This painting should have been destroyed
Imentioned in last week’s Telegraph Magazine that there was a picture with a tale to tell in the amazing new Spanish Gallery at Bishop Auckland. As the
Telegraph reported in 2018, Jorge Coll, who runs the dealers Colnaghi, spotted a painting for sale at Sotheby’s as a work by Juan Bautista Maíno (1581-1649), a sort of missing link between Caravaggio and Velazquez. He bought it for nearly £200,000.
It ought not to exist, because its theme was so controversial that a decree went out in 1629 for all such pictures to be destroyed. You’d hardly guess it from an uneducated perusal.
It shows a bearded St James, identified by the scallop shell on his shoulder, with one hand on a waisthigh carved coat of arms of Spain, quartered with lions and castles, for Leon and Castile. He holds a sword aloft; on his breast is the Cross of Santiago, the emblem of the Spanish military order of St James, as sported by Velazquez in his painting Las Meninas.
On the right stands a young-looking St Teresa of Avila in her Carmelite habit, a quill raised in the air and her eyes lifted to heaven. Her left arm clutches a big, fat old folio book with a yapp-edged vellum cover that can close over the fore-edge when the ties are knotted. It’s probably her writings.
Round her shoulders is a gold collar with a cross, which she never wore in life. But, in a rapture in 1561, as she set about the brave reform of her religious order, she had seen the Virgin Mary put it on her. Above the both of them hovers the feathery dove of the Holy Spirit.
Anyone familiar with St Teresa and the Life written by herself tends to warm to her. In 1617, after she had been beatified but before she was to be canonised (in 1622), the Carmelites proposed she might be made co-patron of Spain along with St James. It was quite a proposal, as though John Henry Newman should be made co-patron of England along with St George.
The king, however, was in favour and the Cortes voted for it hands down. You might think that would have been it, but Spain is often surprising, and a vigorous war of pamphlets ensued for the next 12 years. Early opponents of the idea, naturally, were the canons of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where St James’s relics are revered.
Proponents of the co-patronage plan were called teresianos, and opponents santiaguistas, a word incorporating the Spanish version of James, Santiago. The controversy lived on when King Philip III died. When his successor, Philip IV, came to the throne aged 16 in 1621, a new element came to the fore.
Eighteen years older than the young king, the Countduke of Olivares exerted great influence over him and on his behalf. He attracted negative criticism. Olivares strongly supported the new role for St Teresa. He seemed to have a genuine devotion to her, attributing to her prayers the recovery of his mother from an illness. He is said to have had in his possession her heart in a reliquary. I’ve seen the thing, at Alba de Tormes, not in itself a pretty sight, but in its time a vital part of the saint’s existence.
An ally of Olivares had been the satirical writer with the famous spectacles, Francisco de Quevedo, but he was willing to stick his neck out to write a pamphlet against the co-patronage, and then another one when the first earned him exile from court.
Though in 1627 the pope, Urban VIII, seemed to have it all arranged, he backtracked in 1629 and declared St James the sole patron of Spain. Many a painting like Maíno’s was dumped or perhaps overpainted. It doesn’t make it a better painting, but it gives it a strange history.