From Gothic to Goya. Spanish Paintings from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

Chronologically, the display spans a period from the late 15th century to the early 19th – from the late Gothic to the “Golden Age” of Spanish painting. The exhibits include works by Luis de Morales, El Greco. Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Antonio Pereda, Diego Velazquez and Francisco Goya. These artists continued the traditions of the masters of the past and initiated a new stage in the history of Western European art, forming an independent national school.

The foundation upon which art developed in Spain was direct observation of the world around. That determined the freshness of the devices used by Spanish artists and the national character of their painting. They rarely turned to mythology. Their main subjects were predominantly Gospel episodes and the lives of the saints. Genre painting, landscape and the still life played more of a subsidiary role than an independent one. The sole secular genre that developed extensively was portraiture.

The particular flourishing of culture came in the 17th century, which has become known as the Golden Age, when Spanish painting held one of the leading places among the European schools. Surprisingly, this coincided with a time of political and economic decline. In contrast to other countries, there is less consistency and stylistic unity in the overall picture of the development of Spanish art. Strict restraint and asceticism coexist with unbridled sumptuousness, hidebound practices with artistic boldness, and an archaizing tendency with innovative approaches that were ahead of their time.

The exhibition features eighteen paintings from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and four more from the State Hermitage’s own collection of Spanish paintings. Some of the works were once in the picture gallery of the Imperial Hermitage and formed pairs. Between 1924 and 1930, those pairs were separated. They include Velazquez’s Portrait of the Count-Duke Olivares (Pushkin Museum) and Portrait of Philip IV (Hermitage); Antonio Pereda’s Flight into Egypt (Pushkin Museum) and Crucifixion (Hermitage); Murillo’s Girl with a Basket of Fruit (Pushkin Museum) and Boy with a Dog (Hermitage). The exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see these companion pieces hung next to one another as they were 200 years ago.

The curators are Sviatoslav Konstantinovich Savvateyev, senior researcher in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art, and Svetlana Gennadyevna Zagorskaya, leading researcher in the Old Masters Art Department of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

A scholarly catalogue has been published for the exhibition – Ot Gotika do Goyi. Ispanskaya zhivopis’ iz sobraniya Gosudarstvennogo museya izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv imeni A.S. Pushkina (State Hermitage Publishing House, Saint Petersburg, 2024). The texts are by Sviatoslav Savvateyev and Svetlana Zagorskaya.

The exhibition in the Twelve-Column Hall (Hall 244) can be visited by all holders of entry tickets to the Main Museum Complex until 7 July 2024.

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More about the exhibition

The display opens with works of Spanish Gothic painting, something rarely found in museums worldwide. The Gothic style that once held sway in Spain is reflected in pictures showing scenes from the life of Christ and The Archangel Michael Weighing the Souls of the Departed.

The late Spanish Renaissance gave the world such striking and original artists as Luis de Morales (c. 1515 (or 1509) – 1586) and El Greco (Dominikos Theotokopoulos, 1541/42–1614). Morales’s works on religious subjects are filled with profound personal experience, and in his interpretation of them we can sense echoes of moods characteristic for the artist’s contemporary reality. One example is the image of Christ that he created in the painting Ecce Homo from the Pushkin Museum.

Morales’s oeuvre is in harmony with the art of El Greco. The Greek-born artist arrived in his new country at the age of 35. A mature master, with established views and beliefs, who had learnt professional skills in his Cretan homeland, Venice and Rome, it might seem that he could count on success. However, El Greco’s art was alien to the atmosphere of the Escorial, the residence for the decoration of which King Philip II of Spain was gathering a team of artists. El Greco failed to become a court painter. As José de Siguensa, the chronicler of the Escorial, plainly explains, El Greco’s paintings, while executed with great skill, displeased the King and his entourage because the saints depicted by the artist “do not evoke a desire to pray”. The ancient city of Toledo became the artist’s creative base. There, among educated people, writers, artists and musicians who understood the contradictions of Spain at that time, El Greco’s art flourished.

The turn of the 17th century saw the formation of an independent national style. In the work of Spanish artists features were growing stronger that would determine the main characteristics of the heyday of the nation’s art: freshness in the perception and interpretation of the world around, an inclination to the dramatic and spirituality in the images. The new style developed across the country, but above all in the leading artistic centres – Madrid, Toledo, Seville and Valencia.

The constellation of great 17th-century Spanish artists begins with Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652). A Spaniard by birth, he spent almost his entire life in Italy. This artist did, however, work at the court of the Spanish viceroys in Naples, was always surrounded by compatriots and retained close ties to his homeland. An interest in the reality around him and dramatic situations, together with the use of contrasting lighting, formed the basis of Ribera’s output. In Saint Onuphrius the artist’s gifts as a colourist attain perfection. The treatment of religious subjects as something really happening, closeness to life coupled, nonetheless, with the monumentalizing and heroizing of the personages of Christian legends are features that Ribera shares with other Spanish artists of the 1600s.

The artistic ideals of 17th-century Spain were brilliantly embodied in the work of Francisco de Zurbarán (1598 – с. 1664), who played an important role in the evolution of Spanish Realism. He belonged to the generation whose output advances Spanish painting to one of the leading places in Europe. The display includes such works as The Christ-Child Blessing and Madonna and Child, both from the Pushkin Museum. The images of their subjects are full of piety, but their religious zeal is not ecstatic, as it is with El Greco. Hidden behind the outward calm there is a deep sense of the drama of life. The artist usually painted his personages from living models, and so they stand out for their strong portrait characteristics.

Diego Velazquez (1599–1660) is one of the most famous Spanish painters of the Golden Age. In contrast to the majority of his countrymen who worked predominantly on religious subjects, Velazquez would become one of the first artists in whose output genre painting assumed a leading role. In 1623 the artist moved to Madrid, where he was appointed chief painter to the King. Velazquez’s legacy in portraiture includes grand compositions in which he follows the principles of the Baroque formal portrait that go back to Rubens and Van Dyck. These are represented in the exhibition by the paired likenesses of King Philip IV and the all-powerful minister of the Spanish court, Count-Duke Olivares.

The best artists active in mid-17th-century Madrid included Antonio Pereda (1608–1678). His oeuvre is represented in the display by a picture of The Repentant Mary Magdalene (Pushkin Museum) and a pair of still lifes from the collections of the Moscow museum and the Hermitage. There is usually only a small number of objects in Golden Age still lifes, and consequently not a single detail escapes the viewer. In the second half of the century, the Spanish still life became less elevated to some degree. That tendency is evident in, among others, the works of Antonio Pereda, which are overloaded in a way uncharacteristic of pictures from the earlier period. This artist does masterfully convey the textures of things, splendidly painting the surface of glazed pottery with a relief pattern, clear glass and heavy fabric.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682) became widely known beyond the Iberian peninsula sooner than other Spanish artists. His work was bound up with the finest traditions of the nation’s art in its Golden Age. Murillo was born in Seville and lived his whole life there. He succeeded Zurbarán in the post of the city’s chief artist. In 1660 he became president of the Academy of Arts in Seville. His works are impeccably precise in their composition, rich and harmonious in their colour schemes. Murillo received many commissions from monasteries, convents and churches, while also devoting much attention to genre painting. In contrast to many of the artist’s pictures on religious subjects, the best of his genre scenes are not sentimental at all. They clearly show a keenly observant eye. In the 1650s he produced Boy with a Dog in the Hermitage collection and its companion piece Girl with a Basket of Fruit (Pushkin Museum), which can both be seen in the exhibition. Murillo’s oeuvre brought the Golden Age of Spanish art to a close.

Francisco Goya (1746–1828) laid the beginnings for the development of realistic painting of the modern age, becoming the embodiment of an entire era. A considerable place in the output of one of the most striking representatives of Romanticism was taken by the portrait. Few of Goya’s contemporaries can compare to him in the breadth of his range of imagery, the diversity of his characterizations and his exceptionally keen, personal perception of his model. In his work he sought to reveal the rich depths and inner passion of a female subject. An example is provided in the exhibition by the Portrait of the Artist Lola Jimenes from the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.