Examining Antique Arms

Villegas was a celebrated Orientalist and genre painter, and a long-term director of the Prado museum in Madrid. Born in Seville, where his parents owned a barbershop, he trained from the age of nine at the Colegio de San Fernando before completing his studies at the local Escuela de Bellas Artes (1862–67). In the summer of 1868 he went to Rome and joined a group of Spanish painters centered around Mariano Fortuny (1838–1874), whose light-filled, minutely detailed scenes of everyday life, much prized by collectors, influenced Villegas’s work of the 1870s. After Fortuny’s early death Villegas became the most prominent Spanish painter in Rome, and with greater renown he broadened his themes to include large-scale history subjects as well as genre scenes. Flourishing financially, the artist commissioned a grand house and studio on the outskirts of Rome.

In 1898 Villegas became director of the Spanish Academy in Rome, which led to his appointment in 1901 as director of the Prado. He also held a professorship in the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid. Retiring from the Prado at the age of seventy-four, Villegas died three years later, in 1921.

This painting, dated 1870, was painted in Rome and is one of the artist’s earliest known works. The subject is an antiquarian armor shop, visited by figures in late eighteenth-century dress: an army officer, in a French-cut coat and riding boots with spurs, wearing a long sword in a scabbard; and a seated figure to the right, in Spanish dress, examining a cup-hilt rapier (spade alla spagnola), Italian or Spanish, from the first half of the seventeenth century. To the left, the seemingly uninterested man in the chair may also be a visitor, attended by a servant or shop assistant. A standing figure in the background, mostly blocked from view, appears to be a soldier. The older man, casually posed and fashionably attired, is most likely meant as the shop’s proprietor, who with his potential customer admires the half armor perched on a wooden stool. That piece is Italian, from about 1575, and most of the arms and armor in the painting are Italian, dating from the mid-1500s to the early 1600s. Hanging in the archway to the upper right is a cuirass, with helmet, from a suit of early-seventeenth-century heavy cavalry (cuirassier) armor. The armor nearby on the wall is also probably Italian, of about the same date, with its shoulder pieces (pauldrons) on backward. The shields on the same wall are Western European, ca. 1550–1600. The armor in the archway to upper left is from the same period and probably Italian. All these objects are depicted in great detail and were certainly based on actual examples. Of particular interest are the seventeenth-century rapiers to the lower right, one with a ribbed disk at the end of the blade, indicating that it was intended for fencing practice. A ribbed powder flask, probably Italian, and a flanged mace, Italian or German, both from the mid-1500s, and two helmets also rest on the floor, awaiting closer scrutiny. The helmet to the left is a cabasset (zucotto a cresta), and the one to the right a burgonet which is missing its cheek-piece on the left side. Finally, two polearms lean against the archway, a chauve-souris or coresca with the tripartite head, and a roncone or ronca.

While the shop’s stock of armor would suggest that we are in Rome, its decorated archway is much more evocative of Spain than of Italy. And such a specialized antique shop was more likely to exist when Villegas painted it, not some eighty years earlier. His mixture of motifs from different times and countries has far less to do with history than with Romantic notions about past times, and the picturesque objects that descend from them to artists and collectors.

In the following year, 1871, Villegas painted two pictures that are in some ways comparable. A Good Plan, a panel of about the same size in a private collection, depicts a group of seventeenth-century army officers discussing strategy in a domestic interior. The composition, motifs, and meticulous description, with special attention to fabrics and shiny objects, recall the seventeenth-century Dutch genre painter Gerard ter Borch, although the beards and haircuts have a Van Dyck-like flair. More reminiscent of the Museum’s picture in subject if not design is Moroccans Examining Arms (Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska), with two figures framed in an archway. The latter painting, The Slipper Merchant, of 1872 (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), and other works by Villegas dating from the 1870s were inspired by a trip to Morocco, and by Orientalist pictures by Fortuny. A painting by Fortuny is also brought to mind by the officer in the Museum’s picture, namely La Vicaría (A Spanish Marriage), of 1870 (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona), where a similar figure appears. More broadly relevant are the historical genre scenes, often featuring Napoleon and officers, painted during the 1850s and 1860s by the hugely successful French painter Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891).

[Daniel Ralston 2014]

Inscription: Signed and dated (lower left): Villegas.1870–

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, New York (until d. 1887)

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Arms and Armor: Notable Acquisitions 2003–2014," November 11, 2014–December 6, 2015, no catalogue.

Harry B. Wehle. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Italian, Spanish, and Byzantine Paintings. New York, 1940, p. 301.

Josephine L. Allen and Elizabeth E. Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1954, p. 100.

Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 167, ill.