High Fashion Wasn’t Easy in Imperial Spain

Fabrics, jewelry, and tailoring were tops, but the Hispanic Society shows us that looking good could be hazardous to your health.

O ne thing that enquiring minds don’t ask anymore is whether the Hispanic Society is worth a visit. Those in the know understand that this unique, fantastic museum in Hamilton Heights in Manhattan is always a treat. It’s the best collection of Spanish art outside Spain — think El Greco, Velázquez, Murillo, Goya — and a revered rare-book and manuscript library, both in an art palace on Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets. This might seem like adventure travel, but it’s a unique national treasure. I’ve written about it off and on for years, calling it “the greatest museum no one knows,” but that “no one knows” might be outdated. Through good exhibitions, a traveling treasures show, an energetic director, a new potentate board, an essential, gradual renovation, and something approaching financial stability, word’s gotten out.

For example, its Visions of Spain — 14 monumental paintings of life in each of Spain’s provinces, painted by Joaquín Sorolla between 1913 and 1919 — has got to be one of the magnificent art spaces in America.

The sumptuous Spanish Style exhibition, running through March 22, explores the fashion revolution in imperial Spain, from 1550 — when the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as the first Habsburg was about to end and Philip II was the incoming monarch — to 1700, the year of the death of the profoundly inbred Charles II, the end of the Habsburg era, and the start of the empire’s long, tormented collapse. After the 700-year-long Reconquista, what we now know as Spain kicked the Moors back to Africa, united under the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella — Charles V’s grandparents — and launched Spain’s New World empire with Columbus’s voyages. Spain’s court and elites were loaded with hoards of silver from imperial commerce and war, and with the big escudos and new materials from abroad came an era of opulent and unique attire and a new look for the human body. Spanish Style goes back in time through about 60 paintings, jewelry, textiles, sculptures, and big, bold illuminated manuscripts.

It’s an explosion of glitter, gleam, texture, color, and, overall, Spanish interior design, a unique mix of splendor and austerity. Most of Spanish Style unfolds in the Hispanic Society’s Main Court, a Spanish Renaissance Revival space designed by Archer Huntington, the collector who founded the museum. It was built for the Society in 1908. It’s a feast of terra-cotta floors and wall panels with 35-foot ceilings and plenty of marble. Greeting us — don’t think of Holly Golightly’s party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s — are funerary effigies of a man and woman from the 1640s, the heydays of Philip IV and Velázquez. They’re wood but painted white to suggest marble. Spanish style, first of all, can be splendid, but it’s formal and rigid, too. Everything seems architectural. He’s wearing a golilla, a stiff neckband supporting his collar. She sports a guardainfante, made from hoops and pads covered by a bell-shaped skirt. Skirts were often embroidered with gold and silver thread.

Clothes control the person wearing them. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Mariana of Austria, Philip IV’s queen, his niece, and a fashion icon of the era, wears a black and silver dress in a portrait from around 1650. A huge bell-shaped skirt covers her guardainfante. We don’t know who painted it, but Velázquez’s famous Prado portraits of queens and infants have the same look. Mariana complained about how imprisoned she felt wearing this thing, and she took it off whenever she could. Farthingales, called verdugados, originated in Spain and created cone-shaped skirts. Whalebone, wire, and wood were the materials. Splendor in the Grass moments were rare if not utterly impossible.

Spanish court life was a kind of a prison. Protocols for look and movement were intensely regulated as expressions of royal absolutism and Catholic piety and rigor. Black was always in style. Why? Black was the color for masculine authority. Charles V brought it to Spain from Flanders, where he lived when he wasn’t on military campaigns or ruling Spain. The discovery of Mexican logwood, a premier black dye, made it the color of choice in Philip II’s court. Black capes are still de rigueur for Spanish men’s formal wear. I’m not Spanish but own three and wear them for high-end occasions, though not in rural Vermont.

Spanish high-end tailoring was something else and makes French couture and Savile Row suits look like sackcloth smocks. Juan de Alcega’s Book of Geometry, Practice, and Design, from 1580, was the first tailoring treatise published in Europe. “Him” and “Her” sections describe ruffs, headdresses with side extensions, doublets, brahones — which are shoulder wings — fitted sleeves, and ropas, or different types of overgowns. For the gents, we get a look at muffs, fitted jackets, and cloaks. Fashion’s to be savored in painted parchment letters of nobility, the deluxe versions showing men, women, and children wearing clothing fit for the royal court where they’d see the king and queen and not Judge Judy. To an extent, clothing denotes rank.

There was plenty of room for ornament that isn’t textile. Joya, the Spanish word for jewelry, came from the Italian term for joy. Precious and semiprecious metals and gems were thought to have healing or protective powers, but then there were relics of saints surrounded by gold and silver. Spanish men donned daggers and were medal-mad and sometimes sash-crazy; these ornaments proclaimed one’s special status in the court or achievements in advancing the imperial cause. There’s a case of these trinkets in the Main Court. Gold, Colombian emeralds, Pacific coral and pearls, garnets, Mexican cochineal, black jet, sapphire, and enamels fashioned in the shapes of saints, Jesus, and the Virgin are all part of the drama.

Even the priests got into high Spanish style. Ecclesiastical garments that add pizzazz to the altar are on display, including a dalmatic: a knee-length, T-shaped tunic. It’s a black cut-silk velvet vestment, unique to Spain, embroidered with flowers and embellished with gold appliqués and braid. They’d make the Trump Oval Office look pasty. Textiles made for royals tend to come and go as styles change, invasions and coups happen, and then there’s the desperation sale. Churches tended to keep their styles. They didn’t change much. By the era of Spanish church despoliations in the early 1800s, these things either went into the art market or into royal and aristocratic stashes. The dalmatic came into the Hispanic Society as part of Huntington’s core collection.

By the 16th century, religious sculpture, especially of Mary, Jesus’s mother, was dressed like the ladies of the court. One of my favorite objects in the exhibition is a polychrome wooden sculpture of Mary painted in lifelike flesh tones, with glass eyes, a lamé dress, and embroidered velvet cape. She wears custom-made clothes over a conical farthingale. Three layers of petticoats, too! It’s thought to be from about 1825, well beyond the chronology of Spanish Style, but that’s fine. As the dalmatic teaches us, ecclesiastical style doesn’t change much.

Hair gets a mention and probably needs a show of its own. Often highborn women dyed their hair blonde and attached an intricate hairpiece. Makeup included black eyebrows, red lipstick, and powder to make the face pallid.

As further enticement, Goya’s Duchess of Alba, that supreme flower of hauteur painted in 1797, is on view, though it’s not part of the exhibition. The duchess is in “high maja” style and wearing black since her husband had just died. She’s there representing the Hispanic Society’s marquee Old Masters. Most others — among them El Greco’s Saint Luke and Saint Jerome, Murillo’s Prodigal Son Among the Swine, Velázquez’s Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, and Zurbarán’s Saint Emerentiana — are now traveling. Sorollas are there, though, as well as a nice, small exhibition called Goya and the Age Revolution. I hope the museum does a proper, splashy exhibition on Spain’s unheralded but weighty role in support of the American Revolution.

This is the Hispanic Society’s first fashion show. Good for them. It shows daring and a new taste for pricey exhibitions. Nearly everything is from its permanent collection, but it’s an ambitious show. For New Yorkers, Spanish Style will be something new. The Fashion Institute of Technology’s exhibitions, nearly always a revelation, are, by and large, modern and contemporary. I’m not sure what the Met’s Costume Institute has done for Spanish Golden Age fashion, but I suspect that Spain is the ultimate imperialist, colonizer, oppressor, and extractionist, possibly even worse than America and Jews in ignorant, modish minds. It’s a topic well worth a good dive, though. The Spanish Empire, and Spanish power in Europe, ebbed starting in the 1650s. Before long, Paris fashion ruled supreme. I can’t imagine, and physics couldn’t fathom, enacting Fragonard’s The Swing in a farthingale.

A few words about Spanish style during the Golden Age. Spain’s Renaissance was very different from Italy’s. Many Italian artists worked in Spain starting in the 15th century, bringing a measure of Italian style, but Spain’s centuries-old rule by the Moors inspired visual culture long after 1492. Features of Spanish fashion — black for men and architectural infrastructure for women’s dresses — display a Catholic taste for rigor, to be sure, but the museum’s Main Court is rich in pattern from the Moorish-style terra-cotta floors to intricate but regimented Plateresque walls — “plateresque” means silversmith-like. Sinuous scrolls, heraldry, and detailed ornament suggest low-relief ornament, but it owes much to dense patterns in abstract, repetitive, calligraphic Islamic art. Well into the 16th century, the default medium in Spanish religious art was polychrome sculpture, more lifelike and formal in the true sense of the word. Spanish fashion, big and stiff and spacious, has more than a whiff of this aesthetic.

Spanish Style is a wonderful show. Interpretation is concise, casual, informative, and, here and there, it made me smile.

In the next few weeks, I’ll write about Gainsborough and Fashion, an exhibition opening at the Frick this weekend, and, of course, the Met gala in early May. I’ll write about the Hispanic Society’s massive renovation, too, as another story in a series I’m planning on art and culture north of 96th Street. The Studio Museum of Harlem just reopened after an expansion. The Morris-Jumel House, built in 1765 and the oldest house in Manhattan, is getting a new roof and will open this summer. Washington, the British army, and the Hessians headquartered there during different times in the Revolution. Eliza Jumel, the socialite, lived there. She was once married to Aaron Burr. It’s said she haunts the place. And then there’s the Bronx, home of the Botanical Garden, Woodlawn Cemetery, and the Bronx Museum. Not all of New York’s treasures are along Museum Mile, in Midtown or Chelsea, or on Central Park West.