Bartolomé Bermejo painted the most outlandish face in the whole of the National Gallery. Its glass eyes, like evil snowglobes, contain bloody discs pierced by jet black holes. There’s an owl-like beak, the ears of a bat, and a widely grinning mouth full of lethal-looking teeth.
When the 15th-century Spanish painter was working on this portrait of Satan in Valencia in 1468, he observed dead animals and shopped for monstrous fish. We know that Michelangelo went to markets in Florence when, as a teenager, he wanted to create a diabolical painting – that was how Renaissance artists made monsters. The mouth of Bermejo’s devil looks like an angler fish, an eater of human souls waiting patiently in the dark and the deep for prey to approach his lure.
This charming devil – who also has snakeheads for elbows and wings that are part bat, part butterfly – cowers under the golden-armoured foot of an avenging angel in Bermejo’s painting Saint Michael Triumphant Over the Devil. In 1995, the National Gallery bought this confrontation between good and evil to hang in its Renaissance wing – but it’s an oddity there, a lonely stranger from 15th-century Spain among the treasures from Flanders, Italy and Germany. Now the gallery has assembled some of Bermejo’s other known works and researched his life to flesh out this prodigious talent.
It’s unexpectedly impressive. Bermejo combines a spiky, raw strength with exquisite painterly finesse. Even though this is only a small selection of masterpieces in one room, it grabs you. Maybe that’s because we are drawn to extreme and troubled art that mirrors our fearful age. The Spain that shaped Bermejo was beginning a season in hell as its diverse religions and identities were crushed into a new mould of Christian empire. Bermejo probably came from Córdoba, which until the 13th century was a Muslim city. Still today it is full of relics of a culturally complex medieval Spain that include not just the great mosque but a synagogue built in 1315.
If Bermejo was indeed from Córdoba, he spent his first years in a city that’s a monument to cultural variety. In his lifetime, however, a militant Catholic Spain was expunging otherness. Jews were being forced to convert, and the last Muslim stronghold would fall in 1492. In the same year, all unconverted Jews were expelled from Spain. Bermejo’s wife, Gracia de Palaciano, was a Jewish convert who was punished by the Inquisition for taking part in “Jewish practices”. It is likely Bermejo himself was a converted Jew – which explains why he was once threatened with excommunication if he went off-message in a religious painting.
There are traces of forbidden Judaism in a painting here of Christ rescuing Old Testament patriarchs from Limbo. This scene of the Harrowing of Hell comes from a series of small panels from the bottom layer of an altarpiece thought to have been commissioned by a Jewish convert. Bermejo shares the fears and nightmares of his paranoid age. As Christ enters the underworld, he is observed by more of those gross devils with blazing eyes and impossible bodies.
In Bermejo’s Spain it was wise not only to conform, but to be seen to be conforming. In the three most imposing paintings here, the clerics and laypeople who paid for them to be made are portrayed in fervent prayer in a moving and anthropologically fascinating attempt to fuse the supernatural and everyday. In his great Desplá Pietà, two pious kneeling figures insert themselves next to the body of the dead Christ laid out tragically on Mary’s lap. The corpse is already rigid. Blood from the spear thrown at the dying man cakes on his thin leathery stomach. This moment of despair is emphasised and counterbalanced by the apocalyptic sky beyond the looming cross. It’s a promise of resurrection yet the effect is turbulent and unsettling.
There was surely nothing the church could find fault with in Saint Michael Triumphant Over the Devil. The militant angel towers over his hellish adversary. With his pale, innocent face and wonderfully engineered, brightly metallic armour, this perfect Christian knight embodies the Reconquest that was purifying Spain. Yet your eye is drawn to that exotic devil whose mixture of body parts is a grinning refusal of order. Its very monstrosity is an image of a more complex reality than Saint Michael’s holy war can acknowledge. Bermejo, almost certainly born Jewish in a city of Muslim intellectuals, can see the underside of the story.
His secret is safe with us. We look down, not up. Instinctively we share his sympathy for the devil.
