Familiar Spanish Travels by William Dean Howells
page 62 of 311 (19%)
page 62 of 311 (19%)
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interest, such transcendant powerfulness as those carvings of Berruguete
and other masters less known, which held us fascinated in the lower rooms of the museum. They are the spoil of convents in the region about, suppressed by the government at different times, and collected here with little relevancy to their original appeal. Some are Scriptural subjects and some are figures of the dancers who take part in certain ceremonials of the Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at Seville), which have a quaint reality, an intense personal character. They are of a fascination which I can hope to convey by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this is the motionless force, the tremendous repose of the figures of the Roman soldiers taken in the part of sleeping at the Tomb. These sculptures are in wood, life-size, and painted in the colors of flesh and costume, with every detail and of a strong mass in which the detail is lost and must be found again by the wondering eye. Beyond all other Spanish sculptures they seemed to me expressive of the national temperament; I thought no other race could have produced them, and that in their return to the Greek ideal of color in statuary they were ingenuously frank and unsurpassably bold. It might have been the exhaustion experienced from the encounter with their strenuousness that suddenly fatigued us past even the thought of doing any more of Valladolid on foot. At any rate, when we came out of the museum we took refuge in a corner grocery (it seems the nature of groceries to seek corners the world over) and asked the grocer where we could find a cab. The grocer was young and kind, and not so busy but he could give willing attention to our case. He said he would send for a cab, and he called up from his hands and knees a beautiful blond half-grown boy who was scrubbing the floor, and despatched him on this errand, first making him |
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