Until the nineteenth century, most Spanish paintings were made for a church or for the king, and both told painters what to show. It shows in the pictures below, from a donor kneeling at an altar to a painter wearing the keys of his court office. The strangest was painted for no client at all, on the wall of a painter's house.
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How These Were Chosen
Spain's Golden Age of painting, the 1600s, long stayed out of sight for the rest of Europe. Between 1838 and 1848, the Louvre showed over 400 Spanish pictures from the collection of King Louis-Philippe, and Courbet and Manet found in them a taste for plain realism and free brushwork.
The twelve pictures below are ranked by their weight in Spanish painting and by how widely they are known, not by date. Every artist was born in Spain or built a career there. The list stops before 1900, because the painters of the twentieth century are still under copyright.
Many entries turn on who paid for a picture and where it was meant to hang, from a village altar to a private room at court, the wall of a painter's own house and a dealer's gallery in Paris.
12. Bartolomé Bermejo, Saint Michael Triumphant over the Devil (1468)
Live snakes pour from a second mouth that gapes in the belly of the devil, and smaller reptile heads sprout from its elbows. Above this writhing creature stands Saint Michael, the archangel, in golden tournament armor set with huge jewels, his feet planted on the demon. Bartolomé Bermejo painted the panel in 1468 for the high altar of San Miguel, the parish church of Tous, a town about 30 miles from Valencia.
The man who paid for it is in the picture too. Antoni Joan, lord of Tous, kneels below the fight and has looked up from his book of Psalms to watch it, with the heavy gold chain and the sword that marked a knight. Bermejo gave him wrinkles, a stubbled jaw and a kink in the nose. Above him, the archangel keeps a calm, smooth face that could belong to no one on earth.
The panel later lost its name. Its owners had lost track of where it came from, and Julius Wernher, a diamond magnate, bought it as the work of an unknown master from Provence. Yet the answer had been on the panel all along. At bottom left, on a folded slip of parchment, the painter had signed in Latin: Bartolomeus Rubeus.
That signature was a nickname. Rubeus means reddish in Latin, and bermejo means the same in Spanish, probably for a ruddy complexion. Behind it stood Bartolomé de Cárdenas, born in Córdoba, who worked his way across the lands of the Crown of Aragon, through Valencia, Daroca, Zaragoza and Barcelona.
The paperwork for the commission, found only in the 1960s, settled the matter. It shows that Bermejo had been a citizen of Valencia since the early 1460s, and it turns the panel once sold as French into his earliest documented work.
At a Glance
Artist: Bartolomé Bermejo (about 1440 to about 1501)
Painted: 1468
Medium: Oil and gold on wood
Size: 179.7 × 81.9 cm (70.7 × 32.2 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery, London
11. Marià (Mariano) Fortuny, The Spanish Wedding, or La Vicaría (1868 to 1870)
While a bride and groom sign their marriage contract among witnesses, friends and relatives, a bullfighter and a manola, a young working class woman of Madrid, wait their turn on a bench at the right of the room.
Marià Fortuny worked on this wooden panel from 1868 to 1870 and dressed the wedding guests in the fashions of the eighteenth century, which he admired in the paintings of Goya. Every detail says old Madrid. Yet the panel was not painted in Madrid, and it was never meant for a Spanish wall.