The Influence of Italian Culture on the Sevillian Golden Age of Painting

Rafael Japón

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000543711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Renaissance Art

This book explores the cultural exchange between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth century, examining Spanish collectors' predilection for Italian painting and its influence on Spanish painters.

Focused on collecting and using a novel methodology, this volume studies how the painters of the Sevillian school, including Francisco Pacheco, Diego Velázquez, Alonso Cano and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, perceived and were influenced by Italian painting. Through many examples, it is shown how the presence in Andalusia of various works and copies of works by artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Guido Reni inspired famous compositions by these Spanish artists. In addition, the book delves into the historical, political and social context of this period.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, and Italian and Spanish history.

1 Presentation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003162919-1

The Spanish Golden Age was a time of unprecedented development in the visual arts in Seville. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, the leading practitioners of Mannerism in the city lost ground to a new generation of artists who embraced naturalism,¹ creating a body of work that was highly prized across the territories under Spanish rule. Since the late fifteenth century, Seville had grown into one of the most important enclaves for maritime trade between America and the rest of Europe, and a cultural crossroads for the interaction of people from different nations. Many of these foreign merchants found it convenient to stay in the Kingdom of Seville, moving there with their families to set up their companies, in the process bringing with them their own culture. Among these immigrants, Italians played a special role. Their presence and artistic influence on the Sevillian school of painting are the main subject of this volume.

The Kingdom of Seville covered a vast territory that comprised the current provinces of Seville, Huelva and Cádiz, as well as other localities of Málaga and part of the south of Badajoz (Figure 1.1). An analysis of the region’s cultural heritage in the literature, from the earliest treatises to contemporary publications, shows its significant contribution to the world of art. Notable advances have been made in its cataloging and documentation, as well as in the reconstruction of the biography of its main artists. However, much of this research has been inward-looking in its focus, successively seeking explanations for its idiosyncrasy in the same milieu that generated it. Lack of a wider Spanish or even European perspective has resulted in a partial view that has overlooked some of the connections which had an impact on the development of the Sevillian school during this period.

One of the decisive factors that shaped Spanish art in the early modern period was a heavy Italian influence – where influence is understood as the elements of Italian culture that had been imported into the Spanish art scene since the sixteenth century. These ideological, literary and artistic aspects strongly impacted the Castilian tradition. The political relations derived from the Spanish crown’s possession of various territories in the Italian peninsula – the Duchy of Milan and the kingdoms of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia – which led to the establishment of a wide network of cultural exchanges between Spain and Italy that prepared the ground for the broad reception of Italian artists, models and iconographies in the Spanish terrain. Seville, the most important port of trade between Europe and America, underwent an evident process of cultural hybridity due, in large part, to the presence of diverse groups of immigrants whose customs were gradually assimilated into the local urban culture.²

Figure 1.1 Willem Jansz Blaeu, Andalvzia continens Sevillam et Cordvbam, 1634–1635, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague (photo: KB | National Library: KW1049B12_009 – Vol. 1).

Since the early twentieth century, the Italian presence in seventeenth-century Seville has been the object of research among scholars interested in studying the evolution of trade between Italy, Seville and America. In these investigations, the cultural sphere has played a minor, when not non-existent, role. Even so, these studies have been instrumental in drawing a clear picture of how the city of Seville was structured at the time, taking into account the political and social weight of the Genoese and Florentine communities. Their significance is attested by the number of conferences held on the subject over the past decades – including the Hispano-Italian colloquia Presencia italiana en Andalucía: siglos XIV–XVII (1989) and Génova y la monarquía hispánica (1528–1713) (2011) – as well as by the many theses written in the last decade, such as Yasmina Ben Yessef Garfia’s dissertation entitled “Una familia genovesa entre la república y la monarquía hispánica” (2015). Also worth highlighting are the books that center on the cultural relations between Spain and different Italian states, even when they do not specifically address the Kingdom of Seville, such as the collection España e Italia edited by the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, as well as David García Cueto’s Seicento Boloñés y Siglo de Oro Español (2006), and Artistic Circulation between Early Modern Spain and Italy (2020), edited by Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio and Tommaso Mozzati.

And yet, the influence of Italian culture on the paintings of seventeenth-century Sevillian artists has not been systematically studied. The same is true for a series of circumstances that left an imprint on the Sevillian school, such as the establishment of Italian families in the territories of the Kingdom of Seville and the journeys Sevillians made to Italy, as well as the collections of art in the city that included paintings from different Italian schools. And this despite the well-known dependence of certain works of the Sevillian school on Italian models. In this regard, in the eighteenth century Miguel Espinosa Maldonado de Saavedra, 2nd Count of Aguila, in a letter addressed to Antonio Ponz, pointed to the similarity between the Moses and the Water from the Rock of Horeb by the Genoese Gioacchino Aseretto (1600–1649) and the work on the same subject that Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682) made for the church of San Jorge in the Hospital de la Caridad.³ At that time, too, the close aesthetic resemblance between the production of Guido Reni (1575–1642) and Alonso Cano (1601–1667) led Ponz to dub Cano the “Spanish Reni.”⁴ In the following century, Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez cited other Italian sources of inspiration for Murillo, such as Stefano della Bella (1610–1664), Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) and Titian (1490–1576), whose works he would have seen on his purported stay in Madrid, previously mentioned by Antonio Palomino (1655–1726).⁵ On that occasion, Murillo, accompanied by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), would have improved his technique by studying and copying the Italian originals in the royal residences.⁶ In 1848, Valentín Calderera found fault with the nickname by which Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664) was known at that time, “the Spanish Caravaggio,” arguing that the only similarity he could see in their work was “the vigor only of chiaroscuro.”⁷ Years later, Pedro de Madrazo again called attention to the relation between Raphael’s Madonne and Murillo’s Virgins.⁸

These critics must have had an extensive knowledge of Italian culture, as well as of Spanish historical-artistic sources, especially of the writers and biographers Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644), Bartolomeo Carducci (1560–1606), Jusepe Martínez (1600–1682) and Antonio Palomino. Moreover, the stylistic comparisons they make suggest that Sevillian artists were necessarily acquainted with the work of Italian painters, since they express no surprise at this artistic dependence. This could be due to the fact that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many of the artworks that had arrived from Italy to Seville in the previous centuries were still found in the city, as indicated by Ponz in Viage de España (1780),⁹ José María Montero de Espinosa in Guía de forasteros (1832)¹⁰ and José Amador de los Ríos in Sevilla pintoresca (1844).¹¹ The latter lamented that years of foreign looting of the artworks in Seville’s temples and convents, in spite of the laws that had been enacted for their protection, had decimated the artistic heritage of the city, a situation that had been further aggravated by the plundering of art during the French invasion. He also suggested that a small part had been saved thanks to the Sevillian aesthetes who, aware of this situation, acquired numerous works to prevent them from leaving the region.¹² In these collections, Italian painting plays an important role both for the number of works involved and for the quality of the artists who made them.

However, by the early twentieth century the artworks in these collections had been dispersed and their presence practically forgotten. But even if there had been no certitude of the coexistence of these Italian works with the production of the local masters in seventeenth-century Seville, historians – for the most part foreign – continued to underline the affinities between them. For instance, August L. Mayer identified the compositional inspiration for Murillo’s The Infant Christ and Saint John the Baptist with a Shell to be derived from a print by Reni, which in turn was based on a composition by Annibale Carracci (1560–1609).¹³ What’s more, he discerned in Murillo’s style the influence of Raphael’s and Correggio’s oeuvres, which led him to state that these traits “turn Murillo into Guido Reni’s companion, and we think we really should call him the Spanish Reni more than the Spanish Raphael.”¹⁴

By then, the work of both painters – Reni and Murillo – was experiencing an aesthetic depreciation in Spain, translated into a visual fatigue probably produced by the plethora of reproductions of Murillo’s paintings in the market. Today, Murillo’s oeuvre has regained its value thanks, among others, to the many events organized around the fourth centenary of his birth. Reni’s style, however, continues to be unjustly underrated precisely on account of its stylistic assimilation with Murillo’s.

On the contrary, Velázquez’s work has always been highly esteemed, even when it was equally widely influenced by Italian art. In 1927 Roberto Longhi insisted that he had to know Caravaggist painting during his Sevillian stage in order to have been able to make paintings such as his Saint Thomas (Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans).¹⁵

And yet, at the time when the historiographical reconstruction of the pillars of Baroque art in Seville was taking place, foreign influences took a back seat in favor of Spanish artists. Narciso Sentenach, for example, saw in the figure of Francisco Herrera the Elder (c. 1576/90–1656) a true exponent of naturalistic painting, the painter who managed to leave behind a tradition based on “that school which had been made manifest in the frescoes and panels of the Italian artist,” referring to the work of Francisco Pacheco and Pablo de Céspedes (c. 1538/1548–1608).¹⁶

Denying any foreign influence in Herrera’s compositional process, Sentenach maintained that the artist’s technique was based exclusively on the imitation of nature. Thus, he made him responsible for introducing this new style into Seville, achieving this feat exclusively through his genius, “his own inspiration and the mastery of the tools which he had acquired.”¹⁷ In this way Sentenach contended that the origin of Sevillian naturalism was a product of its own evolution, ignoring the contemporary success of Caravaggism. He endorsed this thesis by claiming Juan de Roelas († 1625) to be a disciple of Herrera, even when he knew that he might have trained in Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century.¹⁸

Indeed, Sentenach recognized a certain parallelism between Roelas’s palette and the brilliant coloring of the Venetian school, but rather than reading this as a progression of influences, he saw it as a casual association of ideas. He thought that Seville and Venice were twinned in that they shared the atmosphere of port cities, even if one was a river harbor and the other a seaport. He believed that the Sevillian school was destined to be the sister of the Venetian one, with Roelas as the link between them.¹⁹ He conceded that Roelas – whom he believed to be of Sevillian origin, when in reality he was born in Flanders – must have studied and assimilated the techniques of Tintoretto (1518–1594), Titian and Veronese (1528–1588), discovering the way to make certain colors shine, a skill that on his return he combined with the naturalism he learned in Seville from Herrera.²⁰

The scholar prepared a convincing explanation for the enigmatic naturalism present in Velázquez’s youthful work. While the latter trained under Pacheco, an artist who consecrated his practice to the production of works in a late Mannerist style, he had previously been Herrera’s apprentice, and this enabled Sente...