculpture of the people had endured longest. But there was no crucible into
which he could pour his lava. The house of Austria was dead from exhaustion;
the Bourbons, emasculated and crushed by unhealthful devoutness, cloistered
their secret vices in the alcove and the confessional. A bad German painter,
Raphael Mengs, was their nearest representative for Velasquez. Spain was a lean
beggar, draped from feet to chin in a patched old garment, worn and rusty. Why
this sudden flame under the mask of carnival, this spark on the cold hearth? We
always deceive ourselves about Spain. With a contemptuous decree, Napoleon
annexes the sleepy thing. It sticks to him like a vampire, saws his tendons,
drinks from his veins, and casts him off, drained of his blood, in a few
months. That thing was not dead; it does not die. It has spasmodic crises which
raise it up at a single bound, impose it upon the world, and send it back to
sleep. It is like the Arab conquest. If the Inquisition and the gold of America
explained the ruin of everything and the apparent death, they ought also to
enable us to explain that savage vitality concealed by the indifference, the
immobility, and the exterior fatalism. The Spaniards did not go to create gold
in the Antilles or the Indies, to be sure, but to gather it up. Upon their
return home they allowed tools to rust, undoubtedly, and the rock to take back
to itself the earth which had been stripped of trees, and the mind to harden.
And after that they stayed in their lair, cut off from Europe. They no longer
saw the sea, the great civilizer; they no longer watched the departure and the
arrival of the ships. But then, why this awakening? And why this sudden energy,
why the terrible insurrection, Saragossa, and the sinister burst of laughter,
and Goya's torrent of pearls and of flowers, if the Inquisition has broken down
the entire strength here? When the desire to expand and to conquer commanded
the heart of Spain, the Inquisition was an instrument of discipline and of
combat. It is a corset of torture when this desire has disappeared; it grinds
that contracted heart. It is in vain that Spain goes beyond her borders, she
lives and goes to sleep at home; her military and lyric expansion is not an
organism that can be controlled, but a spring which, after one release always
comes back into place for another. If some external thing occurs to irritate
her pride, she comes into possession of her power and of her soul for a century
or for a day.
No comments:
Post a Comment