ABSTRACT
On viewing the catalogue of the Museo del Prado's 1992 exhibition of nineteenth-century Spanish historical painting (Díez), I was struck by the frequency, in a pictorial 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 1883 (repeated 1884 and 1882, respectively). 2 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 as national exhibitions, should also be money-makers at fairground displays suggests that, in at least some cases, they held considerable potential for slippage between high cultural and mass cultural modes of spectatorship. In this chapter I will focus on these two paintings, while discussing 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 Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz (1848-1921), <italic>Doña Juana la Loca con el féretro de Felipe el Hermoso</italic> 1877. Oil on canvas. 3.4 x 5.0 m. © 2004 Museo Nacional del Prado. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003135890/f03dc901-aaea-4987-b3d0-75063c0f2fbd/content/fig4_4_1.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> José Casado del Alisal (1832-86), <italic>Leyenda del rey monje</italic> 1880. Oil on canvas. 3.56 x 4.74 m. © 2004 Museo Nacional del Prado. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003135890/f03dc901-aaea-4987-b3d0-75063c0f2fbd/content/fig4_4_2.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
