Incomparable Realms: Spain during the Golden Age, 1500-1700

Jeremy Robbins

Reaktion Books, £25, 464 pages

Spain’s Golden Age spanned the reigns of five monarchs which form-ed a “lineage of piety”: Charles I (Charles V when Holy Roman Emperor), Philip II, Philip III, Philip IV, ending with the death in 1700 of Charles II, the “Bewitched”, “weak of limb and mind” after years of dynastic inbreeding. For much of the period Spain was a major, even domin-ant, European power, having consolidated the disparate kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula. It was Charles V who shaped its ideology and culture for those two centuries.

In this admirable and learned study Professor Jeremy Robbins reassesses the Spain of popular imagination – “angels and austerity, mor-ality and morbidity; Habsburg power and discrete opulence” – to examine afresh its culture and society, its art, literature, mystical theology (including St Teresa of Ávila and St John of the Cross with his infusion of the classical with the biblical), its ideology, doctrine and “moral polemic”.

Although the illustration on the dust jacket is The Virgin of the Navigators with arms out-stretched, the most favoured Habsburg Marian doctrine was the Immaculate Conception which formed one of the twin pillars upon which the dynasty’s piety rested; the other was devotion to the Blessed Sacrament.

Spain’s literary culture in poetry and prose, and its wider significance and influence, is highlighted in Cervantes’ Don Quixote – one of only three books that Charles V enjoyed reading – but Robbins does not neglect other figures, such as the Catalan poet Juan Boscan and the bucolic, pastoral poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega. The mystical poetry of St John of the Cross is seen “as on a dark night when a flash of lightning suddenly illuminates things and makes them clear and distinct”.

That darkness is also evident in the portraits of the Spanish kings where they are invariably dressed in black. It was not merely a fashion with the availability of black dye from Mexico, but signified a sense of continuity and authority; they had no need for bejewelled artistic flattery to display their power. Black also provides the background to still-life painting.

Here, as Robbins observes, conservative artists could test properties and pigments, an easier task than experimenting in the doctrinal minefield of Counter-Reformation painting. One of the book’s significant strengths is the author’s close and revealing readings of the paintings; never less than fascinating, illuminating and authoritative. The book includes 39 colour plates and numerous black-and-white images embedded in the text that immeasurably add to the reader’s understanding.

Royal iconography of the Golden Age had a propensity to include dwarves – a feature of court life – but, more importantly, marked the change and continuity of the dynasty which was “akin to the divine … eternally the same”. Royal portraiture showed how the artistic past was used to rejuvenate the pictorial present, and painting the king’s image played an important, perhaps decisive, part in shaping the cultural context of Habsburg rule. There was congruity, or synergy, between the Habsburgs and the Church, as between heaven and earth, although the Habsburgs did not so much co-opt the Church as the sacred.

Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) influenced royal portraiture and achieved “a certain beauty and monumentality from simplicity, not lavish excess”. His painting Meninas portrays the nature of the royal court, where people see and are seen, watch and are watched. Yet it is his non-royal, incomparable portrait of Juan de Pareja (himself an artist but also Velázquez’s slave) that is his crowning glory. It is hypnotic; de Pareja’s steady unyielding gaze – confident, assured, noble – belies his subservient status. Did we not know, it could be a portrait of a handsome aristocrat. It tot-ally subverts our preconceptions.

The book ends with a study of tapestries by Rubens. Commissioned by Philip II’s daughter Isabel Clare Eugenia, they show both the secular and the ecclesiastical hierarchies adoring the Sacred Host. It is a sublime fusion of the eternal and the temporal, the finite and the infinite, earth and heaven; it stands as a suitably soaring conclusion to the Spanish Golden Age, which was soon to pass away.

The Revd William Davage is a former Priest Librarian of Pusey House, Oxford

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