by Will Durant
VII. ART IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL: 1515–55
Despite El Greco and Velazquez, Cervantes and Calderón, Spain never had a Renaissance in the rich Italian sense. Her far-won wealth gave new ornaments to her Christian culture, it offered productive rewards to native genius in literature and art, but it did not flow into any exciting recapture-as in Italy and France—of that pagan civilization which had adorned the Mediterranean world before and after Christ, and which had begotten Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian, Trajan, and Hadrian on the soil of Spain itself. The remembrance of that classic era had been deeply overladen by the long struggle of Spanish Christianity with the Moors; all the glorious memories were of that protracted victory, and the faith that had won it became inseparable from the proud remembrance. While everywhere else in Europe the state was humiliating the Church, in Spain the ecclesiastical organization grew stronger with the generations; it challenged and ignored the papacy, even when Spaniards ruled the Vatican; it survived the pious absolutism of Ferdinand and Charles V and Philip II, and then dominated every aspect of Spanish life. The Church in Spain was almost the sole patron of the arts; therefore it called the tune, named the themes, and made art, like philosophy, the handmaiden of theology. The Spanish Inquisition appointed inspectors to outlaw nudity, immodesty, paganism, or heresy in art, to specify the manner of treating sacred subjects in sculpture and painting, and to direct Spanish art toward the transmission and confirmation of the faith.
And yet Italian influence was pouring into Spain. The rise of Spaniards to the papacy, the conquest of Naples and Milan by Spanish kings, the campaigns of Spanish armies and the missions of Spanish statesmen and churchmen in Italy, the busy trade between Spanish and Italian ports, the visits of Spanish artists like Forment and the Berruguetes to Italy, of Italian artists like Torrigiano and Leone Leoni to Spain—all these factors affected Spanish art in methods, ornament, and style, hardly in spirit or theme, more in painting than in sculpture, and in architecture least.
The cathedrals dominated the landscape and the towns as the faith dominated life. Traveling in Spain is a pilgrimage from one to another of these mighty fanes. Their awesome immensity, their wealth of interior ornament, the dim-lit silence of their naves, the devoted stonework of their cloisters, accentuate the simplicity and poverty of the picturesque tiled dwellings that huddle below, looking up to them as the promise of a better world. The Gothic style still ruled in the giant cathedrals that rose above Salamanca (1513) and Segovia (1522); but at Granada Diego de Siloé, architect son of a Gothic sculptor, designed the interior of the cathedral with classic columns and capitals, and crowned the Gothic plan with a classic dome (1525). The style of the Italian Renaissance completely dislodged Gothic in the palace of Charles V at Granada. Charles had reproved the bishop of Cordova for spoiling the great mosque by building within its 850 pillars a Christian church;34 but he sinned almost as grievously when he tore down some halls and courts of the Alhambra to make room for a structure whose stern mass and dull symmetry might have passed without offense amid kindred buildings in Rome, but proved strikingly out of harmony with the frail elegance and gay diversity of the Moorish citadel.
Something of the Moors’ flair for architectural decoration appeared in the “plateresque” style that marked chiefly the civil architecture of this reign. It took its name from its resemblance to the complex and delicate ornament lavished by the silversmith (platero) or goldsmith upon plate and other objects of their art. It topped and flanked portals and windows with winding arabesques of stone; it grooved or spiraled or flowered columns with Moorish fantasy; it pierced grilles and balustrades with marble foliage and embroidery. This plateresco marked the Obispo Chapel at Madrid, the church of Santo Tomás at Ávila, the choir of the cathedral at Cordova, and it disported itself without restraint on the Ayuntamiento or Town Hall of Seville (1526 f.). Portugal adopted the style on a portal suffused with ornament, and columns carved with decoration, in the magnificent monastery of Santa Maria at Belem (1517 f.). Charles V took the style to the Lowlands and Germany, where it flourished its signature on the town halls of Antwerp and Leyden and the castle of Heidelberg. Philip II found plateresque too florid for his taste, and under his frowns it died an early death.
Spanish sculpture yielded more readily than architecture to the swelling Italian tide. Pietro Torrigiano, after breaking Michelangelo’s nose in Florence and bearding Henry VIII in London, settled in Seville (1521), and modeled in terra cotta an ungainly St. Jerome which Goya mistakenly judged to be the supreme work of modern sculpture.35 Feeling poorly paid for a statue of the Virgin, Torrigiano smashed it to bits, was arrested by the Inquisition, and died in its jails.36 Damian Forment, returning to Aragon from Italy, carried the spirit of the Renaissance on his chisel and in his boasts; he called himself “the rival of Pheidias and Praxiteles,” and was accepted at his own estimate. The ecclesiastical authorities allowed him to carve likenesses of himself and his wife on the base of the reredos that he made for the abbey of Monte Aragon. For the church of Nuestra Señora del Pilar at Saragossa he cut in alabaster a spacious retable in bas-relief, combining Gothic with Renaissance elements, painting with sculpture, color with form. To another retable, in the cathedral of Huesca, Forment devoted the last thirteen years of his life (1520–33).
As Pedro Berruguete had dominated Spanish painting in the half-century before Charles V, so his son became the leading Spanish sculptor of this age. Alonso learned the art of color from his father, then went to Italy and worked with Raphael in painting, with Bramante and Michelangelo in statuary. When he came back to Spain (1520) he brought with him Michelangelo’s penchant for figures caught in tense emotion or violent attitudes. Charles appointed him court sculptor and painter. At Valladolid he worked for six years carving in wood an altar screen, forty-two by thirty feet, for the church of San Benito el Real; only fragments remain, chiefly a San Sebastian vividly colored, with blood pouring from the wounds. In 1535 he joined with his chief rival, Felipe de Borgoña, to carve choir stalls in the Toledo Cathedral; here too the Michelangelesque manner swayed his hand, and presaged baroque in Spain. When he neared eighty he was commissioned to erect in the hospital of St. John at Toledo a monument to its founder, Cardinal Juan de Tavera; he took his son Alonso as helper, created one of the chefs-d’oeuvre of Spanish sculpture, and died in the attempt in his seventy-fifth year (1561).
Spanish painting, still in tutelage to Italy and Flanders, produced no outstanding master under Charles V. The Emperor favored foreign painters, imported Anthonis Mor to make portraits of Spanish notables, and for himself declared that he would allow none but the great Titian to paint him. The only Spanish painter of this age whose fame crossed the Pyrenees was Luis de Morales. The first fifty years of his life were spent in the poverty and obscurity of Badajoz, painting for churches and chapels in the province of Estremadura. He was fifty-four when Philip II bade him come and paint in the Escorial (1564). He presented himself in magnificent array, which the King thought unbecoming in an artist, but Philip softened when he learned that Luis had spent his life’s savings to attire himself fitly for an audience with his Majesty. Morales’ Christ Carrying the Cross did not strike the royal fancy, and he returned to Badajoz and penury. Several of his pictures can be seen at the Hispanic Society in New York, all of them beautiful; but the best example of his work is a Virgin and Child in the Prado—a bit too redolent of Raphael. Philip, passing through Badajoz in 1581, allotted the artist a tardy pension, which enabled him—now disabled by palsy and failing eyes—to eat regularly during the five years left to him of life.
The artisans of Spain were often artists in all but name. Spanish lace and leather continued supreme in Europe. The woodworkers too were unsurpassed; Théophile Gautier thought that Gothic art had never come closer to perfection than in the choir stalls of Toledo Cathedral. Metalworkers made works of art out of sanctuary screens, window grilles, balcony railings, door hinges, even nails. Goldsmiths and silversmiths transformed some of the pr
ecious metal flowing in from America into ornaments for princes and vessels for the Church; famous were the custodias they made in filigree silver or gold to hold the consecrated Host. Gil Vicente, not satisfied to be the leading dramatist of Portugal and Spain in this period, executed a monstrance—for displaying the Host to the congregation—which has been rated “the masterpiece of the goldsmith’s work in Portugal.”37 And Francisco de Hollanda, Portuguese despite his name, carried on with distinction the dying art of illumination.
All in all, this less than half a century came off with credit in the field of art despite the absorption and disruption of energies in the religious revolution. The masters in architecture, sculpture, and painting were hardly comparable to the giants who shook all Europe with theology; religion was the tune of the time, and art could only provide an accompaniment. But II Rosso, Primaticcio, Lescot, Delorme, Goujon, and the Clouets in France, the Berruguetes in Spain, Brueghel in Flanders, Cranach in Germany, Holbein everywhere, made an honorable roster of artists for an age so agitated and so brief. Art is order, yet everything was in chaos—not religion only, but morals, social order, art itself. Gothic was fighting its losing battle with classic forms, and the artist, uprooted from his own past, had to experiment with tentatives that could not give him the grandeur of a stability mortised in confident time. In the universal turbulence faith too was hesitant, and ceased to give clear imperatives to art; religious images were attacked and shattered; sacred themes that had inspired the creator and the beholder of beauty were losing their power to stir either genius or admiration or piety. And in science the greatest revolution of all was deposing the earth from its theological throne, and losing in the endless void the little globe whose divine visitation had formed the medieval mind and generated medieval art. When would stability come again?
CHAPTER XXXVII
Science in the Age of Copernicus
1517–65*
I. THE CULT OF THE OCCULT
IT is remarkable that this age, so absorbed in theology and scholarship, should have produced two men of the highest standing in the history of science—Copernicus and Vesalius; and curious that the books that contained their lifeblood should have appeared in one annus mirabilis, 1543. Some conditions favored science. The discovery of America and the exploration of Asia, the demands of industry and the extension of commerce, turned up knowledge that often contradicted traditional beliefs and encouraged fresh thought. Translations from Greek and Arabic, the printing of Apollonius’s Conies (1537) and the Greek text of Archimedes (1544) stimulated mathematics and physics. But many travelers were liars or careless; printing spread nonsense more widely than knowledge; and scientific instruments, though numerous, were almost primitive. The microscope, the telescope, the thermometer, the barometer, the micrometer, the microchronometer, were still in the future. The Renaissance was enamored of literature and style, politely interested in philosophy, almost indifferent to science. The Renaissance popes were not hostile to science; Leo X and Clement VII listened with open minds to Copernican ideas, and Paul III received without trembling the dedication of Copernicus’s world-shaking Book of Revolutions. But the reaction under Paul IV, the development of the Inquisition in Italy, and the dogmatic decrees of the Council of Trent made scientific studies increasingly difficult and dangerous after 1555.
Protestantism could not favor science, for it based itself on an infallible Bible. Luther rejected the Copnernican astronomy because the Bible told of Joshua commanding the sun—not the earth—to stand still. Melanchthon was inclined to science; he studied mathematics, physics, astronomy, and medicine, and lectured on the history of mathematics in antiquity; but his broad spirit was overwhelmed by the forceful nature of his master, and by the predominance of a narrowed Lutheranism after Luther’s death. Calvin had little use for science; Knox, none.
A discouraging milieu of occultism continued to surround, confuse, and sometimes—as in Cardan and Paracelsus—threaten the sanity of the would-be scientist. Hermetic lore from Egypt, mystical Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism from Greece, the Cabala from Judaism, bemused a thousand groping minds. Legends and miracles infested historiography, and travelers told of fire-breathing dragons and rope-climbing fakirs. Almost any unusual event in public or private life was interpreted as contrived by God or Satan for the warning or edification, the temptation or ruination, of man. Many believed that comets and meteors were fireballs hurled by an angry deity.1 Cheap literature entered every literate home with assurances that baser metals could be turned into gold; and (says a contemporary report) “all the tailors, shoemakers, servants, and maids who hear and read about these things give all the coins they can spare to... perambulating and fraudulent” practitioners of such arts.2 At a trial in England in 1549 William Wycherley, a conjurer, said there were 500 like him in the island.3 Itinerant students in Germany sold magical protections against witches and devils. Charms and talismans guaranteed to divert musket balls were popular with soldiers.4 The Mass itself was often used as a charm to bring rain or sunshine, or victory in war. Prayers for rain were common, and sometimes seemed too successful; in which cases the church bells were rung to warn the heavens to stop.5 In 1526–31 the monks of Troyes formally excommunicated the caterpillars that were plaguing the crops, but added that the interdict would be effective only for lands whose peasants had paid their Church tithes.6
Perhaps more events were ascribed to Satan than to God. “Scarcely a year goes by,” lamented a Protestant writer in 1563, “without the most appalling news from numbers of principalities, towns, and villages, of the shameless and horrible ways in which the prince of hell, by bodily apparition and in all sorts of forms, is trying to extinguish the new and shining light of holy evangel.”7 Luther joined the commonalty in attributing most diseases to demons entering the body—which, after all, is not altogether unlike our current theory. Many believed that diseases were caused by the evil eye or other magical means, and that they could be cured by magic potions—which again is not too far removed from our present practice. Most remedies were administered according to the position of the planets; hence medical students studied astrology.
Astrology verged on science by assuming a rule of law in the universe, and operating largely through experiment. The belief that the movements and positions of the stars determined human events was not quite as general as before; yet there were 30,000 astrologers in Paris in the sixteenth century,8 all ready to cast a horoscope for a coin. Almanacs of astrological predictions were best sellers; Rabelais parodied them in the Pantagruelian Prognostications of Master Alcofribas. Luther and the Sorbonne here agreed with him, and condemned astrology in all its forms. The Church officially frowned upon astrological predictions, as implying determinism and the subjection of the Church to the stars; yet Paul III, one of the greatest minds of the age, “would call no important meeting of the Consistory,” said an ambassador to the papal court, “and would take no trip, without choosing his days and observing the constellations.”9 Francis I, Catherine de Médicis, Charles IX, Julius II, Leo X, and Adrian VI consulted astrologers.10 Melanchthon changed the date of Luther’s birth to give him a more propitious horoscope,11 and begged him not to travel under a new moon.12
One astrologer of this period is still popular. Nostradamus was, in French, Michel de Notredame. He professed to be a physician and an astronomer, and was accepted as semi-official astrologer by Catherine de Médicis; she built an observatory for him in Les Halles. In 1564 he predicted a life of ninety years for Charles IX,13 who died ten years later at the age of twenty-four. At his own death (1566) he left a book of prophecies so wisely ambiguous that some line or another could be applied to almost any event in later history.
Because Christians of the sixteenth century believed in the possibility of obtaining supernatural powers from demons, and because the fear of demons was ingrained in their rearing, they felt an obligation to burn witches. Luther and Calvin seconded Pope Innocent VIII in urging the prosecution of witches. “I would hav
e no compassion on these witches,” said Luther; “I would burn them all.”14 Four were burned at Wittenberg on June 29, 1540; thirty-four at Geneva in 1545.15 The Reformers, of course, had Biblical warrant for these bonfires, and Protestant dependence upon the Scriptures gave new urgency to Exodus 22:18. The Catholic practice of exorcism encouraged the belief in witchcraft by assuming the power of devils lodged in human beings. Luther claimed that his Leipzig opponent, Johannes Eck, had signed a pact with Satan; and Johannes Cochlaeus retorted that Luther was a by-product of Satan’s dalliance with Margaret Luther.16
Accusations of witchcraft were sometimes used to get rid of personal enemies. The accused had a choice of prolonged torture to elicit a confession, or death as the result of a confession; and in sixteenth-century Europe the administration of torture was systematized “with a cold-blooded ferocity unknown... to the heathen nations.”17 Many victims seem to have believed in their own guilt—that they had had transactions, sometimes sexual, with devils.18 Some of the accused committed suicide; a French judge noted fifteen such cases within a year.19 Secular magistrates often exceeded ecclesiastics in the enthusiasm of this persecution. The laws of Henry VIII (1541) punished with death any of several practices ascribed to witches,20 but the Spanish Inquisition branded stories and confessions of witchcraft as the delusions of weak minds, and cautioned its agents (15 3 8) to ignore the popular demand for the burning of witches.21
