readers have not been uninterested in following our brief sketch of the remarkable men who for four hundred years rendered this quaint old Gothic city famous for its artistic splendours, we retrace our steps, halting and perplexed among so many pleasant ways, blooming flowers, and brilliant bowers, to the magnificent, albeit gloomy Escurial, where Philip II. lavished the wealth of his mighty empire in calling forth the most vigorous energies of Spanish and of foreign art.

For more than thirty years did the astonished shepherds of the Guadaramas watch the mysterious pile growing under scaffolding alive with armies of workmen; and often, while the cares of the Old World and the New-to say nothing of that other World, which was seldom out of Philip's thoughts, and to which his cruel fanaticism hurried so many wretches before their time-might be supposed to demand his attention at Madrid, were they privileged to see their mighty monarch perched on a lofty ledge of rock, for hours, intently gazing upon the rising walls and towers which were to redeem his vow to St Laurence at the battle of Saint Quentin, and to hand down, through all Spanish time, the name and fame of the royal and religious founder. On the 23d of April 1563, the first stone of this Cyclopean palace was laid, under the direction of Bautiste di Toledo, at whose death, in 1567, the work was continued by Juan de Herrera, and finally perfected by Leoni (as to the interior decorations) in 1597. Built in the quaint unshapely form of St Laurence's gridiron, the Escurial is doubtless open to much severe criticism; but the marvellous grandeur, the stern beauty, and the characteristic effect of the gigantic pile, must for ever enchant the eyes of all beholders, who are not doomed by perverse fate to look through the green spectacles of gentle dulness. But it is not our purpose to describe the Escurial; we only wish to bring before our readers the names and merits of a few of the Spanish artists, who found among its gloomy corridors or sumptuous halls

niches in the temple of fame, and in its saturnine founder the most gracious and munificent of patrons. Suffice it, then, to say of the palaceconvent, in Mr Stirling's graceful words, that "Italy was ransacked for pictures and statues, models and designs; the mountains of Sicily and Sardinia for jaspers and agates; and every sierra of Spain furnished its contribution of marble. Madrid, Florence, and Milan supplied the sculptures of the altars; Guadalajara and Cuenca, gratings and balconies; Saragossa the gates of brass; Toledo and the Low Countries, lamps, candelabra, and bells; the New World, the finer woods; and the Indies, both East and West, the gold and gems of the custodia, and the five hundred reliquaries. The tapestries were wrought in Flemish looms; and, for the sacerdotal vestments, there was scarce a nunnery in the empire, from the rich and noble orders of Brabant and Lombardy to the poor sisterhoods of the Apulian highlands, but sent an offering of needlework to the honoured fathers of the Escurial."

We could wish to exclude from our paper all notice of the foreign artists, whose genius assisted in decorating the new wonder of the world; but how omit from any Escurialian or Philippian catalogue the names of Titian and Cellini, Cambiaso and Tibaldi? For seven long years did the great Venetian labour at his famous Last Supper, painted for, and placed in the refectory; and countless portraits by his fame-dealing pencil graced the halls and galleries of the Palatian convents. In addition to these, the Pardo boasted eleven of his portraits; among them, one of the hero Duke Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, who has received a second grant of renown-let us hope a more lasting one*-from the poetic chisel of Marochetti, and stands now in the great square of Turin, the very impersonation of chivalry, horse and hero alike κυδεϊ γαιῶν.

The magnificent Florentine contributed "the matchless marble crucifix behind the prior's seat in the choir," of which Mr Stirling says

"Never was marble shaped into a sublimer image of the great sacrifice for man's atonement." Luca Cambiaso, the Genoese, painted the Martyrdom of St Laurence for the high altar of the church-a picture that must have been regarded, from its subject and position, as the first of all the Escurial's religious pictures, -besides the vault of the choir, and two great frescoes for the grand stair

case.

Pellegrino Tibaldi, a native of the Milanese, came at Philip's request to the Escurial in 1586. He, too, painted a Martyrdom of Saint Laurence for the high altar, but apparently with no better success than his immediate predecessor, Zuccaro, whose work his was to replace. But the ceiling of the library was Tibaldi's field of fame; on it he painted a fresco 194 feet long by 30 wide, which still speaks to his skill in composition and brilliancy in colouring. Philip rewarded him with a Milanese marquisate and one hundred thousand

crowns.

66

Morales, the first great devotional painter of Castile, on whom his admiring countrymen bestowed the soubriquet of divine"-with more propriety, it must be confessed, than their descendants have shown in conferring it upon Arguelles--contributed but one picture to the court, and none to the Escurial; but in Alonzo Sanchez Coello, born at Benifayrô, in Valencia, we find a famous native artist decorating the superb walls of the new palace. While at Madrid he was lodged in the Treasury, a building which communicated with the palace by a door, of which the King kept a key; and often would the royal Macenas slip thus, unobserved by the artist, into his studio. Emperors and popes, kings and queens, princes and princesses, were alike his friends and subjects; but we are now only concerned to relate that, in 1582, he painted "five altar-pieces for the Escurial, each containing a pair of saints." Far more of interest, however, attaches itself to the name and memory of Juan Fernandez Navarete, "whose genius was no less remarkable than his infirmities, and whose name El Mudo, the dumb painter-is as familiar to Europe as

his works are unknown," (vol. i. p. 250.) Born at Logroño in 1526, he went in his youth to Italy. Here he attracted the notice of Don Luis Manrique, grand-almoner to Philip, who procured him an invitation to Madrid. He was immediately set to work for the Escurial; and in 1571 four pictures, the Assumption of the Virgin, the Martyrdom of St James the Great, St Philip, and a Repenting St Jerome, were hung in the sacristy of the convent, and brought him five hundred ducats. In 1576 he painted, for the reception-hall of the convent, a large picture representing Abraham receiving the three Angels. "This picture," says Father Andres Ximenes, quoted by Mr Stirling, (vol. i. p. 255,)" so appropriate to the place it fills, though the first of the master's works that usually meets the eye, might, for its excellence, be viewed the last, and is well worth coming many a league to see." An agreement, bearing date the same year, between the painter and the prior, by which the former covenanted to paint thirty-two large pictures for the side altars, is preserved by Cean Bermudez; but El Mudo unfortunately died when only eight of the series had been painted. On the 28th of March 1579 this excellent and remarkable painter died in the 53d year of his age. A few years later, Juan Gomez painted from a design of Tibaldi a large picture of St Ursula, which replaced one of Cambiaso's least satisfactory Escurialian performances.

While acres of wall and ceiling were being thus painted in fresco, or covered by large and fine pictures, the Escurial gave a ready home to the most minute of the fine arts: illuminators of missals, and painters of miniatures, embroiderers of vestments, and designers of altar-cloths, found their labours appreciated, and their genius called forth, no less than their more aspiring compeers. Fray Andrez de Leon, and Fray Martin de Palencia, enriched the Escurial with exquisite specimens of their skill in the arts of miniature-painting and illuminating; and under the direction of Fray Lorenzo di Monserrate, and Diego Rutiner, the conventual school of embroidery produced frontals and dalmatics,

copes, chasubles, and altar-cloths, of rarest beauty and happiest designs. The goldsmiths and silversmiths, too, lacked not encouragement in this greatest of temples. Curious was the skill, and cunning the hand, which fashioned the tower of gold and jasper tocontain the Escurial's holiest relique, -a muscle, singed and charred, of St Laurence and no doubt that skill was nobly rewarded.

In 1598, clasping to his breast the veil of Our Lady of Monserrat, in a little alcove hard by the church of the Escurial, died its grim, magnificent founder. He had witnessed the completion of his gigantic designs: palace and convent, there it stood-a monument alike of his piety and his pride, and a proof of the grandeur and resources of the mighty empire over which he ruled. But he appears to have thought with the poet

"Weighed in the balance, hero-dust

Is vile as mortal clay;"

for he built no stately mausoleum, merely a common vault, to receive the imperial dead. This omission, in 1617, Philip III. undertook to supply; and Giovanni Battista Crescenzi, an Italian, was selected as the architect. For thirty-four years did he and his successors labour at this royal necropolis, which when finished" became, under the name of the Pantheon, the most splendid chamber of the Escurial."-(Vol. i. p. 412.)

Mr Stirling's second volume opens with a graphic account of the decay of Spanish power under Philip IV., and an equally graphic description of this, the chief architectural triumph of his long inglorious reign. The Pantheon was "an octagonal chamber 113 feet in circumference, and 38 feet in height, from the pavement to the centre of the domed vault. Each of its eight sides, excepting the two which are occupied by its entrance, and the altar, contain four niches and four marble urns; the walls, Corinthian pilasters, cornices and dome, are formed of the finest marbles of Toledo and Biscay, Tortosa and Genoa; and the bases, capitals, scrolls, and other ornaments, are of gilt bronze. Placed beneath the presbytery of the church, and approached by the long descent of a stately marble staircase,

this hall of royal tombs, gleaming with gold and polished jasper, seems a creation of Eastern romance. Hither Philip IV. would come, when melancholy-the fatal taint of his blood was strong upon him-to hear mass, and meditate on death, sitting in the niche which was shortly to receive his bones." Yet this was the monarch whose quick eye detected the early genius of Velasquez, and who bore the palm as a patron from all the princes of his house, and all the sovereigns of Europe. Well did the great painter repay the discriminating friendship of the king, and so long as Spanish art endures, will the features of Philip IV. be known in every European country; and his fair hair, melancholy mien, impassive countenance and cold eyes, reveal to all time the hereditary characteristics of the phlegmatic house of Austria.

Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez was born at Seville in 1599. Here he entered the school of Herrera the Elder, a dashing painter, and a violent man, who was for ever losing alike his temper and his scholars. Velasquez soon left his turbulent rule for the gentler instruction of Francisco Pacheco. In his studio the young artist worked diligently, while he took lessons at the same time of a yet more finished artist-nature; the nature of bright, sunny, graceful Andalusia. Thus, while Velasquez cannot be called a self-taught painter, he retained to the last that freedom from mannerism, and that gay fidelity to nature, which so often-not in his compensate for a departure from the highest rules and requirements of art.

case

While he was thus studying and painting the flowers and the fruits, the damsels and the beggars, of sunny Seville, there arrived in that beautiful city a collection of Italian and Spanish pictures. These exercised no small influence on the taste and style of the young artist; but, true to his country, and with the happy inspiration of genius, it was to Luis Tristan of Toledo, rather than to any foreign master, that he directed his chief attention; and hence the future chief of the Castilian school was enabled to combine with its merits the excellencies of both the other great divisions of Spanish art.

At the end of five years spent in this manner, he married Pacheco's daughter, who witnessed all his forty years' labours and successes, and closed his dying eyes. At the age of twentythree, Velasquez, anxious to enlarge his acquaintance with the masterpieces of other schools, went to Madrid; but after spending a few months there, and at the Escurial, he returned to Seville-soon, however, to be recalled at the bidding of the great minister and Mæcenas, Olivarez. Now, in 1623, set in the tide of favour and of fame, which henceforward was not to flag or ebb till the great painter lay stretched, out of its reach, on the cold bank of death. During this summer he painted the noble portrait of the king on horseback, which was exhibited by royal order in front of the church of San Felipe, and which caused the all-powerful Count-duke to exclaim, that until now his majesty had never been painted. Charmed and delighted with the picture and the painter, Philip declared no other artist should in future paint his royal face; and Mr Stirling maliciously adds that "this resolution he kept far more religiously than his marriage vows, for he appears to have departed from it during the life-time of his chosen artist, in favour only of Rubens and Crayer." (Vol. ii. p. 592.) On the 31st of October 1623, Velasquez was formally appointed painter in ordinary to the king, and in 1626 was provided with apartments in the Treasury. To this period Mr Stirling assigns his best likeness of the equestrian monarch, of which he says" Far more pleasing than any other representation of the man, it is also one of the finest portraits in the world. The king is in the glow of youth and health, and in the full enjoyment of his fine horse, and the breeze blowing freshly from the distant hills; he wears dark armour, over which flutters a crimson scarf; a hat with black plumes covers his head, and his right hand grasps a truncheon."-(P. 595.)

In 1628, Velasquez had the pleasure of showing Rubens, who had come to Madrid as envoy from the Low Countries, the galleries of that city, and the wonders of the Escurial; and, following the advice of that mighty

master, he visited Italy the next year. On that painter-producing soil, his steps were first turned to the city of Titian; but the sun of art was going down over the quays and palaces of once glorious Venice, and, hurrying through Ferrara and Bologna, the eager pilgrim soon reached Rome. In this metropolis of religion, learning, and art, the young Spaniard spent many a pleasant and profitable month: nor, while feasting his eyes and storing his memory with "its thousand forms of beauty and delight,” did he allow his pencil a perfect holiday. The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph's Coat were painted in the Eternal City. After a few weeks at Naples, he returned to Madrid in the spring of 1631. Portrait-painting for his royal patron, who would visit his studio every day, and sit there long hours, seems to have been now his main occupation; and now was he able to requite the friendly aid he had received from the Count- duke of Olivarez, whose image remains reflected on the stream of time, not after the hideous caricature of Le Sage, but as limned by the truthful-albeit graceconferring-pencil of Velasquez.

In 1639, leaving king and courtiers, lords and ladies, and soaring above the earth on which he had made his step so sure, Velasquez aspired to the grandest theme of poet, moralist, or painter, and nobly did his genius justify the flight. His Crucifixion is one of the sublimest representations conceived by the intellect, and portrayed by the hand of man, of that stupendous event. "Unrelieved by the usual dim landscape, or lowering clouds, the cross in this picture has no footing upon earth, but is placed on a plain dark ground, like an ivory carving on its velvet pall. Never was that great agony more powerfully depicted. The head of our Lord drops on his right shoulder, over which falls a mass of dark hair, while drops of blood trickle from his thorn-pierced brows. The anatomy of the naked body and limbs is executed with as much precision as in Cellini's marble, which may have served Velasquez as a model; and the linen cloth wrapped about the loins, and even the fir-wood of the cross, display his accurate attention to the smallest details of a

66

great subject."-(Vol. ii. p. 619.) This masterpiece now hangs in the Royal Gallery of Spain at Madrid. The all-powerful Olivarez underwent, in 1643, the fate of most favourites, and experienced the doom denounced by the great English satirist on power too great to keep, or to resign." He had declared his intention of making one Julianillo, an illegitimate child of no one exactly knew who, his heir; had married him to the daughter of the Constable of Castile, decked him with titles and honours, and proposed to make him governor of the heir-apparent. The pencil of Velasquez was employed to hand down to posterity the features of this low-born cause of his great patron's downfall, and the portrait of the exballad singer in the streets of Madrid now graces the collection of Bridgewater House. The disgrace of Olivarez served to test the fine character of Velasquez, who not only sorrowed over his patron's misfortunes, but had the courage to visit the disgraced statesman in his retirement.

The triumphal entrance of Philip IV. into Lerida, the surrender of Breda, and portraits of the royal family, exercised the invention and pencil of Velasquez till the year 1648, when he was sent by the king on a roving mission into Italy-not to teach the puzzled sovereigns the mysterious privileges of self-government, but to collect such works of art as his fine taste might think worthy of transportation to Madrid. Landing at Genoa, he found himself in presence of a troop of Vandyck's gallant nobles: hence he went to Milan, Padua, and Venice. At the latter city he purchased for his royal master two or three pictures of Tintoret's, and the Venus and Adonis of Paul Veronese. But Rome, as in his previous visit, was the chief object of his pilgrimage. Innocent X. welcomed him gladly, and commanded him to paint, not only his own coarse features, but the more delicate ones of Donna Olympia, his "sister-in-law and mistress." So, at least, says our author; for the sake of religion and human nature, we hope he is mistaken. For more than a year did Velasquez sojourn in Rome, purchasing works of art, and enjoying the society of Bernini and Nicolas Poussin,

Pietro da Cortona and Algardi. "It would be pleasing, were it possible, to draw aside the dark curtain of centuries, and follow him into the palaces and studios-to see him standing by while Claude painted, or Algardi modelled, (enjoying the hospitalities of Bentivoglio, perhaps in that fair hall glorious with Guido's recent fresco of Aurora)-or mingling in the group that accompanied Poussin in his evening walks on the terrace of Trinità de Monte."-(Vol. ii. p. 643.) Meanwhile the king was impatiently waiting his return, and at last insisted upon its being no further delayed; so in 1651 the soil of Spain was once more trod by her greatest painter. Five years later, Velasquez produced his extraordinary picture, Las Meniñas-the Maids of Honour, extraordinary alike in the composition, and in the skill displayed by the painter in overcoming its many difficulties. Dwarfs and maids of honour, hounds and children, lords and ladies, pictures and furniture, are all introduced into this remarkable picture, with such success as to make many judges pronounce it to be Velasquez's masterpiece, and Luca Giordano to christen it "the theology of painting."

The Escurial, from whose galleries and cloisters we have been thus lured by the greater glory of Velasquez, in 1656 demanded his presence to arrange a large collection of pictures, forty-one of which came from the dispersed and abused collection of the only real lover of the fine arts who has sat on England's throne-that martyr-monarch whom the pencil of Vandyck, and the pens of Lovelace, Montrose, and Clarendon have immortalised, though their swords and counsels failed to preserve his life and crown. In 1659, the cross of Santiago was formally conferred on this "king of painters, and painter of kings;" and on St Prosper's day, in the Church of the Carbonera, he was installed knight of that illustrious order, the noblest grandees of Spain assisting at the solemn ceremonial. The famous meeting on the Isle of Pheasants, so full of historic interest, between the crowns and courts of Spain and France, to celebrate the nuptials of Louis XIV. and Maria Theresa, was destined to acquire an additional though melancholy