Art and Empire in San Diego

Walking into Art & Empire: The Golden Age of Spain at the San Diego Museum of Art, a map on the wall reveals the geography behind the world’s most far -reaching empire from the 17th to 18th centuries. Red arrows describe the extensive trade routes from the Iberian Peninsula to New Spain, from much of what is now Southern California to the tip of South America, as well as the Caribbean, Philippines and parts of Italy and Belgium.

Juan Sánchez Cotán (Spain, 1560–1627)Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber, ca. 1602. Oil on canvas, 27 1/8 x 33 1/4 in. (69 x 84.5 cm) The San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of Anne R. and Amy Putnam, 1945

The point, however, is that the influences spread widely with Spanish artists emigrating to the colonies to live, teach and produce art for the emerging wealthy classes. Those artists as well as craftsmen and jewelers were in turn influenced by their time spent in the existing cultures of these many regions along with with trade with China and the Ottoman Empire. Organized by the museum’s curator Dr. Michael Brown, with more than 100 works in this show, the entire idea of a national art is overturned in favor of a global perspective.

Portrait of a Spanish Prince (1573) by the Milanese Sofonisba Anguissola, the most famouse woman artist of her time who came to Spain as tutor of Isabel of Valois, wife of the king. If her name is not familiar, there are two adjacent portraits of King Philip IV, the great Spanish patron, by Diego Velázquez, one from 1623, at the outset of his reign, the other decades later, showing the effects of struggle and age.

Miguel Cabrera (Mexico, 1695–1768) Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1750. Oil on canvas, 77 1/2 x 57 1/2 in. (196.8 x 146 cm) Museo Nacional de Historia, INAH, Mexico City, Mexico

One of the most remarkable is a portrait of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1750) by the Mexican artist Miguel Cabrera. She sits at a desk in a library symbolic of her status as one of the great intellects and poets in Spain. Cabrera also painted the 1759 Virgin of Guadalupe with Apparitions, the story of Mary’s appearance to the peasant Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoazin, an image that remains potent to this day. Cabrera melded the gilding and lapidary colors of High Renaissance art to this story of humility and grace.

Miguel Cabrera (Mexican, 1695-1768), Virgin of Guadalupe with Apparitions, 1759. Oil and tempera on canvas, 72 13/16 x 40 9/16 in. Pérez Simón Collection

Following the Council of Trent in 1563, the church established guidelines for carrying the message to the people regardless of education or position. Spain became the leading force in the Counter Reformation, the response to the Protestant Reformation. Saints and archangels and narratives of good and evil abound in painting and polychromed, gilded wood carvings.

Lux Eterna, sacred music written in 1997 by contemporary Morton Lauridsen.

Francisco de Zurbarán (Spain, 1598–1664)Saint Francis in Meditation, 1635–39. Oil on canvas, 59 7/8 x 39 in. (152 x 99 cm) National Gallery, London, Bought, 1853

Even still life painting is freighted with spiritual symbolism including the pellucid realism of Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán, with a heartbreaking Agnes Dei (1635-1640), the lamb of God lying with feet bound, ready for slaughter, but endowed with a silvery halo above its curly head.

through Sep 2.