The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Through May 31

Realism “seems like a fairly straightforward idea,” said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. Yet there’s something about seeing a human figure, rendered with “super-realistic vividness,” that feels—well, unreal. That explains the uncanny chill you may experience studying the National Gallery’s new exhibition of paintings and “startlingly life-like sculpture” from 17th-century Spain. In that era, statues of Jesus, Mary, and other “luminaries of Christianity” were not only painted in naturalistic color, they also often incorporated real human hair, ivory teeth, and toenails made from animal horns. “Such intersections of sensual immediacy and spiritual poetry still can stir powerful feelings of awe and wonder, if not unquestioning faith.”

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Though small in scope, The Sacred Made Real is “one of the most substantial, important” exhibitions in this museum’s history, said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. Most important, it shatters “our modern tendency to value painting over any other medium.” We assume that such painters as Francisco de Zurbarán and Diego Velázquez were considered the most important artists of their era; in fact, they worked alongside—and sometimes for—sculptors such as Juan Martínez Montañes and Pedro de Mena, who are less well known to us. “When we modern museumgoers admire a certain kind of old religious art,” it’s usually because we’re attracted to a particular kind of refined ethereality. These Spaniards were after something different—something both earthily immediate and supernaturally intense. That explains the preoccupation with the sufferings of Christ and the martyred saints. “This show’s colorful art includes hideous gore, heart-wrenching pathos, and lots of frankly histrionic emotion.”

While some might call it kitsch, said Richard Dorment in the London Daily Telegraph, “you should still move heaven and earth to see it.” On a technical level, anyone can appreciate the “hyper-clarity of every detail” in the sculptures—even veins and stubble are intricately imitated. Juan de Mesa’s sculpture Head of Saint John the Baptist shows just that—a severed head, in cross section and served on a silver plate. It can prove difficult to get past such gruesomeness, said Adrian Searle in the London Guardian. “Even a film like Mel Gibson’s 2004 Passion of the Christ does not prepare us” for the astonishing variety of tortured human figures on display. Still, the show is not all gory horror. The work that will remain with me longest is de Mena’s Mary Magdalene, her body realistically poised midstep as her disheveled hair falls all around. “I have witnessed a woman consumed by grief, and she looked like this.”