There’s something almost secretive about the entrance to the Royal Academy’s Spain and the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. Two unprepossessing portals either side of an oddly blank dark space have just a hint of vacuum pressure behind them. Once through, it takes a moment for the eyes to acclimatise to the gloom: the spaces that were filled with light and garish colour for the Summer Show are now in near blackout, with the skylights covered over and the walls painted an unpromising shade of greyish blue. And then, with the clunk of the closing door behind you, you realise that you are surrounded by treasure.
The RA has effectively curated the curation of a curator. The Hispanic Society of America was the brainchild of Archer M. Huntington (1870-1955), whose obsession with Spain led him to assemble the largest and most comprehensive collection of Spanish objets d’art – objetos de arte? – outside the Iberian peninsula. And so Spain, or rather the vision of a remarkable and visionary Hispanophile, has come to London by way of New York. It starts early (those first impressions of a treasury are the glimmer of Celtiberian silver from the second century BC) and leaps on to the Moorish period – but it gives way to Catholicism soon enough, like history repeating itself.
Pieces from Islamic Andalusia include magnificent specimens of intricately-worked doorknockers – they evoke and seem to anticipate the later great sanctuary equivalents of medieval Europe like that at Durham, far away to the cold and windswept north – and some splendid and highly-decorated pottery. Around a corner an enormous early-fifteenth century glazed earthenware font hammers a message home. Covered in Christian imagery, it was probably made by Islamic potters who had remained in Toledo – for the time being. At the entrance to the rest of the show, as if at the door of a church, it is a clever touch.
Whatever historical qualms you may have about the way in which Catholicism established itself in Spain, without the religious prohibitions on imagery that had formerly existed Spanish craftsmanship came into its own. Spanish culture quickly became Catholic culture, and here the exhibition really takes off – and at considerable speed. Paintings, statues, vestments and sacred vessels vie for attention; while there is plenty of bling, there are intimate moments as well. El Greco’s Pietà and St Jerome are smaller than you might expect – compact enough to be viewed straight on and up close – but who’s complaining?
No one’s pretending that the Spanish Empire was perfect, or didn’t tend towards the lethal either wittingly in its grasping greed or unwittingly in its import of European diseases against which indigenous populations had no natural immunity. Nevertheless, as in so many instances of imperial ambition, the colonial expression of life at home in Spain took on significant nuances that gave it an identity of its own. The same is true of faith; exported Catholicism looked familiar, but also very different. No doubt plenty of sneering contemporaries thought it looked disfigured and vulgar, but in South America Spanish Catholicism became exotic, vibrant, and breathless.
For this we largely have the mendicant orders to thank, with their particular skill of teaching the faith in ways that their new flocks might more easily understand – we all saw The Mission, but we also know how it ended. Imported pictures and statues took on a character of their own under local craftsmen; the Immaculate Conception is everywhere, for long before Pius IX and Ineffabilis Deus the Habsburgs – whom no one could say weren’t pious in their own way – were determined to promote the devotion across their realms, both old and new.
Two sanctuary lamps from late-seventeenth century Chile would not look out of place on a ziggurat; a statue of Our Lady under her title of The Virgin of Quito, vibrantly painted in Ecuador the early-eighteenth century, is so camp that it verges on the indecent – it also has little silver wings. Four later Ecuadorian figurines (above), each only about six inches high, steal the whole show: “The Four Fates of Man: Death, Soul in Hell, Soul in Purgatory, Soul in Heaven.” The dead man is without doubt having a significantly better time than the soul in hell, which is food for thought as Lent approaches.
And then, suddenly, there is Goya. So suddenly, in fact, that it seems that you’ve stumbled into a different exhibition altogether – another product of the exhibition’s eclectic nature. The connecting door to the room with all the domestic religious pieces has been left open, but the arch blocked off with a bench: are we meant to think that this is all part of a natural development, if we know where to look? If so, it doesn’t work as well as the trick with the font – and in any case Goya can speak for himself. At least you can sit on the bench and drink in long and deep his famous Duchess of Alba, with which and whom he seems to have been infatuated.
Next come some less well-known names, but including Ignacio Zuloaga and his Greco-esque The Penitents: which somehow manages to be simultaneously vibrant and still, violent and peaceful, and prayerful with a side-helping of masochism. It sits strangely opposite Joaquin Sorolla’s Sea Idyll, which is all sundresses and straw hats, and peachy sea-splashed bottoms glinting in the sun. Here, innocence and suffering collide; perhaps unintentionally these two very different paintings unlock an unspoken theme to the whole exhibition: beauty has a price, and sunshine comes with shadows.
True, this show is a bit of a hotchpotch – but given its provenance and history it is bound to be, and in any case it’s not necessarily to its detriment. That some critics have already dismissed it as dull and boring is astounding. Spain and the Hispanic World could only be boring if you don’t have an imagination, or (and perhaps more likely) because in these religiously illiterate days you aren’t familiar with the kaleidoscopic story that brings it all together.
For better or worse, the Catholicism of Spain and her Empire runs through this exhibition like gold – both metaphorically and literally. The show is full of many beautiful, precious and luminous things, and – although it sounds daft – they are all so Spanish. You can almost hear the deafening flourishes of Iberian batalhas breaking out overhead, played on bombastic horizontal silver organ pipes: wondrous, almost but not-quite vulgar, and ever-so-slightly out of tune.
Spain and the Hispanic World is at the Royal Academy, London, until 10 April.
Photo: Royal Academy.
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