Baroque ecstasy in the agony

The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700. National Gallery, London. Until January 24.

The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700. National Gallery, London. Until January 24.

THE Sacred Made Real, at the National Gallery in London, is an utterly absorbing exhibition and a substantial contribution to our understanding of an area of art history that is not only unfamiliar to most people, but has suffered from a certain contemptuous hostility for reasons at once aesthetic, moral and philosophical.

Spanish religious art of the 17th century belongs to the most zealous centre of the counter-Reformation Catholic revival.

It was a world of passionate devotion, of mortification of the flesh, of spiritual meditation pushed to the verge of hallucination and of delirious ecstasies of communion: the sort of thing that appals the rationalist, enrages protestants and makes an Anglican acutely uncomfortable.

We have a glimpse of that world in Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila; but for all its baroque excess, his sculptural group translates the Spanish ethos into a slightly more sober and certainly more universal formal language rooted in antiquity and the conventions of rhetoric.

Its very sensuality betrays an Italian tendency to evoke the transcendent through human experience.

The polychrome sculptures on display at the National Gallery take us into a very different cultural milieu, one that we could characterise as uniquely Spanish were it not for the fact that centuries of Spanish dominion in southern Italy and Sicily led to the implantation of a similar sensibility in those places, as well as in many Spanish colonies around the world.

The Spanish artists who made these sculptures - carvers for the wooden figure, and painters to colour them in astoundingly realistic flesh - were concerned with only one thing, to make the figure of the saint, or of Christ, seem as vividly present as possible to the eyes of the worshipper.

Skin tones were built up in layers, including the variable hues of flesh and the blue-grey of beard shadow, eyes and teeth were made of glass or shell or ivory. Sometimes even real hair was used for eyelashes.

There is nothing like this in the more abstract and intellectual mainstream of the Italian renaissance or baroque periods, where it was so axiomatic that painting and sculpture were distinct arts that there was a significant theoretical debate about which of the two was the more successful in representing nature.

The question becomes almost inconceivable when the two arts are associated as they are in Spain.

But the Spanish obsession with vivid representation is also quite different from the kind of naturalism that fascinated the renaissance.

There is a clue in the decollated head of St John the Baptist which lies on its side on a silver stand. The details of flesh and eyes, the open mouth with teeth and tongue, and even the severed trachea and spine, are all horrifyingly accurate.

But there is something wrong: the hair is treated as though the figure were upright, not on its side; it hangs horizontally in defiance of gravity. In other pieces, for example a beautiful Mary Magdalene, the fall of the hair is correct, but this odd detail reminds us that while Italian naturalism was motivated by a love of this world and in particular of the beauty of the human body, the Spanish variety was profoundly anti-humanistic.

The body is evoked with such care in order to emphasise its mortality or its suffering.

In one of the masterpieces of the exhibition, St Francis Borgia gazes intently at the left hand in which he originally held a crowned skull.

It was when the saint beheld the decaying corpse of the Empress Isabella of Portugal that he decided he could no longer devote himself to a mortal lord.

Other figures, such as the companion St Ignatius Loyola, weep as they meditate on the crucifixion.

Although facial beauty is subtly used to appeal to the viewer, particularly in images of the Virgin Mary and of the Magdalene, the body itself remains covered in ample robes unless marked by the signs of mortification.

The only body shown almost naked is that of Christ, bearing the dreadful wounds of flogging and crucifixion. Oddly enough, in this art of meditation, nothing is left to the imagination. The exhibition is accompanied by an outstanding catalogue, and there is also a display explaining the making of a polychrome sculpture, including a contemporary replica, finished to different stages to reveal the process, of the impressive and sumptuously robed figure of St John of the Cross.

This is wisely presented in a different part of the gallery, separating its detached and didactic approach from the dramatic presentation of the works in the main exhibition, where careful placement and juxtaposition, and expert lighting, help even the Anglican viewer to enter sympathetically, if momentarily, into the fervent world of Spanish baroque piety.