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On Art And Painting

Vicente Carducho and Baroque Spain

University of Wales Press

Carducho and the Spanish Literary Baroque

Jeremy Lawrance

From the standpoint of his own day the idea of painting propounded by Carducho in Diálogos de la Pintura strikes us at first sight as chauvinistic, reactionary and backward-looking. Maestro is made to uphold the antique ideals of High Renaissance classicism and Mannerist dogmas of pittura toscana riformata (line v. colour; he twice uses the term 'buena manera'), hero-worshipping dead Italian masters (Leonardo, d. 1519; Raphael, d. 1520; Michelangelo, d. 1564) in a furious rearguard action against the 'affectation' of naturalism lapped up by his contemporaries, the 'omnivorous' devotees of 'Antimichelangelo' Caravaggio (d. 1610).

This impression of mentally inhabiting some other time and place was intentional, as is clear from Carducho's studied refusal to let his interlocutors give due weight to Northern art, even though they several times talk of the royal collections in El Escorial and Madrid, where he must often have cringed before the mighty treasures of Flemish painting assembled by Philip II and his heirs. As a former client of the valido Lerma he must also have known Rubens, the living artist most highly regarded at the 1630s Spanish court; yet of two passing mentions of the Flemish master, the second crops up in Maestro's description of the Real Alcázar's Salón nuevo alongside Titian, Cajés, Velázquez, Ribera, Domenichino (the sole mention of the last three also) ... and 'Vicencio Carduchi' (Diál. viii. 155r–v). Despite owning 'an Inferno by Hieronymus Bosch' and 'two landscapes by Quinten [Massijs]', in Diálogos Carducho grants recognition, among the Goths, only to Dürer. He is named eight times, nearly as many as all the rest together; the tally equals Bartolomé Carducho's and doubles 'Vicencio's', yet remains trifling compared to Michelangelo (47), Titian (24), Leonardo (20), Raphael (15), or – considering no work of theirs survives – Apelles (30), Parrhasius (10) and Zeuxis (8). Maestro is made to praise Dürer as a most 'admirable' artist (Diál. ii. 31r), 'the worthiest of painters, none more so' (iv. 48r), not because Carducho appreciated his painting but only to stress that he owed his 'stupendous greatness' to combining the skills of brush and burin with ciencia, science ('as learned and well-informed as he is expert and careful' (31r); 'he not only painted [...], but wrote [...] with outstanding erudition' (48r)).

This, not any aesthetic criterion, was the point at issue. Sure enough, four of the eight mentions cite Dürer as a theorist known for the anatomical diagrams of Von menschlicher Proportion (1528), three as a maker of prints used as models for study. The most interesting is Dicípulo's query about the iconography of a Dürer woodcut of the Last Supper in Maestro's – or Carducho's – 'richly stocked' studio ('la Cena que en este estudio tan ricamente adornad[o] tienes, de mano del gran Alberto Durero'; Diál. vii. 112v, correcting the misprint 'adornada'). It leads to a discussion of Tridentine debates on religious images that tells us all we need to know. Carducho was well aware of the importance of Northern art for Spanish painters, and freely availed himself of its example through the standard medium of prints (López Plasencia 2008; in general, Carrete Parrondo 1987: 321–44; Veliz 2008); so if 'the Goths' were excluded from Diálogos, it was by design. Maestro's role is not to tell the facts about Spanish painting of his or any other day, but to present a classic sixteenth-century central Italian case for art's being some kind of systematic science (Williams 2008).

Carducho took this care, then, to wrench Maestro's ideas out of the real context of his day, like a cabinet-maker distressing furniture to make it look antique; but, of course, it was just a veneer. He doubtless intended to expound what that age considered immutable, self-evident laws of art, which in his case meant the Tuscan ideas of harmony he learned as a boy plus a ragbag ('migajuelas mendigadas', beggarly scraps; ii. 35r) of classical authorities ransacked from handbooks and copied out in the exercise books of notes for an Arte de la Pintura on which Maestro is portrayed as working ('notes [...] I had just finished copying when you rang at the door'; Diál. viii. 138r; 'my notes of what I have read'; 141v); but the outlook of Diálogos remained stubbornly Spanish and baroque, unharmonious and anticlassical. Nowhere is this clearer than in Carducho's overriding concern with the book's sole intellectual idea, the nature of truth, about which, in common with his peers in the world of letters, though perhaps surprisingly for a visual artist, he judged there is nothing less trustworthy than sight, nothing less real than visible reality, and nothing on earth, as Gracián would later put it, 'more contrary to verity than verisimilitude'. 'Sight does not always grasp the sublime and hidden parts of perfection (lo sublimado y escondido de lo perfecto)', says Maestro of the 'external painter' or 'simple imitator' in his discussion of this topic in Diál. iv. 47r–57r, 'unless guided and enlightened by learned ciencia' (53v); for even if he copies things 'with such accuracy and liveliness that they succeed in deluding it (engañar) into thinking the painting true' (52bis [=56]v), such naturalism has nothing to do with Nature ('not learned, not imitating Nature (which is always wise), just natural-looking (lo natural)'; [56]r).

This nature/naturalism distinction may look like an epistemological argument about the necessary gap between the noumenal form of Dinge an sich and our perception of their phenomenal form; the parenthesis 'Nature is always wise (sabia, divinely provident)' shows it is nothing of the kind. Maestro does not mean reality is unknowable, only that to trust what we see is a dangerous moral delusion – mere word-play on the melancholy topos of desengaño. This is why Caravaggio's 'delusions' (obras engañosas y sin verdad) pose a threat to religion (n. 1, below), why crude realism will never create 'heroic works just by copying an imperfect world with brute naturalism (con sólo imitar el natural bruto y lleno de imperfecciones) without knowing [...] the reason for things' (55r). The evidence of our senses must be rectified by the transcendental a priori categories of ciencia, by which he means the opposite of what we call science, namely faith. 'Knowledge of truth', he later sums up, 'comes from looking with the eyes of disillusion' (Es conocimiento de la verdad, si lo miramos con los ojos del desengaño; Diál. v. 73v). Image alone without the crutch of Idea – a vista of grapes so grapelike that they signify only themselves, inspiring no impulse more edifying than an urge to peck at them (55r–v) – is mere illusion, never the 'perfection' of truth ([56]v–57r). Maybe this thesis could be made interesting; but not here. Maestro is made to grub up the most absurd and banal proofs, as when he proffers the laughably fallacious enthymeme that since life is 'subject to the contingencies of Fortune', painting from it cannot help us attain eternal bliss ('any happiness purchased by this means must perforce be transient'; 48v); or when he declares, in a wild triumph of hope over experience, that painters must remember we can always tell a harlot by her ugly face and rotten figure. 'I am sure there can be no one to argue with this truth', he asserts – but adds disingenuously, and with even less logic, that to avoid 'indecent errors' when painting females, the 'mere imitator of lo natural exterior' should enrol with a teacher like him for 'precepts and knowledge' (49r–v).

Maestro goes straight on to develop this topic of painting's efectos, tongue-lashing the heretics ('sectarians, a prince of this court named them') who practise direct painting without heed for the risks that too much reality poses to what he calls art's 'huge and indispensable utility in politics and morals' (Diál. iv. 58v–59r). More often he speaks bluntly of 'necessity', for instance castigating 'ignorant' painters who see only 'things designed more for display of cleverness than necessity' (Diál. v. 70v), or asserting, in reply to Dicípulo's query whether the world could do without painters, that if we attend to 'the great benefits [...] obtained from this discipline and Art, we must confess it to be universally necessary [...] to the commonwealth'; 'that painting in general is necessary [...] we are told by our holy Mother the Roman Catholic Church, which is infallible' (Diál. vii. 117v–126v, at 118v, 126v). The pernicious link between 'utility' (expediency), 'necessity' (constraint) and power apparently does not trouble Maestro's conscience, but it is always embedded in his language, as in his remark on royal portraiture: 'we should attempt by every possible means to please [Their Majesties] by arranging all things necessary [...] for the portrait' (125r).

Such insistence on art's instrumental function, not as an end in itself but as a didactic arm of the Establishment, seems a long way from Carducho's serenely neo-pagan Renaissance sources. Compared to theirs, Maestro's stance is overtly anti-art: the painter, he argues, has no duty to himself, to beauty, to reality or to the spectator, but only to the 'need' and 'use' of his masters in Church and state. So he rejects all discussion of aesthetics; in a text of c. 89, 122 words, the term 'beauty' (belleza) occurs eleven times (cf. n. 6, below), once in a poem by another hand, four times in relation to subjects other than art (the beauty of Christ, angels, women), the rest in passing and mostly as a dirty word for the frippery of colorido, one of the things explicitly deemed unnecessary for what Maestro elsewhere calls 'the generic purpose' of art (Diál. vi. 92v): 'painting without colours [...] achieves its aim, which is to represent what is necessaryto us; this is not done by formless colours, which [...] are fruitless' (Diál. v. 77v).

Maestro's constrictions on artistic freedom are often treated as if, like his outmoded ideas on colour, they could be blamed on Carducho's dependence on sources – in this case slightly less dated, but still Italian – such as Paleotti (1582) or Possevinus (1593). In truth, however, these were as little important to the origin and import of Diálogosas the others. Tridentine doctrines had long been familiar in Spain (e.g. Prades 1597; Franco Llopis 2010), but it is noteworthy that, despite quoting Paleotti and citing Possevino (Diál. ii. 35r; vii. 122r), Carducho had no copy of either among his books (Inv. 190–6). His subservience to official ideology was just what Maestro said it was: a 'necessity' imposed by the Church's coercive regime and court society's all-consuming demands of rank and deference. His submission to Church authority made him 'far more moralistic' than the Italian sources, observes Glendinning (1988: 74–5), but his conformism went deeper: he was 'hierarchically minded in the social area too, and objected to portraits which depicted the lower orders of society in a symbolic fashion more appropriate to those of a higher sphere', as in Maestro's satiric anecdote of the plebeian parvenu Pedro Gordo's out rageous ambition to have himself painted as a donor to his local parish church – and wearing broadcloth (negro), not workingclass drab – which leads to the following outburst against Caravaggesque paintings of low subjects:

The recent abuse of portraiturearises from vainglory [...], forcing the noble Art to stoop to humbleconcepts, like all the still-life pictures (bodegones) one sees these days, with their low and utterly base ideas, and others of drunkards, card-sharpers and such things, with no more wit or purpose than the Painter's having conceived a whim to portray four disorderly ruffians (pícaros) and a couple of strumpets in déshabille. (Diál. vii. 110v–112r)

To imagine that such snobbery sprang from some aesthetic theory rather than from the painter's pathological social insecurity would be naïve. Maestro's windy discourse about Art's 'noble' (generoso) decorum is just a smokescreen concealing a classic petit bourgeoisanxiety. As Dicípulo earlier points out in his usual innocent way, the court's real upper class of noble lords (señores, poderosos), having no need to feel threatened by the sight of 'base', 'low' or 'humble' subjects, actively preferred the style that 'imitates Nature' (Diál. iv. [56]r).

Another significant moment occurs in Diál. vi. 61r–62v, where Maestro once more discusses the degree to which truth must yield to propriety when portraying 'low and unprestigious concepts, costumes, actions and faces'.

This time he openly admits the social difference between the aristocratic preserve of high culture and the vulgar public arena of painting. Pastoral poetry, he says, may portray shepherds 'with pelt of ermine pale' and 'crook of sacred laurel', 'the shepherdess with sunbeams for hair and two bright stars for eyes, [...] her feet in sandals rich (coturnos), [...] her melting crystal whiteness (los candores y cristales deshechos)', because – this he omits to say – such exquisite erotic images could never be read by lecherous plebs or real peasants. The same licence is not permitted to painters, who must avoid exciting the low-class viewing public with ideas above their station, but also refrain from drawing attention to such fractious political realities as poverty or social inequality:

I don't say one should paint the shepherd 'with pelt of ermine pale' [etc.] and other such things used by Poets [...]; but neither should they sink so lowas to paint the shepherd with disgustingly bare feet, as some have done, even for the figure of Jacob, or Rachel in a dirty, patched smock [...] under a smoke-smudged roof, with a cat or dog lying under a rude chopping-block or three-legged stool covered with odd pots and pans.

The passage concludes a comparison of the painter's task to that of seventeen contemporary Spanish poets (60v–61r); and while its memorable image of the peasant's murky cot and hungry cat no doubt records Carducho's disgust at an actual painting, the lyrical conceits of beautiful shepherds recall lines from works by two of the poets, Lope's Laurel de Apolo and Góngora's Soledades. But then, neglecting his own argument on painting's standing as a liberal art, Maestro slips from talking of the pagan mythological world of erudite poetry, a matter of noble culture for free minds, to the iconography of Jacob and Rachel (Gen. 29) or the Adoration of the Shepherds, a matter of official control for hirelings employed, as St Paul said (1 Cor. 3:1–2), to feed the mother's milk of divine 'simplicity' to the Church's 'carnal babies' ('women and uncouth folk (gente idiota) who cannot [...] read'; Diál. vii. 120r).

In fact, the distinction between poetry and painting was less clear-cut; candores and coturnos was exactly how Titian painted the nymphs in his erotic mythological Poesie (n. 18, below). This links the passage to another of the book's departures from the spirit of its Renaissance precursors. Maestro's diatribe towards the end of Diál. vii (121r–124r) against 'lewd and lascivious things' in art, or in blunt terms that 'invention of the devil', the nude, would be hard to credit in any sincere defender of classical or Renaissance art and looks crazy in a work that exalts Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo as its arbiters of taste. Yet the passage once more reveals Carducho's involvement in current realities, for this was a topic on which Spain in the 1620s parted company with the rest of Europe. That a hostility to nude paintings should have arisen there precisely at a time when Madrid's royal and noble collections boasted some of Europe's finest assemblies of such items (Philip IV alone purchased sixty-eight of the nudes now in the Prado) is a paradox that still calls for explanation. The circumstances, which included calls for wholesale public bans and bonfires by figures as influential as Paravicino (Portús 1996), are reflected in Carducho's decision to make Maestro round off his remarks on indecency – part of a diatribe against iconoclasm that constitutes his reply to Dicípulo's query about the 'necessity' of art (Diál. vii. 117v–130r) – not with any exposition of the Tridentine decree on sacred images (he cites the Vatican-based Jesuit Possevino on 122r only to invoke Plato, Aristotle 'and other philosophers [...] of the pagans' and some pointedly classical examples), but by referring to a brand-new publication of twenty-one legal opinions on the 'abuse of lascivious figures and paintings' gathered from Spanish professors of divinity by a Portuguese noble resident in Madrid (122v–124r). Copia's depositions are well reasoned and nuanced, as we expect of pro fessional theologians ('with some exceptions judging it a mortal sin to paint [nudes]', says Maestro), refraining from the puritan overkill displayed by zealous laymen and demented fanatics like Bragança in his preface. Carducho did not own Copia, but his outlook was closer to the theologians than the bigots. At all events, he elsewhere makes Dicípulo covet the earl of Monterrey's 'grand drawings of the bathers (nadadores) [...] by Michelangelo' (Diál. viii. 151r), and has him call the Sistine Chapel Giudizio – of which Carducho owned a multi-sheet print among his many nude paintings, drawings and casts (Inv. 183 'un Juicio de Michael en pedaços') – the most 'intelligent' painting in history, explicitly referring to its unique 'nudes and foreshortened bodies' (Diál. i. 5r–v). Maestro agrees that on successive viewings the fresco's marvellous technical triumphs of draughtsmanship and perspective overcome disappointment at its subdued colours, not like some dumb made-up blonde 'who pleases at first view because fair white looks cover a multitude of faults', but a dark lady (dama trigueña) who, 'since usually [...] the body is matched by a beauty of soul, the more one converses and gets to know her, the more she pleases and the deeper she turns out to be, [...] an everlasting loveliness' (v. 78v–79r).

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Excerpted from On Art And Painting by Jean Andrews Jeremy Roe Oliver Wood. Copyright © 2016 The Contributors. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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