As far as Spanish sculpture is concerned, the seventeenth century was the age of realism. The classical formulas of the Renaissance are separated from the Baroque by the intrusion of a realistic art which aimed not only at close observation of the model, but also at the exact rendering of emotion. This is manifested in the idiosyncrasies of the style, in a preference for carving in wood, a warmer material than stone, and in the replacement of Renaissance polychromy with gilding and brilliantly imaginative lusters, touches that tend to intensify the verisimilitude of the image. This thirst for truth, and the prospect of economies, eventually led the religious sculptors to the "clothed effigy," only the head and extremities of which were carved by the artist himself. Before arriving at this extreme, they produced some marvelous and astonishingly vital figures with all the vigour of a portrait. This art was a more effective expression of popular piety than was painting. Nevertheless, the "pasos", groups of sculpture which are carried in procession during Holy Week, are essentially pictorial in character.
During the seventeenth century, the great centres of Spanish sculpture were Valladolid, Madrid, Granada, and Seville. These schools may be distinguished by the greater pathos of the Castilian images, as compared with the ideal beauty sought by the sculptors of Andalusia. The school of Valladolid began with an important master, Gregorio Fernández (c. 1566-1636), whose style owes less to Italy than it does to the North. His first known work is the recumbent Christ of the Capuchins (1605), commissioned by Philip III and now in El Pardo. Sober, refined, profoundly sensitive in his modeling, and restrained in his use of drama, Gregorio Fernández turned away from idealist aesthetics to portray the emotions of real life, suffering, agony, and death. His images of the Pietà, which may have an antecedent in those of Juan de Juni, are designed to touch the hearts of the faithful, but at the same time satisfy the canons of plastic beauty. Fernández also carved retables, and his studio produced effigies for the Holy Week processions in Valladolid.
During the same years the Portuguese Manuel Pereyra (died 1667) was busy in Madrid. The Academia de San Fernando has a St Bruno, rightly considered his masterpiece, in which the artist has captured both the spirit of the saint and the mood of a passing moment.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the central figure of the Andalusian school of religious sculptors was Vázquez the Elder. At the same time, the rise of realism is most closely linked with the work of the great artist Juan Martinez Montañés (1568-1649), known to his contemporaries as "the god of wood" and immensely famous even during his lifetime. Montañés learned his craft in Granada. His first known work, dating 1597, is the graceful - and pictorial - St. Christopher, in the church of El Salvador at Seville. Later, he evolved a more strictly sculptural style, exemplified by the Christ of Mercy in Seville cathedral, a work in which the human blends with the divine. Montañés also created the Infant Jesus type, so highly esteemed in Andalusia. The foremost of his retables is that of San Isidoro del Campo at Santiponce, with splendid reliefs characterized by a remarkable humanization of the classical spirit. The artist carved a number of impressive heads for clothed effigies of the saints, including those of St Ignatius and St Francis de Borja now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Seville. Montañés exerted a widespread influence, both directly and through his pupils.
Alonso Cano (1601-1667) was an artist in whom restlessness lay concealed beneath a cloak of apparent serenity. His passion for beauty led him to create statues of the Virgin that have not been surpassed in this respect by any other Spanish artist. His sculpture had a profound influence not only in Seville, where he lived during his formative years, but also in Madrid and Granada. In the retable which he executed in 1629 for the church of Lebrija his personality appears to have set in its final mold. Gentleness and strength are joined in the figures of this admirable artist, whose most notable works include the St. Anthony in the Museum of Fine Arts, Granada, the Child Jesus with the Cross of the Cofradia de los Navarros in Madrid, the marvelous Virgin in the sacristy of Granada cathedral, and the busts of Adam and Eve on Granada cathedral façade.
Cano died in 1667. The most gifted of his pupils was undoubtedly Pedro de Mena, who was born in Granada in 1628 and began to work with Cano after the latter's arrival in that city in 1652. Pedro de Mena carried naturalism almost to excess, imposing the image as such upon the sculpture proper, as in the Mary Magdalene, preserved in the National Museum of Sculpture at Valladolid.
The panorama of realistic Spanish religious sculpture of the seventeenth century closes with a line of Andalusian sculptors, the Mora family, whose chief representative was José de Mora (1642-1724). The drama of his images is concentrated in its intimacy and always compatible with the purest beauty, as may be seen in his Virgin of Solitude in Santa Ana de Granada, or in the Mater Dolorosa of the convent of Maravillas in Madrid. In the work of José Risueño (1665-1732) Cano's influence mingles with certain Flemish traits, while the realism is partly neutralized by the intrusion of the Baroque.
During the final decades of the seventeenth century and through most of the eighteenth, there is repeated evidence of the workings of this Baroque influence, derived from Bernini and running counter to the realism and classical austerity of the trend whose course we have just defined. Andalusia was the region most affected. Sevilla was the home of Pedro Roldán, a sculptor born in Antequera about 1624. His principal achievement is the great retable of the Hospital of Charity, which was begun in 1670. Scenes like that of the Entombment reveal a decidedly pictorial approach to the design of a sculptural group. The artist's daughter, Luisa Roldán (1656-1704), known as "La Roldana," placed even greater stress on pictorialism, at the same time displaying a taste for anecdote compatible with a positive neatness in execution.