Page 10 - The mystery of faith

As I had spent almost all my entire career as an Italophile, I did not, at that time, have a good working
knowledge of Spain and its treasures; the visits to countless cathedrals, churches and museums that
soon followed, most notably starting with those in Valladolid, followed by Salamanca, Ávila, Zamora,
Toro, Palencia, Zaragoza and many more, led to a crash course in Spanish sculpture and to a plan for
the current exhibition. Nicolas indoctrinated me in the merits of Spanish sculpture and soon we were
hell bent on a wild acquisition spree ranging from Madrid to London, from Milan to New York –
everywhere we managed to discover Spanish sculpture! Most was of extremely low quality, but among
the hundreds of items of dross viewed every now and then a major work surfaced. The results may be
seen in this catalogue and our only regret is that we were unable to secure a great Crucifix or
Lamentation and that an especially fine masterpiece of an intensely gory decapitated head of the Baptist
on a charger was pre-empted under our very noses at auction for the Spanish State.

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T he earliest piece in this exhibition entitled THE MYSTERY OF FAITH just predates the Counter-
Reformation, yet the primary thrust of the exhibition is to illustrate the explosion of faith that was
actively promoted by the Church through encyclicals and a judicious use of the Inquisition as a counter
to Martin Luther. In order to regenerate and defend its teaching and status, the Catholic Church
urgently needed a means with which to bolster the faith professed by its rank and file, the generally
uneducated and illiterate populace. What better way to do this than by the use of highly religious
imagery, dazzlingly coloured with estofado, glass eyes or dripping simulated blood that was intended
to awe the onlooker; a form of ‘advertising’ a means to salvation which, by its colourfulness and
unremitting realism, hammered home by means of ‘Shock and Awe’ the teachings of the Church and
the sacrifices made throughout history by its ‘soldiers’ – the saints. These images were specially
designed to heighten emotion: ‘The true meaning of religion is thus not simple morality, but morality
touched by emotion’ (Matthew Arnold). By making both the sacrifices and the sanctity of the Church
both tangible and visible to the ordinary man through the use of the palpable veracity of its imagery
the Church had launched a counter offensive. Antonio Palomino, for instance, describes seeing a work
in La Roldana’s house and being so moved by the imagery of the Saviour that he felt that he was in the
very presence of the dead Christ in person (see ‘The Portrayal of Imagery’ in this catalogue, p. 30).

In effect nothing is new under the sun and, just as astute TV advertising today lulls the susceptible into
purchasing, so the Counter-Reformation Church used its own ‘spin doctors’ to spread its message. The
best method of getting this across was by using artists, artisans and imagery in order to induce a feeling
of veneration, wonder and reverence for the established Catholic teachings in the eyes of the common
man. ‘The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible’, said Oscar Wilde. His seventeenth-
century counterparts understood this very well, as is demonstrated by the Spanish mystic Saint John of
the Cross (1542–1591), who lauded the superior merits of polychrome sculpture as a means to inspiring
piety, and the preacher Fernández Galván, who considered the plasticity of sculpture to be of greater
effect than painting.4