Ràfols was both the oldest and the tallest in the group. He was eclectic when it came to painting. His inclinations led him to seek out wistful eyes or a cheek able to inspire mystical tenderness and defend him from the morbid, erotic, digestive pomposity of the painters of the Bologna school. At the same time, nevertheless, he spoke of French impressionism and the humility of painters in that school so warmly, he revealed how far he had understood the state of grace which realism can attain — the fascinating beauty of reality.
In matters relating to life and politics the Mexican was an out-and-out revolutionary, but he had an academic taste in art that was fairly haphazard, if reasonably well grounded. He was no devotee of what he called academic prints and thus believed Rafael was cold and unfeeling. On the other hand, he was bowled over by Michelangelo. He liked to see art display the sweat and tautness produced by straining effort, tensed muscles and twisted mouths. He liked large symbolic figures, showy, dramatic foreshortening, and what he called social art. One of his idols was El Greco, not the familiar realist El Greco of the large portraits, but the restrained glow of El Greco suffused with purple incandescence. In any case, that gentleman reckoned that religion (what he called superstition) weighed too heavily in European art. He leant towards a lay, social Michelangelo.
Llimona and I always understood each other, although he is more Gothic and stylized and I’m more realist and plebeian. In Italy we always championed the champagne brut of the art of Umbria and Tuscany. When we arrived in Florence we immediately felt the connection and parallels that existed between our country’s past which peaked spiritually with the Gothic, and Tuscany’s culminating moment. When Barcelona and Florence reached their high point in art, they were two trading states able to give stone an unadorned, incisive elegance. So we were enthralled by the process we noted in the history of Italian painting: the process that Cimabue begins and Rafael d’Urbino concludes. We were fascinated by the initial stage, particularly as represented by the sequence of Cimabue, Giotto, Simone Martini, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, and Sandro Botticelli. We set out to recreate in situ, in our turn, the path that leads from the primitives of Umbria, hovering between discreet mystic fervor and the heat of local, feudal passion, to Benozzo Gozzoli’s pink, springtime, gracious youthfulness and Botticelli’s supremely elegant luminous sensuality. We spent hour after unforgettable hour refining our understanding of the landscapes and figures we met in the course of our explorations.
We found the second part of that path, from Botticelli to Rafael, much less interesting. Initially, painting shifts from south to north, from Siena to Florence, to be precise. Then follows an opposite path: moves from north to south, from Florence, via Arezzo, Siena, Orvieto, Perugia, to Rome, where it enjoys its stellar moment, enjoys a radiant solstice in Rafael and, subsequently, goes into ineluctable decline. As painting shifts down the peninsula, it becomes more perfect, but at the same time grows cold and icy. Consider Siena’s position in this to and fro. In Siena the source of Italian art, one sees the ascendant phase, the wonders of the Tuscan primitives, especially Simone Martini, who is simply unforgettable. However, two centuries later, one can also observe the decline in the work of Pinturicchio, housed in the cathedral sacristy, a painter who is colder and stiffer than ice. That doesn’t mean we don’t champion Signorelli from Orvieto, El Perugino from Perugia and Rafael. But in the second part of this process one discerns elements of conscious, elective affinity, elements that must be contrived, because they have lost the fascination and grace of our discoveries on the first part of our explorations. We thus followed the basic itinerary in the history of Italian painting: an itinerary that marches towards perfection and that perfection — lethally — leads to burnout and is killed off in clever formalism. Such seems to be the fate of the works created by the human mind.
We were much less intensely drawn to things after Rafael. There is a significant drop in temperature. Two great branches spread out from Rafaeclass="underline" the schools of Lombardy and Bologna. Our eager, petulant, melancholy youthfulness made it impossible for us to grasp the voluptuous treasures abounding at the solstice of Italian painting. Voluptuousness requires a degree of mature experience. Later, the Venetians — Titian’s realism — seemed to bring us back to authenticity, to what our real tastes and inclinations favored.
When we first set foot in Rome, it was a huge disappointment. Our spirits sagged. We felt removed from genuine life and surrounded by a formal art full of grandiose but indifferent rhetorical exercises that lacked a warm pulse. Everything seemed too solemn, rich, and spectacular. We understood someone had to do what Michelangelo did to make the world complete. However, the baroque, with the ghastly Bernini, gave us a dose of unbearable sweetness — a kind of saturation on sickly pastries and sticky, insoluble saccharine. Youth can be shortsighted and dismissive, but time has changed nothing in this respect: I have never been able to stomach the baroque that I consider to be the essence of all that is superfluous and clichéd, pretentious, over-blown and over-stretched. Its fake passion exasperates me. Its theatricality exhausts me. Its emptiness depresses me. Its cardboard verismo provokes hilarity and sarcasm. The baroque is the only form of artistic exploration that is indifferent to human feeling. If the baroque hadn’t existed, Europe would be more substantial, more serious; its spirit would be lighter. The baroque was a wrong turning that helped to distort and mystify the svelte, genuine grace of Mediterranean humanity.
Rome, that is, the superficial but oppressive Rome that hits you in a first impression, panicked us. We became immensely nostalgic for Florence. Of course, there was much to see in Rome, but where would we find Florence’s crystalline purity? When you are slightly familiar with Florence, that urban mass is what the spirit will always long for. So our first stay in Rome was short-lived: we fled to Naples, not for any intrinsically Neapolitan reason, but with the Greek museum in Naples in mind. We were fortunate: when you are familiar with Verrochio and Donatello, the Greeks and Greek sculpture dazzle most. Freed from the intolerable burden of Rome’s baroque, we felt a delicious lightness of being in the Greek rooms in the Naples museum — though the wind in southern Italy creates an oppressive, obsessive melancholy with a pathetic pornographic flavor.
In the course of our first trip to Italy, the focus of which was Florence, we thus tried to concentrate on the primitives in Umbria and the school of Tuscany. We were especially interested in the artists we called the most western, the least troubled by the influence of the Etruscans, to follow Ruskin’s terminology in this regard. Llimona was very fond of Ruskin’s essays on Italy. Ràfol was too. I wasn’t so keen. I found him too much of an aesthete, too prone to explain things by their exterior, always trying to emphasize intentions that only existed in the subjective mind of the observer and that might be brilliant but were invented rather than based on reality. Such things deserve an explanation — if I could only find one.
We brought the usual mental baggage to Italy: I mean we had digested the limited number of ideas written in the European languages used to popularize the country. The bibliography on Italy in French, English, and German is quite remarkable.
The French have never felt been at all drawn to what they called in blanket fashion the Tuscan school. President de Brosses describes it as dry, worn out, and leathery, and all his sentiments are drawn towards the ample bosoms and hips of the Bologna school. Fair enough, there’s no shortage of them! Stendhal follows faithfully in the footsteps of the distinguished magistrate. Stendhal scorned “the modern burghers of Florence” and regretted that Florentines lacked passion. “They believe,” he wrote, “that passion is a failing.” They have always had the same criteria in the Villa Medicis in Rome: painting begins with Raphael. Before Raphael, painting is archaeological, naturally, not excluding the existence of sporadic works, like the Uccellos and Ghirlandaios in the Louvre!