Yet, be it remembered, that the Spanish painters, more perhaps than the painters of any other school, could imitate and absorb the art of others without degenerating wholly into copyists. The temper of the nation was strong. Even now it was not so much a _copying_ of Italian art, rather it was an unfortunate blending of style which took away for a time the dignity and strength which is the beauty of Spanish painting. Thus, Peter van Kempeneer, a Flemish painter, known better in Spain as Pedro Campaña, who, strangely enough, was the first to bring the Italian influence to Seville, was inspired alternately by the Northern and Italian styles; and in such a picture as his famous “Descent from the Cross,” still in the Sacristía Mayor of the Cathedral, with its crude colour and extravagant action, we find him--in an effort, it is said, to imitate Michael Angelo--being more Spanish than the Spaniards. Indeed, this picture, which made such strong appeal to Murillo that he chose to rest beneath it in death, gives us a very curious, left-handed fore-vision, as it were, of the marvellous work of Ribera. In the large altar-piece, of many compartments, of the Capilla del Mariscal in the Cathedral, the first picture painted by Campaña, when, in 1548, he came to Seville, we see him a realist in the portraits of the donors, painted with admirable truth; but in the “Purification of the Virgin,” the scene that fills the lower compartment of the altar, he is Italian and demonstrative--spectacular movement, meaningless gestures, all done for effect.
The Italian influence, the _buena manera_ it was called in Seville, is more insistent in Luis de Vargas, whose painting was contemporary with that of Campaña. He was the first painter of Seville to submit himself wholly to Italy, and most often he was inspired by Raphael. Much of his work has perished; of the once famous frescoes, “his greatest gift to Seville,” nothing remains except a few colour traces upon the Giralda Tower. De Vargas, the pupil probably of Perino del Vagas, brought back as the reward of twenty-eight years of painting in Italy much craft skill; and his work, as we see it in the “Pietà,” in Santa Maria la Blanca, in the earlier “Nativity,” and, even more, in his masterpiece, the popular “La Gamba,” both in the Cathedral, gives us a borrowed art, academic and emotional. Only in portraiture does he say what he has to say for himself. The portrait of Fernando de Contreras, in the Sacristía de los Calices, is a portrait of sincerity and character, in which is the Spanish insistence on detail, unpleasant detail even, as in the ill-shaven cheeks rendered with such exact care. Contrast this portrait with his other pictures, so extravagant, with such futile gesticulation, to understand how a really capable painter lost his sincerity, as just then it was lost in all Spanish painting. In this effort to be Italian, De Vargas’ natural gift of reality, as we see it, for instance, in the “Christ” of Santa Maria la Blanca, or in the peasant boy of the Cathedral “Nativity,” was overclouded, mingled curiously enough with a Raphaelesque sweetness. It was not that this painter did not realise the scenes that he depicts--yes, and depicts with passion--do we not know the sincere piety of his life?--but he used to express them an art that was not his own, an art he was temperamentally unfitted to understand.