Museo Carmen Thyssen

Sanctity and its portrayal in art were two aspects that characterised Baroque culture in Spain. Following the Council of Trent (1545–63), the cult of saints as mediators and the definition of Catholicism as a decidedly visual religion were cornerstones of the Catholic reaction to the Protestant Reformation. The late sixteenth century saw an increase in painted and sculpted images of sanctity in Spain. They were intended to move the faithful to devout imitation of the models of virtues shown in them and their realism was intensified in order to achieve this effectively. The aim was to reach viewers' hearts through extremely lifelike works steeped in drama, and accordingly create images with a strong emotional impact.

This exhibition, produced in collaboration with the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia and curated by its director, Pablo González Tornel, analyses Baroque sanctity through a selection of thirty-five Spanish paintings and sculptures and a few Italian examples that show the common intentions in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean area. It also offers a modern-day look at the arts as a vehicle for emotions, showing their validity in today's visual culture. These works display an almost photographic realism achieved through a naturalistic portrayal of faces, bodies, fabrics and objects, focused and contrasted lighting and monumental formats. As a result, Baroque images of saintliness are, at once, instruments of propaganda for faith and a universal and timeless representation of the suffering and weaknesses of these fiercely human beings.

For more than half a century, great Mediterranean artists such as Ribera, Cano, Vaccaro, Murillo, Giordano, Velázquez, Ribalta, Orrente, Martínez Montañés and Mena explored the relationship between realism and devotion, always guided by the crudest naturalism. In Valencia, Seville, Madrid, Milan and Naples, saints were taken down from altars and mingled with the faithful, appearing before them as beings of flesh, blood and tears. More humanised than ever, the heroes and heroines of Catholicism ceased to be icons and were presented as real people in a vast array of images created to persuade and move viewers at what was one of the culminating moments in Spanish art history.

More than three hundred years on, this portrayal of real, human and emotional saintliness has been transformed in today’s world to show that certain values of visual culture are timeless. Three masterpieces of contemporary Spanish art, products of the genius of Equipo Crónica, Darío Villalba and Antonio Saura, enter into frank dialogue with the Baroque and prove that today, as yesterday, emotions make the world go round.

Being eternal. Early and Modern Saints

Sixteenth and seventeenth-century theorists of Catholic imagery such as Gabriele Paleotti, Charles (Carlo) and Federico Borromeo, and Francisco Pacheco made it clear that the main function of Counter-Reformation religious art should be to persuade souls through the senses in order to strengthen their faith. With this aim in mind, in Spain painting and sculpture aspired to blur the boundary between physical reality and artistic fiction. Accordingly, deceiving the eye and depicting the great truths of the Catholic faith in a realistic manner became objectives of the Baroque arts.

Images of male and female saints did not escape this realistic trompe l'oeil approach, and canvases such as those depicting the Blessed Simón de Rojas and Brother Bernardino de Obregón are true portraits, taken on their deathbeds in order to capture the real features of the deceased. Following the appearance of this trend, seventeenth-century Spain saw an increase in the number of true portraits – veræ effigies – made during the lifetime, or taken from the corpse, of an individual who had died ‘with the odour of sanctity’ or based on physiognomic descriptions drawn from literary sources. This was the case of Saint Francis Borgia, Saint Peter of Alcántara and Saint Teresa of Jesus, whose portraits converted them into flesh and blood saints similar in all respects to the faithful who prayed to them. This realistic approach soon spread to images of early saints such as Saint Peter and Saint Francis, for which life models were used. As a result, these people, who had lived centuries earlier, resembled inhabitants of seventeenth-century Spain.

Portraying sanctity was no easy task for Baroque artists. Not only did the simulacrum need to reflect the physical features of an outstanding man or woman, but the image was also intended to embody his or her spiritual essence. This was the only way the painter and sculptor could present the faithful with a model of perfection whose mortal humanity made imitation possible. Empathy and sympathy were the mechanisms employed by artists to turn their images of sanctity into almost everyday beings whose suffering and affliction could be easily understood and experienced by any mortal. The deaths of numerous men and women ‘with the odour of sanctity’ in the vast Spanish empire in the Early Modern period and the successful path to canonisation of many of them merely fuelled the belief that spiritual perfection in a mortal body was possible.

This realism, which brought Baroque saintly portraits closer to viewers in the seventeenth century, still has the same power. Its timelessness continues to appeal to the senses through the profound humanity of images in which we still recognise our fellow humans, burdened, then as now, by life's trials and tribulations.

Scraping the shadows. Martyrs and Penitents

Images of saintliness in the Spanish Baroque period were characterised not only by their realism but also by their intense suffering. This dramatic nature of portraits of male and female saints should come as no surprise in a context in which empathy for the suffering of others became one of the main means of ensuring the success of the artistic simulacrum. The Devotio Moderna reform movement had already established ritual meditation of the faithful on Christ's suffering as a central element of the Christian faith in the late Middle Ages, and the Counter-Reformation decisively relaunched this cult. As supreme examples of renunciation and suffering for the sake of redemption, images of the Passion provided a reference for resigned acceptance of sacrifice. Suffering at others’ suffering, compassion, became a focal point of religion, and every believer was encouraged to weep for Christ. During the Baroque, the suffering and bleeding image of the Son of God – his purely human version – was powerfully re-launched thanks to the newly achieved figurative realism and saints, like any human beings, merely imitated Christ.

Images of penance and martyrdom enabled artists to explore stark visual realism by painstakingly depicting the physical and mental devastation that this struggle had wreaked on saintly men and women. Martyrs such as Saint Sebastian or Saint Peter showed, in the cruellest way, how Christ's example could be followed and updated by believers. Extreme models of atonement for sins also occupied a prominent place in Reformed Catholicism, which, as with the Eucharist and the worship of the body of Christ, made penance the centrepiece of its doctrine. The penitent saints and anchorites (Saints Jerome, Onuphrius, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt), portrayed in isolation in inhospitable places with menacing shadows, mortify themselves in order to ward off the temptations and weaknesses that separate them from spiritual perfection and divinity, while highlighting the decrepitude of their bodies. Their inevitable end, tragic and human like that of all of us, is recalled by the skulls that accompany them – a memento mori (reminder of death) that underlines the futility of life.

Human and divine, decrepit and beautiful, sinners and saints, near and far, simulacra of saintliness are as sensorially appealing today as they were in the seventeenth century. If there was one thing that Baroque artists understood well, it was how the senses connect perceptible reality with the human mind and heart. The saints produced back then out of wood, canvas and oil paint are still fiercely human today, as real as the people who viewed and continue to view them.

Contemporary paintings

The contemporary paintings distributed around this exhibition offer an alternative reading to that of the main group on display. Aside from the religious meaning with which these works were created during the Baroque period, today's art shows that many of the seventeenth-century concepts concerning the human condition remain valid today.

Inspired by Baroque vehemence or theatricality, contemporary artists have often drawn on the imagery of devotional painting to create profane works. This is true of certain pieces by the Valencian group Equipo Crónica (Rafael Solbes and Manolo Valdés), which evoke great Golden Age paintings in order to cast a critical eye on the country's social and political situation or on its historical and cultural distinguishing features.

Besides the language of the mass media – flat colours, drawn outlines – and a critical intent, tradition is a very effective iconographic tool for these artists. The Courtyard of Temptations (1972) displays an interesting combination of high and low culture – a perfect example of how Equipo Crónica subject classical paintings by Velázquez, Goya or El Greco to anachronisms and decontextualisation. Executed in an aseptic style, stripped of all emotion, the Baroque pastiche is complemented with surreal elements. In this case, the references to Paul Delvaux's Pink Bows (1937) are evident in the painted bows (also on the frame itself) and in the paving against which the figure is depicted.

This piece represents the mystification and appropriation of Pop Art in a parodic portrait of Saint Teresa. The reinterpretation undermines the sacred nature of images and their transcendent and moralising value and enhances the ‘fiercely human’ essence of Baroque mysticism.

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The modern works on display here, engaging with their seventeenth-century counterparts, reveal how the Baroque has captured the imagination of countless contemporary artists. Seduced by the expressiveness, monumentality, lyricism and drama of the art of the past, as well as by a solid tradition of realism, they revive the mundane beings who were objects of popular devotion in the most avant-garde examples of twentieth-century Spanish art.

There is an iconic work by Basque artist Darío Villalba (1939-2018): Mystic (1974), a large-format photographic piece that links up with the starkest Baroque visions. Open to interpretation, it refers to the alienation of modern man, who is anonymous and impious, and revives an image of a suffering mystic though of a prosaic kind, devoid of any sense of ascent.

The work by Antonio Saura (1930–1998) is a re-reading of a Baroque theme par excellence, the Crucifixion (1959). His version is an artistic and historical reflection on the identity of the sacred, as well as a statement in support of figurative expressionism. The salient characteristics of Saura's production, such as emphasis on black, violent brushstrokes, are linked to what has been called the ‘wild streak’ in Spanish painting – an imaginary lineage that relates both to the Baroque and to Goya's Black Paintings as well as to the stark realism of Zuloaga and Gutiérrez Solana.

Contemporary art radically distorts the naturalistic realism of the Baroque through the representation of impenetrable spaces, the excessive materiality of the paint or grotesque and irrational disfigurement. Dramatic force is no longer based on a tenebrist aesthetic or exacerbated realism but on the intoxication of the gesture and its expressiveness – an expression that for the artist is pure anguish, but with no trace of faith or hope.

Images:
Pedro Orrente, Magdalena penitente, c. 1625. Óleo sobre lienzo, 105 x 83 cm. Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Ecce homo, c. 1670-1680. Óleo sobre lienzo, 156 x 106 cm. Museo de Bellas Artes de Murcia
Luca Giordano, Martirio de san Bartolomé, c. 1650. Óleo sobre lienzo, 137 x 96 cm Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia