The beautifully produced catalogue of the exhibition that opened at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and will have its second venue at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is devoted to the re-evaluation of the art of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, making known to a wider public the work of artists that preceded the great flowering of Spanish painting in its Golden Age, specifically during the period between the death of Philip III’s father, at the end of the sixteenth century, and the accession to the throne of his son, Philip IV, in 1621. The exhibition El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III (click here for review) and the text of its catalogue are the fruit of many years of research on the part of its curators, Sarah Schroth and Ronni Baer. They, as well as the scholars who contributed to the catalogue, are to be commended for the thoroughness and quality of their work.

Although the names El Greco and Velázquez bracket the catalogue’s title, and the artists are represented in it by works that belong to the end and beginning of their respective careers, the bulk of the painters that make up the exhibition are virtually unknown except to specialists in Spanish art. The catalogue’s essays and entries, therefore, open up a new vision of Spanish painting in the span of time covered by the well-known works of those two masters. The most important painters studied here—Vicente Carducho, Eugenio Cajés, Juan van der Hamen, Luis Tristán, Juan Bautista Maino, Francisco Ribalta, and Pedro Orrente—are artists of considerable merit who not only deserve a place in the sun, but also introduce into Spanish painting some of the fundamental traits that give its character to the art of the Golden Age.

Antonio Feros’s catalogue essay, “Art and Spanish Society: The Historical Context, 1577–1623,” covers the historical, political, and social context of the reign of Philip III, and provides a revealing perspective on the changes that were introduced in Spain’s society and governance by the king and his favorite, the Duke of Lerma. After the social austerity of the reign of Philip II, that of his son was, to the contrary, devoted to the manifestation of luxury and grandeur, and it was not only the king who reveled over the splendor of his possessions, but members of the nobility were also exponents of that new spirit. During his reign, Philip II had been practically the only source of artistic patronage in Spain outside of the Church. As Schroth’s essay, “A New Style of Grandeur: Politics and Patronage at the Court of Philip III,” makes clear, during his son’s reign an interest in collecting art was not limited to the king but also engaged the royal court, principally the Duke of Lerma. In response to this expansion of the pool of collectors, Spanish artists began to develop areas of painting that had not been commonly dealt with before, such as still life, self portraits, and informal likenesses of poets, family, and friends, genres already present in the northern centers of the Spanish dominions, and now practiced with success by Spain’s native painters.

While the portrayal of artists, writers, and other members of the middle class emphasized both naturalism of form and individual personality, royal portraiture remained based on the standards set in the sixteenth century by Anthonis Mor and restated by Alonso Sánchez Coello. The portraits of Juan Pantoja de la Cruz and Bartolomé González emulate those of Sánchez Coello in their careful attention to detail and their finished surfaces, but they are set apart from them by their considerable stylization in the rendering of the sitters’ garments and of their features. In royal portraits, the dominance of pattern, together with the stylization of the subject’s features and their impassive expressions, result in a flattening out of the image of the sitter, both literally and psychologically, and establish a new model for the genre. The ideal of composure and dignity that was felt appropriate for the public image of the members of the royal family is perfectly embodied by the hieratic and impersonal presentation given to them by the court artists, and those ideals would remain constant to a large degree until the end of the seventeenth century in Spanish aristocratic portraiture.

In her essay, “Images of Power and Salvation,” Rosemarie Mulcahy explores the enhanced spiritual purpose that informs religious art after the Council of Trent, whose aim was to move the faithful and reinforce their beliefs, and was given form by the visual language, anchored in realism, that was developed by the artists of this period, geared as it was to the expression of Catholic doctrine in terms accessible to the common people. There is a consistent emphasis in religious art on a physical approximation to the divine, so that even visionary experiences are treated as tangible events. This approach takes particularly vivid form in sculpture; the works of Gregorio Fernández and Juan Martínez Montañés, building on the existing tradition of polychromed statues, engage the viewer emotionally by giving the most naturalistic description possible to images such as the Supine Christ or Christ at the Column. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola instructed its readers to experience in their meditations the sufferings of Christ as their own, and these sculptures undoubtedly provoked in the viewers a powerful emotional response.

But if this approach is the most pervasive, one figure stands apart from it, that of El Greco. His paintings present intensely spiritual images of the holy personages—flame-like figures lit by an unreal light—that are anything but earthbound. He is, however, the only painter of this period that takes this path, for even his immediate followers, such as his pupil Beltrán, do not imitate his ecstatic style.

The first quarter of the seventeenth century has always been acknowledged as the richest and most innovative period of Spanish literature, in contrast to its less brilliant artistic production. The essay contributed by Laura Bass, “The Treasury of the Language: Literary Invention in Philip III’s Spain,” which studies literary invention in Philip III’s Spain, is an important addition to the catalogue, providing a view of the great writers that flourished during his reign in the context of the cultural vitality of Spanish society. This is a theme brought to light by the catalogue’s various historical essays. It also reveals the interactions of writers and painters, which eventually helped to legitimize the aspirations of the latter to attain an equal status with the other liberal arts. Besides illuminating the existing connections between art and literature, Bass’s studies of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Góngora are in themselves magisterial.