The agony and ecstasy of The Sacred Made Real
National Gallery, WC2
Were the art world a field of battle (to some extent, of course, it is), the new director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, should be awarded the Victoria Cross for his current foolish act of gallantry - foolish, that is, in the perfect sense of guileless, virtuous and ingenuous innocence.
The contents of his latest exhibition number only 35, though in the criss-cross of diagonals between the rooms we see them many times and from different angles and different distances.
Sanctity and spirituality: the Dead Christ of Gregorio Fernández, the corpse unwashed and unanointed, before the wrapping in fine linen of his burial, the body scrawny, the pose angular and uneasy, recalling the gothic tradition of dying and dead Christs
Even so, the press cannot describe the event as a blockbuster.
As it is not of paintings by Monet or Picasso, no one can expect queues to form across Trafalgar Square.
It is not devoted to Titian, Raphael, Michelangelo or any other revered old warhorse of the Italian Renaissance, nor have the favoured old familiars Rembrandt and Rubens any part of it.
Instead of these, it is an exploration of the intense spirituality of painting and sculpture in Spain in the 17th century, of the transcendental, of mysticism, of the artist's identification with the sanctity and suffering of saints, of himself feeling the lash, the thorns, the nails and nakedness of crucifixion.
This is not the pretty stuff of Christmas and the birth of Christ. It is the profoundly Catholic response to the prolonged violence and cruelty of his execution and the martyrdom of the saints who believed that they served his purpose.
It is not the stuff of even High Anglican Protestantism and it has no obvious link with either the Church of England or English art, though before the destructions wrought by Henry VIII - and certainly in the days of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - there may well have been such links.
But Henry VIII led to Oliver Cromwell, and Cromwell to the Hanoverian Georges who, to reinforce our native prejudice against popery, brought to England the blind and bitter Protestantism of Luther, a political weapon with which to continue the exclusion of Catholic Stuarts from the throne.
As late as 1829, in the final debates on Catholic Emancipation, both the bishops of the Church of England and King George IV were adamantine in their opposition and though in law they failed to obstruct it, in spirit they succeeded, for by then it was too late for art of any quality to embellish the new Catholic churches as they sprang up the length of Britain.
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Architecture in the service of a church that had not one single old foundation was functional but bleak, and the sacred images within them were much the same sentimental painted plaster figures that can still be bought as souvenirs in Lourdes.
Those of us who hold these in aesthetic contempt and to whom the human body is the instrument that most profoundly expresses humility and humiliation, pity, grief and exaltation, rapture and the trance, may be intrigued to see the best of what was produced in Spain in the 17th century, embodiments of these responses.
These Spanish saints and Christs leap the intellectual century of the Italian High Renaissance and reach at once from the gothic horrors of northern European art in the 15th century, so influential in Spain, to the renewed spiritual intensity of a Catholic church that had never been threatened by reformation and that in the 17th century was absolute over a country and a nation that had never been traumatised by division in their Christian faith.
Renaissance man? Fernández's Michelangelesque Ecce Homo
There had been no Renaissance in any Italian sense, yet there was strong kinship with the emergent Italian baroque and Spanish artists had been little diverted from their primary service to the church.
There was in their art an extraordinary emotional intensity and clarity of potent purpose in which irrational fervour combined with unquestioning belief.
These were not artists engaged in intellectual enquiry, not classicists against baroque, not Poussinists against the Rubenists, not debaters over form and volume and perspective, for they took these in their strides; instead, with startling realism, they sought to convince the Spaniard of his faith.
How then, four centuries on, strangers to their traditions, ceremonies and superstitions, do we in England see these works of art, we who have at best only a residual belief in Christianity or no belief at all? How can we be fair, as it were, to artists so ardently enchanted by this mythology?
How can we whose churches and cathedrals are largely stripped and bare of art respond to art so empathic and cathartic? It is essential to set aside protestant and agnostic prejudice.
There is, to help us, an art-historically disciplined purpose in the exhibition, for it makes the point that paintings were influenced by sculptures and sculptures by paintings, that both strove to be as true and real as possible, and that between their makers stood the polychromers whose skills lay in painting sculpture, the Pygmalions of their day - and with the same objective.
In Spain there was scant tradition of sculpture in stone and bronze; the common medieval material was wood, as it was right across Europe to the eastern Baltic, and everywhere the wood was polychromed; sculptors carved the figures, sometimes hollowing the timber to stabilise it and prevent cracking, adding glass eyes, bone teeth (in dentures) and eyelashes of hogs' hair; polychromers then painted them to be as lifelike as the living (or the dead).
The more real these sculptures and their associated paintings seemed, the more effective they were deemed as links between the human and divine.
They bleed, they groan, they endure in silence and they die, the marks of suffering explicit - and in shared emotion, we come near to suffering too.
As few artists practised all or even two of the three crafts as painter, sculptor and polychromer, or commanded workshops covering them, and Royal Ordinances restricted specialist craftsmen to their craft - a gilder, for example, was not permitted to paint a face - there must have been, at the highest level, many aesthetic arguments; at the lowest, systems of mass production must have been introduced.
The exhibition's excellent catalogue outlines the nuts and bolts of the business, coolly explaining who did what and introducing us to the useful common terms imagineria (for the images) and encarnación (for painting flesh in colours that seem to turn the timber into flesh itself); it is supported by a supplementary exhibition in Room One that deals with technicalities.
I know no other book in English that explains so much of the subject as clearly and succinctly; my only criticism of it is that it offers no inkling of how bad these carved figures could be when they were not made for major shrines and churches - the thousands that were hacked out for the benefit of newly converted indigenous populations in the Americas and dispatched thither as ballast for treasure ships returning empty were of a quality that can only be described as primitive.
What we have in the National Gallery, however, is sublime.
The beauty of a handful of these paintings and sculptures is of an aesthetic level so lofty that they trigger the Stendhal Syndrome, the phenomenon of so powerful an empathic response by the observer of works of art that it becomes unbearable and he must flee their provocative presence. Twice I reached this tipping point.
In his martyred St Serapion, Zurbarán reaches far further than in the two Meditations of St Francis, with which we are familiar in the gallery's permanent collection: figures of extraordinary form, volume and weight, the saint's meditative mood more embodied in the hooded habit and impressive hands than in the shadowed face.
Serapion's habit has become a shroud, the livid pallor of death spreading over the full face; we know him to be dead, his neck half severed, his stomach disembowelled, but of the bloody horror of his martyrdom (and his quartering is yet to come) there is scant indication and Zurbarán achieves the quiet quintessence of pathos in the heavy fall of unbloodied drapery, the hands, relaxed in death, held in place by ropes, and from the long, slow swag of drapery between them Serapion's head emerges, fallen sideways in exquisite imbalance, his right shoulder its last pillow.
Can this be borne without a rising tear? Zurbarán shrewdly replaced the Serapion of martyrology, an austere and monkish Englishman aged 62 in 1240, with a much younger man of distinctly Spanish cast - a studio assistant in his twenties tough enough to hold the exhausting pose, and of a physical type with whom young Sevillian monks in their mortuary chapel could immediately empathise.
For relief I turned to a life-size standing sculpture of Christ after the flagellation, an Ecce Homo carved by Gregorio Fernández in c1620 - relief because something about the upturned eyes seems so much more grand guignol than truth, and because I could debate with myself the possible influence of Michelangelo's Risen Christ of 100 years before.
Fernández could not have seen it and in reversing the pose may have worked from an engraving - but by whom? It is a rare example of Italian Renaissance influence in early 17th-century Spain.
There is, too, the coincidence that both figures were carved complete with genitals, perhaps reflecting the theological debate over Christ as the whole man, and if whole, then sexually whole - and then misgiving follows.
For both figures, a breech-cloth was made - Michelangelo's of bronze and not by him; of real cloth for the Fernández and always intended.
What, I wonder, passed through the mind of sculptors in an age of faith when carving the buttocks and genitals of Christ? I note, in passing, that no carving of a female figure in this exhibition carries the conviction of the male.
If this Christ is not quite of Stendhal standard, another by Fernández is. Perhaps a decade later and not long before his death at 60 in 1636, he carved for the Jesuits in Madrid a life-size figure of Dead Christ.
Scrawny, as opposed to muscularly Michelangelesque, the recumbent pose angular and uneasy, this Christ recalls the gothic tradition of dying and dead Christs, the contrast of blood congealed and wounds sugaring with pale exsanguinated flesh quite horrifying in its realism, the body's pallor enhanced by the white crumpled sheet beneath it and the soft aquamarine blue of the cloth about his loins.
In this last, the grain of the timber has been deliberately exploited to give the semblance of silk, for unlike the underlying timber of Christ's flesh, this element has not been primed with gesso to obscure the grain - the pale blue, too, was as common in medieval Chinese silk as it is now in moiré silk.
From the wondrously fine fold forms and selvages of this loin cloth, realism extends further in the eyes of glass, the toe and fingernails of ox-horn and the coagulated blood of crumbled cork.
Wherever we stand in this Christ's proximity we become the mourners who stood about his corpse two thousand years ago, while Joseph of Arimathaea asked Pontius Pilate for the body; with them we are confronted by Christ dead, unwashed and unanointed, before the wrapping in fine linen.
Can anyone, unmoved by it, see this sculpture only as a document of art history, belief and taste?
The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700 is at the National Gallery (020 7747 2885, nationalgallery.org.uk) until 24 January 2010. Daily 10am-6pm (Friday until 9pm). Admission £8, concs available.