The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  Nevertheless, there was a continuous shift in power between Venice and Spain during the sixteenth century, symptomatic of a general movement from the Mediterranean states to nations bordering the Atlantic. Venice reached its apogee in the late Middle Ages and this was when the city assumed the shape it has retained to the present day. A bird’s eye view woodcut of the city by Jacopo de’ Barbari, dated 1500, gives a fascinating view of the city at that time. With the exception of some churches built by Palladio, and some palaces on the Grand Canal, almost all of the major buildings that we would recognize were already in place. Despite her great wealth, however, the Serenissima’s power was steadily diminishing, as the Ottoman Turks gradually conquered her territories in the Adriatic and the Aegean which she, in turn, had taken from the Byzantine Empire.

  By the mid-sixteenth century the only Christian power able to fight on equal terms with the Ottomans were the Spanish, who possessed far greater resources than Venice. Maritime trade routes were opened up by Spanish and Portugese mariners to the Americas in the west, and to India and the Spice Islands in the east (Philip II conquered Portugal in 1580 thus acquiring her vast overseas empire). Venetian ships may have played their part in the battle of Lepanto, but it was Philip’s half-brother Don John of Austria who had commanded the fleet. On the Italian terra firma the Veneto (the area of north-east Italy, including the cities of Padua, Vicenza, Verona and Bergamo ruled by Venice) was surrounded by states under Spanish control. The movement of the Rape of Europa from Venice to Spain is the first of a number of occasions in its history that the painting follows the shift in power and economic strength between nations.

  This is also true in terms of the arts. At Titian’s death in 1576, Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Bassano were all working in Venice. All three, in their different ways, were strongly influenced by Titian. The seventeenth century, however, marks a severe decline in the quality of Venetian painting. In contrast, the reign of Philip II was followed by a golden age in Spanish painting and it is no coincidence that Velázquez, the greatest Spanish artist of the seventeenth century, should have been so strongly influenced by the great Titians in the royal collection, including the Rape of Europa.

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  Philip II as Ruler and Patron of the Arts

  Titian’s patron Philip II, who presided over the greatest era in Spanish history, remains a deeply controversial figure. Over 400 years after his death, historians continue to argue over the nature of the man and the scale of his achievements. Venetian ambassadors, masters of diplomacy and displaying an acute analysis of foreign rulers, had a particular interest in the Spanish king, whose control of Northern Italy was a constant threat to their security. One of these ambassadors, Federico Badovaro, considered Philip to be ‘phlegmatic and melancholic’, by nature ‘inclined toward the good’, adding that ‘his disposition is feeble, his is a somewhat timid spirit … He is more inclined to mildness than to anger.’ Badovaro’s use of the adjectives ‘feeble’ and ‘timid’ holds the key to an understanding the king. Philip had grown up in awe of his father, and hid behind his natural shyness and reserve.

  The way that Philip learned to cope with his heavy responsibilities was to acquire an inscrutable mask in public, hiding his private emotions. This discrepancy between the public and the private persona is apparent in every aspect of Philip’s life. He inherited the Spanish crown at a time of political crisis. The 1550s was a time of great religious unrest in Europe, with increasingly violent clashes between Protestants and Catholics. Philip, a fierce defender of Catholic orthodoxy, was determined to stamp out heresy in his dominions, particularly in the Netherlands. The Council of Trent, the major reform of the Catholic Church, was coming to a conclusion, advocating the condemnation of heresy and the total rejection of the Protestant belief in salvation through faith alone. Philip, as a leading Catholic ruler, therefore felt fully justified in publishing decrees, known as placards, in the Netherlands, encouraging the widespread persecution of his Protestant subjects. It was a similar story in England, where Philip, as husband to Queen Mary, whom he married in 1554 (a dynastic marriage that Charles V hoped would bring England into the Habsburg fold), supported her decision to burn leading Protestants at the stake in London and Oxford. In Spain the king attended a number of autos-da-fé and witnessed the execution of 100 Protestants by the Inquisition.

  Philip’s public support for religious persecution contrasted with his private enjoyment of a number of mistresses (he was also to have four wives). During the 1550s he carried on affairs with Doña Ana de Osorio, a lady-in-waiting at court, and Eufrasia de Guzman, lady-in-waiting to his sister Juana. Paolo Tiepolo, the Venetian ambassador, writing in 1563, described how the king liked the company of women ‘in whom he takes a great deal of pleasure, and with whom he is often secluded.’ He continued by referring to the queen (Philip’s second wife, Elizabeth of Valois) who ‘knows that the king has many affairs with other ladies, but she has learned from her mother [Catherine de Medici, Queen of France] to put up with this.’

  Considering how hard Philip worked, it seems surprising that he had enough time to cultivate a string of mistresses. Meticulous by nature, a natural bureaucrat, he devoted unremitting energy in an effort to centralize his empire so that he could exert control over every aspect of government. But with such widely disparate possessions, scattered over four continents, where it took weeks, or even months, to relay his orders, this proved impossible to achieve. The king was therefore forced to rely on subordinates. The problem was that he was loath to delegate and found it very difficult to find servants whom he could trust. As Lorenzo van der Hammen, who wrote a generally sympathetic biography of Philip, emphasizing his devotion to duty and hard work, stressed: ‘suspicion, disbelief and doubt were the basis of his prudence’. As his reign developed, Philip was increasingly afflicted with a chronic mistrust of other people’s motives, something that badly affected his dealings with his most able servants. To take the example of his leading generals, whose military brilliance made Spain the dominant military power in Europe, the Duke of Alba, the premier Spanish grandee, victorious in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal, was exiled, the Flemish Count Egmont, who defeated the French at the decisive battle of San Quentin, was executed, Philip’s half-brother Don John of Austria, victor of Lepanto, and his nephew Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, Governor General of the Netherlands and the greatest general of the age, were both removed from office. Philip’s most able secretary Antonio Perez was suspected of treason, arrested and tortured, but managed to escape from prison.

  Not surprisingly, the king’s powerful position meant that he also had many genuine enemies and they used every opportunity to blacken his character. The most effective attack was the Apology, written by William the Silent, leader of the Dutch Revolt against Spain. The Apology began what was to be known as the Black Legend, depicting the king as an ogre: a cold, duplicitous and scheming religious bigot who enjoyed attending autos-da-fés where Protestants were burnt at the stake, and spent hours closeted with his precious relics in the depths of the Escorial. He would stop at nothing, even ordering the death of his own son Don Carlos, who was to be the hero of a play by Friedrich Schiller and an opera by Giuseppe Verdi. When he was not weaving sinister plots to destroy his enemies, the king amused himself in the company of dwarfs, jesters and buffoons.

  Philip retaliated to this attack by ordering William’s assassination, which was carried out at Delft in 1584 (William’s supporters regarded it as act of semi-sacrilege to order the death of a fellow head of state, though the king regarded William as merely a rebellious subject). This provided further ammunition to Philip’s enemies who had broadcast his political failings. They depicted him as a feeble military leader who had failed to crush his rebellious Dutch subjects, lost the ‘invincible’ Armada sent to destroy England, and failed to prevent his bitter foe Henry IV from becoming King of France (though Henry had to convert to Catholicism to gain the throne).

  Thi
s one-sided picture failed to give any credit to the extra-ordinary achievements during Philip’s long reign. Spain had won a series of military and naval victories, culminating in the Duke of Alba’s conquest of Portugal in 1580, thus uniting the Iberian peninsula, the dream of Spanish kings for centuries. The Spanish achievement in exploring, colonizing and governing a worldwide empire was quite astonishing. To put it in context, John Cabot had discovered Newfoundland at much the same time as Columbus had reached America in 1492, but it was to be well over a century later that the English, despite abortive efforts by Sir Walter Raleigh and others, made a successful, permanent settlement in North America, by which time the Spanish had colonized the whole of South and Central America (the Portuguese, now part of Spain, had colonized Brazil), defeating the mighty Aztec and Inca empires in the process, and had even reached Florida, New Mexico and California. Although Philip’s fierce championship of Catholicism had backfired badly in the Netherlands, it had led to the eradication of Protestantism in Spain and throughout the Spanish empire in the Americas and the Far East.

  In Spain itself leading theologians and jurists at the School of Salamanca, following the lead given by the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), acted as the nation’s moral conscience, discussing the legitimacy of conquest and championing the rights of all races, a counter to the conquistadors’ rough-shod methods of dealing with the conquered natives in their pursuit of gold. The reign of Philip II was dominated by the Counter-Reformation, a revival of Catholicism which led to the persecution of heretics by the Inquisition, but which also produced major religious figures such as St Teresa of Avila who exerted a powerful influence on Spanish religious thought. She also influenced leading artists such as El Greco, whose paintings are perhaps the closest artistic expression of her mystical strain of Catholicism.

  Philip proved himself to be the greatest patron of the arts of the later sixteenth century. The king’s most outstanding artistic achievement was the building of the vast palace of San Lorenzo de Escorial, situated in the bleak foothills of the Guadarrama mountains, 50 kilometres north-west of his new capital of Madrid. It is difficult to form a proper picture of Philip without visiting his greatest creation. Even today, it is impossible not to feel its chilling effect. This is partly geographical: the site is much higher than Madrid so that, no matter how hot it might be in the capital, the very fabric of the building seems to chill the soul. But it is even more the nature of the building, with its unremitting expanse of blank granite walls, and endless cold, stone corridors.

  From the moment you enter, you are made very aware that this is a religious foundation, built to fulfill a vow made by the king on the eve of the battle of San Quentin on 10 August 1557, the feast day of St Lawrence. If God granted the Spanish victory over the French, Philip vowed to build a palace-monastery which would house a mausoleum to his parents, the Emperor Charles V and the Empress Isabella of Portugal. The king deliberately chose an austere style of architecture to reflect the religious nature of the whole complex, run by Jeronymite monks, with the basilica placed over the mausoleum at its heart.

  Turning his back on the light, decorative style of late Gothic architecture known as plateresque (the word comes from plata, the Spanish for silver), Philip instructed his architects to construct a square, rigidly symmetrical building in the classical style, devoid of ornament. It rivals St Peter’s in Rome in sheer scale as the greatest architectural project of the late sixteenth century. Indeed, the original architect, Juan Bautista de Toledo, had worked under Michelangelo on St Peter’s, though his early death meant that the majority of the building was done by his successor Juan de Herrera. The complex consists of a pantheon, basilica, monastery, seminary and library, encompassing the whole world of knowledge. It has often been remarked that the building was designed on a grid plan, resembling the grid on which St Lawrence was martyred, though there is no evidence that this was Philip’s intention. It seems more likely that the king saw the building as a modern version of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, with Philip cast as a latter-day Solomon.

  The Escorial (inappropriately, it takes its name from a slag heap from an abandoned iron mine nearby) was a highly suitable location for Philip’s collection of art. He amassed a total of some 1,500 paintings, of which about 1,100 were housed in the Escorial, 100 statues of famous people in marble and bronze, dozens of caskets filled with jewellery, cabinets containing over 5,000 coins and medals and whole suites of rooms filled with furniture and armour. The king’s collection demonstrates the complexity of the man. Deeply pious, or, as his enemies maintained, a religious bigot, he accumulated 7,000 relics including ten whole bodies, 144 heads, 306 arms and legs, countless bones, fragments said to have been taken from the True Cross and Crown of Thorns, and hairs of Christ and the Virgin.

  But the king was also intellectually curious, forming a whole compendium of natural and man-made wonders, and dozens of scientific and musical instruments, including 137 astrolabes and watches, showing the king’s profound interest in scientific discovery. The royal library of 40,000 volumes contained the usual quota of orthodox Christian works, but also included a considerable number of forbidden books devoted to magic and the occult, and 1,800 titles in Arabic taken from the Moors in Andalucia after Philip ordered their expulsion from Spain.

  The Escorial also housed the king’s religious paintings, including Titian’s dramatic nocturnal depiction of the Martyrdom of St Lawrence, designed to hang over the main altar of the great church arising in the middle of the complex. In addition, Philip possessed a superb collection of Flemish Primitives, including Rogier van der Weyden’s magnificent Descent from the Cross, which had originally hung in the chapel of his aunt Mary’s palace at Binche in the Netherlands.

  Philip showed unexpected taste in his passion for Hieronymus Bosch, the Flemish artist whose fantastic, visionary landscapes are some of the most unusual works of the sixteenth century. They are peopled with a strange and often grotesque array of humans and animals, which appealed to Philip but bore no relation to his orthodox religious beliefs. As in the case of Titian’s mythologies, he took profound aesthetic pleasure from all forms of great art. Various interpretations have been given to Bosch’s strange and original creations, ranging from an allegorical or moral one, satirizing the sins of mankind, to a more esoteric one, stressing astrological and even heretical views, and to a more straightforwardly religious one, inspired by the Book of Revelations. For the king, it appears that the paintings were simply objects of fascination, beauty and truth, as Jose de Siguenza, the Jeronymite monk (the austere order of St Jerome was very popular in the Iberian peninsula) who was the king’s librarian in the Escorial, wrote:

  there are some people … who are foolish as to think that Bosch was a heretic; which is absurd, for if that were so, the king would never have had his pictures near him. No, Bosch is a devout and orthodox satirist of our sins and follies … [He had] the courage to paint men as they really are.

  The building of the Escorial, the personal creation of Philip, acts like a metaphor for the changing character of the king. As the vast complex gradually rose above the Castilian plain, a chilly sanctuary where Philip could retreat from the world outside, so the king withdrew within himself. He increasingly disliked courtly life, with its horde of courtiers and placemen jostling for position. A man of rigid self-control, the king preferred the monastic purity of the Escorial, where he could live an ordered life, seated at his desk in his small study, surrounded by a mass of paperwork. All major decisions had to be referred to the sovereign, and letters were dispatched by his secretaries to every corner of the empire signed Yo el Rey (I the king). There are a surprising number of paintings showing Philip in direct communion with God which support the view that the king believed that he enjoyed a direct communion with God.

  Not surprisingly, the subdued, silent atmosphere of the palace-monastery had a detrimental effect on many of the artists who came to work here. It was as though the building, like the
monarch who had commissioned it, had a deadening hand on the artists he enticed to Spain. Philip seems to have been pleased with the Genoese Luca Cambiaso’s rather lifeless painting of the vault in the choir of the basilica, but the effort seems to have been too much for the artist, who died soon after completing the work. Pellegrino Tibaldi, whose mythological paintings in Bologna have an almost Michelangelesque power, painted a number of fine works, especially his ceiling fresco of the library, but the Central Italian painter Federico Zuccaro, a renowned artist who had worked for the papacy, fared less well. Having been granted a salary of 2,000 gold ducats a year (four times that awarded to Titian), he soon found himself in trouble. The king, pedantic as ever, objected to his Adoration of the Shepherds, painted for the high altar of the basilica, on the grounds that the basket held by the shepherds contained too many eggs, something that a shepherd, running from tending his sheep in the middle of the night to Christ’s manger, was very unlikely to be holding, especially as he probably did not keep chickens. Soon he was dismissed with a golden handshake and sent back to Italy, and his frescoes painted over, while the king commented sadly: ‘The blame does not belong to him, but to him who sent him this way.’

  The most talented painter working in the Iberian peninsula was the Cretan Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco, who arrived from Italy in the ancient capital of Toledo in 1576, having previously worked briefly in Titian’s studio in Venice. El Greco made his name in Toledo with highly charged religious works that seem to epitomize the Spanish Counter-Reformation. It therefore seemed appropriate that Philip, an ardent champion of the Catholic revival, should have wanted to patronize such a major figure working on his doorstep. However, this was not the case. Shortly after his move to Toledo, Philip commissioned the Cretan to paint St Maurice and the Theban Legion to celebrate the fact that the saint’s body lay in the Escorial. El Greco did his best, including portraits of three of Philip’s leading generals: Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, victor of the battle of San Quentin, the event that had inspired the king to build the Escorial, Alessandro Farnese, and Don John of Austria. But his strange elongated bodies and flickering light effects, and his relegation of the scene of St Maurice’s martyrdom to the background, was not to Philip’s liking and he was never to commission another work from the Cretan artist.