El Greco and Goya - tears, shackles and torment in dark Spanish dramas
Automatic translate“The best place to see Spanish art in the UK,” says Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection in London, “is the Bowes Museum.” This remarkable institution in Barnard Castle, County of Durham, exists thanks to the philanthropic instincts of its founders, John and Josephine Bowes. He was a British, illegitimate son of the third Earl of Strathmore; she was a Frenchwoman who performed on the Paris stage. They bequeathed some wonderful paintings to the people of northeast England.
In 1862, their art adviser Benjamin Gogh wrote to them about El Greco and Goya, saying: “I sold several paintings by these two artists. I think you can take one of them for your collection. ” They did this and as a result, Barnard Castle had what Bray, the former curator of Spanish art at the National Gallery in London, calls “just the greatest portrait of Goya’s brush in the country.” A penetratingly intimate image of a friend of the painter, poet, lawyer and prison reformer Juan Antonio Melendez Valdes. There is also one of the best works made by El Greco, “Tears of St. Peter”. This object, depicting a saint in the agony of self-denial after the betrayal of Christ, was that to which the artist returned from Crete several times - there are at least six versions. But this version is “the most original,” Bray says.
Now, for the first time, these masterpieces, along with a small but exquisite selection of Spanish paintings, also provided by the Bowes Museum, can be seen (for free) in the Wallace collection, where they were freed from a slightly overloaded “salon”. The strange church atmosphere of the show, with its dark, moody walls and dramatic lighting, recalls that most of these paintings were originally made for religious contexts and that their acquisition by Bowes was indirectly related to the confiscation of property from the Spanish Church in 1836 by the liberal government of Juan Alvarez Mendizabal.
Most of the captured art flowed into museums; some of them, like the work received by Bose from the widow of the Spanish aristocrat, were in private hands. Such a suppression of monasteries, as Bray points out, is one of the moments in history when works such as The Immaculate Conception by José Antolines (1635–1675), a highlight of the Wallace exhibition, cease to be objects of religious veneration and begin to be art. These items have primarily aesthetic value, not cult or ritual.
If this small exhibition is a drama, she has a star: El Greco. This is not the exalted Peter, who sits on the right hand of God, fingering the keys to heaven, but a person who knows that he did something completely inexpressibly terrible. A capricious composition with deep blue in mustard tones, in which the saint’s loosened eyes rushed up to the stormy sky, this, says Bray, is an “almost abstract expressionist” and a rejection of realism.
Hanging opposite him and in full contrast is Goya: the poet’s lawyer is depicted with his mouth open, as if about to speak, pink veins are visible on his cheeks. Next to him is another Goya masterpiece, of a completely different order. The painting, restored several years ago, shows the scene in prison. Ghostly shadows fall on chains, skinny gaunt and half-naked. This is part of a series of 12 works that appear before us as ugly truths of human nature. Other canvases feature a lunatic asylum, bullfight, a theater fire and bandits shooting travelers.
Despite the element of reporting, the work has an intriguing relationship with realism. The light source is a dazzling white arch at the back of the stage, which seems to have nothing to do with the architecture of a real prison. It resembles a strange lighted window in another picture of Goya, which hangs in the Valencia Cathedral, in which St. Francis Borgia prays at the deathbed of an unrepentant sinner who is about to be swallowed up by many predatory, grotesque animals from hell. For Goya, these little tin drawings were the beginning of a work that led him to the dark, satirical and fantastic prints of Caprijos - and, ultimately, to the enormous desolation of Black paintings in his later life.
Another pleasure of the exhibition is the work of lesser-known Spanish artists. In addition to the sensual Immaculate Conception of Antolines, with its Virgin, resembling Venus, rising from the waves, there is an intriguing painting by Saint Eustochius Juan de Valdes Lila (1622-1690), which once hung in the Monastery of Jeromeonite in Seville. Saint Eustochia, daughter of a Roman senator, was a fourth-century scholar who read Latin, Greek and Hebrew and helped St. Jerome in the translation of the Bible in Latin. Saint Jerome himself is a favorite subject for artists of religious scenes, with his friendly lion and hermit in a cave - this time there is a small scene in the background for such subjects, and the star of Saint Eustochia (scientist, housekeeper and nun) is at its zenith.
There is also Tobias Antonio de Pereda, restoring the look of His Father, illustrating an episode from the apocryphal Book of Tobit. Tobias, according to the direction of an angel in the foreground looking directly at us, lures us into a picture, treats his father’s blind eyes with gall gutted fish that lies on the ground.
If between these works there is a special thread that Bowes accidentally felt, it is their spontaneity: even artichokes, lemons and grapes in two still lifes glow against a dark background with terrible force. St. Francis levitates into the moody sky, his bloodshot eyes full of ecstatic devotion to his God. Queen Mariana - the same queen, now much older, whose reflection shines in the mirror in the Meninas of Velazquez - looks grimly from the portrait of Claudio Coelho. St. Andrew, in the work of El Greco’s disciple, Luis Tristan de Escamilla (c. 1585-1624), approaches his death on the cross in a dark landscape, his flesh is whitened, like a flash, because God sent a blinding light to illuminate his last moments.
In misery and ecstasy, these works excite you and draw you into their dark, ferocious dramatic stories.
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