On Christian Iconography: Selections from The Art of Painting (1649) by Francisco Pacheco

Abstract

Reviewed by: On Christian Iconography: Selections from The Art of Painting (1649) by Francisco Pacheco Tanya J. Tiffany On Christian Iconography: Selections from The Art of Painting (1649). By Francisco Pacheco. With an introduction and the Spanish text translated by Jeremy Roe with Carles Gutiérrez Sanfeliu; Latin text translated by José Solís de los Santos. [Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts, Volume 16.] (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph University Press. 2017. Pp. xxv, 340. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-91610-189-3.) In 1638, at age seventy-four, the learned Sevillian painter Francisco Pacheco completed his life's work, the Arte de la Pintura (Art of Painting), a treatise published posthumously in 1644. A monumental text, the Arte consists of three books on the nobility, theory, and practice of painting, with a particular emphasis on sacred images. Scholars have long valued the Arte for the light it sheds on intellectual life in early modern Seville and especially on the career of Pacheco's most illustrious pupil, Diego Velázquez. Until now, however, only fragments of the Arte have been available in English. The translation under review is therefore most welcome for making Pacheco's treatise more widely accessible to students and scholars of early modern art history. As indicated by the book's title, Jeremy Roe and Carles Gutiérrez Sanfeliu have chosen to focus on the ample sections of the Arte devoted to decorum in religious painting. This decision follows the precepts of Pacheco himself, who affirmed that it was by representing Christian subjects with both "majesty" and historical accuracy that painters fulfilled their ultimate purpose: to create images that "serve[d] as truthful books" for the faithful (p. 46). In his introduction, Roe provides a nuanced perspective on the relationship between Pacheco's artistic theory and his practice as a painter of sacred subjects. Building upon Bonaventura Bassegoda's critical edition of the Arte (1990), he highlights Pacheco's close engagement with writings by Sevillian churchmen and by post-Tridentine figures of international renown, among them Gabriele Paleotti [End Page 145] and Johannes Molanus. He also emphasizes Pacheco's commitment to establishing new sacred iconographies, as illustrated by the artist's paintings and codified in his text. Like other Catholic Reformers, Pacheco opposed the invention of novel religious iconography for its own sake, but at the same time he sought to abandon pictorial conventions that failed to adhere to the letter of scriptural truth. In an example well known to specialists, Pacheco thus used historical evidence to affirm that Christ's crucifixion should be depicted with four nails, rather than the usual three. He also sought to correct the "improprieties" seen in versions of the Last Judgment by Michelangelo and others (p. 56); according to a cleric quoted in the Arte, Pacheco rejected images of a "terrible and fearful" Christ and, in his own Last Judgment, instead depicted the Lord as "merciful and joyful," in keeping with biblical evidence of God's "delight" in saving the just (p. 66). Yet as Roe contends, Pacheco's portrayal of a gentle Christ benignly delivering judgment means that his painting lacks the very narrative clarity and emotional impact that he and other post-Tridentine painters sought to achieve. Roe also explores how this painstaking search for historical precision distinguished Pacheco from other artists of the day, among them his rival in Madrid, the Florentine-born Vicente Carducho, who ridiculed ongoing "disputes over … how Christ our Lord was crucified" and affirmed that pious painters should simply focus on representing "the essential" aspects of sacred history (quoted on pp. 28–29). For the translation itself, Roe and Gutiérrez have included chapters from the Arte dealing with "Order, Decency, and Decorum" and the Last Judgment (chapters 2–4 of Book Two) as well as Pacheco's lengthy appendix on the iconography of various Christian themes, the Adiciones a algunas imágenes (Further matters raised by a number of images; appendix to Book Three). They have rendered Pacheco's often unwieldy Spanish prose into lucid English, and have included English translations by José Solís de los Santos of Pacheco's quotations from Latin. Accompanying the text are 123 reproductions of works either...