There is one quality that, at a first glance, impresses us in these pictures, so different, and yet all having one aim. It is their profound seriousness. Rarely, indeed, shall we find a picture in which the idea of beauty, whether it is the beauty of colour or the beauty of form, has stood first in the painter’s mind; almost in vain shall we search for any love of landscape, for any passage introduced just for its own sake. For, let it be remembered, in Andalusia art was devotional always. “The chief end of art,” says Pacheco, the master of Velazquez, in his _Arte de la Pintura_, “is to persuade men to piety and to incline them to God.” Pictures had other purposes to serve than that of beauty. They were painted for the Church to enforce its lessons, they were used as warnings, and as a means of recording the lives of the Saints. In other countries, it is true, painters have spent their strength in religious art, but almost always we can find as well as the sacred, some outside motive, some human love of the subject for itself--for its opportunities of beauty. The intense realism of these Spanish pictures is a thing apart; these Assumptions, Martyrdoms, and Saintly Legends were painted with a vivid sense of the reality of these things by men who felt upon them the hand of God. We know that Luis de Vargas daily humbled himself by scourging and by wearing a hair shirt, and Juan Juanes prepared himself for a new picture by communion and confession. These are two examples chosen out of many. A legend we read of Don Miguel de Mañara, the founder of the Hospital of La Caridad, illustrates this dramatic religious sense of Spain. One day in church Don Miguel saw a beautiful nun, and, forgetful of her habit, made amorous proposals. She did not speak; instead, she turned to look at him; whereupon he saw the side of her face which had been hidden from his eyes: it was eaten away, corrupted by a hideous disease, so that it seemed more horrible than the face of death. It was such scenes as this that the Spanish artists chose to paint. But, indeed, it would be tedious to enumerate the examples which Spain offers of this curious, often, it would seem to us, corrupted sense of the gloom of life, carrying with it as one result the passionate responsibility of art. Always, we feel certain that the Spanish painters felt all that they express.