Spain and the visual culture of suffering

Abstract

This chapter explores the representations of the pain of others at two different moments of the nineteenth century in Spain. It begins with a discussion of Goya’s Disasters of the War and ends with an examination of various works of social intent produced at the end of the century, including some of the most famous canvases painted by Joaquín Sorolla during the 1890s. Unlike some other interpretations based on the iconographic analysis of the figures or the emotional reaction that those images triggered on their beholders, this chapter explores the inner reactions of the painters themselves as part of a Catholic culture of obstinacy and martyrdom. Without falling into sentimentalism or, even less, without a clear political judgment of the social conditions of the destitute, the Spanish representation of suffering, either as part of the legend of the black or the white Spain, shared a Catholic disposition by means of which the painter was able to acquire a moral authority, a form of religious sanction based on the way in which the pain of others was imposed on his own experience.