Incomparable Realms: Spain during the Golden Age, 1500–1700 by Jeremy Robbins (review)

Reviewed by: Incomparable Realms: Spain during the Golden Age, 1500–1700 by Jeremy Robbins Roy Norton Incomparable Realms: Spain during the Golden Age, 1500–1700. By Jeremy Robbins. London: Reaktion. 2022. 367 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1–78914–537–3. In recent decades few scholars have contributed as valuably as Jeremy Robbins has to our understanding of the world-view of Golden Age Spaniards. Incomparable Realms builds on his already classic studies on the 'uncertainty' and the 'epistemological mentality' of the age, with a focus on early modern Spaniards' sense of existing between heaven and earth, the two realms alluded to in this book's title. The culture of Golden Age Spain is envisioned here as one defined by its creators' unusually sharp awareness of their liminal existence, with its attendant dualities of secular and religious, body and soul, appearance and reality, transient and eternal, or the acá and allá, in the words of Teresa of Ávila. But, as Robbins observes, 'despite being shaped by these rigid binaries', Golden Age culture 'is far less one of either/or than of both/and' (p. 26), although the two realms are 'incomparable' and the heavenly cannot be accurately portrayed. This remarkably rich and readable study does an excellent job of exploring many of the subtle and fascinating complexities (and occasional paradoxes) of a culture that is easily caricatured and thereby misunderstood. Robbins's cultural history is divided into three parts, each blending a crisp account of relevant details of the period's geopolitical history with thoroughly illuminating analyses of many of its most representative artistic achievements in the fields of literature, painting, sculpture, tapestry, architecture, and performance, dramatic and musical. Part 1 focuses on Spain's Habsburg rulers and their self-conceptualization and self-presentation, especially as heirs to the Roman emperors and chief defenders of Catholicism. Part 11 considers the 'encounters' that helped [End Page 632] shape the global world-view and the hybrid art of a nation some have thought of as homogeneous and isolated, encounters with the Italian Renaissance, with Jews, Muslims, and enslaved Africans, for instance, and with God. Finally, Part iii, entitled 'Journeys and Reflections', considers two motifs that Robbins argues had a special place in Golden Age Spaniards' conceptualizations of life and of themselves, the journey and the mirror. This brief overview of the book's structure hardly does justice to the dazzling breadth and variety of the material treated, invariably with the impeccable judgement and clear-sightedness that Robbins's erudition allows him to bring to bear. Two things stand out as especially valuable here. First, Robbins's desire 'to present something of the diversity and multiple narratives and perspectives of this pivotal period' (p. 32) certainly bears fruit. Alongside discussion of works that feed into Golden Age Spain's image in the popular imagination as one consisting of 'angels and austerity; morality and morbidity; Habsburg power and discreet opulence' (p. 13), Incomparable Realms delights by showing how these coexisted with the period's intense humanity, including a certain moral ambiguity, occasional licentiousness, and a pervasive sense of humour. So, for instance, Félix Castello's c. 1634–37 painting Bathing in the Manzanares surprises with 'the unselfconscious nudity on display across the canvas. Most men are already naked, many are undressing and some are in undershorts' (p. 13); or, not far from the chapel at Madrid's Descalzas Reales convent in which one finds Becerra's 'vividly bloodied polychrome statue of the Dead Christ' (p. 305), Robbins notes a show of light-heartedness in religious iconography with the pair of cats painted on a fresco scurrying away from the onlooker towards the faux altar of John the Baptist. Second, this book contains umpteen colourful details that even the expert reader will enjoy. Who knew, for example: that Charles V received some 34.5 million pearls from the pearl beds off the coast of Venezuela; that Philip II (like a latter-day Noah) gathered up into his ark (the Escorial) precisely 7422 relics (including 144 whole heads), rescuing them from the Protestant north; or that 'bilocation was particularly common among Franciscan women' (p. 271)? The book's prose is lucid. It is lavishly...