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Charles H. Caffin. The Story of Spanish Painting
The Story of Spanish Painting
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I. THE STORY OF THE NATION
CHAPTER II. CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH PAINTING
CHAPTER III. A PANORAMIC VIEW. Part I: To the End of the Sixteenth Century
CHAPTER IV. A PANORAMIC VIEW. Part II: Seventeenth Century to the Present Day
SCHOOL OF VALENCIA, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
SCHOOL OF ANDALUSIA OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER V. DOMENCO THEOTOCOPULI (EL GRECO)
CHAPTER VI. VELASQUEZ
CHAPTER VII. MAZO
CHAPTER VIII. CARREÑO
CHAPTER IX. RIBERA (LO SPAGNOLETTO)
CHAPTER X. MURILLO
CHAPTER XI. CANO AND ZURBARÁN
CHAPTER XII. GOYA
A POSTSCRIPT
INDEX
Отрывок из книги
Charles H. Caffin
Published by Good Press, 2022
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And now let us revisit the Alhambra, which enshrines the soul of another race. No colossal formality here, or precision of foot-rule and compass from which the free spirit of the artist’s imagination has been dogmatically barred! On the contrary, the palace of the Moorish kings grew cell to cell by accretion, expressive of an accumulating sense of the power and joy of life, alive with the breath of artistic imagination. It dominates its own hill, looking across, on the one hand, to the protecting barrier of higher hills, and on the other, over a smiling hospitable vega, a far reaching garden of luxuriant fertility. The hill itself is a paradise of refreshment. Its slopes are richly clothed with shade trees and semi-tropical vegetation, embowered in flowers, fragrant with the scents of living growths, musical with the song of birds, the tinkle of tiny runnels, and the plash of fountains and cascades. Set above this scene of ordered wildness, where the license of nature is united to the task of man, stands what is left of the palace of the Arab Sovereigns of Granada.
There is no need to describe its plan of gardens, fountains, courts and corridors, halls of ceremony and suites of living rooms. It is the spirit of the whole that we may try to capture. Here, as in the Mosque of Cordova, the Arab’s love of vistas is revealed; but while the former spreads over a large space, the perspectives of the Alhambra are actually restricted. In their case even more than in the other is created an illusion of distance. The triumph is one not of material emphasis but of artistic suggestion. It was the human imagination, finding its free expression in art, that gave form and fabric to this Oriental dream of beauty. It is a visualised symphony, whose theme is life; the joy of life and beauty that irradiates the joy. And the inspiration is drawn from nature. To those who know the Alhambra it will not sound like freakishness of speech to say, that the imagination of the artist has ensnared a portion of the spirit of beauty which roams at large in the desert and sky and lurks in the silences of woods and gardens; and, because he felt the phenomena of nature in relation to the supreme whole, has captured something of the infinity of the universal and enshrined it in his microcosm of beauty. Also more intimately he has fashioned his invention upon nature; studying her forms and methods and adapting them to the conventions of art. In the endless variety of decorative encrustration with which the wall-spaces, the soffits of the arches and the vaultings of the chambers are embroidered, the motives are drawn from the interlacing of boughs and vines, the rhythm of the brooklet meandering through luxuriant undergrowth of vines and flowers, from the facets of the crystal and the accumulated cells of bees. But they are not interpreted in a naturalistic vein. The Oriental imagination, at its best, rises above naturalistic representation; it accepts the fertilization of nature, but conventionalises the product to conform to the artist’s idea of abstract beauty.
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