Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Spanish, 1599–1660, The Immaculate Conception, 1618-1619, Oil on canvas, The National Gallery, London. Bought with the aid of The Art Fund, 1974, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Spanish, 1599–1660, Luís de Góngora y Argote, Detail, 1622, Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Greek (active in Spain), 1541-1614, Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, Detail, 1609, Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Isaac Sweetser Fund, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Spanish, about 1553-1608, King Philip III of Spain, about 1601-1602, Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Eugenio Cajés, Spanish, 1575–1634, Joachim and Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate, about 1605, Oil on canvas, Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston
617-267-9300
El Greco to Velazquez:
Art during the Reign
of Philip III
April 20-July 27, 2008

The vibrant age that served as a backdrop both for the end of El Greco’s brilliant career and the beginning of Velázquez’s is the focal point of El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III. Organized by the MFA and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the exhibition sheds new light on this little known period of 23 years (1598-1621) during which Philip III ruled Spain. Featured are more than 60 paintings, among them 11 works by El Greco and seven by Velázquez, including two masterpieces from the MFA collection, El Greco’s Portrait of Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino (1609) and Velázquez’s Luis de Góngora y Argote (1622).

El Greco to Velázquez is curated by the MFA’s Ronni Baer (Mrs. Russell W. Baker Senior Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe) and the Nasher’s Sarah Schroth (Nancy Hanks Senior Curator).

El Greco to Velázquez offers an in-depth study of Spain’s art in the context of the political, religious, and social history from 1598 to 1621, a period bookended by the strikingly original late style of El Greco and the emergent naturalism in the work of the young Velázquez. It focuses not only on the achievements of Spain’s greatest painters, but also introduces to the American public outstanding works by lesser known yet highly accomplished artists, among them: Juan Bautista Maino, Juan Sánchez Cotán, Luis Tristán, and Gregorio Fernández.

The exhibition gathers together the best examples of painting and sculpture made between 1598 and 1621 in order to show the splendid accomplishments of a key group of Spanish artists in creating a new visual language that addressed and expressed the demands of their time. In addition to paintings from the MFA’s collection, works included in the exhibition represent important national and international loans from, among others: the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Museo Nacional del Prado; the Musée du Louvre; the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; and the National Gallery in London. Works on loan (many of which have never traveled abroad) also are drawn from private collections and churches in Spain.

Previously dismissed for its lack of artistic accomplishment, the reign of Philip III will here be examined through a new lens. The discovery of 13 inventories of the goods of the king’s favorite, Francisco de Sandoval y Rojas, the Duke of Lerma, by co-curator Sarah Schroth, has put to rest the standard view of Spain during Philip III’s reign as a cultural backwater. These documents indicate that Lerma amassed an extraordinary collection of more than 2,000 paintings. Among them was the monumental Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma (1603, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) that the Fleming Peter Paul Rubens painted while on a diplomatic mission to the Spanish court. The inventories also mention nearly 900 pieces of luxury glass, porcelain, ceramics, and redware that Lerma arranged in a camarín, or “little room.”

A re-evaluation of the importance of the reign of Philip III to the history of art is the goal of El Greco to Velázquez. To achieve this, the exhibition is divided in thematic sections: Late El Greco, Portraiture, Religion and the Court, Still Life and the Bodegón, and the Duke of Lerma’s camarín.

Late El Greco
El Greco (“The Greek”) was the Cretan-born artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614) who, after working for many years in Italy, moved in 1577 to Toledo, Spain. In the last 16 years of his life, El Greco’s works became more intensely spiritual, even mystical, with strange shapes and acid colors filling his monumental canvases. His new-found acceptance by courtiers in Madrid may have offered the artist a freedom of expression that accounts for the inventiveness of his late style — a novel treatment of space, bold use of light and colors, and the reinterpretation of existing religious iconography. With his daring, painterly technique, El Greco developed a unique, “extravagant” style.

Included in El Greco to Velázquez are two of the artist’s most famous paintings, which reflect this dramatic new direction, View of Toledo (around 1600, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Laocoön (around 1610-14, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). View of Toledo is a cityscape, representing new subject matter for El Greco and reflecting the collecting of maps and cityscapes by the well-to-do that was very much in vogue. The painting is the artist’s very personal interpretation of his adopted city, capturing its essence rather than its actual appearance. Laocoön, El Greco’s sole mythological painting, depicts the temple priest responsible for warning his fellow Trojans about accepting the wooden horse from the Greeks (“beware of Greeks bearing gifts”). El Greco paints the sprawling Laocoön and his sons as ghostly figures, while substituting Toledo for the legendary city of Troy in the background.

Portraiture
Royal portraits created during Philip III’s reign were not intended to be accurate, life-like depictions, which would have violated notions of decorum. Instead, the royal image was carefully crafted to reflect court politics and taste. Artists of this period helped to create an appropriate, idealized image of the king and queen; the royal subjects appear grand and aloof, with mask-like faces, stressing their inaccessibility. The portraiture also reflected the splendor of Philip III’s court, offering a dramatic departure from the austere image of his father’s (Philip II)
reign. In his Portrait of Alfonso “el Caro” and Ana Margarita (around 1613-14, Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, Madrid), Bartolomé González captures the rich, realistic details of the royal children’s fine lace and heavy brocades — indicators of luxury, wealth, and power. By contrast, non-royal portraits display an intimacy and burgeoning naturalism not found in official court portraiture. Maino’s Portrait of a Monk (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) has a sympathetic and spontaneous quality emphasized by the sitter’s side-long glance. In the portrait of Luis de Góngora y Argote (1622, MFA, Boston), painted from life, Velázquez captures the intensity of
gaze, down-turned lips, and creased furrow of his brow that give the renowned poet and clergyman an air of dissatisfaction or disillusionment. El Greco’s Portrait of Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino (1609, MFA, Boston) presents a compelling, personal view of this celebrated orator and preacher to the king.

Religion and the Court
Philip III, known as “pious Philip,” was highly attuned to the power of art to convey religious dogma. During his reign, many large altarpieces were created for hospitals and churches (Tristán, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1620, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), and smaller works were painted as private devotional pieces (Cajés, Nativity, 1610, Placido Arango Collection). New iconography was developed that reflected the religious tenor of the time. El Greco introduced to Spain the Apostolado, a set of 13 individual canvases depicting Christ and the 12 apostles, commissioned for important churches and cathedrals. Santiago (around 1610-1614, Museo del Greco, Toledo) most likely belongs to his last Apostolado and illustrates the artist’s innovation of “portraitizing” the saint, concentrating on his facial features rather than his attributes. Important Spanish saints were beatified during this period and came to be depicted in art, including St. Teresa of Avila and St. Ignatius Loyola, whose images in the exhibition (dating from about 1614 and 1622, respectively) were sculpted by Gregorio Fernández. Devotion to St. Francis was particularly strong; during this reign, representations of the saint changed from the humble poet, benevolent man of charity, or gentle friend of the animals to a contemplative penitent rapt in prayer, as in El Greco’s painting St. Francis Venerating the Crucifix (about 1596, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), or transported in ecstasy, as in Carducho’s Stigmatization of St. Francis (Hospital de la V.O.T. de San Francisco de Asis, Madrid). The theme of the Immaculate Conception, another popular subject, was treated by many of the artists of the period as a way to further the king’s goal of having the pope declare that Mary’s conception, like that of her Son, was without sin. Velázquez’s painting of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (The National Gallery, London) depicts the Apocalyptic Woman from St. John’s vision as a very young girl with loose hair. His naturalistic, three-dimensional image is very different from that by Sánchez Cotán, whose hieratic Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (about 1617-1618, Museo de Bellas Artes, Granada) is surrounded by an otherworldly mandorla and accompanied by the full panoply of Marian symbols.

Still Life and the Bodegón
The early 17th century was a time of artistic experimentation across Europe. The court of Philip III provided fertile ground for the development of new, sophisticated types of painting, including the independent Spanish still life. An extraordinarily creative approach to the genre can be seen in Sánchez Cotán’s Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber (around 1600, San Diego Museum of Art). Ingeniously arranged within the confines of a blackened niche or window, fruits and vegetables are hung from strings to form a curve. The brilliant composition and unflinching naturalism of such an image helped to secure the popularity of the still life. Another Spanish artistic invention was the bodegón (which means tavern or inn but refers to a painting that gives equal weight to figures and still life elements). In Velázquez’s Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh), the figures become part of the still life. This compelling work draws the viewer’s attention both to the objects displayed — a worn ceramic pot, shiny brass vessels, and the translucent quality of the cooking eggs — and to the enigmatic relationship between the old woman and the young boy. Created when Velázquez was only 19, it represents the earliest stage in his long and successful career.

Camarín
The Duke of Lerma assembled a magnificent collection of Chinese and Iberian ceramics and Venetian and Catalan glass, as well as various curiosities in a small room or camarín (measuring approximately 20’ x 20’). An astonishing array of 847 glittering objects, representing the height of luxury, was intended to awe the visitor. El Greco to Velázquez will offer an evocative re-creation of this dazzling camarín with a carefully chosen selection of ceramics, porcelain, and glass from the MFA’s own collection and other American and Spanish museums.

El Greco to Velázquez charts the birth of a new style, which formed the basis of the art created during Spain’s subsequent “Golden Age,” and explores the exciting artistic environment in which the severe, mannered works created under Philip II gave way to a more luxurious, ornamental, and naturalistic art that would be the hallmark of Philip III’s reign.

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek (active in Spain), 1541-1614, Laocoön, about 1610-14, Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.