In the smaller pictures of Sánchez de Castro that remain to us, such, for instance, as the panel of the “Madonna with St Peter and St Jerome,” once in San Julian, but now in the Cathedral, we find him more bound by convention, less himself. We see the immense debt Spanish painting owed to Flemish art. And this influence, always so beneficial, the Northern art being, for reasons of race not possible to state here, the true affinity of Spain in art, remains, with different and more certain knowledge, in the “Pietà” of Juan Nuñez, which still hangs in the Cathedral where it was painted. It meets us again in the fine and interesting “Entombment” by Pedro Sánchez, a painter of whom we know nothing, except that his name is given by Cean Bermudez among the illustrious artists of Spain. The picture may be seen in the collection of Don José López Cepero, at No. 7 Plaza de Alfaro, the house in which Murillo is said to have lived. In all three pictures, and in other work of the same period not possible to mention here, we are face to face with that special Spanish trait, the pre-occupation with grief, that is quite absent from the early fourteenth-century Madonnas, as from the simple child-art of De Castro’s “San Cristóbal.” The shadow of the Inquisition had fallen; art, the handmaid of the Church, could express itself no longer in quaint and beautiful symbols. Instead, it had to force itself to be taken seriously, being occupied wholly with emphatic statements, its aim an insistence on the relation of human life to the divine life.
Juan Nuñez, once, at least, in those pictures in the Cathedral in which he has painted the archangels Michael and Gabriel quite gaily, their wings bright with peacock’s feathers, returns to the child-humour of De Castro. And Nuñez carries us forward to Alejo Fernandez, the most important painter of this early period, much of whose work remains for us in the Cathedral and in the old churches of Seville.
Go to the suburb of Triana, and in the Church of Santa Ana there is the sweetest Madonna and Child, in which we find a new suggestion in the joy of the Mother in her Babe, a human attitude, making the picture something more than mere illustration. And we notice a delicate care for beauty found very rarely in Seville, perhaps never as perfectly as in the work of this painter. The “Virgen de la Rosa” is the name given to the picture. The Mother sits enthroned under a canopy of gold, in a beautiful robe of elaborate pattern, pale gold on brown. She holds a white rose out to her Child. Typical of Fernandez is this fortunate use of the flower; typical, too, of his new mood of invention is the small landscape of rocky and wooded country that fills the distance. The gracious pose of the Virgin, the beauty in the Child, show an advance in ease upon earlier pictures. But the other figures, four angels who guard the Mother, all posed a little awkwardly, suggest a scheme on whose design the early Byzantine models may have had a forming influence, though the result is different enough. For Fernandez understood the very spirit of the Renaissance; he saw life beautifully and strongly. The attraction of the picture is in its effect of joy, in the charming way in which it forms a pattern of beautiful colour, and in its new sense of humanity that carries us beyond the scene itself.