Spanish Gold in England

By ROBERT HUGHES

Of course, the face is familiar. Like the pink convexities of Rubens' child-wife Helene Fourment, it is one of the obsessive human presences of 17th century painting: Philip IV of Spain, growing older in the long succession of Diego Velasquez's court portraits. This one was painted late in the monarch's life, around 1653. The King's features--the bulbed Habsburg lip, the forehead's waxy promontory, the thick ball of a chin, the upswept mustache that Salvador Dali would appropriate and vulgarize--must have been more familiar to Velasquez than the map of Spain itself (see color overleaf).

Yet there is not a trace of formula in the painting. Every millimeter of the royal face, rendered with baffling illusionistic skill, has been studied afresh.

Philip's head remains the object of thoughtful, disinterested scrutiny, like Cezanne's apple, but much more mysterious. There are the signs of age and stress: an eyelid droops, the gaze is not quite focused. There is the vast dignity: no real head, seen in isolation, could possibly envelop itself in such distances as Velasquez's painted fiction.

"When I saw it, this commanded such deep respect and reverence in me that, since it already possessed so much spirit and living flesh, all the portrait lacked was the voice." So wrote Velasquez's protector, Lazaro Diaz del Valle, when he saw the portrait in 1656. It was, and remains, a "speaking likeness," but it also has the eloquence that only great art possesses. It defeats imagination by leaving nothing to imagine: imagination is replaced by consciousness.

There are no gaps to fill in, no interpretations to be made.

The very notion of "creativity" seems, in Velasquez's presence, a sentimental impertinence. He was unquestionably the deepest painter of matter who ever lived.

It would be pleasant but wildly optimistic to hope that every other picture in the exhibition in which this portrait of Philip IV may be seen--"The Golden Age of Spanish Painting," organized by the Prado's director, Xavier de Salas, at London's Royal Academy, through March 14--were at this august level.

Quite a few are: there are five other Velasquezes and five major El Grecos, including that overwhelming trumpet voluntary, the Prado's huge Annunciation of 1600. There are works by Francisco Ribalta and his great junior Jose de Ribera, a group of paintings by Zurbaran--including an exquisite still-life of cream and ocher pots drawn up like liturgical vessels on a table.

There are also first-rate representative pieces by Murillo, Sanchez Coello and Antonio Pereda.

Lardy Cherubs. But the exhibition includes whole roomfuls of provinciality, grading down to junk. No 17th century European painter could possibly have produced a sillier work than Jose Antolinez's trio of lardy, simpering cherubs posing as The Christian Soul Torn Between Vice and Virtue. No matter.

This is not a "masterpiece" show, but it does accord with Spanish reality in the 17th century and is required seeing for anyone interested in that singular efflorescence.

Spain was a small, provincial place in 1650. Its economy was chaotic, its empire was fraying, the royal treasury was near bankruptcy and state policies were mostly devised by knaves or fossils. Art patronage was erratic, and to learn any thing about the "mainstream," a young painter of talent like Ribera or Murillo had to spend long stretches abroad.

But provincial beginnings often confer a certain intensity on painters. The eye becomes obsessive, prehensile. Sanchez Cotan was a cloistered monk who never went outside Spain--but his Bodegon of vegetables (see color overleaf) is one of the most remarkable still-lifes ever painted. Each form--the ribbed curves of the cardoon stalks, the fleshy convolutions of the hanging cabbage, the ragged lace of the lettuce--is rendered with breathtaking economy. The picture is a lesson in ideal vegetarian geometry, with the slice of lemon and the slender cones of carrots occupying space like Renaissance mathematical models. At the same time, the darkness (coupled with the close focus) gives the objects a painful density. The hanging lemon seems ready to explode. One will see few still-lifes like this until the 20th century, when another Spaniard--Picasso--would give their components a similar energy, distinctness and isolation.

Cyclopean Breast. Even when a Spanish painter lived away from Spain, he could keep a peculiarly Iberian fla vor. Such was the case with Ribera, who spent most of his working life in Italy, becoming the most gifted of Caravaggio's followers and the best artist in 17th century Naples. His portrait of Magdalena Ventura, the bearded lady of the Abruzzi, exposing one cyclopean breast as her worn husband looks on, belongs to the same Spanish tradition of dispassionate curiosity about freaks as Velasquez's court dwarfs and idiots.

His Penitent Magdalene, circa 1640, with her pert mouth and enormous dark eyes, is in effect a maja. But the high point of Ribera's career is the great Calvary from Osuna, never displayed before outside Spain (see color opposite).

During the Peninsular War, French soldiers used it for target practice. It is a wreck, blackened and blistered: but of what a vessel! Spanish religious painting takes on the grand rhetoric, the "mighty line" of Marlowe: the arc of stricken figures at the foot of the cross, its profile ending in a folded blaze of green, gold brocade and crimson; the faces of weeping women, smeared and half eroded by darkness; the immense twisted figure of Christ, "quoted" from a Michelangelo drawing, that rises on the cross. Even if there were nothing else in the Royal Academy, this painting alone would justify the show.

Robert Hughes

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