PAINTING IN SPAIN
Spanish Painting. By E. Harris. (Gifford. 42s.)
THERE are fairly efficient and easily available monographs on most of the great artists of Spain, but there was ample room for a general book on Spanish painting as a whole. This need has now been filled with brilliant success by Miss Harris. The form of the book is that of a series of plates with only a short, introduction, but both parts are planned on the basis of such a thorough knowledge of the subject, and with such a clear understanding of the way in which a book of this scale should be written, that the volume contains more useful infor- mation than many others twice its size.
The plates consist of over a hundred subjects taken from the whole range of Spanish painting, from the Romanesque frescoes of Catalonia to the death of Goya. They have been chosen to be really representative of the painters which they illustrate, and in many cases they show works which are very rarely seen. Particularly worthy of praise are the details by means of which many telling comparisons are made, and much of the artists' technical methods revealed. The two illustrations of heads from portraits of Philip IV, by Velazquez, for instance, put side by side on one plate make the reader sec at once the whole change which came over the artist's style between 1630 and 1655. In fact, about the plates, there is only the usual complaint to make, namely, that those in colour are abominable. Can it be that publishers are really right in their view that coloured plates make a book sell, however bad they are ? In this case one or two, particularly the Ribera Apollo and Marsyas, are not only quite unlike the originals but also so unpleasantly printed that they do not even look attractive in themselves. The introductory text consists of a short history of Spanish painting, notes on the individual painters, and a bibliography. The two latter are models of conciseness and accuracy. The history is of great value, since the authoress describes the development of the arts not from a purely technical point of view, but in relation to other activities. Spanish painting of the Middle Ages is seen largely in connexion with the political evolution of the country ; that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in relation to the Counter-Reformation on the one hand and the Court of Madrid on the other ; the painting of Goya in the light of struggles against French and Spanish tyranny. In this way some of the most peculiar character- istics of Spanish painting are explained, such as the complete division of the arts in the seventeenth century into two types, one belonging to the court and the other fostered by the Church. Miss Harris shows how the naturalism which had come into Spain through the Caravaggiesques could be applied to the needs of the Catholic Church ; and in this context it might have been possible to make a sharper division between the two great branches of religious painting, represented roughly by the names of Zurbaran and Murillo. Murillo excelled at presenting in its most effective form a popular religion based primarily on the supernatural and emotional elements in Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Zurbaran, on the other hand, though he occasionally had to play this game, was most at home in setting out the more human stories of the Bible in a simply naturalistic manner (Cf. the Adoration of the Shepherds on plate 64), without any appeal to the emotions or to a belief in the supernatural. This art could not have been so popular in its appeal as that of Murillo. Zurbaran was painting, as Miss Harris points out, for a more monastic audience than Murillo—when he does paint an ecstasy it is the frigid ecstasy of the cell, not the ostentatious ecstasy of the miracle worker. But it must also be true that his painting appealed to a slightly more sophisticated lay audience than Murillo's, to one which had rather less need of the consolations of religion than the poor classes of Seville for whom the latter
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