National Gallery's most severe test (From The Oxford Times)

National Gallery's most severe test

12:32pm Thursday 10th December 2009 in Exhibitions By Theresa Thompson

I like what the National Gallery has been doing in its recent big exhibitions. It has been extending us, not simply offering popular art. Now, it’s doing this in a truly remarkable way, offering possibly its most severe test yet of an audience’s willingness to see afresh.

The Sacred Made Real offers us Spanish religious art of the 17th century, the so-called Golden Age of Spanish art, when a new kind of realism emerged in Spain due to the Catholic Church, painters and sculptors all working together to try to make the sacred as real and accessible as possible.

Which means, yes, art that is sometimes hard to look at, simulated blood and bruises and marks of martyrdom, an awful realism in effect. And because of this I hadn’t been looking forward to it that much, but as I found out, there’s also an astonishing beauty here thanks to the unbelievable quality of the artworks assembled.

Spanish religious art, unlike what was developing elsewhere in Europe, offered an austere type of realism, a ‘hyper-realism’ that aimed to “shock the senses and stir the soul”.

While paintings from the period are relatively well known — several masterpieces by the likes of Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán are in the exhibition — the extraordinarily life-like polychrome (painted) sculptures that also emerged then are less well known, at least outside Spanish museums or the confines of the monasteries, churches and chapels that held them.

These sculptures have never been the subject of a major exhibition before. Some are still passionately venerated, used in processions during Holy Week, and very few have ever been exhibited overseas before.

Which made it an unusually difficult exhibition to mount. It took its curator Xavier Bray ten years to organise, two to three times as long as the average exhibition. Part of this was persuading the Spanish Catholic Church to agree to the loans and the delicate business of transporting these extraordinary sculptures.

Penny concedes the gallery is taking a risk with an exhibition of this sort. Here after all is religious art at its most grisly and uninviting — as well as sublime and specialist. Will visitors be drawn in? When he became director in spring 2008 Penny said that they must take risks in terms of exhibitions, put on what they believed was best. I’d venture that the ‘risk’ in putting this one on will pay off. No matter what one’s viewpoint on religion or religious art, this is a memorable show.

It is an exhibition of sculptures and paintings — and the relationship between the two. Their strategy of juxtaposing 16 polychrome sculptures and 16 paintings of the saints, the Virgin, and the Passion of Christ allows direct comparisons to be made.

Their thesis is that the ‘hyper-realistic’ approach of painters such as Velázquez and Zurbarán was informed by their familiarity, or in some cases direct involvement with sculpture. Take for example the interconnectedness of the trio of artists in the first room. Diego Velázquez’s sensitive painting of The Immaculate Conception was painted in 1618–19 (incidentally, the curator said this painting in the National Gallery’s collection was the inspiration for the exhibition).

It is hung next to a statue by a sculptor known as ‘the god of wood’, Juan Martínez Montañés. The natural pose of Montañés’s The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and the way the light falls on her cheekbones and her robes around her ankles is almost identical to the Velázquez.

Montañés did not paint the sculpture himself. He would have sent it to a painter’s studio, sculptors being prohibited from painting their own works in 17th-century Spain due to strict governance by a guild system.

Skills for painting sculpture were learnt in painters’ studios. In Seville, Velázquez trained under his future father-in-law, the scholar and painter Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644), renowned for painting ultra natural flesh tones and drapery on Montañés’s fine wooden sculptures.

It is likely Velázquez also learned how to paint sculpture in Pacheco’s academy. You only have to look at the similarity between what Bray calls one of Velázquez’s more ‘sculptural’ paintings, The Immaculate Conception, and Montañés’ polychromed wooden version standing beside it to see the influence of this training.

Sometimes 17th-century attempts at realism got ‘improved’ in later centuries.

Two life-sized statues of black-robed monks, the results of collaborations between Montañés and Pacheco in the early 1600s, depict Saints Ignatius Loyola and Francis Borgia (this last commissioned by the Jesuits to celebrate his beatification in 1609; making the loan even more significant given this year’s 400th anniversary of this event).

Both are stunning in their austere realism, yet they differ in one respect. Look closer at Saint Ignatius Loyola and you see crystal tears running down his pallid cheek, added to satisfy a later century’s tastes. To my mind it adds nothing, merely gets in the way of what the artist was trying to achieve. The exhibition certainly made me see afresh. We’re used to seeing painted religious art in 2-D, as paintings. You only have to go round the corner to see hundreds of Renaissance religious paintings in the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing. In 3-D, we’re used to seeing sculptures plain, often white, classical, scrubbed clean of colour by time and other factors.

So this hyper-realistic Spanish approach feels disturbingly full-on. Most viewers will probably look at the artworks for their aesthetic value, which is huge, and less their religious, which is also huge. Either way, I hope visitors will look beyond the more macabre aspects to the beauty and skill that’s on display here. For by offering us things we might otherwise not seek out, this decidedly unusual show enriches and enlightens.

The Sacred Made Real is on until January 24.