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You cannot trace upon its walls the slow, groping progress of art towards perfection. It contains few of what the book-lovers call incunabula. Spanish art sprang out full-armed from the mature brain of Rome. Juan de Juanes carne back from Italy a great artist. The schools of Spain were budded on a full-bearing tree.
The master-of-camp was sent with a number of men to attempt the ransom of Juanes from the natives, with orders to stop on the way at Eleyti to ascertain the cause of the delay of a certain Pedro de Herrera who had been sent thither to obtain resin for pitching the ships. When this latter returned he bore a letter from the master-of-camp to the effect that Herrera had gone beyond his instructions.
From the plains of Castile and the hills of Navarre went, among others, Berruguete, Becerra, and the marvellous deaf-mute Navarrete. The luxurious city of Valentia sent Juan de Juanes and Ribalta. Luis de Vargas went out from Seville, and from Cordova the scholar, artist, and thinker, Paul of Cespedes.
What mastery of drawing, and what honest integrity of color after all these ages! It is reported of Juanes that he always confessed and prayed before venturing to take up his pencils to touch the features of the saints and Saviours that shine on his canvas. His conscientious fervor has its reward. Across the room are the Murillos.
Juanes proved to be not a Spaniard, but a Mexican Indian who had accompanied Villalobos. This Indian declared the three men to be of the same expedition, and Herrera had made a mistake in the time, which should be years, not months.
The latter was thereupon arrested and tried. This man brought news of three Spaniards who were held in the island of Tandaya who had been captured from a vessel within fourteen or fifteen months. Legazpi immediately sent this information to the master-of-camp, in order that he might ransom those men as well as Juanes, but the messengers failed to find that officer.
The master-of-camp having returned meanwhile, Legazpi sent a reenforcement of thirty men to Goyti with orders to explore the strait between Abuyo and Tandaya. At the mouth of this strait, news was had of a Christian "named Juanes, who had lived with the Indians for more than twenty years, and had married the daughter of a chief, and that he was painted like the other natives."
The first pictures you see to your left are by the early masters of Spain, Morales, called in Spain the Divine, whose works are now extremely rare, the Museum possessing only three or four, long, fleshless faces and stiff figures of Christs and Marys, and Juan de Juanes, the founder of the Valentian school, who brought back from Italy the lessons of Raphael's studio, that firmness of design and brilliancy of color, and whose genuine merit has survived all vicissitudes of changing taste.
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