Woman Triumphant | Page 8

of the noon
hour to explore those salons as if it were a new world, delighting in the
warm air of the furnaces. As they went, they left footprints of plaster on
the floor; they called out to each other to share their admiration before a
picture; they were impatient to take it all in at a single glance; they
waxed enthusiastic over the warriors in their shining armor or the
elaborate uniforms of olden times. The cleverest among them served as
guides to their companions, driving them impatiently. They had been
there the day before. Go ahead! There was still a lot to see! And they
ran toward the inner halls with the breathless curiosity of men who
tread on new ground and expect something marvelous to rise before
their steps.
Amid this rush of simple admirers there passed, too, some groups of
Spanish ladies. All did the same thing before Goya's work, as if they
had been previously coached. They went from picture to picture,
commenting on the fashions of the past, feeling a sort of longing for the
curious old crinolines and the broad mantillas with the high combs.
Suddenly they became serious, drew their lips together and started at a
quick pace for the end of the gallery. Instinct warned them. Their
restless eyes felt hurt by the nude in the distance; they seemed to scent
the famous Maja before they saw her and they kept on--erect, with
severe countenances, just as if they were annoyed by some rude
fellow's advances in the street--passing in front of the picture without
turning their faces, without seeing even the adjacent pictures nor
stopping till they reached the Hall of Murillo.
It was the hatred for the nude, the Christian, century-old abomination
of Nature and truth, that rose instinctively to protest against the
toleration of such horrors in a public building which was peopled with
saints, kings and ascetics.
Renovales worshiped the canvas with ardent devotion, and placed it in
a class by itself. It was the first manifestation in Spanish history of art
that was free from scruples, unhampered by prejudice. Three centuries
of painting, several generations of glorious names, succeeded one
another with wonderful fertility; but not until Goya had the Spanish

brush dared to trace the form of a woman's body, the divine nakedness
that among all peoples has been the first inspiration of nascent art.
Renovales remembered another nude, the Venus of Velásquez,
preserved abroad. But that work had not been spontaneous; it was a
commission of the monarch who, at the same time that he was paying
foreigners lavishly for their studies in the nude, wished to have a
similar canvas by his court-painter.
Religious oppression had obscured art for centuries. Human beauty
terrified the great artists, who painted with a cross on their breasts and a
rosary on their sword-hilts. Bodies were hidden under the stiff, heavy
folds of sackcloth or the grotesque, courtly crinoline, and the painter
never ventured to guess what was beneath them, looking at the model,
as the devout worshiper contemplates the hollow mantle of the Virgin,
not knowing whether it contains a body or three sticks to hold up the
head. The joy of life was a sin. In vain a sun fairer than that of Venice
shone on Spanish soil, futile was the light that burned upon the land
with a brighter glow than that of Flanders: Spanish art was dark,
lifeless, sober, even after it knew the works of Titian. The Renaissance,
that in the rest of the world worshiped the nude as the supreme work of
Nature, was covered here with the monk's cowl or the beggar's rags.
The shining landscapes were dark and gloomy when they reached the
canvas; under the brush the land of the sun appeared with a gray sky
and grass that was a mournful green; the heads had a monkish gravity.
The artist placed in his pictures not what surrounded him, but what he
had within him, a piece of his soul--and his soul was fettered by the
fear of dangers in the present life and torments in the life to come; it
was black--black with sadness, as if it were dyed in the soot of the fires
of the autos-de-fé.
That naked woman with her curly head resting on her folded arms was
the awakening of an art that had lived in isolation. The slight frame,
that scarcely rested on the green divan and the fine lace cushions,
seemed on the point of rising in the air with the mighty impulse of
resurrection.
Renovales thought of the two masters, equally great, and still so

different. One had the imposing majesty of famous monuments--serene,
correct, cold, filling the horizon of history with their colossal mass,
growing old in glory without the centuries