Page 28 - The mystery of faith

reflects the greatest number of rays of light [...], a
beautiful body will be the more beautiful the whiter it
is.’18 While this point of view dominated eighteenth-
century Europe and has for a long time dominated the
canons of western art, it did not do so in Spain, where the
traditions of the ‘peculiar style’ ran deep. The painter and
theorist Antonio Palomino, in his Lives of the Eminent
Spanish Painters and Sculptors (1724), recorded his
emotional response to Luisa Roldán’s Jesus of Nazareth
(Fig. 14):

I was so thunderstruck at its sight that it seemed irreverent
not to be on my knees to look at it, for it really appeared to
be the original itself. And after we had admired it […] we
went to sit down, but turning to look at it, I said to Don
Luis that unless he covered His Majesty again, I would not
sit down. The respect and reverence that it produced was
such that I swear I lack the words to manifest it! For not
only the head and facial expression [...], but the hands and
feet were so marvellously executed (and with some drops of
blood trickling down) that everything looked like life
itself.19

Fig. 14

Nor has the power of Spanish sculpture affected only Spaniards. The appreciations quoted earlier in
this essay are by Severn Teakle Wallis, an American lawyer sent to Spain by the U.S. government to
investigate the titles to some public lands in Florida, and Francis Schroeder, then serving as secretary to
the commander of the U.S. squadron in the Mediterranean. Neither of them was sophisticated in
matters of art appreciation and neither had his experience of the sculptures shaped by a learned art
historian or critic. Like many others who first see Spanish polychrome sculpture on a trip to Spain or
in a rare special exhibition such as this one at The Matthiesen Gallery in London, Wallis and Schroeder
were simply and deeply moved by the immediacy of the works of art.

SUZANNE L. STRATTON-PRUITT

28