-4-

Horror, Spectacle and Nation-formation:

Historical Painting in Late-nineteenth-century
Spain
Jo Labanyi

On viewing the catalogue of the Museo del Prado's 1992 exhibition of nineteenth-
century Spanish historical painting I was struck by the frequency, in a
pictorial
(Díez),
genre promoted by the Spanish state as a tool of nation-formation, of
melodramatic even Gothic sensationalism. 1 What kind of image of the nation, I
- -

wondered, would these scenes of death and madness have produced in the broad
public who viewed these
paintings at the
Exposiciones Nacionales de Bellas Artes
mounted from 1856 by the Ministerio de Fomento, which included education in its
modernizing agenda? My wonderment increased when I discovered, thanks to

Sanchez Vidal's research into the Gimeno family (which pioneered cinema in Spain
while running a flourishing waxworks business) that in the 1880s waxwork shows
started to reproduce historical paintings shown at the National Art Exhibitions. The
two examples cited by Sánchez Vidal (114-16) are, precisely, the two paintings that
had most struck me as being at odds with any nation-formation mission: Francisco
Pradilla y Ortiz's (1877) Doña Juana la Loca (Figure 4.1 ) and José Casado del
Alisal's (1880) Leyenda del rey monje (Figure 4.2 ), reproduced as wax tableaux by
the Galena de Figuras de Cera La Universal at the Fiesta del Pilar in Zaragoza in
2
1883 (repeated 1884 and 1882, respectively). That images produced as part of the
state's attempt to foster a national school of painting of the highest quality, winning
prizes at international as well
national exhibitions, should also be money-makers
as

atfairground displays suggests that, in at least some cases, they held considerable
potential for slippage between high cultural and mass cultural modes of
spectatorship.
chapterIn this
paintings, I will focus
discussing on these two while late
nineteenth-century historical painting generally. I shall read these paintings through
Mark B. Sandberg's thesis, in his book on waxworks and folk museums in 1880s and
1890s Scandinavia, that such spectacles constituted a pedagogy of spectatorship: that
is, by exposing the public to representations of the past organized in a particular way,
they schooled them in modes of viewing appropriate to modern citizens.
3
 Horror, Spectacle and Nation-formation

Figure 4.1 Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz (1848-1921), Doña Juana la Loca con el féretro de
Felipe el Hermoso 1877. Oil on canvas. 3.4 x 5.0 m. © 2004 Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 4.2 José Casado del Alisal (1832-86), Leyenda del rey monje 1880. Oil on canvas.

3.56 x 4.74 m. © 2004 Museo Nacional del Prado.

 Jo Labanyi

I have argued previously (Labatiyi) that the nation-formation process that

occurred in Spain as elsewhere in Europe in the late nineteenth century,
-
-

intensifying
from 1875 under the Restoration, took the form not only of central state
but also of the debates national life that took place in the public
legislation on

sphere. I use the term "public sphere" in Habermas's sense of public opinion,
whose role was to provide a forum for debate among members of civil society, in
order to keep a democratic check on the actions of the state. The nation-formation
project contained a considerable amount of heterogeneity, for public disagreement
on what the nation was and should be was considerable. As Boyd notes, these
debates were, among other things, a "dispute over the right to define and transmit
the meaning of history" (xv). In his article in the catalogue of the 1992 Prado
exhibition
pintura siglo
La de historia
España (Díez 35), en el XIX en Pérez Sánchez
observes that late-nineteenth-century Spanish historical painting does not propose
a single, celebratory model of the nation but a "duplicidad interpretativa." The
National Art Exhibitions were a site of struggle between competing interpretations
of the national past in which artists, members of the jury that awarded the prizes,
reviewers in the national press, and the educated and mass public all played a part.
The stakes were considerable, in terms of both financial reward (the top prizes
consistently went to historical paintings) and public dissemination (through
engravings in the national press, not to mention school textbooks, postage stamps,
calendars, and brand labels: Álvarez Junco 283).
Although these exhibitions were sponsored by the state and held in Madrid, and
although many of the prize-winning paintings were bought by the state for the
National Art Museum (amalgamated with the Prado when the latter passed from
crown to state ownership with the 1868 revolution) or for the Congress or Senate,

painters from the periphery increasingly won the major prizes (Gutierrez Buron
vol. 1: 24-5). A high proportion of prize-winning entries were painted at the
Spanish Academy in Rome by artists on state or local government scholarships. All
writers on the subject stress the importance of historical painting in fostering local
as well as national identities. Despite the overwhelming prestige of the National
Art Exhibitions, local exhibitions, also privileging historical paintings, continued
to be held in many provinces, sponsored by local governments or private cultural
associations (Arias Anglés et al. 41, 50; Gutiérrez Burón vol. 1: 147; Pantorba 3).
Provincial Diputaciones, as well as the Congress and Senate, commissioned
historical
paintings topics display -

often on local -

for on their walls. The Valencian

and Catalan local governments played a major role as patrons, commissioning
many works which were awarded prizes at the National Art Exhibitions. Favorite
subjects with painters and patrons from other regions too included Jaume I el
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Conquistador (who conquered Valencia and Mallorca from the Moors) and the
Principe de Viana (heir to Juan II of Aragón, proclaimed king by the Catalans
when he was arrested by his father under pressure from the latter's second wife,
the mother of Fernando el Católico) (Reyero 1987: 141-8, 213-20). Paintings on
this last subject not only catered to Catalan regionalist sentiment but also disputed
the legality of the Reyes Católicos' accession to the throne of a unified Spain.
Private provincial cultural associations also commissioned works that celebrated a
local past: for example, the painting of Abderrahmán III commissioned for the
Salon Liceo del Círculo de la Amistad of Córdoba (Reyero 1987: 80), contrasting
with the celebration of the Catholic Kings' conquest of Granada that was a

favourite topic in paintings commissioned by the central state -

for example,
Pradilla's (1882) La renditión de Granada, contracted by the Senate in 1878 after
the spectacular success of Doña Juarta la Loca (Reyero 1989: 23).
If historical painting in the 1850s and 1860s had largely followed French
Republican neo-classical models, it was in order to construct a secular genealogy
of the nation, countering the celebration of religious fervour found in, for example,
the various paintings of Columbus's exploits (Reyero 1987: 267 97). This
secularizing
developedclassicism
early 1860s, by
was from the
particular, Gisbert in
into statuesque hyper-realism that recreated the execution of martyrs fighting for
a

local or liberal freedoms, in order to support progressive political agendas.

Gisbert's famous painting of the execution of the Comuneros was bought by the
Congress in 1861, and his equally famous 1888 painting of the Romantic
revolutionary
Torrijos facing the firing squad was commissioned for the Congress in
1886 by Sagasta's Progressive government, as part of its campaign against
Canovas's centralizing measures (Reyero 1989: 26). The role of the Republican
leader Castelar in championing historical painting is notable: in 1873, as president
of the First Spanish Republic, he set up the Spanish Academy in Rome which
would produce so many prize-winning historical works (Pradilla painted his Doña
Juana la Loca while studying there, and Casado was its president from its
inception
until his resignation in 1881 when his Leyenda del rey monje failed to win the
top prize at that year's National Art Exhibition). Castelar headed the parliamentary
commission that secured state funds to buy Pradilla's painting for a record 40,000
pesetas, and gave an impassioned speech to the Congress in defence of Casado's
painting (whose depiction of Ramiro II of Aragón with the heads of the nobles he
had slaughtered could be read as a statement of anti-monarchist sentiment), again
securing state funds (35,000 pesetas, second only to the sum paid for Pradilla's
painting) to buy it for the nation (Salvá Herán 83 -4; Gutiérrez Burón vol. 1: 397;
Arias Anglés et al. 55).
I will be most interested here in the dominant move in the late 1870s and 1880s
to expressive, dynamic artistic forms, which rendered history not in the form
more

of the statuesque but in that of the (often sensationalist) theatrical tableau. This
new concern with theatrical spectacle does not seem to have been identified with
any particular political agenda it equally served the purpose of glorifying
-

national unification (as in Pradilla's 1882 La renditión de Granada) or of

denouncing the religious intolerance that formed its basis (as in Vicente Cutanda
y Toraya's ;A los pies del Salvador! (Episodio de una matanza de judíos en la edad
media), awarded third prize at the 1887 National Art Exhibition). But its emphasis
on dramatic effect produces a disconcerting freezing of time, which disturbs any

providentialist notion of history moving inexorably towards a present thereby

constructed
as the realization of a manifest destiny. In many cases, the moment of time

that is frozen is a scene of individual or (more often) collective death, presented

not as stoic triumph (as so often in the earlier neo-classical paintings), but as a
source of horror. The freezing of time eternally prolongs the moment of dying or

the moment of horror of those who, within the painting, contemplate the already
(but only just, or possibly not quite) dead. Any transcendental or redemptive
message is undone by this very physical focus on gore and horror: the contorted
or dismembered corpses, the bodily reaction of the diegetic onlookers. Álvarez

Junco titles a section of his book on Spanish nation-formation "La pintura

historica les pone rostro" (249-58), but what stands out in these historical
paintings
is not the faces but the bodies.
One must remember here the mutilation in Christian
emphasis physical on

religious
painting: Spanish audiences
(especially the illiterate whose education was

imparted largely by religious images) would have been used to contemplating

gruesome scenes of martyrdom, and would have been trained to inscribe these
gory scenes in a teleological narrative of redemption. That Spanish popular
audiences
were schooled to read visual images in terms of religious allegory is shown

by contemporary complaints that the lower classes who flocked to the Prado on
non-rainy Sundays the only time that attendance wais free, after it was opened to
-

the public following its nationalization with the 1868 Revolution (Gil and Romea
119)- mistook Velázquez's La renditión de Breda for St. Peter proferring the keys
to the pearly gates: a forgivable mistake given that the Prado did not display the

titles of paintings till the start of the twentieth century (lower-class spectators
could hardly be expected to buy the catalogue). Indeed the restriction of free
access to Sundays constructed a visit to the Prado as something one did after
4
mass. However, even the most gruesome Christian iconography contains signals

that invite the degradation of the flesh to be read as spiritual triumph: not least the
omnipresent heavenwards gaze of the sufferer and/or bystanders. In Pradilla's
painting, the upwards gaze of the seated ladies-in-waiting is trained on the vacant
gaze of Juana la Loca looking downwards at the coffin of Felipe I; while, in
Casado's painting, the rev monje is looking up at the horrified nobles who are
looking down at the severed heads of his victims. Any upwards gaze is redirected
downwards to the spectacle of death. In Pradilla's painting, the priest's face, buried
in his prayerbook, is almost hidden by his cowl, as if disowning what is going on.
In Casado's painting, the only representative of the Church is the bishop whose
severed head forms the gruesome bell clapper preferred by the rev monje to his
rebellious nobles. Although the foremost noble has a Christ-like countenance and
posture Jacinto Octavio reviewing the 1881 National Art Exhibition,
-

Picón,
complained that he looked like
(Díez 358) a "Cristo enfurrunado" -

his gaze is fixated

on bleeding heads on the ground (not even on
the the bishop's head dangling to
the left). A redemptive reading of either of these paintings requires considerable
ingenuity.
Popular audiences were, however, used to forms of spectacle other than the
religious.
We should not forget the public executions that drew large crowds, albeit
moved ever further to the city outskirts in the mid-century (Fernández de los Ríos
156). Marginally less gruesome but equally sensationalist were the mass cultural
entertainments proliferating with the acceleration of urbanization from the 1870s
on. This is precisely the time when the historical paintings exhibited at the
National Art Exhibitions developed a penchant for the spectacular. If these
paintings
were reproduced in mass cultural forms such as calendars and brand labels, it

is because they shared the representational codes of contemporary mass culture -

including waxworks, and (from 1895) the cinema which critics have seen as an

articulation of the modern habits of mass cultural consumption articulated by the

"living pictures" of the wax tableaux (Charney and Schwartz; Schwartz; Singer;
Sandberg). Indeed, several of these historical paintings were painstakingly
recreated
number of historical films of 1944-52, many (but
in a all) directed for not

CIFESA by Juan de Orduña with the pre-war avant-garde stage designer Sigfrido
Burmann as artistic director (Díez 113-18; Hernández Ruiz). The best known
example is Burmann's meticulous reproduction in tableau form of Pradilla's Doña
Juana la Loca at the end of Orduña's Locura de amor (1948), massively popular
asPradilla's painting had been in its day.
The nation-formation project of early Francoism differed from that of the
Restoration not only in that it was not allowed debate in the public sphere, but also
because its privileged vehicle was the mass cultural medium of cinema whereas -

painting is a high cultural medium. With the development during the nineteenth
century of forms of public exhibition, however, it became increasingly unclear
who the public for paintings was a problem that mirrored contemporary political
-

debates about who exactly constituted the nation. The Academia de Bellas Artes
de San Fernando had been founded in 1753 with the mission of educating national
taste, so as to worthy to be members of civil society (Álvarez
produce citizens
Junco 81). It must be remembered that
political liberalism was based on the notion
of representative government, whereby elected representatives acted on behalf of
the interests of the less able, who in turn voted for these representatives in the
name of those who were excluded from suffrage on the grounds that they were not

capable of independent judgement, because of lack of education or lack of

economic
independence. Late-nineteenth-century Spanish politics riven by were

disagreements
Constitution, about who constituted the nation. The 1869
instance, for
following the 1868 revolution which deposed Isabel II,placed sovereignty in the
nation rather than the crown and introduced universal suffrage (males over 25).
The draft constitution (never instituted) of the 1873—4 First Republic replaced
national with popular sovereignty, opening the way for inclusion of the lower
classes. The Krausist reformers of the 1870s and 1880s supported national rather
than popular sovereignty, with suffrage based on a limited property qualification
since they felt the masses needed to be educated before being enfranchised. The
1876 Restoration Constitution, drafted under the conservative liberal leader
del Castillo, revoked universal suffrage, reintroducing a substantial
Cánovas
property
qualification and placing sovereignty in the hands, not of the nation or the
people, but of the monarchy and parliament. In 1890, universal suffrage was
reintroduced
by the progressive leader Sagasta (Labanyi 24, 108).
These renegotations of sovereignty find their cultural counterpart in the
hesitations
regarding the
appropriate public for the National Art Exhibitions. The
historical
paintings by only byshowcased these exhibitions constructed the nation not

inviting citizens to internalize particular versions of the national past, but more
importantly by developing certain kinds of taste, as Gutiérrez Burón (vol. 1: 87)
-

has noted. Bourdieu has argued that taste is not the product of class but constructs
class in the first place. That is: one is labelled as belonging to a particular social
class according to what cultural products one consumes and especially the
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manner in which one consumes them. Bourdieu's key insight is that cultural

products
are labelled "high culture" or "popular culture" (he uses the latter term in its

late-twentieth-century sense of "mass culture") not because of their intrinsic

qualities
but because of the manner in which they are consumed. High cultural
products
are those which are consumed in a detached, disinterested, aesthetic manner;

while popular cultural products are those consumed through forms of emotional
and bodily involvement. Bourdieu assumes that popular culture, unconcerned with
aesthetic considerations, is largely realist, and that high culture is aligned with an
avant-garde scorn for realism, since the latter supposes audience identification.
Bourdieu is discussing France in 1963; his analysis overlooks the earlier history of
taste. For, in the mid to late nineteenth century, popular audiences mostly
consumed diet of spectacle (narrative and non-narrative), which in the growing
a

urban centres, it became enmeshed with proliferating

as a culture of
mass

commercial
performance and mechanical reproduction, adopted increasingly
sensationalist
forms. Whereas realism the privileged
was form of the bourgeoisie,
art
seen as a vehicle of nation-formation since, on the one hand, it invited the
audience
identification necessary to construct national citizens as a "we," while, on the
other, it served as a forum for public debate, parallel to the national press, airing a
common fund of concerns about what "national society" was and should be.
Realism's combination of intellectual reflection with audience identification made
it always prone to tip into the melodramatic sensationalism of popular culture,
from which it partly extricates itself (in the case of the realist novel, at least)
through self-reflexive critique. This ambivalence allowed realism to serve as the
basis of nation formation, since the modes of response it permitted were all-
inclusive: the realist novel could function as an apprenticeship in citizenship by
emotionally engaging the untutored reader, who would then be invited to partake
in intellectual reflection (and thus "elevated" to a higher cultural plane) through its
metafictional commentary on its own processes.
What, however, of the visual arts? Sandberg observes a complementary process

whereby, in the 1880s, popular spectacles like waxworks started to mimic the
representational
techniques of realism in order to acquire a higher cultural status.
Previously, waxworks were associated with sensationalist displays of diseased or

dismembered bodies, of an often morbid or pornographic nature as in the Venus -

figures that could be taken apart to show their inner organs (Pilbeam 1-16). This
was true both of the "anatomical cabinets" of wax figures that toured the
fairground
circuit
(which proclaimed motley their wares among a assortment of freak

shows) and of the anatomical collections, which included figures modelled in wax,
of medical schools and anthropological museums (both open to public display for
"educational" but often prurient purposes). 5 Pilbeam has shown how Madame
Tussaud, after moving her waxwork display to England in 1802, trod a difficult
path between the popular touring circuit and the more upmarket museum, building
her reputation on the frisson of authenticity derived from the fact that she had,
during the French Revolution, made casts of guillotined heads or murdered leaders
in situ (Marat stabbed in his bath was, and still is, a favorite), but at the same time

insisting on her respectable connections with the French royalty and aristocracy.
Tussaud's wax "museum" as she called it even during its touring days
-
-

contained
a mix of displays of great historical figures from the past and present,

increasingly legitimized by authentic material props and costumes; and the

"Adjacent Room" which in 1846 became dubbed the "Chamber of Horrors,"
depicting the acts of notorious criminals. The concern with authentic props and
costumes had, by the 1880s, developed into the creation of tableaux, sometimes

arranged in a developmental narrative sequence, involving a number of wax

figures arranged in a play of body movements and gazes that bound them together
in an "event," located in a recreation of the original environment. This new vogue
for tableaux became the basis of the displays in the new Paris wax museum -

the
Musée Grévin -

when it
opened in 1882 (Schwartz 89-148).
As Sandberg argues in his discussion of how these techniques were developed
by the upmarket wax museums created in Scandinavia in the 1880s, these
tableaux -

whether recreating historical scenes or famous crimes -

schooled
spectators
in causal logic (through their perception of the relations between figures
and their environment), and in the limits of what constituted acceptable
voyeurism (through visual jokes which subjected the unreflective viewer to
private if not public embarrassment). Unlike Tussaud's earlier displays, which
invited spectators to mingle with and touch the wax figures, the construction of
these tableaux in the form of a self-contained environment, viewed through a
glass or imaginary fourth wall, encouraged the spectator to gaze, but from a

distance.Most
importantly, emphasis body such tableaux abandoned the on isolated

parts typical of the disreputable early history of waxworks, insisting on the

incorporation of bodies into a socially constituted whole. The pedagogy of
spectatorship
by constituted
by inviting such tableaux functioned visitors to

knowingly
have it both ways: that
is, enjoy depicted,
but to reflect on
to the sensationalism of the
the mechanics of the illusion created. Via
a different route, the
scenes

wax museums of the 1880s coincide with the contemporaneous

come to

strategies
of the realist novel which, in Spain at least, borrows from sensationalist
popular fiction while inviting the reader to reflect critically on its effects.
The other gentrification strategy used by wax museums in the 1880s was the
construction of tableaux recreating scenes from realist novels (for example, those
of Zola reproduced in the or-

more frequently historical

-

Musée Grévin)
paintings,
showing that the popular cultural medium of wax figures was capable of
creatingthe effects of high culture. This was possible only because the high cultural
works that were imitated themselves contained the sensationalist effects on which
popular culture relied. The 1880s can thus be defined as the period when realism
(bourgeois culture) and spectacle (popular culture) come together, in a shifting and
uneasy alliance that attempts to work through the various possible definitions of
who is eligible for national citizenship (perhaps we should say "national

spectatorship").
As Sandberg notes (69-116), the modern nation-formation process takes

place not only via the Foucauldian subjection of citizens to surveillance, but also
via the construction of certain legitimate forms o f looking. In urban modernity, to
be is to look as well as to be looked at. Indeed "being-looked-at" can construct
one as an individual or as a member of the mass, but looking necessarily constructs
one as an individual. This is particularly true when the looking takes place within
the confines of a high cultural event like a state-run National Art Exhibition, with
the paintings viewed at a distance on a wall. The massive dimensions of many of
these historical
paintings (the bigger canvases tended to win the prizes: Pradilla's

Doña Juana la Loca measured 2.38 x 3.13 meters, Casado's La leyenda del rey
monje 3.36 x 4.74 meters), while forcing a direct involvement in the painting, also
obliged one to stand back to take the whole thing in.
Itis clear that the organizers of the National Art Exhibitions were ambivalent

about who their intended audience was (just as the Prado opened its doors to the
masses on Sundays provided it was a dry day so they would not muddy the
floor). Entry was initially free to encourage cross-class attendance, and from
1871 railway companies offered substantial discounts (45 per cent in 1881) so
people could travel from the provinces. In 1864 the press reported traffic jams
in the surrounding streets and extra members of the Guardia Civil were brought
in. To of crowd disorder, from 1861 the state increasingly
counter the threat

reduced the number of days with free entry; by 1884 it was limited to Sundays.
The number of tickets sold in 1884 was 15,386, peaking at 21,396 in 1887,
which also the year when the largest number of historical paintings were
was

exhibited (no attendance figures are available for days when access was free). In
1860 an Época had waxed lyrical about the innate
anonymous reviewer in La
artistic vocation of the "pueblo español" that flocked to that year's National Art
Exhibition, making it difficult to get in; and in 1864 even the conservative
novelist
Alarcón claimed that "el pueblo por antonomasia, la plebe de la villa, la
gente que habla a voces en las calles y plazas constituye, por decirlo así, la van-
guardia de la opinion publica." By contrast in 1884 Jacinto Octavio
Picón
complainedabout the ignorance of uneducated viewers (Gutiérrez Burón vol. 1:
617-21, 625; vol. 2: 703-4, 710; Reyero 1989: 100). Gutiérrez Burón cites two
press articles of 1881 (the year when the refusal to award top prize to Casado's
Leyenda del rey monje caused a public outcry, and when Sagasta's progressives
returned to power, reinstating educational freedom) which defend popular taste
against the decision of the jury, on opposing grounds. The first (in La Gaceta
Universal) insisted that "las obras de arte caen de lleno bajo la jurisdicción del
sufragio universal" (original emphasis), making it clear that the definition of
who was fit to form the national art public was a definition of who was fit to
enjoy civil rights: this supposes that artistic taste is based on a capacity for
intellectualdiscrimination
(Gutiérrez 622). (in Burón vol. 1: The second the Revista
de Madrid) defended the lower classes' artistic taste on the basis of their
emotional
cuestiones de estética, el corazón
response: "En el mejor juzga, es que es,
por lo menos, juez inapelable. ¿Conmueve la obra? ¿Hiere las fibras ignoradas
en que duerme el sentimiento? Pues la obra es buena, es hermosa, y merece

aplauso incondicional... ¿No conmueve? ¿No arranca un grito involuntario a los

labios o una lagrima a los ojos? Pues entonces ¿ Qué importa que la critica la
halle perfecta? (Gutiérrez Burón vol. 1: 623). The same defence of popular taste
on the basis of its emotional engagement is found in an 1887 article in La

Ilustración Artística (Gutiérrez Burón vol. 1: 622-3).

These press articles suggest that popular and bourgeois taste, based on
emotional
involvement and intellectual discrimination respectively, had become
inextricably
entangled
Exhibitions
and that the historical
paintings privileged at the National Art

played a role in this process. The requirement to appeal to a broad

public seems to have produced a contamination of bourgeois art by the

sensationalism
popular characteristic of
España commenting taste. As an 1867 article in La
on the mass attendance at the National Art Exhibitions stated: "donde quiera que
haya un espectáculo allí está Madrid. Elespectaculo es para Madrid absolutamente
necesario" (Gutiérrez Burón vol. 2: 719).
 At this point it becomes necessary to discuss the
implications of the fact that, in
late-nineteenth-century Spain, waxworks remained
an itinerant fairground

attraction,
rather than being incorporated into bourgeois culture through the creation of
elegant wax museums. While this did not stop Spanish waxworks from starting in
the 1880s to recreate historical paintings, as happened contemporaneously in the
wax museums of northern Europe, one cannot help wondering if the public

exhibition
of historical paintings took on in Spain some of the functions fulfilled by the
new sophisticated wax museums elsewhere: specifically, the use of a sensationalist

mode of realism that appealed to popular tastes while educating those tastes in
bourgeois decorum and conversely allowing bourgeois viewers to indulge
-

popular tastes they might not confess to at home. Puente notes that no bourgeois
would have bought for his home paintings with the gruesome subject matter of
those exhibited at the National Art Exhibitions (Arias Angles et al. 28).
Interestingly, the pre-1856 exhibitions of the Academia de San Fernando in the
Calle de Alcalá had coincided with Madrid's September Feria celebrated in the
same locality, producing a hugely mixed public. Indeed, there were complaints that
the public for the September Feria regarded these exhibitions as an extension of
the fairground stalls (Arias et al. 77). This led to the transfer of the
Anglés (now Calderón)
exhibitions
to the Ministerio de Fomento
Atocha, Teatro in the Calle de
where they remained after their conversion into the National Art Exhibitions till
their 1867 relocation to the Palacio de la Fuente de la Castellana (popularly known
as the Barracón del Indo, since the pavilion was installed much like a fairground
barracks in the garden of the private mansion of Señor Indo). This was the locale
where Pradilla's and Casado's paintings were exhibited, in both cases attracting
huge crowds 312; Pantorba 111; Gil and Romea 216). In 1887 the
exhibitions
(Díez relocated to what is
(Pantorba 10).
were now the Museo de Historia Nacional
We may also note the gentrified wax museums of northern Europe
that, just as

located their "Chamber of Horrors" in a different space from the respectable

historical
tableaux, so too the National Art Exhibitions had their "Sala del Crimen"
where paintings judged unworthy of acceptance were hung (Gutiérrez Burón vol.
1: 575-7).
Pantorba, writing at the time of the early Francoist nation-formation project,
notes the gruesome nature of the majority of historical paintings exhibited and
awarded prizes -

at the National Art Exhibitions: "Todas las notas negras de la his-

toria de España, que no son pocas [...]. No se buscaba sino lo convulso [...]
cadáveres y féretros, puñales y fusiles, miradas de horror, ojos de llanto, ademanes
amenazadores" (35). Pantorba could be describing the contexts of a wax museum.
He rightly picks up the theatricality and play of gazes, again typical of the wax
tableaux that into vogue in the 1880s. Significantly, Pradilla the painter of
came -

the most successful historical painting of them all, that of Juana la Loca gazing
ashen-faced and blank-eyed (like a wax effigy) at the coffin of Felipe I -

had
trained with a stage designer in Zaragoza and subsequently worked in Madrid with
two Italian stage designers (Arias Angles et al. 205). Just as contemporary wax
museums elsewhere filled their tableaux with historically authentic accessories, so
Pradilla worked from props and costumes constructed by him from descriptions of
the time (Díez 313, 316). Casado also drew on his studio wardrobe of historical
costumes to paint Leyenda del rey monje. And, if Madame Tussaud modeled wax

figures from the heads of guillotine victims, so Casado painted the heads of
Ramiro II's victims "live" from the decapitated heads of corpses he had delivered
to one of Rome's hospitals. According to a rumour that no doubt
his studio from
enhanced the painting's mass appeal, when the messenger emptied the sack of
heads onto the ground, Casado nearly fainted but took up his brush the following
day (Díez 356-7).
Sandberg (92-5) notes how the new wax tableaux of the 1880s created a "reality
effect" by giving some of the figures the ability to look, mirroring the gaze of the
spectator. This produced audience identification indeed these diegetic spectators
-

figured the emotional response that the non-diegetic spectator was expected to
adopt. Pantorba (111) notes that the "miradas de horror" in the canvas were echoed
by those on the faces of the crowds who flocked to see Casado's Leyenda del rey
monje. What, one has to ask, might have been the function of that horror for the
nation-formation project? Spectators would have known of Cánovas del Castillo's
1854 historical novel La campana de Huesca: Una crónica del siglo XII, published
in his youth the same year as his Historic/ de la decadencia de España. The novel's
illustrations included the Gothic scene of the king displaying his rebellious
subjects'
decapitated heads, fashioned into a bell clapper (the campana of the title), to
the nobles who form the diegetic audience. Cánovas's text ends with the king
absolved and spending the rest of his life in prayer; but one wonders what attracted
the future architect of the Restoration's centralizing project to this gruesome

subject matter, which he chose to foreground in his novel's title. The play of gazes
within Casado's canvas ensures that one identifies with the horror of the nobles
contemplating the massacre from the steps on the right, encouraging a reading of
this painting as a condemnation of monarchical tyranny. Or does it? An
eyewitness
recounted hearing Casado, incognito, ask a bystander at the 1881 National
Art Exhibition what he thought of the
painting. Casado was appalled when the
viewer replied that, in his view, the king ought also to kill the nobles in the picture
for protesting at his dispensation of justice. Misreading was clearly possible (Díez
358-60). Indeed, the catalogue description of the painting explained the event as
Ramiro IT'8 revenge on "los soberbios varones del Reino" for disregarding "la
autoridad rural y los fueros del pueblo" (Díez 352) which makes Ramiro the
-

champion of popular rights. I would suggest that the function of the painting was
precisely to stir up debate about political rights and justice, and, at a more basic
level, to trigger an emotional response of horror that filled spectators with a sense
of the importance of responding to injustice, no matter how that injustice was
defined. The painting could thus function as a training in citizenship, using horror
to open -

rather than close -

debate.
It is even harder to determine how spectators might have responded to Pradilla's
Dona Juana la Loca, except for the fact that know from eye-witness reports
we

that they were transfixed by it that is, reduced to the same immobile staring that
-

is enacted in Juana's figure. For these paintings are not so much historical
representations
like the contemporaneous
as -

tableaux historical wax -

enactments.
Like a wax tableau, Pradilla's painting gives the spectator the sensation of being

an interloper contemplating a scene that is poised between life and death: wax
being associated with embalming and yet producing a "living image" (all the
writers on waxworks comment on this uncanny quality of the medium). What this
means is that the spectator internalizes Juana's own inability to determine whether

Felipe I is really dead. This is not a "mad" question for what is at stake is the status
of the past as "living dead": gone but still with us in its effects. This question,
dramatized explicitly in Pradilla's painting, is effectively raised by all these
historical
paintings, whose status
"living pictures" figures hovering
as the past as

equivocallybetween life and death. It is

especially important question an for nations on

Europe's periphery anxious about their relation to modernity; that is, anxious
about the pull of the past but also about the consequences of breaking free from it.
Sandberg suggests that this explains the vogue for wax museums in 1880s
Scandinavia. Tamayo y Baus's famous 1855 theatrical melodrama Locum de amor
had picked up on this same anxiety: it ends with Juana asking her courtiers for
silence so as not to wake Felipe's "sleeping" corpse; this scene was reproduced in
an 1866 panting by Lorenzo Vallés, whose simple grouping of figures and plain

backcloth represents a stage in the history of the visual image prior to the
development
of the sophisticated wax tableaux of the 1880s. One may note here the
popularity in wax museums of comatose figures e.g. Sleeping Beauty whose- -

apparent death is belied by a mechnically propelled heaving bosom.

I am not here arguing that Spanish historical paintings were influenced by the
new wax tableaux: Pradilla's painting predates the 1880s, and we have very little

information about waxworks in nineteenth-century Spain, where they remained an

itinerant, ephemeral art form. What I wish to suggest is that these

contemporaneouscultural
phenomena correspond developments, to similar visual which in
both express anxieties about whether the past is dead or alive, and use frozen
cases

dramatic re-enactments to train spectators in shared habits of looking that define

them as national citizens. I would also suggest that, while these paintings produced
certain emotional responses, they allowed these to be applied to a
inescapable
range of alternative readings of the visual configuration. In the case of Pradilla's
painting, the spectator cannot help reproducing that is, identifying with the
-

emotional response of Juana la Loca to the sight of Felipe's coffin. But how exactly
does the spectator interpret this emotional response that he or she is forced to
internalize?
Juana's vacant look evokes an
unspeakable trauma and we may recall
-

here Peter Brooks' observations on the melodramatic genre's ability to "speak the
unspeakable," frequently through the dramatization of muteness. On the one hand,
Juana's madness her fixation on her Habsburg husband may have been read as
- -

an emblem of the "disturbance" caused to Spain's historical destiny by the

Habsburg dynasty, Felipe becoming king (with Juana's father Fernando el
Catolico's connivance) after having Juana declared mentally unfit to rule.
Alternatively, female spectators especially may have interpreted Juana's
traumatized
figure against unjust
as a mute protest her husband's and father's treatment of
her (and they would surely have picked up the pathos of her clearly delineated
advanced pregnancy). If Casado's painting reproduces a single emotion of horror
in the spectators within his canvas, the onlookers in Pradilla's painting represent a

range of emotional responses, from sympathy to dismissal. I suggest that the

strength of Pradilla's painting is that, while binding spectators emotionally to its
central figure (Juana), it forces them to try out a range of possible interpretations
of the emotion they see dramatized in her figure, and which they internalize,
without being able to articulate its contours. The painting thus provides a
schooling in the need to think twice before claiming to understand the motivations
of other people; that is, in responsible social relations. It is also a schooling in the
need to reflect before coming to hasty conclusions about one's reading of the
national past.
In her book Democracy and the Foreigner (2001), Honig has suggested that the
nation is perhaps figured better not through the genre of romance, with its happy
6
end, bat through that of the Gothic (Honig 107-22). Honig has in mind the female
Gothic, which invites us to reflect on helplessness and our habit of invoking
saviors which perpetuate the problem. Pradilla's painting can be read as an
example of the female Gothic, but I wish to argue here for a reading of Spanish
historical painting in general, with its emphasis on spectacles of horror, in the light
of the Gothic genre in its broadest sense. For horror requires us to react
empathetically,
and its extremeness forces us to confront issues of injustice, while requiring
us to reflect on what the nature of the injustice might be. Horror, which does not

tell us what to think but requires us to feel, can thus be seen as a democratic genre:
a schooling in responsible civic participation. I started this chapter by wondering
how Spanish spectators interpreted these gruesome representations of their
national past. I end it by suggesting that the only thing we can know with any
certainty
is what
they felt, history and that was an intense involvement: this was a that
"grabbed" you and made you part of it, like it or not. And, as Honig (2001)
observes, democracy requires us to find ways of cohabiting with those we would
rather not live with. As far as Spanish spectators' intellectual interpretations of
these paintings are concerned, the point, I would argue, is that the paintings forced
them to work these out for themselves; that is, they functioned as a schooling in
democratic public debate.

Notes

1.Gruesome subjects are too many to detail. Some fall into the carpe diem

formula; most are scenes of unjust execution or slaughter. Particularly popular

were the collective suicides of Sagunto and Numancia, which paralleled
contemporaneous archaeological excavations designed to provide a myth of
origins for"Spanish" spirit of independence, going back to the third and
a

bc respectively (Álvarez Junco 267).

second centuries
2. For the many paintings of Juana la Loca, see Reyero (1989: 326-33); Díez
(250-3, 306-17); Salvá Herán (66). Pradilla's painting won first prize at the
1878 National Art Exhibition, and was the only painting to be awarded the
medalla de honor between 1856 and 1895 (Pantorba 19). It won medullas de
honor also at the 1878 Paris and 1882 Vienna World Exhibitions. Casado's
painting won prizes at the World Exhibitions of Vienna, Munich and
Diisseldorf in 1882 and 1883. See Díez (316, 360). For Pradilla's and Casado's
careers, see Garcia Loranca and García-Rama; Portela Sandoval.
3. I thank Rebecca Haidt for introducing me to Sandberg's and Schwartz's work
on wax museums,

4. This information about lower-class responses to the Prado was given in

Eugenia Afinoguénova's paper "The Prado Museum and the Birth of the
Spanish School" at the 2002 Modern Language Association conference, New
York.
5. For a description of the Anatomical Museum of Madrid's Facultad de

Medicina, see Gil and Romea's 1881 guidebook, which also notes the
anatomical
collection of the Anthropological Museum (opened 1875). For waxworks
and popular entertainments in Spain, see Gil and Romea; Sánchez Vidal
(19-132); and the sources used by the latter: Varey; Baroja; Gutiérrez Solana
(1918, 1961, 1991). The current Madrid Museo de Cera was not created till
1972. Despite the tackiness of its displays (especially those where a jumble of
historical figures line the walls, as in the early wax cabinets), those of its
displayswhich
organized exactly
are in tableaux form conform
Parisian and Scandinavian counterparts, including the
to its late

nineteenth-century
reconstructions of paintings and self-reflexive games (see the illustrations in
Schwartz; Sandberg).
6. My thanks to Doris Sommer for mentioning Honig's book.
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