Herrera the Younger. The Absolute Baroque

Francisco de Herrera the Younger (Seville, 1627–Madrid, 1685) is one of the least known artists of the Spanish Golden Age despite being renowned in his lifetime as a painter, draughtsman, engraver, architect, theatrical designer and engineer. He was also a notable fresco painter, but that aspect of his activities is now completely unknown as none of his mural projects have survived. Herrera trained in Seville, probably with his father, the painter Francisco de Herrera the Elder. In the early 18th century the writer on art Antonio Palomino described him as polemical, valiant and gallant, with a lively wit and an awareness of his own worth. Palomino’s observation that Herrera was greatly envied was also made by contemporaries of the painter such as the priest and scholar Fernando de la Torre Farfán and the canon of Seville cathedral Francisco Barrientos. The time Herrera spent in Rome was crucial for his formation as it was there that he assimilated the Baroque language of Bernini and Pietro da Cortona. His subsequent arrival in Madrid had a galvanising effect on local artists of his generation, such as Francisco Rizi, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Claudio Coello. Similarly, his activity in Seville is essential for an understanding of the evolution of Murillo, whom Herrera may have ousted from some projects, as documentary sources suggest. Herrera’s importance lies in his ability to reinterpret the magnificence and propaganda characteristic of the Baroque through an ingenious fusion of the arts and his particular interpretation of the “absolute Baroque” that he learned in Italy. For that alone and for his subsequent influence Herrera deserves the place of honour he has been denied in Spanish art history. The present exhibition aims to rectify that neglect by presenting the finest examples of his work, many of them specially restored for this occasion and shown here from a new perspective.

Herrera was in Italy from 1648 to 1653. During that time he produced a series of prints of decorative cartouches now in the library of the Spanish national church of Santa Maria in Monserrato degli Spagnoli. Together with this graphic evidence, paintings by the artist are documented in the collection of the canon Giovan Carlo Vallone, archivist of the church of Santa Maria ad Martyres (the Pantheon) and academician of the Virtuosi, and that of Paolo Giordano Orsini, 2nd Duke of Bracciano, academician of San Luca and a friend of Bernini. In both collections Herrera’s works are described as still lifes of fish and the artist is identified as “il Spagnolo”, confirming Palomino’s statement that in Italy Herrera was referred to as “Il Spagnolo de gli pexe” [the Spaniard of the fish].

During this period Herrera should be associated with what are now termed the painters of the dissenso: a varied community who survived in Rome on the chance of securing commissions from picture dealers, who prioritized colour in their work and who above all practised drawing as a learning method at private academies. It is in the latter discipline that this exhibition is able to offer one of its most fundamental contributions as it reconstructs all Herrera the Younger’s Roman graphic output based on the identification of a group of drawings previously attributed to the circle of the Milanese painter Pier Francesco Cittadini who was active in Bologna and Rome. These sheets are essential for an understanding of Herrera’s formation and creative process and they reappear in some of the forms and the details of figures in his subsequent paintings, such as The Triumph of Saint Hermenegild and The Dream of Saint Joseph in the Prado.

Following his Italian years, Herrera is documented in Madrid in 1654 in relation to the commission from Juan Chumacero de Sotomayor, a former ambassador to the Vatican, for the principal altarpiece of the Barefoot Carmelite church in the Spanish capital. Herrera’s Triumph of Saint Hermenegild made a powerful impression on his contemporaries, generating both praise and envy. So great was its success that in a characteristic display of vanity, the artist said that “the painting should be greeted with trumpets and cymbals”. This declaration not only conveys his particular personality but also his approach to painting: a reflection of magnificence and Baroque triumphalism in line with the art of Pietro da Cortona and Bernini’s “bel composto”. The prestige Herrera achieved with this work was confirmed by subsequent commissions and recorded in contemporary sources, which compared him with the celebrated ancient Greek painter Apelles. He acquired equal fame in Seville during the time he lived there, from 1655 to 1660, where he undertook important commissions for paintings such as The Triumph of the Sacrament of the Eucharist and The Ecstasy of Saint Francis, both for the cathedral. In those projects Herrera pursued a direction both different and innovative in relation to Murillo, resulting in two works in which colour and the dramatic use of shadow emphasise their theatricality.

Herrera the Younger saw drawing as the origin of all his activities and the basis of his art. It was his father, another extremely gifted draughtsman, who instructed him in the medium and also in engraving. Herrera’s surviving drawings are essential for an understanding of his creative process and provide exceptional evidence for knowledge of the different facets of his work as an oil and fresco painter, an engraver and a designer of altarpieces and temporary architectural structures, funerary monuments, tapestries, letters patent of nobility and luxury objects. Together with lost compositions known from other sources, all these works demonstrate his powers of invention and are more than sufficient to justify the words of Juan de Tejada, a canon of Seville cathedral, regarding the artist’s abilities and diligent application to his work, which resulted in him “achieving more and of better quality than others in twice the time”. Above all, however, Herrera’s graphic work is essential for understanding the ideas proposed in this exhibition regarding the fusion of the arts and the concept of the “total” artist, without which the Baroque is not fully comprehensible.

Paintings for the Augustinian Recollects in Madrid

Herrera executed a series of paintings for the dome and crossing arches of the conventual church of San Agustín in Madrid, a building that occupied the site of the present-day National Library of Spain. Numbering eight in total, the paintings were probably set into the interior sections of the dome, the majority depicting Doctors of the Church and Augustinian saints. The earliest writers to refer to them, including Father Antonio Conca in 1793, described them as fresco paintings. They are in fact monumental compositions on canvas devised to be seen di sotto in sù and executed with a dynamic line and dragged brushstroke typical of Herrera’s technique as a fresco painter. Their recent restoration has reinstated the correct chromatic range and made it easier to appreciate their original oval format, which corresponded to the location for which they were painted.