Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682 by Robert Goodwin

Author:Robert Goodwin [Goodwin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620403617
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-07-20T18:30:00+00:00

15

Holy Week: Art and Illusion

The God of Wood.

Sobriquet of Juan Martínez Montañés

The same year that Part Two of Don Quixote was first published, 1615, in Seville the religious Brotherhood of Christ’s Passion, the Hermandad de Pasión, commissioned an image of Christ carrying the Cross from the greatest sculptor then working in the city, Juan Martínez Montañés, who was also an hermano or brother of the confraternity. It is one of the greatest examples of an almost all-consuming trend towards startlingly lifelike religious images of Christ, the Madonna and the saints which achieved a sublime brilliance in Spain during the first half of the seventeenth century. Carved in wood and carefully painted to look real, these works mark an emotional and psychological apogee in western sculpture after which all else seems tastefully bland or excessively vulgar.

Antonio Palomino, the ‘Spanish Vasari’, wrote in the early 1700s that Montañés had created the breathtaking image of the Christ of the Passion ‘with such an anguished expression that it excited the devotion of even the most lukewarm heart and it is said that when they carried this sacred image in procession during Holy Week, the artist himself went from street to street to watch it, exclaiming that it was impossible that he should have made something so wondrous. There is also a Calvary by him,’ Palomino went on, ‘in which Christ Our Lord is speaking to the Good Thief, so lifelike that it is as though one can hear His voice.’1

Known to his contemporaries as the ‘God of Wood’, Montañés worked at that vibrant and thrilling yet perilous artistic juncture where the emotionally charged extreme realism of high Spanish Baroque seems to peer into the gargantuan abyss of kitsch perdition. Palomino’s anecdote obviously fits into the fashionable delight that was taken in artifice and desengaño alongside the story of a Sevillian aristocrat who tricked his servant into believing a portrait to be real. In a similar scene set in Barcelona, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are invited by Don Antonio to meet a miraculous ‘talking head’. It is a bronze bust of a man connected by a speaking tube to a room below, where the operator can hide. Quixote and Sancho are apparently deceived by this device and engage it in simple conversation, much to the amusement of their host and his friends. This was not the product of Cervantes’s imagination, however, for such things were real: according to one eyewitness, in the Royal Palace in Madrid, there was ‘the head of a Satyr which could move its eyes and ears around aggressively’, shaking its hair, ‘and opening its mouth with such powerful groans that it shocked and frightened anyone who had not been forewarned, as I once saw happen to a man who, terrified out of his wits, jumped more than four paces’.2

At one level, such objects are vulgar fairground humour, humble slapstick jocularity for the not always sophisticated aristocracy; but with Don Antonio’s ‘talking head’ Cervantes highlights the far more complex and profound

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