Spanish Painters Bring Heaven to Boston Museum

By Richard Lacayo

Philip III of Spain is one of history's also-rans. Historians tend to treat his reign, from 1598 to 1621, as a kind of listless interval between that of his father Philip II, who consolidated Spain's global empire, and that of his son Philip IV, a middling monarch but one whose court painter was Diego Velazquez. That cinched his immortality. Philip III was known for his piety, his love of luxury and his willingness to allow his chief adviser, the Duke of Lerma, to run things--not always well.

All the same, he presided over an era when Spanish painting was moving, sometimes spectacularly, into the golden age that it fully arrived at after his death. You understand that right away from the thunderclap that is the first gallery of "El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III," which has just opened at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston. There are five fierce El Grecos in that room, all humming in his high, mad register. Spain may have been adrift, but its art was advancing nicely--and advancing into territory where you might not have expected Spanish art to go.

Though it's not the only subject of this wonderful exhibition, co-curated by Ronni Baer of the Boston MFA and Sarah Schroth of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, one of the show's plain lessons is that during Philip's reign, Spanish painters perfected the means of bringing recognizable human beings into their art. Spain may have been a center of Catholic piety, its eyes always fastened on heaven, but its paintings were full of vital, supple people made of real flesh and blood.

That was partly because of the arrival of influences from outside, especially Italy. As his name tells you, El Greco (the Greek) wasn't a product of Spain at all. He was a meteor that fell there. He was born on Crete in 1541 and made his way to Spain, via Venice and Rome, only in 1576. But he spent the remaining 38 years of his life there, mostly in Toledo, and his high-key palette, flickering brushwork and twisted Mannerist figuration were perfectly suited to Spain's militant piety and the strain of Catholic mysticism spreading there through the writings of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. A cooler, more classicizing artist would not have answered so well to the emerging Spanish taste for religious ecstasy.

El Greco brought with him the practice of making portraits of ordinary people, not just royals, nobles and high churchmen. He was one of the first European painters to probe psychology--although he wouldn't have called it that--in his portraits, and when he turned to devotional subjects, he treated those as portraits too. His Saint James is not the picture of a remote celestial being but of a man, even a contemporary.

Velazquez, one of the greatest painters in history, would take note. Born in 1599, he started his career painting bodegons, kitchen scenes, like the meticulously detailed An Old Woman Cooking Eggs. This was the homey territory that Dutch painters worked in all the time but where the high-minded El Greco didn't venture. (You can't imagine any of El Greco's crackling holy men doing anything in a kitchen but frightening the cooks.) Like Caravaggio, Velazquez would also use ordinary people as models for figures from the Bible. When he paints The Immaculate Conception, you can tell just by looking that it's a local girl from Seville dressed as the Virgin.

Another import from Italy was the still life, and some of the most haunting canvases in this show are the paintings by Juan Sanchez Cotan. His practice was not so much to present as to isolate a few vegetables and pieces of fruit on a shelf or suspend them above it on strings. All are sharply lit before a deep black background, the simplest products of creation, not just seen but beheld, and summoning us from the darkness. What should we make of the mysterious gravity in these pictures? Perhaps just that in fiercely religious Spain, even a cabbage could be God's anointed messenger.

Get the Picture? Richard Lacayo blogs daily about art and architecture at time.com/lookingaround