Page 32 - Nada temas, dice ella

matter, to the pleasure of the visible (due, perhaps, to the hatred of pagan idols): sacred beliefs belonged to an invisible world, to that ‘heaven of ideas’ that Plotinus called for in The Enneads (ca. 270), at the height of the spiritualist crisis of the Lower Roman Empire, when he defended an exclusively mental art dedicated to depicting the kingdom of the One, of the Absolute, championing an aesthetics of escape that turned its back on the senses, disdaining matter and separating from nature and naturalism, i.e., from volume, space and the weight of figures in favour of a beauty only accessible to an ‘inner eye’.
The first Christian art, the earliest, surrendered to this transcendent ideal- ism precisely, and even though by the sixth century Christianity was beginning to forget the biblical prohibition and producing divine figures, throughout the following millennium and up until the arrival of the Renaissance, the work of art was seen as the starting point for a metaphysical experience, a means to arrive at the ‘ocean of the One’, the nous or the most elevated part of the soul. In order to attain the essential principle of the divine, what was needed was a ‘transpar- ent vision’ in which bodies were pervaded by unhindered light and the spectator did not perceive the limits separating him from the contemplated object: an aspiration that materialised in the heavenly, brilliant and coloured wonder of the Gothic stained-glass window.3
A desire for nature, so to speak, only emerged in the Late Middle Ages. Divine figures, miraculous scenes and a whole imaginary of the sacred began to come down to earth, to worldly landscapes and architecture, to worldly time. Artists recovered the taste for observation and narrative, and virgins, saints and mar- tyrs glorified bodies rooted in physical space.4 The historical collection in the Museo Nacional de Escultura is a tribute to this representation of religiousness brought by the winds of modern humanism, retaining a thread with transcend- ence that is rigidly dogmatic though tenuous and ambiguous as regards form. Its figures illustrate the legends, rites and events of Christian spirituality and are paradigmatic of the paths and styles that successive generations of artists in- vented to promote the bond between the believer and divinity, each one remak- ing previous rules and frontiers. The emotional vigour of Alonso Berruguete,
the tumultuous pathos of Juan de Juni, the dolorousness of Pedro de Mena, the tortured cruelty of Gregorio Fernández all compose a ‘theological theatre’ based on a physical and sensory relationship with the figure, conceived as a receptacle of the sacred, a miraculous, transfigured icon. Sculpture in particular, with its tangible corporeality, its material and positive brutalism, reaches the core of the soul of believers, who see figures as mysterious apparitions. Beside artistic considerations, we must bear in mind that religious icons were always visible