The Bull and the Arts

1997. Cartel de Félix de Cárdenas. Colección RMCS
1997. Cartel de Félix de Cárdenas. RMCS collection.

Bullfighting is not merely a public spectacle, typical of a particular culture or country. Since time immemorial, the bull and everything associated with it have been a source of inspiration in art and therefore in culture.

There are no known representations of living beings that are older than those of the bull. Moreover, the last efforts of the best artistic interpreter of tauromachy, Pablo Picasso, were applied to the effigy of a matador.

The Bullfighting Festival, as we know it in modern times, has been a subject treated by artists of different types in all the expressive disciplines, from the plastic arts to the cinema and literature, both narrative and poetic.

Literature

In Spanish literature, the phenomenon of bullfighting  appears as a constant presence, but at first in an isolated manner, as if in passing, and it was not used as the central protagonist or main occurrence until the beginning of Romanticism, the period in which bullfighting festivals began to be arranged as regulated and well-organized events, and in which their principal actors, the bullfighters, became popular heroes.

Apart from Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, one of the few XVIIIth century intellectuals who dealt with bullfighting (Oda a Pedro Romero, Carta histórica sobre el origen y progresos de las fiestas de toros en España), Professor Alberto González Troyano drew attention to a singular aspect: “…the role of awakening the potential for argument that  is inherent in the world of bullfighting  seems to have fallen on foreign romantic writers.”

Stories of love between the hero (the bullfighter) and a lady, in an atmosphere charged with pure breeding, thus became the basis of a large part of the literature associated with bullfighting. Merimée and the bullfighter in his Carmen; El toreador  by the Duchess of Abrantes; Militona by Théophile Gautier; Cartucherita by Arturo Reyes and Sangre y Arena by Blasco Ibáñez all provided this essential component, with the addition of a tragic element, the death of the bullfighter in front of his beloved.

In the XXth century, several works by national and foreign authors were published, among which we can highlight three because of their international transcendence:  the previously-mentioned Sangre y Arena, by Blasco Ibáñez; Fiesta and Verano sangriento by Ernest Hemingway.

Théophile Gautier,
(1811-1872)

Ernest Hemingway,
(1899-1961)

Federico García Lorca,
(1898-1936)

“I consider that bullfighting is the most cultured of all the festivals”, wrote Federico García Lorca. The writers of his generation were perhaps the first to consider that bullfighting belonged more to the field of artistic creation. Representative of this proximity is the picture of the members of the Generation of the 27  assembled in Seville round the figure of the bullfighter and patron Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, on whose death Lorca himself wrote one of the most moving poetic elegies  of all time. Poets such as Gerardo Diego and Rafael Alberti left numerous proofs of their interest, as did  José Bergamín with La música callada del torero, and Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, José María Pemán, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Guillén and Jean Cocteau, among others.