INCHOATE THOUGHTS
November 22, 2009
Hi,
Recently I had the good fortune to visit Indianapolis, where I was
able to spend several hours in the best pre-modern art exhibition I can
remember seeing in ages, Sacred Spain:
Art and Belief in the Spanish World at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
I have to admit to having expected good things from the organizer, Ronda Kasl,
Senior Curator of European Art before 1800 at the IMA, whom I have long
admired. She and her team surpassed themselves.
The exhibition is arranged in six thematic sections, “In Defense
of Images,” “True Likeness,” Moving Images,” “With the Eyes of the Soul,”
“Visualizing Sanctity,” and “Living with Images.” The selection of
artworks—paintings, sculpture, illustrated books, metalwork—perfectly balances
the aesthetic command that each object exerts with the role each plays in
thematic exemplification. Generous grants allowed Ronda to research the topic
in depth, tracing relatively unfamiliar examples of Spanish and Spanish
colonial religious art not only in the US and the UK, but in museums, churches,
and monasteries in Spain, Mexico and Peru.
Admirably, Ronda observes no status hierarchy among metropolitan
and colonial artworks. She freely mixes objects from Spain and America. For
instance, in the section “True Likeness,” large trompe l’oeil paintings
depicting venerated sculpted images, one of the Virgen de los Desamparados
(patroness of Valencia), another of the Virgen de la Soledad (venerated in
Madrid) are shown near one another. The former, dated 1644 (Real Monasterio de
las Descalzas Reales, Madrid), is by the Valencian, Tomás Yepes, whereas the
latter (circa 1690; San Pedro Museo de Arte, Puebla) is by Cristóbal de
Villalpando, an artist who was born, worked, and died in Mexico City. In both
cases, the painters have exerted themselves to the utmost in order to evoke the
presence of a distant cult object. Close by, borrowed from a private
collection, is an extraordinary accoutrement of another venerated sculpture of
the Virgin, a seventeenth-century gold crown, amended in the eighteenth
century, encrusted with over 200 emeralds, made to adorn the statue of the
Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in the cathedral of Popayán, New Granada
(now Colombia).
Throughout the exhibition, Ronda Kasl explores how Spanish and
Spanish American artists used verisimilitude to convey abstract doctrines and
to promote devotion by evoking a heightened awareness of the senses. Sacred
visions play a large role in such works, including Antonio Montúfar’s 1628
painting of Saint Francis of Assisi
Appearing before Pope Nicholas V (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). So do
images themselves, as in the case of The
Miracle of Saint Dominic in Soriano by Alonso Cano (Instituto Gómez-Moreno,
Granada) in which the Virgin Mary, Saint Mary Magdelene, and Saint Catherine
are shown appearing to a Dominican friar in 1530 with a true likeness in the
form of a painting of the founder of his order. Reflexivity in art-making takes
a specifically religious turn in the Spanish tradition, and nowhere is it more
possible to gain an appreciation of the intensity with which it could be
pursued than in this extraordinary exhibition. This is a single venue show, so,
if at all possible, get to Indianapolis before it closes on January 3, 2010!
Ever,
Ivan