Monthly column on the arts

Spain is really amazingly lovely. I say this for the benefit of those of you who, like me, tend to think of the Iberian Peninsula as full of drunken British holidaymakers and hotels that aren't quite finished.

But, as many of you already know, this accounts for only a narrow coastal strip of resorts. Elsewhere, it's a country of extraordinary landscapes, intriguing cities, plentiful antiquity, and a sensible lifestyle that involves sleeping for quite a lot of the afternoon.

I spent nine days there in August with my wife. We were teaching at Cascadas, a Christian establishment in the mountains near Madrid that deserves an article of its own. We were leading a week on the arts and media, but managed to fit in a memorable holiday between seminars, mealtimes and siestas.

Segovia

One day our hosts took us to Segovia, a city bisected by an amazing Roman aqueduct, its triple arches built entirely without mortar. St. John of the Cross is buried nearby, and a magnificent castle dominates the town. From its windows you can look out over classic landscapes, and in its shadowed courtyards you can contemplate a slice of European history that left some dazzling achievements behind.

An exhibition of paintings of Christ was showing at the Cathedral, to which we went with great expectations only to emerge disappointed. Its layout seemed a deliberate attempt to compromise the Cathedral's vast spaces and shadows. The art didn't help, either. It was dominated by numerous depictions of the Passion, all portraying exquisite agony and suffering, but existing in a time-warp in which the resurrection and the triumph of the Crucified seemed so far away as to be non-existent. There was a streak of Catholic sentimentality running through it all, as if one's emotions were being manipulated without theological justification.

We emerged into the bright sunlight of Segovia feeling vaguely troubled, as if the half had not been told.

Madrid

On our last day we visited Madrid's Prado Museum, a palatial building with a superb collection of Rubens, Velazquez and other European masters.

The Velazquezs were riveting. Here were his portraits of the Spanish Habsburg rulers, depicted in their palaces and gardens with their servants, dwarves and fools. Diego Velazquez straddles 17nth-century Spain like an artistic colossus. As a young man he painted Philip IV as a fashionable equestrian; Philip threw out all other paintings of himself and appointed him court painter.

Philip had inherited the 'Habsburg jaw', a deformity that left several Habsburgs unable to eat solid food in later life. Over the years Velazquez charted the physical decline of a handsome man. You can see the family flaw in all his paintings of the royal family; the lower jaw enlarges as the years pass. He painted without flattery - the deformity is plain to see - yet he painted with immense tenderness, and invested his sitters with enormous humanity. You can see it in Velazquez's portrait 'Philip IV in Brown and Silver' in London's National Gallery, to sit in front of which is to converse with another person's soul: Velazquez's as much as Philip's.

Perhaps to distract from their deformity, the Spanish Habsburgs peopled their court with dwarves and freaks. Velazquez painted them too, again without flattery, again with the same probing humanity. His portrait of Sebastien de Morra stares out at you, the vigour and character of the eyes daring you to dwell on the sitter's disability and short stature. His portrait of the jester Calabacillas, whose mental disability is etched into the canvas, pronounces judgement on an entire court.

Monster

The painting that moved me most, however, is not by Velazquez but by his protege, Juan Carreno de Miranda, who succeeded him as court painter. Simply called 'The Monster', it portrays a naked child of around six years old who was grotesquely fat to the point of deformity; she had been brought to court as a curiosity. She is modestly holding a fig-leaf. One wonders why the artist took such pains to cover the one part of her that nobody was looking at. Then you look at how her troubled eyes are painted, and the delicacy of her surprisingly slender hands, and you realise that the artist wants to affirm that, curiosity or not, this child is a person and is entitled to be modest. In such paintings, and in the tender works of Velazquez, you see the doctrine of the image of God in humanity spelled out.

Collapse

After 40 years at court, Velazquez painted Philip one last time. The painting is in the Prado. In Philip's face and posture you can read the physical decline of the man and the collapse of the entire Spanish Habsburg dynasty. It is a profoundly sad elegy for worldly pomp, and a moving farewell to someone who had known Philip for four decades.

Velazquez is not known as a religious painter. But you can find in some of his Prado paintings more good theology than was on show in most of the painted passions of the Segovia Cathedral exhibition.

Spanish sentiment and friends at court

Segovia

Madrid

Monster

Collapse

David Porter

Main Articles

Other articles