By Jan Dalley - August 29, 2009
The phrase “sacred art” gives us trouble these days. Despite all the parallels we draw between art and religion – descriptions of art galleries as the new cathedrals, and so on – to most modern minds art, although it may be spiritually significant, is resolutely secular, even worldly.
A ‘costalero’ carries a religious statue during a procession in Asturias, Spain
But it wasn’t always so. In the 1490s, the hot-headed young artist Pietro Torrigiano punched his fellow student Michelangelo in the face and broke his nose, and had to leave Florence in a hurry for fear of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Michelangelo’s patron.
The hapless Torrigiano went to work in London and later in Seville, where he made fine sculpture in terracotta. One day there was an altercation with a client over the fee for a terracotta Pietà and, in a rage, Torrigiano took his mallet and smashed the piece – which was, after all, still his own property, since it hadn’t been paid for. But when the Inquisition’s authorities heard about the incident they threw the poor man into prison – where he languished miserably until his death – for the crime of defiling a sacred image.
Alonso Cano’s ‘Saint John of God’, c1655
Now then, the 21st-century rationalist wants to ask – at what point in the process did that sculpture, that lump of clay, become sacred? Is this an argument about intentionality? Or is sacredness, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?
Medieval as Torrigiano’s story sounds, there are still powerful echoes of this sort of feeling about works of art. When in 1956 Lady Churchill destroyed Graham Sutherland’s portrait of her husband Winston, because she so disliked it, the artist described the action as “vandalism” and the public outrage still resonates today. We now consider the destruction of an artwork a crime, a secular sacrilege – not because of religious feeling but because of the aura surrounding aesthetic value.
At the other end of this scale, “art” can mean nothing, spiritual content everything. Some minority cultures feel their spiritual concerns have been swamped by a foreign aesthetic as surely as their artefacts have been removed – and the world’s museums are flooded with claims not only for restitution but also for restrictions on the exhibition of objects considered sacred or culturally significant.
Pedro de Mena’s ‘Mary Magdalen Meditating on the Crucifixion’ (detail), 1664
So what are we doing when we look at such an object in a museum context? Certainly, we are looking at something its creators and original viewers did not see (or did not value), and we cannot see what they saw. The interface between aesthetics and sacredness is so complicated that it can sometimes seem an unbridgeable gap.
When it comes to the Christian tradition, we are used to thinking that the problem was resolved by the worldly, Renaissance-imbued Italians, whose “religious” art often made only the merest nod to the notion of worship as it cheerfully celebrated other values. The parade of Christs and Madonnas, on which our art history traditionally depends, seems as happily placed in a gallery as in a church. But things were very different in the southern Spanish tradition, and to an extent they continue so to this day. When the National Gallery’s curator Xavier Bray was scouring Andalusia for works he might include in the forthcoming exhibition Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700, he discovered that even in modern-day Spain, aesthetics can still come a distant second to worship, and there are objects of museum quality that haven’t made the transition from church niche to gallery plinth.
. . .
Curators are like fishermen: their eyes gleam most brightly when they talk about the ones that got away. This means, in this case, the works they’d most wanted to include in their show, and couldn’t. And, during a visit to Spain earlier this year, Bray was determined to show us what he meant. In the spring light, the church in a small town not far from Seville looked almost deserted. Inside, it was large, light and airy; we dawdled, waiting for the priest; a steady trickle of worshippers – mostly alone, mostly stopping for only a few minutes, women with shopping bags, a few elderly couples – increased as the day went on. Most were heading for a recently built, day-lit side chapel off the main nave, and that turned out to be our destination too. There, sitting high above an altar, was a small polychrome Madonna, a sculpture in wood covered with gesso and then painted, in the local manner.
Made early in the 17th century, about half life-size and vividly realistic, she was dressed in luxurious robes that at first seemed surely to be actual cloth, but are in fact carved wood worked in the technique called estofado – the gesso covering the wood is scored to give the impression of brocaded cloth and overpainted with gold and silver, as well as rich colours, to create a surface that even after 400 years gleams like silk and velvet.
This girl seemed terribly young – 13 or 14 at most – and her face bore a mixture of the startled teenage embarrassment I’ve seen in my daughter performing in the school play (what am I doing up here in these strange clothes, with you all looking at me?) and the first gleams of a serene wisdom beyond any worldly teenager; it was a face you could look at for a long time.
This was the Madonna that Bray had most wanted to bring to London, but the priest had stood firm. It would be an honour for his small church, he demurred politely, and yet ... he simply spread his hands in a small shrugging gesture towards the scattering of worshippers in the chapel. And even my atheist’s soul could see exactly what he meant.
This sculpture is, in curatorial terms, a very fine example of its type. Even to the uninstructed; as soon as you see it you get that small thud under your ribs that is the sure sign of real art. Nevertheless, an empty spot in that church, even temporarily, would tear the heart from the place. I even found myself wondering whether, if this Madonna were to go on her gap year to England, she would come back changed.
Torchlight and pointed hoods give most of us the shivers. Is it because, having seen too many movies about America’s Deep South, we have come to associate them with the Ku Klux Klan? Or – even though Spain’s hooded marchers are humble penitents, not aggressors – is there something innately threatening about the utter anonymity of the garb, the figures made abnormally tall by the hoods? The thousands of such figures who silently process through the streets of many Spanish towns during semana santa, the week before Easter, day and night, hour after hour, become a sort of human flood – you find yourself searching for traces of individuality (a pair of pudgy child’s feet, or some red-painted toenails, peeping out from under the robes). Although some processions take place with great solemnity, theatrically torchlit in the night, you get strangely used to wandering down an ordinary street in the morning light in search of coffee and seeing, past the Benetton and the Starbucks on the corner, two or even three sets of pointed hoods – green, red velvet, pale blue for the different “confraternities” – nodding gently along on parallel streets, still walking, walking.
The brotherhoods who stage the processions are somewhere between a medieval guild and a charitable group; they date back to the 1300s, though this is a living tradition and some were created only a few years ago. Each procession (always hundreds of people, and sometimes as many as 3,000) is escorting its imagenes, life-size religious statues that are carried on huge ornate floats, carved and decorated and covered with cloth and flowers, past a crowd that falls respectfully silent as each goes by. In Seville (though the styles vary in different cities) the floats appear to move by themselves, as the 50 or so costaleros doing the donkey work of carrying the holy cargo on their shoulders and necks are hidden underneath, sweating in the dark to preserve the illusion; these things weigh, quite literally, a tonne.
But what of the statues themselves? Some, the newer ones, are gaudy and coarse, though dramatically lifelike, and about as interesting to art as oversized plastic dolls. (Well ... Jeff Koons, Murakami?) A few, however, are venerated as artworks as well as holy images, their confraternities vividly aware of their importance, and their beauty. Juan de Mesa, a 16th-century sculptor who is among the artists that the National Gallery wants to bring to our notice, is credited with two of the best – an enormous crucified “Jesus del Gran Poder” and a mournful “Cristo de la Buena Muerte”. But Seville’s most famous is “La Macarena”, a Virgin who appears dressed in a way that would make Marie-Antoinette look grungy. Like other precious and ancient sculptures, it still takes to the streets each year.
. . .
Painted statuary is another problem for most of us. We may know that almost all sculpture was originally highly coloured – and prized for being so – but few of us actually want to see a painted-up version of the Elgin Marbles, or the Venus de Milo with her pink lipstick on. No, coloured sculpture, especially if it is religious in subject matter, is hopelessly mired in kitsch. And there is plenty of this – blood-drenched Christs and soupy-eyed Marys with their tears picked out in stick-on fake pearls that make me want to run away.
So, in mounting their exhibition, there’s no doubt that the National Gallery is facing a tough sell. This art, even the best of it, flies in the face of everything that western art currently values, and everything we’ve spent the past 100 years learning to look at – abstraction, minimalism, intellectual content, irony, and much else. Paintings as well as sculpture will be included in the NG show, but what it is really taking on is nothing short of re-training our eyes to see beyond our preconceptions, to appreciate an art that celebrates heightened naturalism, literalism, craft at its highest peak. It also wants us to appreciate the sort of intensity that comes from seeing how a painter can show you the blue shadow of vein patterns under the skin of a neck, or how the stubble on a monk’s shaven head is subtly different from that of his beard.
The best of the type – such as the stay-at-home teenage Madonna we visited – are very far from kitsch: they have an ethereal lightness, a sort of hyper-real quality that makes their incredibly lifelike skin translucent and pulsing with human contact; their impact is a raw sort of emotion that has nothing to do with the intellect and everything to do with visceral reaction. Try this: stand a little too close to another human being – even one you know well – and look at them. Really look at them. That’s the feeling. It’s not comfortable, but it’s powerful.
‘Saint Bruno’, 1634, by Juan Martinez Montañes
One of the master painters of this sculpture (although his canvases were ghastly) was Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644), best known to history as the first teacher and later the father-in-law of Velázquez, a native of Seville who spent his teenage apprenticeship in Pacheco’s studio before marrying Juana Pacheco and moving on to much higher things. Whether or not Velázquez painted any of the polychromed figures that survive from the time is, frustratingly, unknown. But it’s likely that his years with Pacheco would have included training in the techniques.
So determined is the NG to educate us about these methods that there will be a demonstration workshop on site, to show us the carving of the wood, the application of the gesso, the painting. Traditionally, these tasks were carried out by different artists or craftsmen – so you can have a piece sculpted by Juan de Mesa and polychromed by Pacheco, which is the summit of happiness for Bray. The workshops will be led by one of the artists still working in the tradition: Seville is home to several busy workshops that produce painted religious statuary carved from wood and decorated in the old way, for eager Catholic markets that stretch from Italy to Indonesia by way of Peru. As I said, it’s not comfortable, but it’s powerful.
‘Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700’ opens at the National Gallery, London, on October 21. www.nationalgallery.org.uk
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