Page 11 - The mystery of faith

At the same time as the Counter-Reformation was being promoted the expansion of trade to the New
World brought immense riches of silver and gold to Spain, further enabling expansions to churches,
convents and monasteries both old and new. In the years between 1570 and 1630 Spanish imports of
silver and gold averaged from 1,000,000 to 2,700,000 kilos of silver and from twenty to forty thousand
kilos of gold for each decade.5 To put this into a modern perspective at current bullion values this
amounted to roughly $60,000,000 to $120,000,000 of gold and from half a billion to one billion
dollars or so of silver each year! The rival armies of monastic orders proselytising the populations of
the New World and its Indios population, either voluntarily or, often more tragically, by terror and
force as in the case of the Jesuits, led to a rash of new Baroque church building from the most remote
Andean mountains in Peru to the campos of Mexico. This in turn created an export market for
altarpieces, oil paintings and, of course, sculptures. Some of the grandest altars of all may be found in
Lima or Mexico City.

???

S uzanne Stratton-Pruitt touches on the procedure for the fabrication of polychromed sculpture in her
introduction to this catalogue and Xavier Bray describes the process in greater detail in the National
Gallery catalogue ‘Introduction’. For a graphic introduction to the varied processes involved in the
making of Spanish polychromed sculpture there is a fine video produced by the Getty Museum
education department.6 Of greater interest still is the relationship or rivalry between sculptors and
painters. Countless further parallels of painting having been influenced by contemporary sculpture may
be stated, as, indeed, several have been in the National Gallery catalogue.7 The two mediums were
closely related and Palomino recounts how, when viewing Zurburan’s painting of Christ on the Cross
made in 1627 for the sacristy of San Pablo in Seville, ‘everyone who sees it and does not know believes
it to be sculpture’. Such realistic sculptures not only possess an eerie quality when candle-lit in churches,
but became imbued with a sense of movement when processed through the streets in a paschal
ceremony or pasos. In consequence the art form of polychromed realistic sculpture was a goal for
painters to emulate in the search for ever more acute realism. Velázquez, in particular, was aware of
sculpture since he apprenticed in Montañés’ studio and, as is actively demonstrated in the current
National Gallery exhibition, his Christ after the Flagellation Contemplated by the Christian Soul owes
an evident debt to Gregorio Fernández’ Christ. Nevertheless the fabrication of sculpture was governed
by the strictures of two separate guilds, the Guild of Carpenters for the sculptors and the Guild of
Painters for the painters and decorators. Painters could well be sculptors, as in the case of Alonso Cano,
and others, and this blurred the boundaries as time went on particularly when the sculptors complained
that they were paid less and the painters more for completing the ‘decoration’. Partnerships existed,
such as those between Montañés and Pacheco or Roldán and Valdés Léal or Fernández and Díaz, but
the painters, Pacheco included, retained a snobbish attitude of superiority and took the view that a
sculpture was lifeless until decorated. The fact that the painters tended to be paid more for their work
than the sculptors inclined the latter, as the seventeenth century progressed, to carry out the entire task
and Cano was the first to set the trend. When in 1621 Montañés announced that he was going to keep
three quarters of a six-thousand-ducat payment for the altarpiece in Santa Clara, Seville, the
exasperated painter, Baltasar Quintero, who had received a subcontract, threatened to sue.8 By the