We must remember these things if we would understand the pictures in Seville.
But first we find ourselves carried away from the reality and darkness of life back to a happy childhood of art, as we look at the three fourteenth-century frescoes of the Virgin--the “Antigua,” in the chapel named after it in the Cathedral, “Nuestra Señora del Corral” in San Ildefonso, and “Señora Maria de Rocamador” in San Lorenzo--an art when the painter, less conscious of life and of himself, was content to paint beautiful patterns. In these three pictures--all that are left to us--we see the last of Byzantine art in Spain. The figures, with long oval faces all of one type, are placed stiffly against a background of Gothic gold. Look at “Señora Maria de Rocamador,” as she sits holding the Child upon her knees; while two little angels kneel, one upon the left, one on the right. She wears a blue robe, partly covered with a mantle of deep purple, very beautiful with ornaments of gold and bordered with gold braid. A bent coronet around her head stands out against the glowing halo; the background is all of gold woven into a delicate pattern. It is a picture of pure convention in which is no effort to carry the mind beyond what is actually seen; it makes its appeal just as so much decoration. This fresco, as well as the “Antigua” and “Nuestra Señora del Corral,” have been much repainted--the ill-fortune of so many early Spanish works.
But, in the fifteenth century, a new spirit came into art; and with the work of Juan Sánchez de Castro the school of Seville may be said to begin. No knowledge has come down to us of his life; we know only that he was painting in Seville between 1454 and 1516. In his great fresco of “San Cristóbal,” that covers the wall near to the main door in the old Church of San Julian--alas! now spoiled by re-painting and by the subsequent rotting away of the plaster--we find a different, human, almost playful treatment of a sacred story. And for the first time in Seville, we see the special Spanish quality, characteristic of the whole school from this time to the time of Goya, of rendering a scene just as the painter supposed it might have happened. “A child’s dream of a picture,” Mr Arthur Symons has called it. San Cristóbal, many times the size of life, stretching from floor to ceiling, fills the whole picture; he leans upon a pine-staff as he supports the Child Christ upon his shoulders, who holds in his hands a globe of the world upon which the shadow of a cross has fallen. The other figures, the hermit and two pilgrims with staves and cloaks, are quite small; they reach just to the Saint’s knees. And this immense grotesque figure is painted in all seriousness, as a child might picture such a scene. To understand the sincerity of the Spanish painter, we must compare his work with that other fresco of “San Cristóbal,” painted, much later, by Perez de Alesio, which is in the Cathedral. The Italian picture is an attempt to illustrate a popular miracle, perfectly unconvincing; De Castro’s Saint compels us to accept and realise what the painter himself believed in. This is the difference between them.