Hand in Hand. Sculpture and colour in the Spanish Golden Age

There are references to the art of sculpture and its first materials, such as clay, stone and bone, in the earliest accounts of the creation of human beings, starting with the Greek myths – the first man modelled by Prometheus or the stones that Deucalion and Pyrrha threw behind them after the flood – and continuing with the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Emulating humans through sculpture was soon considered necessary and natural. Represented in this form, the divinity also took on a more earthly and protective appearance, which was rendered more lifelike by colouring, an essential attribute of life as opposed to the pallor of death.

Colour was added to volume from Antiquity onwards both by using materials of varying hues and by applying pigments directly to the surfaces. Both possibilities coexisted in the Hispanic world of the Early Modern Age, where wood was the main material, enhanced with other media and refined polychrome work. The combination of sculpture and colour not only achieved excellent results in that period but also increased the persuasive and emotive power of devotional images, boosting their efficacy.

The corporeality of sculpture contributed to its direct and natural correspondence with reality, besides providing the divine with a tangible and human appearance that was made more credible by gestures. Devotional literature had the most famous images speak, move, change colour, grieve and weep – that is, engage directly with the faithful, as if they were truly alive.

Theologians and preachers encouraged these wondrous stories and many defended the palpable truthfulness of sculpture as opposed to the illusionism of painting, whose beauty was visible but ungraspable. However, painting’s greater narrative potential made it a useful means of recording miraculous events, helping to fix in viewers’ memories stories that blurred the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural.

Prints also played a key role in disseminating the main devotional sculptures. Thanks to the lightness and accessibility of paper, news of their miracle-working and healing properties spread through time and space.

The singularity and prestige of some devotional sculptures stemmed from legends that attributed their creation to angels’ workshops or biblical characters such as Nicodemus or Saint Luke. However, conventional sculptors of sacred figures also needed to be virtuous, because their task was more than simply an artistic exercise.

The cult of Saint Joseph and his carpenter’s profession gained particular importance. The workshop where Christ spent his childhood served as a metaphor for his subsequent martyrdom on the cross, while the sculptor’s painstaking work with wood became an image of Christian life as an exercise in deprivation and renunciation aimed at attaining eternity.

Along with the very common idea of God as a painter, sermons also used the image of the supreme sculptor. It was to him that humans owed their primary form, but it was up to each person, through their actions, to ‘polychrome’ the divine creation with greater or lesser success. Sculpture and painting thus formed a perfect partnership for telling sacred stories.

The combined action of sculpture and painting was aimed at achieving a lifelike portrayal of both anatomies and their textile coverings. The third dimension made saints’ humanity more credible, but its effect was only complete when colour was added. ‘Every figure, however perfect it may be in sculpture, is a corpse,’ wrote the Benedictine friar Gregorio de Argaiz in 1677, adding: ‘It is given life, and soul, and spirit, by the brush which represents the affects of the soul. Sculpture shapes tangible and palpable man with regard to all the limbs and parts that pertain to his corporeality; but painting gives him life’.

Owing to its low cost and deep-rooted tradition, wood became the quintessential material for sculpture. It could be coloured to imitate skin and also dressed with garments that could be adapted to the fashions of the time. Polychromy, whether applied by the maker of the carving or by a specialised artist, attained an impressive degree of technical sophistication and was highly regarded. The result could be enhanced with glued-on or real fabrics, as well as with jewels, ivory, glass or real hair. All this was done to create familiar and lifelike representations with which the faithful could readily identify.

The image of the Virgin of Solitude, which was venerated in the convent of La Victoria in Madrid from 1568 and perished in a fire in 1936, is a paradigm of the interrelationship between painting and sculpture. Created in a Tridentine courtly context as the emblem of a penitential confraternity under the patronage of Queen Elisabeth of Valois, it was designed for a purpose that gave it added value: to be paraded in processions.

Its uniqueness also stemmed from its miraculous crafting. Legend had it that its creator, Gaspar Becerra, was a sort of medium in contact with the divinity, which gave him instructions for creating the iconic work: a dressable sculpture in simple black and white mourning attire. Here we find a new connection with Antiquity, where black was an established visual expression of grief and death.

The Virgin of Solitude also exemplifies the potential of the interaction between sculpture, painting and printmaking. Reproduced and copied endlessly, and recreated and reinterpreted by the most famous artists and in all media as in a play of mirrors, it became one of the most distinctly Hispanic objects of devotion, spreading from the Philippines to New Spain and from Sicily to Flanders.

The preliminary designs of altars and altarpieces are some of the most interesting expressions of the interrelationship between sculpture and painting. During religious services, words and music merged with these spectacular structures to create a total work, like a grand-scale opera.

Coverings were devised for special occasions, such as the Holy Week Lenten veils: large curtains depicting the altarpieces they concealed in pale, deathly tones. These paintings imitating three-dimensional sculptures and architectural structures gave them a new appearance in a suggestive play of flatness and volume.

The ‘true portraits’ painted of devotional sculptures with a particularly large following were based on a similar idea. These trompe l’oeil pictures of sacred figures showed them on their own altars, often flanked by curtains which, although usually kept closed in real life to conceal the mystery, were always drawn back in the paintings. This made it possible to view them more intimately and closely, because ‘painting and sculpture, taking each other by the hand, are a wondrous sight’.