As the years passed, and art in Seville grew older, many painters trod in the steps worn by these others. It is not possible, nor is it necessary, to wait to look at their pictures; too often they exaggerate the faults of the masters they copied, and by a slavish repetition of accepted ideas--the inevitable fault of the age--they weakened still further native art. And, when we come to the next century, which gives us Alonso Cano, sculptor, architect, and painter, described admirably by Lord Leighton as “an eclectic with a Spanish accent,” many of whose facile, meaningless pictures may be seen in Seville, to the much inferior work of the younger Herrera, and to the exaggerated over-statements of Juan de Valdés Leal, in whose art Sevillian painting may be said to die, we realise into what degradation pseudo-Italianism had dragged painting.
But there is a reverse side to the picture. The spirit of Spain was too strong to sleep in an art that was borrowed. Already Luis de Morales, a native of Estremadura, known as “the divine,” on account of the exclusively religious character of the subjects he painted, and of the strange intensity with which he impregnated them, had evolved for himself a sincere expression of Spanish art; already Navarrete, the mute painter of Navarre, had broken from conventions, and taken for himself inspiration from the marvellous pictures of Titian which he had seen at the Escorial; already, Theotócopuli, known better as El Greco, was painting with wonderful genius in Toledo, pictures, so new, so personal, that to-day they command the attention of the world. But Seville does not represent these painters.[B]
It has been the fashion, since the tradition was started by Cean Bermudez, to call Herrera _el viejo_ (1576-1656) “the anticipator of the true Spanish school.” Herrera had a studio in Seville, in which worked many painters, and among them Velazquez, Antonio Castillo y Saavedra, and perhaps Alonso Cano; and it seems certain that he owes his position to-day in large measure to this fact; had he not been for a few months the master of Velazquez his impossible art would remain unknown outside Seville. For the truth is Herrera said nothing that Roelas had not already said better.