To recount a bit of the history of Spanish painting during the 16th century, it is necessary to go back to the last years of the 15th, when the Valencian school turned its course towards the Italian Renaissance. This change towards more Italian influences happened amidst an environment of predominantly Flamenco-styles. As we shall see, the Valencian school continued along this Italian-influenced path throughout the 16th century. In contrast to the Valencian school, the Catalan school partially assimilated the new current but showed works with clear provincial influences.
The first great Castilian painter fully imbued with the Renaissance was Pedro Berruguete, Alonso’s father. Born as his son in Paredes de Nava, before 1477 he had been in Italy at the court of the Duke of Urbino Federico III da Montefeltro, where he probably painted in collaboration with Justo de Gante (Justus van Gent) and Melozzo da Forli. His vigorous Renaissance style was perhaps influenced by Piero della Francesca; this influence was seen on his earlier, typically Spanish-Flemish, realist style. In the work that he made on his return to Castile, he fluctuated between his first flamenco tendencies and the Italian style. Among his best-known works are paintings and altars that he painted for Santo Tomás, de Avila, on San Pedro Mártir, and Santo Domingo (today all in the Prado). In the church of the Avila convent he left the main altar and the panels he painted for the main altar of the cathedral of the same city from 1499 until his death, in 1506; this work was continued by two other painters.
Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-de-fe, oil on panel, by Pedro Berruguete, ca. 1495, 154 x 92 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid).
In Valencia, in 1506 emerged two painters born in La Mancha, but formed in Italy. Their names were Fernando de Llanos and Fernando Yáñez de Almedina who brought Leonardesque influences reflected in the main altarpiece they painted for the cathedral between 1506 and 1510. Llanos later painted in Cuenca.
Later, Italian styles were imposed in the Valencian school. These styles were heavily influenced by the art of Raphael, and were represented in the work of artists such as Vicente Masip, the father of Joan de Joanes, and himself (who was actually called Vicente John Massip). Vicente Masip worked in Valencia and in 1530 he painted the altarpiece for the Segorbe cathedral. Father and son painted, in collaboration for many years, and his Italianism is very clear, especially influenced by the work of Raphael.
Joan de Joanes himself, around 1550, turned into a more Italian style influenced by Leonardo‘s art with hints of a mild mannerism. He left an excellent portrait of Don Luis Castelví, lord of Carlet, which is now in the Prado Museum.
Much more pictorial independence was shown in paintings from Seville from the beginning of the 16th century. Seville achieved great artistic importance in painting thanks to the interchange with America, which allowed an air of cosmopolitanism highly favorable to the prosperity of this type of art. In 1496, a painter named Alejo Fernández, known as “German painter”, had arrived in the Andalusian capital coming from Córdoba. Fernández was a highly talented painter, one of those artists who, in the first half of the 16th century, showed Flemish and Italian influences in his work. His Virgins: that of the Navigators (Alcázar of Seville), that of the Rose (church of Saint Anne), the one he painted for the Altarpiece of Maese Rodrigo, also in Seville, are all different versions, but very refined, on the theme of the Mother of God. His Italianism appears more clearly in the Triptych of the Supper, now in the Museum of Zaragoza.
The commercial importance of Seville attracted another foreigner in 1537. It was Pedro de Campaña (or Kempeneer) from Brussels. He was a painter of dramatic temperament, which is revealed by his two famous Crucifixions, one in the Louvre and the other that is in the sacristy of the Seville cathedral.
In other paintings that he left in Seville (such as the main altarpiece of the church of Santa Ana, painted in 1557), he shows some qualities of his treatment of light and his tender realism, that will be typical of the Seville school of painting during the following century.
Another great Italianate painter of the Sevillian school of the 16th century was Luis de Vargas, whom painter Francisco Pacheco filled with qualities in his “Book of True Portraits, of Illustrious and Memorable Men” (1599-1637). The son of a painter, Vargas was born in 1566, and at the age of 21 he was in Rome, where he had to witness the looting of the city by the troops of Charles V. He did not return to his homeland for good until 1553, and died in 1568.
According to Pacheco, it is presumable that he would have been a disciple of Perino del Vaga, who in turn was a disciple of Raphael. Two of his famous works are in the Seville Cathedral: one is the Nativity altarpiece, dated 1555; the other is the altarpiece titled Temporal Genealogy of Christ, from 1561, this is a moving composition of great smoothness of forms inspired, it seems, in a painting by Vasari.
During the 16th century, Spanish portrait painting showed great productions. Charles V relied on Tiziano as a portraitist, an artist that never moved from Italy, and under Philip II the royal portraitist was, at first, the Dutch Antonio Moro, who lived in the Iberian Peninsula and in Lisbon. Sánchez Coello had to learn directly from him.
Alonso Sánchez Coello was born in 1531 in the small town of Benifayó, in the kingdom of Valencia. His maternal ancestry was perhaps Portuguese; the case was that when he was ten years old he moved with his parents to Portugal, where his grandfather was established in the service of King Don Juan III. His relationship with the painter Antonio Moro possibly began in 1550; then he moved to Flanders. In n 1555 he was working for the court of Castile, in Valladolid, and later moved to Toledo and finally to Madrid, were he was named “painter of chamber” of the king. If as a portraitist he learned from Moro, he was greatly influenced by the art of Titian, some of whose works he had copied.
Among his portraits of the members of the Spanish royal family, those of Prince Carlos, the hapless son of Felipe, and of the princesses stand out: he portrayed Isabel Clara Eugenia and her sister Catalina Micaela. On the other hand, there are no portraits of Felipe II made by his hand, although, according to Pacheco, he did paint them and must have disappeared in the fire at the Palacio del Pardo. Among those he made outside the court that of Father Sigüenza, who held the position of librarian at El Escorial, stands out for its profound simplicity. In addition to being a portraitist, he cultivated religious painting. His Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, in the Museo del Prado, dates from 1582, also the year in which he painted five of the altars for El Escorial. Relations between the monarch and the artist seem to have been very cordial. Felipe II visited his workshop while he painted, and sometimes surprised him eating with his wife and children. Sánchez Coello died in 1588 leaving behind a large fortune and several apprentices.
Prince Don Carlos of Austria, oil on Canvas, by Alonso Sánchez Coello, ca. 1558, 109 x 95 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain).
His successor in the courtly art of portraiture was Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, born in 1553. His style followed that of Sánchez Coello; he painted Philip II and his last wife, Margaret of Austria, as well as Philip III, as a prince and then as a king. The portrait of Felipe II, as a widower, is impressive in its apparent simplicity.
Alonso Sánchez Coello died in 1608. In two of his religious paintings: The Nativity of the Virgin and the Adoration of the Shepherds (both today in the Prado and dating, respectively, from 1603 and 1605), he portrayed members of the royal family as if they were characters of these biblical scenes.
The transition between Raphaelism and Mannerism during 16th-century Spanish painting is fully evident in the work by Luis Morales, a painter nicknamed El Divino. He was from Extremadura (born in 1510) and it is probable that his training was in Seville.
Luis Morales was par excellence the painter of the Ecce Homo (as Juan de Juanes was of the Eucharistic Jesus), he was, in addition to a mostly religious artist, a very unique painter. We don’t know by what paths he adopted the Italian-inspired manner that brought him so close to Parmigianino‘s art, when he painted, for example, Madonna with the Child, but without a doubt that way of painting suited his spiritualized sensibility. He knew how to combine elongations and twists with marvelous lighting effects, in a rich and varied color scheme, many times soft, but which can be limited to a strictly sour palette, as when it comes to accentuating the tragic sense that some of his Pietà paintings have. More than his compositions of religious scenes, his figures of Jesus in pain and the tenderness of his Virgin with the Child are moving. He was the favorite painter of San Juan de Ribera, whom he portrayed on a canvas today in the Prado Museum.
This was the state of Spanish painting when the brilliant figure of El Greco came to influence it. El Greco will be the focus of the following essays.
In the applied arts, the Spanish 16th century was very rich. The silver and goldsmiths, for example, left prodigious works. They were very numerous at that time: the Becerril, the Cosida, from Zaragoza, etc. The pillar of the Arfe family was Enrique, a German silversmith whom Cisneros entrusted with the sumptuous custody of Toledo Cathedral. In 1554, his son Antonio made the custody of the cathedral of Santiago, and Enrique’s grandson, Juan, has been considered the most talented of the family. Like Herrera, he was passionate about Greco-Roman art, and he theorized about his craft in a little book written in royal octaves. In it he describes the custody that he made for El Escorial and that later disappeared during the events of the Napoleonic war. The Becerrils, from Cuenca, were also three: two brothers, Francisco and Alonso, and the latter’s son, Cristóbal.
Another brilliant specialty of the time were the great cathedral fences. The one in the main chapel of Toledo Cathedral is the work of Francisco de Villalpando; it is seven meters high, and it took ten years to complete. The fence of the choir of the same cathedral was done by Maestro Domingo. In the year 1540, he was paid five thousand ducats to make it with the condition that he was provided with all the gold and silver necessary for its embellishment. That gives an idea of the monumentality of such works in those times.
The embroideries of religious ornament were lavish at the time. Those executed by the Hieronymite monks of Guadalupe stood out.
The Artistic Adventure of Mankind 