Painting and Devotion in Golden Age Iberia

Luis de Morales

Jean Andrews

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786836045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte europeo

Luis de Morales, known as El Divino because of his intensely religious subject matter, is the most significant and recognisable Spanish painter of the mid-sixteenth century, the high point of the Spanish and Portuguese counter-reformations. He spent almost his entire working life in the Spanish city of Badajoz, not far from the border with Portugal, and did not travel outside of a small area around that city, straddling the border. The social, political and cultural environment of Badajoz and its environs is crucial for a thorough understanding of Morales's output, and this book provides context in detail – considering literature and liturgical theatre, the situation of converted Jews and Muslims, the presence of Erasmianism, Lutheranism and Illuminism (Alumbradismo), devotional writing for lay people, and proximity to the Bragança ducal palace in Portugal as a means of explaining this most enigmatic of painters.

Badajoz in the 1540s: City of Joy

Morales had settled in Badajoz in 1539, having begun his artistic career in Plasencia in the north of Extremadura, the likely place of his birth.¹ His Virgin and Child with a Little Bird, dated 1546 and created for a church in Badajoz, is a remarkable piece, quite different from the work he produced in his mature period (fig. 1). It is light and airy, and reflects a society and a religious culture more open to joy than the austere devotional environment portrayed in his more mature work. It also suggests confidence and cosmopolitanism in the city itself which a critic as eminent as Rodríguez de Ceballos (though, in fairness, focusing specifically on the devotional context for Morales’s output) does not detect.

Writing in 1987, he repeats the poor opinion of Badajoz prevalent in the rest of Spain, characterising it as a site of normally unshakeable monotony, noting only three major court events in the years Morales lived there: the entry of the infanta Juana de Austria on her way to marry the Portuguese crown prince, João Manuel, her first cousin, in 1552; a visit by her only son, Sebastião I, in 1576, two years before his death at Ksar el-Kebir, Morocco; and the aforementioned passage of Felipe II in 1580–1 to claim his nephew’s vacant throne.² In the context of court life in Madrid and events in other major Spanish cities such as Seville or Valencia, Badajoz was indeed a place of minor importance. However, viewed from a Portuguese perspective, it assumes quite a different hue, and perhaps the proper referent and comparison for Badajoz ought to be Évora. Under Manuel I (1495–1521) and João III (1521–57), who developed the city and installed their courts there, Évora was one of the most eminent cultural centres in Portugal, becoming an archdiocese in 1540 and acquiring a Jesuit-sponsored university ten years later. Thus the Lisbon-based musicologist Carl Santiago Kastner argued, in 1957, that Badajoz was, even before the Spanish annexation of the Portuguese throne, a site of much commercial, cultural and court transit between the two kingdoms:

No hubo reyes, príncipes, princesas casaderas, embajadores, prelados, banqueros, artistas, letrados, mercaderes, artesanos, frailes y monjas que para ir y venir entre España y Portugal no prefiriesen el camino por Badajoz. Debido a la configuración del terreno, a las facilidades de comunicación, proporcionadas por tales condiciones geográficas, y a la cercanía entre centros culturales y eclesiásticos rayanos como Badajoz por un lado, y Elvas y Vila Viçosa por otro, los contactos e intercambios entre éstos fueron mucho más frecuentes, intensos, constantes y fecundos que entre otras ciudades fronterizas de aquende y allende del lindero, relativamente vecinas y casi todas ellas sedes episcopales como Tuy y Braga, Braganza y Zamora, Ciudad Rodrigo y Guarda, Castelo Branco y Coria, Ayamonte y Castro Marim.³

There were no kings, princes, betrothed princesses, ambassadors, prelates, bankers, artists, lettered men, merchants, artisans, friars and monks who, in order to come and go between Spain and Portugal, did not prefer to take the road through Badajoz. Because of the configuration of the land, of the communication facilities made possible by such a geographical configuration, and the nearness of cultural and ecclesiastical centres along the border such as Badajoz on one side and Elvas and Vila Viçosa on the other, contact and exchange between both of these was much more frequent, intense, constant and fertile than between other pairs of frontier cities, relatively close to one another and almost all episcopal seats, such as Tuy and Braga, Braganza and Zamora, Ciudad Rodrigo and Guarda, Castelo Branco and Coria, Ayamonte and Castro Marim.

In this sense, the most constant and comprehensive system of administrative links uniting Portugal to the kingdoms of the rest of the peninsula was rooted in the Church. From the Middle Ages, when the progress of the Christian Reconquest had enabled the religious orders to expand southwards, little distinction was made between Portugal and the other Christian kingdoms. Indeed, the major religious orders administered Portugal as part of Spain throughout this period. The seventeenth-century Dominican chronicler, José de Medrano, for example, records the founding of the convent of São Domingos in Évora, una de las ciudades más hermosas y ricas de Portugal/‘one of the most beautiful and richest cities of Portugal’, in 1286 under the province of Spain.⁴ The Carmelites administered Portugal as part of their province of Hispania from the foundation of their first convent in 1251 in Moura, south of the Alentejo near the frontier with Spain. Their Lisbon convent was founded in 1389, with the support of the Constable of Portugal, Nuno Álvares Pereira, and the Carmelite province of Portugal was created on the basis of these two substantial convents in 1423.⁵ The Discalced Carmelites, on the other hand, were very much newcomers on the Peninsula. Teresa of Ávila founded the first Discalced Carmelite convent, the female convent of St Joseph in Avila, in 1562.⁶ The order grew very rapidly after this, with the establishment of male and female foundations throughout Spain and Portugal. Up to 1612, Portugal and Baja Andalucía (the region around Seville) were administered as the province of St Philip. At the General Chapter held in the Castilian town of Pastrana, 80 km east of Madrid, in 1610, there was a motion that the rest of Andalusia should be incorporated into the province of St Philip. However, according to the Portuguese chronicler Belchor de Santa Anna, the Andalusians saw this as a measure to reduce the voting power of the Andalusian foundations and render the Castilian houses dominant on the Peninsula. The matter was put before Pope Paul V, and he decreed in 1612 that the Portuguese should separate from Seville and constitute the province of Portugal with its seat in Lisbon.⁷ Internal politics apart, this demonstrates that there was really no distinction to be drawn in the everyday observance of Catholicism on either side of the border, or in general in the guidance given on devotional practice. Indeed, Badajoz may have been 5 km from the border with Portugal for most of its modern existence, but it cannot be considered other than a culturally hybrid entity, inasmuch as the flow of people, ideas and trade over the border from one nation to the other took place, as Kastner observed, along its streets. The Portuguese city of Elvas, 10 km due west, while not as large, even then, as Badajoz, was nonetheless designated the seat of a diocese in 1570 – further evidence of the prosperity and cooperation in the border area in the period before the Restoration.⁸

In Morales’s time, there was a thriving and relatively informal practice of liturgical theatre in Badajoz, fomented by two of the several notable bishops of the mid-sixteenth century, the humanist Francisco de Navarra, appointed from 1545 to 1556, and Juan de Ribera from 1562 to 1568.⁹ Both of these churchmen went from Badajoz to more significant bishoprics: Navarra to become archbishop of Valencia (1556–63) and, in Ribera’s case, to be (concurrently) patriarch of Antioch and archbishop of Valencia (1568–1611) and Viceroy of Valencia (1602–4). Navarra and his successor, Cristóbal de Rojas y Sandoval, attended the Council of Trent; Navarra was present at the first convocation in 1545 and Rojas y Sandoval at the second between 1551 and 1552. The latter subsequently held a diocesan synod in Badajoz in 1560 to introduce the reforms of the Council.¹⁰ Marcel Bataillon, doyen of early modern French Hispanists, insists, in an article from 1940, that though there was a need to reform liturgical theatre in the mid-sixteenth century, this was not a Counter-Reformation reaction to Protestantism. Rather, liturgical theatre was overhauled because the Church in Spain had identified aspects of the pageantry which it deemed unacceptable when compared to similar practices elsewhere. Citing the views of the Augustinian theologian and philosopher Martín de Azpilcueta, he notes:

Su juicio tiene para nosotros tanto más valor cuanto que antes de enseñar en Salamanca y Coimbra había permanecido largo tiempo en Francia, tanto en París como en Toulouse y Cahors, y podía hacer comparaciones.¹¹

His opinion has much greater value for us inasmuch as, before teaching in Salamanca and Coimbra, he had lived for a long period in France, in Paris and in Toulouse and Cahors, and he was thus able to make comparisons.

In a treatise first published in 1545, the year the Council of Trent opened, Azpilcueta condemns the rambunctiousness and lack of respect for the liturgy in some Corpus Christi pageants:

más se ofende Dios hoy que se sirve en las invenciones profanas y gastos que se sacan el día del Corpus y otros en que se hacen semejantes procesiones.

God is today more offended than served by the profane theatrics and expense which are brought out on the day of Corpus Christi and others on which similar processions take place.

He has seen processions enter the church while the liturgy is being conducted, with dancing, singing, laughter and joking, which distracts both clergy and congregation from the seriousness of the festival. As far as he is concerned, in this sense, those Lutherans who got rid of the practice altogether had a point because of

las muchas profanidades y gentílicas vaciedades, y aun injuriosas invenciones que en muchas partes en ella se hacen pareciéndoles que más montan sus livianas invenciones, cantos y ruidos a la honra y la gloria del redentor que los graves oficios de la Santa Madre Iglesia.¹²

the many profanities and gentile idiocies, and even insulting theatrics which in many places are presented in [the Corpus Christi procession], it seeming [to the Lutherans] that their vulgar theatrics, songs and noise are more fully produced for the honour and glory of the Redeemer than the sacred offices of the Holy Mother Church.

Unlike the Lutherans, however, he opines that it would have been sufficient simply to get rid of those abuses and retain what was worthwhile in the processions, shortening them so that they finished by midday at the latest.¹³

Bataillon records that a series of decrees issued by provincial councils in Valencia, Toledo and Salamanca in 1565 and 1566 seemed to deal with the objections raised by Azpilcueta, without reducing the spectacles to colourlessness or undue solemnity. These decrees were also, of course, direct responses to the 1551 ruling on the signi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Badajoz in the 1540s: City of Joy
• 2 Badajoz in the 1550s: Iconographical Licence
• 3 Badajoz in the 1560s: Meditation on the Life and Death of Christ
• 4 Tridentine Badajoz and its Environs: The Model Male Penitent
• 5 Both Sides of the Border: The Two Franciscos
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography