Exhibition-goers in London are having their abstract notions of God challenged by old Spanish masters at the National Gallery exhibition, “The Sacred made Real”. In their fight to beat back the Lutherian challenge of protestantism, with its rejection of religious imagery, these artists stripped down their work into a direct, vivid form.
Alonso Cano, The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, also known as The Miracle of the Lactation, about 1657–60, © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
“The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux”, by Alonso Cano, gives us a taste of the “real” we’re dealing with here. Also known as “The Miracle of the Lactation”, this painting depicts a statue of the Virgin coming to life and projectile lactating in the direction of the Saint, after his demand that she “show [herself] to be a mother”. The statue of Mary mutates from a devotional object into the tangible flesh of a mother. The Virgin mother could be depicted metaphorically or as an ethereal vision. Cano makes it real.
Cano’s literal representation of lactation is minor compared with the blood, flesh and compassion in the rest of the show. Depictions of the mourning Virgin, the penitent Magdalene, devoted saints and a bloody, beaten and crucified Christ were designed to inspire awe in the Catholic public. Surprisingly lifelike, the subjects appeal directly to human emotion and empathy: the agony and ecstasy of the Counter Reformation in all its gory detail.
The sculptures, which have been neglected by the keepers of the Canon and have never been exhibited outside of Spain until now, are alarming in their attention to detail. As with Cano’s painting of the lactating Virgin, they are neither sanitized nor metaphorical. Far from it. The artists sought to render fleshy humanity in as much detail as possible – from glass eyes to fingernails fashioned from bull’s horn, eyelashes of real hair to stained red cork as congealing blood.
Particularly gruesome is Juan de Mesa’s “Head of John the Baptist” from Seville Cathedral. The severed head lies on its side revealing the inner workings of the human anatomy. Carved out of wood and polychromed (painted), these sculptures are a marvel of seventeenth century special effects and have the same uncanny qualities found in the contemporary hyperrealist sculptures of Ron Mueck or Duane Hanson.
Gregorio Fernández, Dead Christ (detail), 1625-30, © Photo Imagen M.A.S. Courtesy of Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
While these devotional sculptures are still in use in Spain and paraded through the streets at Easter, “The Sacred Made Real” reevaluates their aesthetic qualities, drawing comparisons between the two dimensional and the three dimensional. Many seventeenth century Spanish artists trained as both sculptors and painters and the exhibition argues that the paintings, with their emphasis on sculptural human forms, take their cue from polychromed sculptures. “The Immaculate Conception” by Velazquez is described as “statuesque” and having a “strong sense of the three-dimensional”, while the immediacy of sculpture is translated into intense chiaroscuro in Zurbarán’s painting “Christ on the Cross”.
But despite the academic and aesthetic curatorial focus, the reaction from the public has been more visceral than intellectual. On encountering Gregorio Fernandez’s “Dead Christ”, visitors become reverently silent, pausing for longer than at any other exhibit as if contemplating The Dead Christ himself. Skillfully executed, the sculpture represents such a universal image of death and suffering, that it seems almost disrespectful not to take a moment to reflect. We are caught between the abstract sacred and the corporeal physicality of the works. The effect is tremendous and disturbing.
The Sacred Made Real is on at the National Gallery in London until January 24, then it is coming to the National Gallery of Art in Washington from February 28 through May 31
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