Berruguete’s Mystical Wood Sculptures, in Dallas

On offer: Wiggling angels, an anguished Abraham, and densely adorned altarpieces

T his week, Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain ends at the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University’s superb art gallery. Berruguete (1488–1561), though enigmatic on many fronts, is pivotal in the history of Spanish art, but he’s mostly unknown here.

In a few words, Berruguete brought the aesthetics of the Italian Renaissance to Spain.

When I read about this exhibition, I thought “impossible to do.” I knew enough about Berruguete to understand that some of his best and most indicative work — tombs, big altarpieces, and choir stalls — was fixed to church architecture. I was wrong — lots of his best work can travel — and, besides, the Meadows and its partner, the National Gallery in Washington, do the most they can in the show and its catalogue to present work that can’t travel.

One thing was impossible, and that was seeing the show in Washington. Lunatic lockdowns made Vermont a pretty prison. They’re reckless and useless, except if the goal is ruining the economy and reducing free people to sheep.

They haven’t stopped COVID, yet too many vested interests have grown to love their lockdowns or don’t have brains or imagination. We’re living in the public-health quack world of fake science and failed models. Still, I was determined to the point of obsession to see this show. So, the day after Christmas, I flew over the lockdown cuckoo’s nest and went to Dallas. The show at the Meadows is bigger, anyway, and the Meadows specializes in Spanish art.

It’s a beautiful show visually and, like the best museum exhibitions, interprets complex and new ideas with cogency and without fear. Many museums seem anxious when they tackle unusual or unfamiliar subjects, and Spanish art often seems strange, so they dilute content until it’s flavorless and spoon it to visitors as if they were babies. The Meadows isn’t afraid of hard or big ideas. Rather, it has the skill to immerse us in these ideas so we leave informed and exhilarated rather than bewildered.

Berruguete is best known in Spain as a sculptor working in the medium of painted wood and as a designer of huge, multi-part, multi-figure altarpieces, or retablos. His figures, culture critic Cristóbal de Villalón wrote in 1539, “seem on the brink of speaking, as though Nature had given them a soul.” This was the revolution the artist created. A single sculpture, The Sacrifice of Isaac, from between 1526 and 1533, in the Meadows show, is Berruguete in top form. It was part of a retablo that Berruguete did for a Benedictine monastery. The creature called a “retablo” is the Spanish altarpiece. More on this unusual, sometimes scary thing later.

The figures, about four feet tall, show Berruguete’s emotional style. Abraham stands, tense and unstable, his mouth open in anguish. We’re not sure if he’s struck dumb or wailing or beseeching God either to order him to stop or to explain why he’s meant to kill his son. Isaac crouches in terror. Drapery, the son’s hair, and the father’s hair and long beard quiver. The painted surface evokes sweat, and the gilding sparkles. The figures have volume and arms and legs that look elastic.

The pair was placed in a niche 20 feet from the floor, in an altarpiece with about 60 niches, each with sculpted wood figures. Abraham and Isaac are lifelike. The scene is condensed drama. Color, sheen, and economy of pose would have made it readable, terrifying, and inspirational.

Berruguete was born near Palencia in Castile y León on the eve of the expulsion of the last Moors from Granada and the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. His father, Pedro (1450–1504) was an accomplished, prosperous artist who’d possibly spent time in Urbino in Italy in the 1470s. Alonso inherited both art genes and art connections and had, through his father, good artistic training.

We know he was intrepid and inquisitive, too. Between 1504 and 1518, Berruguete lived and worked in Florence and then Rome. He might have worked for Michelangelo, but we definitely know that Michelangelo knew and liked him.

In Florence, Berruguete was part of a new, effervescent art milieu led by Michelangelo, and among his peers were Rosso Florentino, Sarto, and Pontormo. All were avant-garde. They gave the human figure in art volume, mobile energy, and character. They embraced autonomy and individuality. They fashioned Roman and Greek philosophy to serve modern life. This circle, though cutting-edge, had big Florence money behind it. Berruguete was viewed as both a good artist and a cultural player.

The Meadows show excels first in uniting Spain’s aesthetic past with the future that Berruguete heralded. This is tricky. Until around 1500, Spanish art owned more to Burgundy and Flanders than it did to Rome and Florence. Until 1492, Spain was a gaggle of kingdoms whose international alliances — political, business, and cultural — ran northward.

The Meadows’s own Adoration of the Magi, a large painting from 1519 by the Master of Sigena, shows the state of play in high-end art in Spain when Berruguete returned from Italy. The figures aren’t bodies. They’re flat, richly colored, and ornamented patterns. Space is compressed. Form comes from folds in sumptuous robes.

This is a northern aesthetic, but, in Spain, its prevalence and resilience owe something to 700 years of Moorish rule, slowly but surely eroded with the Reconquista, which ended, also in 1492, with the last caliph tossed from Granada. Moorish design is many things, but flat, decorative pattern is one of them.

These two features — generations of a Burgundian and Flemish touch, along with the legacy of the Moors — helped to make Spain opaque to the Renaissance. Another factor is subtly at work. Spain had a Roman past, but it was spotty. Great humanist courts, such as Urbino’s, Siena’s, and Florence’s, were very late in starting.

So Berruguete returned to a Spain newly united and under the rule of Charles V, seemingly the omnibus king. Young and newly empowered, Charles was the king of Spain, archduke of Austria, Holy Roman Emperor — and those were only a few of his baubles. He could reach, and wanted to reach, for the best of all new ideas, among them aesthetic. He hired Berruguete first to be part of the team decorating the Capilla Real in Granada. Charles’s grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, and parents, Juana la Loca (or Joanna the Crazy) and Philip the Fair, are buried there.

C. D. Dickerson, one of the show’s curators and the sculpture curator at the National Gallery, writes two essays in the catalogue that are first-rate in content and clarity. He presents Berruguete’s years in Italy and his return to Spain in 1518 to work for Charles V. In the exhibition, we see his scholarship and the Meadows’s good exhibition-design sense in making the Spanish retablo scrutable and immersive.

The Spanish retablo is an altarpiece that looks like it’s made of Legos, or think of the fanciest, frilliest wedding cake flattened into a frieze. It’s often a floor-to-ceiling proposition, sometimes a hundred feet tall. They’re multistoried and look flat but are really made of dozens of niches filled with painted wood sculptures of figures. The stories are separated by string courses of carved putti, garlands, grotesques, or meanders, often gilded. They usually have wings that project on either side and have pediments like the top of a wedding cake — except Jesus on the cross or some other big divinity is there instead of a bride and groom.

The retablo is a late Spanish Gothic proposition. Think of the façade of a French Gothic cathedral. There’s lots of sculpture, but the figures seem to emit neither sound nor the slightest swoosh of moving robes. Retablos offer plenty of glitter, but they emphasize static flatness.

Retablos also offer several conceptual problems. They’re often dense to the point that the figures look like dolls. They don’t have a big, central feature like many Italian altarpieces but, rather, passages that suggest hierarchy in size and the importance of the characters without, overall, providing a dynamic central focus.

Painting, for many, is a flat art. Its magic is illusionary. Painted wood (some retablo figures seem lifelike) is an acquired taste. There’s another hierarchy at work here, too. Wood isn’t marble. Our taste is conditioned by art history’s celebration of marble as “the” luxe material for sculpture. Much of the white marble sculptures of the Greeks and Romans were painted in vibrant colors and tarted up with touches of bronze. Today, we think that’s tacky.

Painted wood sculptures aren’t often carved from a single block of wood but made of pieces glued together, making it seem more like craft. Painted wood sculpture also strives for realism. There’s not much in it that’s abstract or essentialized.

Berruguete worked on retablos for a few years, learning their aesthetics and technology along the way. He’d never sculpted in wood before or dealt with the unique dynamics of painted and gilded wood. In 1526, he got the commission for the retablo of San Benito, Spain’s big Benedictine church in Valladolid. It was a prestige commission, as the church was the headquarters of the Benedictine Order in Spain and Valladolid was the new, united country’s nominal capital.

The Meadows demystifies the retablo. The San Benito retablo is one of his career triumphs, but it was mostly dismantled in 1835 when the monastery was suppressed and converted into a barracks by the government. Most of its sculptures are in a Valladolid museum, and the best are in the Berruguete show. The Meadows displays them with miraculous success, giving us an immersive feel. Originally, they would have been seen at a far distance. Now, in looking at them closely, we can understand Berruguete’s new style, modern for Spain, and his technique.  The sculptures, with lots of guiding, are set against deep red walls at the Meadows.  The look is both galvanizing and intoxicating.

Berruguete simplifies the retablo standard. There are fewer niches and a clear hierarchy with three anchors: a big, lower-register, central niche with a painted wood figure of St. Benedict, another big niche above it showing the Assumption of the Virgin, and then a giant scalloped canopy that’s empty except for gilded bands of candles and topped by a grand three-dimensional sculpture of Jesus on a crucifix flanked by two big 3-D sculptures, one of his mother Mary and the other of St. John the Evangelist. All are in the exhibition.

The show revels in Berruguete’s various debts to Michelangelo, among them nude putti carved in high relief recalling the Sistine Ceiling, and Bramante, whose own domes were examples. The decoration of the canopy comes from an older source: Nero’s Golden House. The Benedictine monks, by the way, were scandalized by all the rowdy, naked putti but learned to live with them.

The sculpted figures themselves are lifelike and seem mobile. Benedict is austere but steps forward into the viewer’s space. Mary, surrounded by wiggling angels, is appropriately otherworldly and has a touch of the flat Gothic icon, but she looks down at the nave with a sign of engagement. Jesus, in pain, his eyes bulging, his arms skin and bone stretched taut, and the subtle curve of his torso evoke the Laocoön, which Berruguete knew well and firsthand.

The Sacrifice of Isaac and another pair, St. Christopher Leading the Baby Jesus Across the River, are in the show and come from the two registers on either side of St. Benedict. All of these figures invite another dimension of the Meadows show, and that involves technique. This is mostly handled in the catalogue in great essays by Daphne Barbour and Manuel Arias Martinez, both digging deeply in iconography. In the exhibition, we get a close look at Berruguete’s painting and gilding technique, which, masterful as it obviously is, raises another issue: Who’s the artist, and of what?

Berruguete’s gestural, often physically twisted figures brought new drama and emotion to the Spanish altarpiece. But painted wood sculpture doesn’t have the allure, mystique, or pedigree of, say, Carrara marble. “Wood’s for whittling,” a snooty art historian might insist.

Berruguete was a giant in the design of retablos, but, as the exhibition and catalogue make clear, the retablo was an immense enterprise that enlisted carpenters, painters, and gilders. Berruguete’s contracts with churches made it clear that he was the conceptualizer, with some guidance, the designer, and the master of the works. Sometimes we’re clear in what he actually painted, and these usually were faces and flesh. Berruguete was not a master carver at first, though he became one. In a massive retablo, suffice it to say that many hands were at work. Berruguete sometimes faced charges from his patrons that he wasn’t detail-oriented and didn’t himself do some of the painting he was charged to do.

Scholars, students, and art lovers visit Toledo to see work by El Greco, and they should, but two of Berruguete’s star turns are there as well. They’re treated in the exhibition through two chapters in the catalogue and very nice photographs, but they’re not moving. I think the wooden choir stalls in the Toledo cathedral, designed and mostly carved by Berruguete, are in places electrifying and in others ethereal and among the most unheralded works of art in Spanish churches. They demand close looking, but I would take Job, which Berruguete carved in the early 1540s, as an example. For anatomical accuracy, pathos, and dynamism, the writhing figure is hard to beat.

Berruguete’s last big project was the tomb of Cardinal Juan Pedro de Tavera, done between 1554 and 1561. It’s in the Hospital Tavera in Toledo. Tavera ruled the Spanish church, so it was a commission that ranked with a royal tomb.

It’s the most provocative of Spanish tombs, the cardinal’s face possessing a portrait-like fidelity not in life or even in sanctified death, in which he would look serious but blessed. Tavera, rather, is presented in pallid, sunken, mute, and insensate death. Luis Buñuel used the tomb in his 1970 film Tristana for a moment when the libertine Tristana, played by Catherine Deneuve, climbs the tomb, looks in Tavera’s cold, marble, half-opened eyes, and understands that she, too, will one day die.

The effigy is a frank assessment of death, clearly inspired by Tavera’s death mask and, coming at the end of Berruguete’s life, shows him as a startlingly good portraitist. And a portraitist, for all his impressive realism, with a flair for irony. Tavera holds a crozier. Its finial presses against his cheek. It’s a small, male, screaming head. It’s everything Tavera isn’t. Why it’s there is a mystery. Berruguete learned the art of the grotesque decades earlier when he was in Rome. He filed this particularly animated imp away for future reference.

I walked through the Meadows with its director after I saw the show. We talked about the legacy of the retablo in Spanish art. It is, after all, Gothic, and the Italian innovations from Berruguete revolutionized Spanish altarpieces. A few years after his death, El Greco came to Toledo. Before long, there was an invasion of Italian style, mostly Mannerist, that made Spanish contemporary art more like Italy’s. What remained of the old style?

Well into the 18th century, painted sculpture was a leading medium in Spain, liked mostly for its realism. Painted wood was especially revered in Seville, and this is why Zurburán’s painting and the early work of the Sevillian Velázquez was sculptural in feel. Velázquez’s style changes when he joins the court of Philip IV, where the work of Titian, Tintoretto, and Rubens was much admired.

The taste for realism, though, conditioned by years if not centuries of painted wood sculpture, persists, as does a view of art as, among many things, a piece of construction. Picasso’s Cubism has a thousand fathers but one of them is the retablo, which, like the Cubist portrait or the collage, is made of parts that look and sometimes are reassembled or reconstructed.