Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664). Virgin of the Misericordia, 1634 Photo: © Photo Imagen MAS Courtesy of Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville.
Sacred heart
Ron Kentish is witness to some powerful visions
Anyone who has experienced semana santa (holy week) in Spain will appreciate the extraordinarily dramatic way in which the story of the Passion of Christ is depicted in colourful processions through the streets. Dating back to the sixteenth century, they are at there most Catholically extravagant in Andalusia – especially Malaga and Seville – where people carry floats depicting scenes from the story of the fall and rise again of Jesus Christ along with images of saints and the Virgin Mary. These life-sized painted sculptures are mounted on the floats, each float depicting a differed episode from the passion. A heady flavour of this Spanish passion is captured in a powerful exhibition at the National Gallery in London entitled The Sacred Made Real. In the dramatically illuminated virtual darkness of the Sainsbury Wing, religious paintings and sculptures from seventeenth century Spain are brought vividly to life in a dramatic and often disturbing way.
In a period when Spain’s political dominance was beginning to wane, this new kind of realism in art emerged with the aim of putting fresh life into the Catholic Church in a country where church and state were so inextricably linked.
Famous painters such as El Greco and Velazquez feature alongside sculptors such as Juan Martinez Montanes, Pedro de Mena and Juan de Mesa, creating a breathtaking visual glimpse into the heart and very soul of Spanish religious art and the mysteries of faith.
The exhibition takes the visitor on a journey through a series of rooms, each one presenting a stunning blend of the sacred and secular, some of which may appear macabre and gory in their powerful realism.
Francisco de Zurbaran’s ‘Saint Francis standing in ecstasy’ shows the saint standing upright in a state of ecstasy, just as pope Nicholas V reputedly found him when he entered his tomb. Pedro de Mena’s sculpture of saint Francis may well have been inspired by Zurbaran’s painting with the use of glass for the eyes, ivory for the teeth and hair for the eyelashes adding to the reality.
Many of the startling life-size figures hold your gaze as you journey from one room to another. Particularly riveting are the figures of saint Francis Borgia and saint Ignatius Loyola, each one an imagen de vestir, a life-sized manikin covered in a simple cassock that would have been dressed in liturgical costume on solemn occasions. Both are the work of Montanes and Francisco Pacheco, and the realism accentuated by the use of a darker shade of brown to accentuate Borgia’s cheekbones and black line along the eyelids. The faces not only look real but surprisingly contemporary.
Choosing highlights is virtually impossible in an exhibition described as one of the most powerful shows the National Gallery is ever likely to hold, but among the most harrowing is the ‘Dead Christ’ by Gregorio Fernandez. The corpse has not yet been washed and prepared for burial and blood still oozes from the wounds. This effigy, shocking in its reality, powerfully embodies Christ’s suffering and was designed to make believers feel truly in the presence of the dead Christ.
The Sacred Made Real is an exhibition that will not be to everyone’s taste, its reality perhaps proving too much for some stomachs, especially where the bloodied body of Christ is concerned. But it confronts us with a series of visions that will linger long in the memory, however disturbing.
The exhibition ends on 24 January.
