21 March 2013

Conferences

HOLY WEEK CYCLE

The Passion dramatised
Tenderness and tears. Salzillo's processional floats

D. Cristóbal Belda Navarro.
University of Murcia

The dramatized passion and Tenderness and tears. The processional steps of Francisco Salzillo were the core of two interventions scheduled in the days before Easter by the Chair Heritage and Art Navarre with the desire to show the scenic components of a peculiar artistic manifestations and own art and collective religiosity inherited from the Baroque world and the way in which this cycle was closed in the eighteenth century by the work of the sculptor Francisco Salzillo. Both conferences were given at position by Prof. Cristóbal Belda Navarro, Full Professor of Art History at the University of Murcia.

The dramatized passion began the tour of the main components of an art endowed with great scenic possibilities. Both the composition of processional groups and the creation of images destined for stages in continuous change and movement were original creations of Spanish art which, in the words of V. L. Tapié, constituted, together with other brilliant contributions to the thought and spirituality of the sixteenth century, one of its most solid contributions to the European Baroque panorama of its time.

The singularity of the image in movement already suggests by itself its own scenic nature both for its own expressiveness, germ of physiognomic attitudes determined to emphasize the value of the staging and of the gesture as a communicating element.

The relationship between work of art and theater is an old question, fortunately treated by an abundant bibliography. The popular literature, the hagiographic drama, the Golden Legend, the sacred oratory or the allegorical carts of the Corpus Christi, were the germ delegate of those inanimate theaters that toured the cities in the midst of acclamations and penitential demonstrations that wisely took advantage of the dynamic message of the theater.

In those games of expressions, art occupied a fundamental place. Baroque emotionality, profoundly theatrical, intensified the messages, emphasized the fantasy of the profane and the sacred, the passions of the soul and, in general, such decisive values as clothing, the articulation of the image, polychromy, visibility and harmony, risky compositions, changing points of view and the power of emotion as an essential premise for the approach to a dramatized reality. The actors of that dramatis personae carried their own theatrical nature implicitly in the gesturality converted in the hands of our sculptors into an essential resource to show the states of the soul and its individual and social behaviors.

Nicolas de Bussy. She-devil
Diocesan Museum of Sacred Art. Orihuela (Alicante)
 

Tenderness and tears were the expressions used by the spectators of the Murcian Holy Week of the 18th century when they saw the processional groups made by Francisco Salzillo pass through their city every Good Friday. This procession, one of the most brilliant of its century, was the culmination of centuries of experience carried out by an important group of masters of the 17th century, issue , creators of the secrets of an art brilliantly closed by Salzillo when the winds of the Enlightenment invoked other forms of piety and religious expression far removed from the Baroque tinsel.

From 1752 Salzillo had to undertake the adventure of sculpting various processional groups. The main confraternity, that of Jesús in Murcia, had been enjoying a period of splendour since the beginning of the century thanks to a brilliant management which reformed its original structure, consolidated its sources of income and regulated in a stable way the different classes that made it up, now open to an urban aristocracy committed to its reform.

Salzillo had to face the challenge of challenge to give shape to ideals that reflected the new directions taken. Far from returning to the old Tridentine spirit, the driving force behind the original urban Way of the Cross from which the procession was born, he advocated a refined staging, typical of the gallant spirit of his century, based on the new iconography which, while banishing arguments that were not in keeping with the temporal sequence of the story, proposed others that would solve the great compositional problems of the moving image. To them we owe the side view of The Fall ( 1752), the genius, hitherto unknown in sculpture, of The Prayer in the Garden (1754), the new version of The Last Supper ( 1761) as a staging of Judas' betrayal, the narrative sequence of the Arrest (1763) as the climax of the fateful advertisement and, in general, any of the effects produced by a story of which he was the only sculptor. This condition contributed to the essence of the story his ability to determine where and when to increase the drama of each scenic proposal either in the context of groups of several figures or in the moving and tragic solitude of his isolated images(Veronica, Saint John and Dolorosa, all from 1755-1756). Saint John alone would suffice to understand the organic unity of the sculpture understood, in the classical manner, as a definition of the art of four profiles.

In 1776 this brilliant episode came to an end with the Flagellation. Salzillo became involved with a new patron, the son of the one who commissioned the processional groups for the famous Nativity Scene, a work that was already clearly committed to the ideals of the Enlightenment.

F. Salzillo, Dolorosa
Parish Church of San Lorenzo, Murcia