A landmark exhibition in London shows priceless pieces of religious art that have never before been allowed out of Spain

The Mother Superior pulled me towards her: "They will take care of our Dolorosa?" she said, clasping her wrinkled hands around mine.
The focus of her concern was not human, but almost. It was for an exquisitely lifelike painted wooden sculpture of the suffering Virgin Mary, created in 1673 by Spanish sculptor Pedro de Mena whose expression of religious motive is considered to be unsurpassed in the sculpture of Spain.

I was inside the Real Monasterio (Royal Nunnery) de San Joaquín and Santa Ana in Valladolid in the company of Xavier Bray of London's National Gallery. Bray, an expert in the art of Spain, has just completed curating an exhibition whose graphicism he thinks could take the UK by at least as shocking an artistic storm as Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ.

The Sacred Made Real, Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600-1700, which opened at the National Gallery on 21 October, is groundbreaking both for its subject matter and for its rarity value. Many of the works on display have never before left Spain, let alone been seen by the Spanish wider public. Many have been entombed for centuries in monasteries, nunneries and churches partly thanks to their preservation during the Catholic fundamentalism of the Franco years and partly due to the isolationism of the religious institutions in which they have been gathering dust. Take the wistful "Mater Dolorosa" sculpture (Virgin of Sorrows), about whom the Mother Superior was so concerned. She nearly did not make it to London. When Bray made his initial loan request to the Cistercian nunnery in Valladolid, the 16 nuns in residence blackballed him outright. "They voted with marbles in the time-honoured way used for decision-making since 1596," said Bray. "They used black ones (to indicate against) and white ones (to indicate for). At my first attempt, every single marble was black . . ."

It took Bray travelling in person to the nunnery to convince the nuns that the decision was not as black and white. Eventually his charm and erudition won them over (after he had negotiated the National Gallery covering the costs of a much-needed restoration of the masterpiece) and the religious beauty was allowed to make her first ever journey into the wider world.

Those who suspected that dust gathering was the primary purpose of most religious art may be surprised by this exhibition. It presents a landmark reappraisal of the "hyper-realism" of this religious art form. Many of Spain's greatest painters and sculptors are represented, including Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán. The role of religious art during Spain's Baroque period was to uplift audiences rather than encourage idolatry -- "to unsettle you and bring you back to what happened", says Bray.

Realism manifested itself in different ways in seventeenth-century Europe. Italian master Caravaggio developed a mode of painting in which ordinary people were made to pose and re-enact episodes from the bible but in Spain, says Bray, "a very different and much starker brand of realism developed", one that was quite unlike any other developing in Europe and that was austere and often gory.

In contrast to Spanish artists from the sixteenth century who had emulated the Italian ethos of Michelangelo for whom the function of art was to represent a timeless idealised beauty, seventeenth-century artists did just the opposite, "attempting to make their sculptures [and paintings] increasingly lifelike and realistic", says Bray, even studying corpses on morgue tables to get their bloodsoaked anatomical details right.

The pieces on display are artworks produced at this time when sculptors used every shock-horror technique at their disposal to make the figures look real, introducing glass eyes (an artistic trick brought back by Jesuits sent out on missions to the Far East in the 16th century where they would have seen glass used on Buddha statues), resin tears and ivory teeth into their sculptures, as well as the bark of a cork tree to simulate coagulated blood and oozing scabs on the wounds of Christ, and bull's horn for fingernails.

It is all not far-removed from the sheer technical brilliance of the work of the contemporary Australian hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck for whom these works will strike a chord, given the controversy his dead dad caused. Dead Dad was a hyper-realistic grotesque sculpture of Mueck's late father, lying naked on the floor so that visitors could easily trip over him, shown at the Royal Academy's 1997 Britart extravaganza, Sensation. While it had huge emotional power, it outraged many.

As might one of the most shocking pieces here: Head of Saint John the Baptist (1625, Juan de Mesa), a painted sculpture of his freshly decapitated head, almost certainly modelled from a human specimen, bleeding, with the trachea, oesophagus and paraspinal muscles all perfectly depicted. Two of the other signature sculptures that have never before left Spain and will be on show at the National Gallery are Ecce Homo (1671, Gregorio Fernández) whose nude figure of Christ, with its extraordinary bloody bruises, is for Bray "the Jackson Pollock of sculpture", and Mary Magdalen Meditating on the Crucifixion (1664, Pedro de Mena), which he believes "verges on the waxlike for its realism".

An exhibition like this might not have obvious "pull value", admits Tom Almeroth-Williams, press officer at the National Gallery, but its hyper-realism will make it of interest to visitors of both a religious and non-religious bent: "This kind of Spanish art isn't as well known as that of, say, Picasso, but we're hoping visitors will be prepared to take a risk and come and see something completely different," he says. "We've deliberately designed the posters to be quite 'Mel Gibson' to encourage people with the show's shock value."

He's right. Anyone who saw Body Worlds, the worldwide exhibition showing plasticised real bodies, or Gibson's Passion, will not be disappointed by this. The exhibition is a first for Spain in Britain and will shock your senses and stir your soul -- and just in time for Christmas.

"The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600-1700" runs until 24 January 2010

www.sarahmonaghan.co.uk

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