The art of the Prado : a survey of the contents of the gallery, together with detailed criticisms of its masterpieces and biographical sketches of the famous painters who produced them

Front matter

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Contents

I. The Contents of the Gallery i

II. The Spanish School before Velasquez . 47

III. The Spanish School: The Characters of

Chapter I The Contents Of The Gallery

The gallery of the Prado has often been called a collection of masterpieces. Supremely fortunate as it is in the accumulation of canvases executed mainly in the maturity of the art of painting, it is less fortunate in its comprehensive view of art as a whole ; in fact it may be said that the extraordinary quality of what is contained in this gallery blinds one to the absence of some of the greatest names.

The Prado, therefore, is less a treasure-house of the art of the world than the Louvre, for instance, or such galleries as the National Gallery, or the Royal Gallery of Berlin. It is, however, a centre where certain phases of art can best be appraised; and it stands immeasurably above such collections as those of Venice, Milan, or

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Antwerp, where some school or set of schools may best be studied, since its range is larger, or at any rate more copious in the possession of unique works.

One might describe it as a rich man's gallery, did not this expression seem to exclude the evidence of national effort, both in the production and in the encouragement of art. This term, a rich man's gallery, is more appropriately given to the gallery of St. Petersburg or of Vienna.

Nevertheless, the evidence of a magnificent art patronage is characteristic of the Prado; an art patronage less continuous, less constructive than that of France as shown in the Louvre, and less conscious than that presiding at the formation of the Florentine galleries. In comparison with the Prado the gallery of Munich becomes sparse, and the collection of Dresden the result of an epoch in collecting less rich or less fortunate. In fact, over and above the national effort of Spain in the arts as we find it illustrated by the Prado — which it is as easy to overrate as to underrate — we notice the fruits of Spain's direct patronage of Titian; the lucky contact with Rubens has left its trace. Spain, like the English court in the time of Charles i., was a great purchaser of Italian pictures.

The character of the Prado is therefore mixed;

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it represents at once a national, if intermittent, effort in the collections of Spanish painting; it represents even more the noble and direct patronage of the arts at fortunate moments in its history ; there is also evidence of the purchase of works by painters with whom Spain had not come into actual contact; and as a whole it justifies, despite the change of fashion in art matters by which so much has become of secondary importance, the title ' a gallery of masterpieces.'

National effort — the conscious wish to have, hold, and develop, to enjoy and to sustain to its utmost the instinct for art, as we find it in the artists and patrons, and less consciously in the very social conditions of certain races — has borne fruit in the past in such works as the Acropolis of Athens, the Temple and Precincts of Olympia; in which a society during some generations has done its utmost to enrich that which was felt as the most significant symbol of its effort towards perfection. Something of this spirit has also haunted Italian centres, and in the hands of the two great Medicis we have the evidence of this spirit become conscious and clairvoyant in the patron. In Rome we possess in the Sistina, the halls and chapels of the Vatican, the largest and most noble expression of continued effort that has come down to our time,

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revealing as it does the interchange between the artist doing his utmost and the magnificent patron for whom nothing was too fine or too ambitions. Here, if we dismiss the frescoes of Rome, the frescoes and galleries of Florence, we quit art patronage at its noblest, or the formation of art nuclei at their noblest, and turn to centres where this sense was less continuous and to some extent derivative.

It has been the privilege of France, after the waning of her Gothic effort, to continue the work of the Renaissance and its ideal of responsibility towards art, not merely in acquisition, but in maintenance and development; it is owing to this that the Louvre has become pre-eminent — however overcrowded and spoiled by work which only an undue sense of nationality could place by the side of efforts which seriously justify the artistic claim of France as a nation among the artistic nations and centres of the world.

With the Spanish gallery, and the tradition behind it, we have a somewhat analogous case. Charles v., the rival of Francis i., was not, it is true, the typical patron we find in the French king, though the son of the great and magnificent Maximilian. With Charles there was not the same desire to transplant the wonderful growth of the mature Renaissance into his own country;

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but, wearied of much, he turned with delight to the art of Titian; or rather a chance meeting with and chance employment of the greatest of Venetians proved an ever-increasing pleasure, till masterpiece after masterpiece became the property of the Emperor and of his much less sympathetic son, to whom art was probably a mere adjunct to piety and pleasure, or if you will, the necessity of a fashion which was not ignoble. The next addition to Spanish treasure, the next stimulus to acquisition, came with the advent of Rubens, and the tendency he left wherever he went towards the encouragement of the art of his wonderful centre of activity in Antwerp, and also towards the purchase of those masterpieces of Italian easel painting of which there were just then a quantity to be exchanged for money. The scope of this work will not allow discussion of the change that came about in Europe when this accumulated treasure of Italian painting became current in the seventeenth century. At any rate the modern collector, as we understand him, came into existence then — that is, the man who collects works for their beauty or scarceness, as a man collects precious stones. Previous collections had been made mainly in the centres of production themselves; later on by men not only anxious to possess, but to help in the making

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and encouragement of art. Of this type the finest in more modern times would be Francis i. of France, Charles i. of England, and — less passionately, or perhaps less consciously — Philip iv. of Spain; with whom dies down the type of royal collector and patron : for the cases of Frederick of Prussia, or Catherine of Russia, are not of the same importance.

From the time of Philip iv. the growing history of the national Spanish collection practically ceases; and if Spain is enriched by the addition of a few French pictures, and the last of her great sons, Goya, has to be studied in Madrid, still the character of the collection remains typical of the sixteenth-century patronage that started it, and of the collector and patron tendencies of the early seventeenth century; it might be even described as the finest extant collection showing the faculty of the seventeenth century for collecting pictures.

Art historians and critics speak of Philip's eminence as a connoisseur, strengthened or even guided as he probably was by one of the world's greatest painters, Velasquez; yet there is a touch of irony after all in the fact that the Prado collection benefited so little by the connoisseurship of Velasquez — himself a passionate student of the Italian art; that second visit of his to Italy,

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from which he hoped great things, came just too late, and added little to the collection. One or two Veroneses, not of the first rank, and some Tintorettos and Bassanos, are all that the Spanish painter secured, in which we can detect his predilections. What would we not give for a larger and more fortunate choice of Italian painting made by Velasquez? — to trace the bent of his temper in the masterpieces of others, just as we still can trace in the Angerstine collection in the National Gallery the evidence of a love for generous colour, fresh brush-work, and a certain lustre in the pigments themselves taught to the English by Reynolds and Lawrence, at a time when the rest of Europe valued academic qualities too much.

It has been Spain's good fortune, however, to keep practically intact the work of the greatest of her artists; and we go to Madrid to study Velasquez as we go to other centres to study the easel pictures of no other painter.

Besides this fact, and perhaps above it in importance, the art of Titian in its scope and range can nowhere else be so profoundly felt and understood as in the Prado. To the student the earlier and still Giorgionesque phases of his genius are only represented by the Madonna, No. 236; but 1 The Bacchanal ' is the culmination after all of that new spirit of delight known in art as the

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Giorgionesque, and constitutes its grandest and most impassioned claim upon our attention. Absent is the earlier phase of Titian's portraits under the influence of Giorgione, which make such delightful battlefields for the men of our generation, in which a reputation can be staked and lost upon the curve of an eyebrow or eyelid. Yet Giorgione himself is here in a work of great tenderness and perfection, — if, like most of his authentic works, less stimulating or convincing than its reputation would suggest.

The Louvre, the next finest nucleus of Titian, is, despite its marvellous portraits and pictures, not equal in scope ; and it is at Madrid and nowhere else that we really touch the spirit of Titian at a time when the light of his intellect burns duskily, and with a hint amongst the ashes of a keener flame illumining things more fitfully — with those chance flashes as of a torch in the richness of a sanctuary. The genius of Titian in his youth and manhood, so open, as was also the genius of the Renaissance itself, to c the truth of outward things,' seems to have anticipated at the last much that Rembrandt holds in store for us. In the depth of Titian's old age glimmers a star that was invisible in the daylight of his youth.

Next to Titian and Velasquez the third glory k-i.

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of the Prado is in its series of pictures by Rubens. Nowhere do we find precisely the same thing; nothing of Rubens gleaned in the galleries of Antwerp and Vienna, and in the Flemish churches, prepares one for the beauty of some of the works here. If in Flanders and Paris he is epical, in Madrid we find lyrics of a quality it is difficult to match, — a delight, a feast for the eye, a glow and radiance in the touch itself, impossible in larger canvases. To find Rubens painting for his own delight rather than for the wonderment of others, we must go to Munich and to Madrid, to the Prado to see ' The Garden of Love, ' * The Rondo/ * The Three Graces,' and the sketch of Marie de Medicis. Other works of the master, of a more usual stamp, though they are numerous and unequal — some fifty in all, — dilute, but do not destroy, this impression. In ' The Brazen Serpent ' (still given to Rubens) we are face to face with a masterpiece by Van Dyck; one of those astonishing variations on the manner of his master with which his pupil, the precocious and in some sense the spoilt child of painting, sometimes astonishes us — Van Dyck, whom Rubens held at the font of Italian art — or if you will, to whom Rubens and Titian in turn were sponsors.

Of Van Dyck it will be time to speak when we i2 Ufoe Brt of tbe prafco

are brought face to face with the fine subject pieces collected in this gallery: though after the world's masterpieces so far mentioned he seems to fascinate us less as a portrait painter than is his wont. Here, in the Prado, among the twentytwo pictures given to him, we have nothing like the ' Children of Charles ' to pit against the royal children by Velasquez; no Madame de Sainte Croix to face Mariana of Austria, no Carew and Killigrew to outface Montanes or Olivarez. As a portrait painter ""he is here outdone and surpassed; as a painter of pictures, however, he nowhere else equals his ' Betrayal ' and his ' Crown of Thorns,' both of which he presented to Rubens, and they place him on a very different level as a painter of pictures from that which he usually occupies.

This collection of ripe and glowing paintings in the Prado, to which we must go to find at its best the gold of Titian, the silver of Velasquez, the glow — no, in this case the pearl-like qualities of Rubens, fails at one point; for one picture alone represents the magic and awe we associate with the name of Rembrandt ; or rather does not represent it at all. The ' Artemisia/ about to drink the ashes of her husband presented to her in a costly German cup, is, like many early pictures by the master, on an intellectual level with

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the works of his pupil and imitator Ferdinand Bol, if technically, and in the art of design, it is superior, but not very greatly so. In the forced oppositions of tone, cheap realism and loose drawing, there is a great deal which is open to easy criticism, and nothing in design, intention, or initial effort to compensate for the absence of insight and inspiration we expect from Rembrandt. So far we have noted in the Prado works that owe their existence, directly or indirectly, to the influence of Titian; his noble influence gilds and makes delicate the restraint of Velasquez. With Rubens, Titian's rival in the world of colour, we find a debt to the great Venetian not merely acknowledged >but claimed and insisted upon, in copies of the older master done as a stimulus to invention and to charm himself. One of the great things of the Prado should be a series of copies by Rubens of Titian's ' Loves of the Gods/ — now condemned to a cellar to spare the susceptibilities of the ex-Queen Isabella. To-day we are, however, still spared the ' Adam and Eve,' which outshines in its more obvious sense of -gladness in light and noble human flesh the grander picture by Titian of which it is a copy, or more properly speaking an interpretation. In the Prado we find above all things Titian at home, surrounded by his real disciples and lovers —

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Rubens, Velasquez, Van Dyck. Not even Watteau is absent, the latest and most retiring of those to whom Titian was, through his Venetian pastorals, the great light beyond. In the two works of Watteau we find evidence of the great colour tradition invented by Titian gleaming in the smaller and more jewel-like touches of the exquisite yet profound Frenchman.

The series of master- works which the student is most anxious to see have been specified broadly as masterpieces of ripe or mature painting, work done in the July and August of its history. The Prado has other claims, and our grandfathers journeyed there, if at all, principally to see the once famous series of Raphaels, and the now perhaps underrated pictures by Murillo.

A certain measure of frankness is no longer necessary for one to say that Raphael would not hold the exalted place he does if the pictures once broadly known as his, and once his greatest asset in public estimation, had alone survived to justify his claim. His frescoes, his portraits and drawings, it is true, would be enough to jus- 'tify his reputation; but as a painter of easel pictures, his Madonnas would only have entitled him to a place above Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto. In Raphael's better easel pictures we praise mainly the more scientific

TITIAN. ADAM AND EVE

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and accomplished climax of a long series of efforts to which Francia and Bartolommeo had contributed, far more than a phase of art invented and made his own such as we find in the art of Michael Angelo, Titian, and Correggio. As a portrait painter Raphael is comparable to any other painter of portraits; both in his frescoes, and in his easel portrait of Pope Leo x., or of Baldassare Castiglione, he is one of the world's supreme portrait painters. It is the good luck of the Prado to possess one of these masterpieces in the beautiful portrait of ' A Cardinal,' besides one authentic picture, the ' Madonna and the Lamb.' To the lover of pictures the once world-famous series attributed to Raphael in Madrid (the catalogue counts no less than ten) is more a subject of respectful study than one of impassioned interest ; the intense sense for finer realities, shown in so many masterpieces around, obscures the somewhat mechanical idealism and pattern of things behind the ' Madonna del Pesce,' and the ' Spasimo di Sicilia.'

Right and left the student finds works of the first rank by other men. The influence of Raphael more than of Bartolommeo, upon a temperament not first-rate, is shown in a fine work of Sarto, 1 The Virgin, St. John, and Angel,' perhaps his masterpiece. An echo of the art of Sarto, trans-

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muted it is true by one of the most original temperaments in art, blossoms out in the irregular but impassioned art of Correggio ; and here we have a picture, not one of the best preserved certainly, but one of startling personal bent, the 1 Noli Me Tangere,' — one of the treasures of the Prado, — together with another small, but genuine, picture of the Madonna.

Before leaving this rough list of what the schools of Italy yield us at Madrid, we turn to the less famous specimens of the Northern schools. The attention of the student will have noted that where the Prado falls below the modern standard of a gallery is in the almost total absence of Italian Primitives, Fra Angelico and Mantegna being the two exceptions.

Curiously enough, owing to their hold upon realistic and ascertainable facts, the early Flemings never lost to the same extent their ascendency over the collector, even in the past. The finish, delicacy, and gloss of their work has always held its own. The finest collectors prized their Rogier Van der Weyden, their Petrus Cristus; or failing them, the more casual products of Flanders which did duty as genuine Van Eycks or Van der Weydens; and in this matter the Prado has a few works to show of great charm, and one masterpiece, ' The Adoration of the Magi,' attributed

DURER. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF

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to Memlinc — in part a repetition or rather elaboration of the Bruges picture.

The early German schools are richly represented, if not in actual numbers, at least in the quality of a few masterpieces. Foremost among these rare treasures of German painting preserved in the Prado is Durer's famous portrait of himself of 1498, of which there exists a good copy in the Uffizi : — in that strange and promiscuous place, the Painters' Portrait Gallery, with its prominent canvases still recording the names of forgotten artists with something of the pomp of the old flattering epitaphs of dead important nobodies. It was doubtless an agreeable recollection of the panel in. the Uffizi which led Sir Walter Armstrong to dismiss the original in the Prado as a copy; to the present writer this generally accepted work is not only an original painting by Diirer, but one of his masterpieces of portraiture, like the ' Oswolt Krell [ at Munich; comparable in charm if not in intensity and gravity to that other likeness of the artist, dated 1500, also at Munich, before which one forgets all other portraits whatsoever, in the sense that this perfect realization of one of the world's greatest men is equal to the occasion ; that physical and intellectual beauty in the sitter are one with the perfection of art interpreting them, and,

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before a work like this, one wonders 'if Diirer's unfailing skill of hand, his fertility as a designer, can really be valued above this evidence of his mere eyesight. This picture is one of the few masterpieces in the Prado which is hung too high, though it is only placed above the superb portrait of Imhof by the same master.

The life-size panels of ' Adam ' and ' Eve ' count with the less attractive ' Lucrezia ' at Munich amongst Diirer's efforts in painting, made perhaps from a somewhat academic or didactic standpoint. It is curious to note that these figures are in their pose less reminiscent of the famous print of 1504 than of a drawing made in preparation for it, now in the Albertina, in which the figure of Eve is posed like the Adam at Madrid, whilst the Adam is placed somewhat like the Eve at the Prado. These two famous panels are dated 1507; their dusky colouring, notably in the figure of the Adam, would point to a Venetian influence in the workmanship, such as we find in those two portraits by Diirer that are reminiscent of Antonello da Messina; the one, dated 1507, being in Vienna, the other, one of the greatest treasures in England, badly hung in Hampton Court. This last represents a man whom we find again in the damaged 4 Crown Fest ' of Prague.

DURER — PORTRAIT OF HANS IMHOF

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But let us turn to the portrait of Imhof, a keen-looking man in hat and furs who holds a scroll. This picture is one of Durer's masterpieces, and fortunately for us it is also in a perfect state of preservation. The expression of the face is haunting in its intensity, the workmanship is no less searching. One feels before this face that Diirer has striven to express the purpose of a life, so piercing yet inward are the eyes, so firm and nervous the rendering of the shut mouth and clenched hand.

We change, not the quality or frankness of the art, but the name, on leaving this masterpiece of Durer's maturity to look at the portrait attributed to Holbein and formerly given to Albert Diirer, with whose method and design it has an unusual affinity,,

Holbein, the Raphael of the North, here uses the privilege of his Italian prototype by astonishing us, used as we are in his work to an extraordinary sense of balance and control, by an equally astonishing frankness and insistence of vision. Here, in the grand and almost terrible ugliness of the sitter, Raphael's Pope Leo x. is quite outfaced. Once only has Holbein dwelt upon physical deformity with equal insistence, in the superb portrait of Wareham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, now in the Louvre. The ugliness of the unknown man in the Prado is of a nobler cast ; above

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the enormous nose Holbein has painted two intelligent eyes; the mouth is shrewd; the thumb and finger join as they might with one used to the handling of money. One thinks instinctively of those all-powerful merchants of the Middle Ages who built fleets and were the familiars of the wisest princes, to whom they lent fortunes.

The interest of the Spanish school, outside the achievement of Velasquez, the greatest and most genial of her sons, is great; yet it is often overrated — in the bulk it is neither first-rate nor second-rate; if its finer work is more naive, less affected, than that of the .eclectic Italians and Tenebrosi, it remains in fact an offshoot of theirs in method, if not entirely in spirit.

Two elements in the Spanish school have made for its popularity: on the one hand, a sombre strain reflecting a part of Spanish life, or rather history, has attracted the Romanticists of 1830 and Baudelaire, who has been wittily described as the unfrocked priest of Romanticism : ' on the other hand, a certain literalness has seemed to the realistic generation following that of 1830, to Courbet and Manet, a confirmation of their own aims. Both veins of thought are French, it is true, but for the last twenty years the current language of art has been French.

HOLBEIN. PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN

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We now find in the Prado, since the Exhibition of a few years ago, an important collection of the whimsical, perverse, but also fascinating works of Theotocopuli, known as El Greco, the Greco- Venetian painter, who should be called a Veneto- Spaniard. If we have left for further consideration the origins of Spanish painting, where it echoes with a provincial accent the art of Flanders and the decadent art of Italy, and start with El Greco as the first of the Spanish school, it is because the works of Sanchez Coello are of slighter interest ; because the early and merely decorative art of Spain, founded on the methods of the Flemings, is still to be sought for mainly in the churches for which it was painted; that, admitting some slight injustice to Sanchez Coello, before El Greco there was nothing in Spanish painting that is of general interest.

The world which El Greco painted is seen by flashes of lightning and in a spirit of hallucination and solar eclipse, when the dead seem to walk with the living. We have little in the Prado by this painter that shows the further disintegration of his art, the extremes of his Toledan manner; yet even at his worst and most whimsical we note an expressive use of the brush and of the qualities of his pigment.

Ribera, Zurbaran, are both well represented

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in solid, realistic, and austere canvases — the first to the full bent of his unequal but great faculties. If Ribera at his average is only the most realistic of the Tenebrosi, at his best he is one of the great masters; the large room given over to him represents his work in every phase.

Zurbaran uses in his work a more impassioned quality of prose, if I may use the expression, but he is not represented in the Prado to the full bent of his talent, and he should be studied at Seville.

One of the curious facts about the Spanish school is that to a close outlook upon Nature it added a quality of gravity, not to say austerity, that it saw Nature more sadly than it saw it whole — therein lies the strength of Ribera and Zurbaran. This criticism does not apply to Velasquez: as stated before, this most gifted of the sons of Spain had, inside certain limitations of invention and vision, a quality of artistic and intellectual nimbleness denied to his fellowcountrymen ; and if, in the estimate of the art of the world, Velasquez remains Spanish, or brings a note that could have come from Spain only, still in its quality that element had sunned itself in Italy. His essence is more genial, more delicately natural; we quit the atmosphere of the cellar, the cell, at times even of the charnel-house,

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to enter upon more room, more air and light; a courtlier and kindlier sense of things pervades his work; we no longer think of the callousness of Rome or the large shadows of Africa; and we can forget the Inquisition.

An estimate of that curious mood we find south of the Pyrenees only should properly be kept for a later chapter of this book. The Spanish gloom in art was crossed, it is true, by equally strange outbursts of florid sentiment or sentimentality, which we find in Roelas, Murillo, and Valdes Leal, and from these also Velasquez was free.

It is unnecessary now to state more than that at the Prado we find Velasquez at home, that all his masterpieces, with the exception of four or five scattered in Rome, London, and above all in Vienna, are still to be found in Madrid; it is here alone that we can estimate to the full his range as an artist.

In painting, the more florid phase we find in Spanish literature, architecture, and decoration flickers in the demonstrative, sentimental, and amiable work of Murillo, once so esteemed and now so fallen in popular estimation ; of this there is a room full. It is needless to add, that to the impartial student of art the Prado now offers the best standard by which to judge of this accomplished but often merely meretricious artist :

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and it is only fair to say that for better or for worse he reveals himself in these specimens (among which we find many formerly in the academy of St. Ferdinand) as at least able to satisfy himself; that, in fact, one understands his hold technically upon certain schools of the past, his fascination for the artists of the eighteenth century. Here are yards of yellow glories, with woolly clouds and woolly angels, surrounding a peasant model in prayer doing duty for the ' Immaculate Conceptions ' and ' Purissimas ' and 1 Virgins in Ecstasy ' ; — a sentimental ecstasy, amiable, tearful and bland; but how far removed from that passionate gravity of Titian's Virgin in ' The Assunta,' or the Madonnas in ecstasy or contemplation of a Mantegna or even a Crivelli! Let us look, but pass. How much of this belongs to the cheap melodies of another period, a period of unblushing trills and mechanical roulades; how much of this in its technical accomplishment is not even the furniture of art, but its upholstery! It is difficult to be just to the many Murillos in the Prado, or, for that matter, to the bulk of the Spanish school. Here we are surrounded by the greatest series of Titians in the world ; an impassioned sense of beauty, an impassioned gravity, is revealed for our delight. Here, with Rubens, we are initiated into what was most