Saying sorry in Seville

There’s been a lot of muttering lately about the word ‘sorry’ and the reluctance of politicians and bankers to say it — an unrealistic expectation, given that the logical follow-up is resignation.

There’s been a lot of muttering lately about the word ‘sorry’ and the reluctance of politicians and bankers to say it — an unrealistic expectation, given that the logical follow-up is resignation. In Seville, they have a more sensible approach: instead of demanding personal apologies, they muck in for a mass penitence lasting a week.

Before attending my first Semana Santa this year, I’d imagined it to be a punishing affair involving penitents shuffling on their knees. As I discovered, it is anything but. A week of stirring spectacle and rousing music experienced from the comfort of a balcony or bar is not what we in Britain would call a penance; in fact it’s what we call a festival.

There’s something here for every sector of the community. Oldies can sit and watch the world go by in a good cause, when not scraping last night’s wax deposit off church floors. Young girls can wear their most alluring — and surprisingly revealing — dresses. Young men can prove their machismo by hefting 1,500kg floats on the backs of their necks for hours on end. Children can beg for candy, collect big balls of wax and, if privileged to carry candles in procession, sneak drips on to fellow penitents’ capirotes — garments conveniently restricting peripheral vision. Local musicians, meanwhile, have a field day. With drums and trumpets following the images of Christ and brass marching bands escorting the Virgin, there’s a gig for every amateur in town. And the tradition of serenading the pasos (floats) with saetas (flamenco verse) means even singers past their prime can stop the show.

Though the saeta singer on the restaurant balcony from which we watched Palm Sunday’s Santa Marta procession looked, and sounded, like a retired bank manager, the paso still halted respectfully while he sang his piece. We were not in Seville, however, to observe the crowds but to study the objects of their veneration: the sacred images carried in procession, some of which are masterpieces of 17th-century Spanish polychrome sculpture. This autumn, a dozen examples of the genre will travel to London for the National Gallery’s exhibition, The Sacred Made Real (opening on 21 October).

The tradition of polychrome sculpture is not peculiar to Spain. One of the finest examples in Seville’s Museo de Bellas Artes is a painted terracotta sculpture of ‘St Jerome in Penitence’ by the Italian Pietro Torrigiano (1472–1528), whose Florentine career hit the buffers after he broke fellow-student Michelangelo’s nose. His Sevillian career was finished by another act of violence, this time against his own work: when a patron haggled over a Madonna and Child, the sculptor smashed it. He was hauled before the Inquisition for destroying a sacred image, and died in gaol.

Torrigiano’s undoing was not just his temper but his failure to understand the Spanish mind-set. To an Italian a sculpture was a sculpture; to a Spaniard a holy image was far more than that. When the colour went on, it received the kiss of life — the process of applying flesh tones was actually called encarnación. Watching the images in procession, you see why. ‘What I’m fascinated by is the Pygmalion effect,’ says the show’s curator Xavier Bray.

Bray is also convinced that the heightened realism of these sculptures precipitated the Golden Age of Spanish realist painting usually attributed, for want of a better explanation, to the foreign influence of Caravaggio. To prove his point, the exhibition will juxtapose polychromed carvings by Seville’s two greatest sculptors — Juan Martínez Montañés (1568–1649) and Juan de Mesa (1583–1627) — with related works by contemporary realist painters. A Virgin of the Immaculate Conception carved by Montañés and polychromed by the painter Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644) will stand alongside the painting of the same title by Pacheco’s famous pupil Diego Velázquez; Montañés and Pacheco’s sculpture of St Francis Borgia meditating on a skull will be mirrored in a contemporary painting of the same subject by Pacheco’s other star pupil Alonso Cano; and an exquisite carved Crucifixion by Juan de Mesa — a miniature version of the Cristo del Amor processed on Palm Sunday — will find an uncanny echo in Francisco de Zurbarán’s ‘Saint Luke with a Palette Contemplating the Crucifixion’.

On a plaque outside Seville’s Basilica del Gran Poder, Juan de Mesa is commemorated as the inspired creator of religious images ‘which the Sevillians venerate and the erudite admire’. It will be interesting to see how English audiences respond to this ravishing but culturally alien art form when it is presented cold in a gallery setting. Bray’s argument about Spanish realism is persuasive; the question is whether the encarnación will work its magic without that Pygmalion moment of transformation when the paso is lifted, with a series of heaves and jolts, and the candlelit image sways miraculously into life.

Will this show inspire an autumn of public apologies? I fear not. But it will make a suitably austere counterpoint to Antony Gormley’s populist experiment in hyperrealism on the Fourth Plinth, which ends a week before.