The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting & Sculpture 1600-1700
National Gallery, London
Sometimes the shock of the old can be more intense and disturbing than the shock of the new. This is certainly the case with The Sacred Made Real – religious paintings and rarely seen carved and painted sculpture from Spain. It was a period in which the Roman Catholic Church sought to assert its authority with fearful images to shock the senses and stir the soul that highlight suffering and death with gruesome reality. All were intended to be seen in the intense gloom of churches as devotional images against a background of liturgical music, meditations and reminders of the suffering seen as part of the Christian faith, their context in which they were displayed an intrinsic part of their meaning.
Sensitively shown in the Stygian gloom of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, the paintings and sculptures are presented as works of art, their context suggesting connections between the different works rather than as devotional objects. As such, the exhibition presents a curious dilemma in that it is intended for both believers and non-believers, offering for some the intensity of a religious experience, while for others it is the aesthetic qualities of the work that will be of primary concern. For the technically-minded, the carving and colouring of the hyper-real sculptures – with real hair, ivory teeth and glass eyes – is an intriguing virtuosity display of great skill and craftsmanship.
Yet so intimately are all the different aspects bound up together that it is almost impossible to separate them, which allows the work to operate at many levels. This is particularly so with the polychrome sculptures – and to describe them as such is a recognition that they transcend subject matter – which are carved with great detail and painted to replicate the appearance of human flesh as accurately as possible. Juan de Mesa’s decapitated head of St John the Baptist, show lying on its side, is so gruesomely anatomically convincing that it could also serve as a medical model. Yet it is the facial features of agony combined with resignation that elicit compassion and feeling.
Equally powerful is Pedro de Mena’s sculpture, Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Ecce Homo). Close scrutiny reveals bruising beneath the skin caused by beatings, while rivulets of blood trickle down the body to be soaked up by the loincloth round his waist. With a look of utter resignation, the youthful body is both vulnerable and yet defiant.
In contrast to highly unfashionable polychrome sculptures – and their inaccessibility in churches – the painting by leading artists such as Velázquez and Zurbarán are relatively well known, many on loan from national collections. Although the painters aimed for a high degree of realism – many studied with the artisans who painted the sculptures – none have the sense of reality of the sculptors. Their work has a visionary rather than a literal quality and as such touches on ideas and themes not limited by the subject. Zurbarán’s Virgin of the Misericordia, portraying the Virgin stretching out her arms to under her mantle to protect the adoring monks, is about compassion and understanding rather than suffering.
While The Sacred Made Real will not be to everyone’s taste, it poses disturbing questions about the role of art produced with a particular purpose in mind. The powerful imagery can be unsettling, yet it is impossible not to be moved by such profound expressions of feeling.
Emmanuel Cooper
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