Diego Velázquez

• 1. Introduction

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  Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was baptized at the church of St. Peter in Seville on the 6th of June 1599, the son of a notary and a woman whose surname he would carry through his entire career. He died on the 6th of August 1660, and within eight days his wife Juana was buried beside him. Between those two dates, he painted somewhere between 110 and 120 known canvases. For a man considered one of the greatest artists in the history of Western art, that is a remarkably small body of work. How did a Sevillian boy from modest circumstances become the leading painter in the court of King Philip IV? How did he develop a style so distinctive that three centuries later, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Francis Bacon felt compelled to answer it? And what does a painting called Las Meninas, completed four years before Velázquez's death, actually show?

• 2. Seville and the Bodegones

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  Francisco Pacheco, the teacher who shaped Velázquez's early years, was by most accounts a dull painter. He worked in a Mannerist style that was already aging out of fashion, yet he ran a school of genuine intellectual ambition. A contract signed on the 17th of September 1611 formalized a six-year apprenticeship for the young Velázquez, backdated to the 10th of December 1610. In Pacheco's studio, the student studied the classics and learned proportion and perspective. He also absorbed the literary and artistic conversations swirling through Seville.

  Velázquez's earliest surviving paintings are bodegones, kitchen scenes built around prominent still-lifes. His Old Woman Frying Eggs, painted in 1618, shows a command of realistic depiction that is startling for a teenager. The dramatic lighting in that work may owe something to Caravaggio, whose paintings Velázquez could have encountered only through copies. The Sevillian tradition of polychrome sculpture was likely another influence.

  Two of his kitchen scenes from 1618, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus, embed religious episodes into the background with deliberate ambiguity. A viewer cannot be certain whether the biblical scene is a painting hanging on the wall, a vision in the kitchen maid's mind, or an actual event glimpsed through a window. That ambiguity would become a signature of Velázquez's mature work.

  On the 23rd of April 1618, he married Juana Pacheco, the daughter of his teacher. Their younger daughter, Ignacia, born in 1621, died in infancy. Their elder daughter, Francisca, born in 1619, would live to marry the painter Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo at the Church of Santiago in Madrid on the 21st of August 1633. The Waterseller of Seville, painted between 1618 and 1622, has been called the peak of Velázquez's bodegones, admired for its rendering of volumes and textures and for what one source describes as its enigmatic gravitas.

• 3. The Road to Madrid

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  Rodrigo de Villandrando, the king's favorite court painter, died in December 1622, leaving a vacancy at the center of Spanish artistic life. Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares and the most powerful minister in Philip IV's government, sent a command to Velázquez to come to court. The young painter was offered 50 ducats, equivalent to 175 grams of gold, to cover travel expenses, and he made the journey with his father-in-law.

  Don Juan de Fonseca, chaplain to the king, lodged Velázquez in his home and sat for a portrait. That portrait was taken to the royal palace, and a commission for the king himself followed. On the 30th of August 1623, Philip IV sat for Velázquez. Olivares was so pleased with the result that he commanded Velázquez to move to Madrid permanently and promised that no other painter would ever paint Philip's portrait again.

  Velázquez secured a salary of 20 ducats per month, lodgings, and payment for any pictures he might produce. In 1624, he received a further 300 ducats to cover the cost of relocating his family. His portrait of Philip was exhibited on the steps of San Felipe and received with enthusiasm, though the work is now lost.

  In 1627, Philip organized a competition among Spain's best painters on the subject of the expulsion of the Moors. Velázquez won. The winning painting was later destroyed in a palace fire in 1734, but records describe it as showing Philip III pointing with his baton toward a crowd of men and women being led away by soldiers, with the personification of Spain seated in calm repose. As reward, Velázquez was appointed gentleman usher and later received a daily allowance of 12 réis alongside 90 ducats a year for dress.

• 4. Italy and the Changing Style

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  Peter Paul Rubens arrived in Madrid in September 1628 as an emissary from the Infanta Isabella. Velázquez accompanied him to view the Titians at the Escorial during the seven months of that diplomatic mission. Rubens held a high opinion of Velázquez but did not, by the sources, significantly influence his painting. What the encounter did do was sharpen Velázquez's desire to see Italy directly.

  In 1629, Velázquez received permission to spend a year and a half in Italy, with Philip IV sponsoring the trip. He traveled through Venice, Ferrara, Cento, Loreto, Bologna, and Rome, and visited Naples in 1630 to paint the portrait of Maria Anna of Spain. The major works of this first Italian stay, Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob and Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan, both painted between 1629 and 1630, show his ambition to compete with Italian masters as a history painter.

  A technical change from this period proved lasting. Following the practice of Bolognese painters such as Guido Reni, Velázquez switched from the dark reddish grounds he had always used to a light gray ground. The result was a greater luminosity, and he kept light-gray grounds for every painting he made afterward.

  When Philip sent Velázquez back to Italy in 1649 to acquire paintings and sculpture for the royal collection, he traveled with his assistant Juan de Pareja, who was at that point a slave trained in painting by Velázquez himself. They sailed from Málaga to Genoa and moved on to Venice, buying works by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese along the way. In Rome, the Pope received Velázquez with marked favor. The resulting portrait of Pope Innocent X, now in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, was so psychologically forceful that some in the Vatican feared it would offend the Pope. Innocent was pleased and hung it in his official visitor's waiting room. Sir Joshua Reynolds later described it as the finest picture in Rome.

  Also in Rome, in 1650, Velázquez painted a portrait of Juan de Pareja, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The work earned him election into the Accademia di San Luca. In November 1650, Velázquez freed Pareja from slavery.

• 5. Court, Canvas, and Character

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  Thirty-four portraits of Philip IV by Velázquez have been counted. The painter depicted the king across decades, capturing the transformation of a young monarch into a middle-aged ruler. He also turned his attention to the people who existed at the margins of court life. Buffoons and dwarfs sat for him, and he depicted them with the same careful individuality he brought to royalty. The Jester Don Diego de Acedo, painted in 1644, shows a man whose intelligent face and large folio with ink-bottle and pen by his side mark him, in the source's words, as wise and well-educated.

  The Surrender of Breda, painted between 1634 and 1635 for the Palacio del Buen Retiro, stands as his only surviving painting of contemporary history. Rather than depicting a Spanish general towering on horseback over a kneeling enemy, Velázquez shows the Spanish commander standing before his Dutch counterpart as an equal, extending a hand of consolation. The symbolic choice refuses the rhetoric of conquest and superiority that was standard in military painting.

  Had it not been for his royal appointment shielding him from the Inquisition, Velázquez could not have painted La Venus del espejo, known in English as the Rokeby Venus, completed around 1644-1648. It is the first known female nude by a Spanish artist, and the only surviving female nude in his entire output.

  His paintings of Aesop and Menippus, both from around 1636-1638, show ancient writers dressed as beggars. Mars Resting, painted around 1638, presents the god of war as a weary, middle-aged man with an unkempt, oversized mustache. Art historian Javier Portús describes it as a reflection on reality, representation, and artistic vision, while Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez has called it a melancholy meditation on the arms of Spain in decline.

• 6. Las Meninas

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  In 1656, Velázquez completed the painting now generally known as Las Meninas, depicting one of the infantas, Margaret Theresa, the eldest daughter of Queen Mariana of Austria, surrounded by her attendants. The Italian painter Luca Giordano, a contemporary, called it the theology of painting. In 1827, Sir Thomas Lawrence, president of the Royal Academy of Arts, described it in a letter as the true philosophy of the art.

  The painting resists a single reading. Velázquez himself appears in it, brush in hand, working on a large canvas. The king and queen are visible as reflections in a mirror on the back wall, but whether they are standing in the viewer's space or whether the mirror shows the very canvas Velázquez is painting on remains unresolved. Dale Brown has proposed that the faded image of the royal couple may have been intended by Velázquez as a foreshadowing of the coming decline of the Spanish Empire.

  Michel Foucault opened his 1966 book Les Mots et Les Choses, known in English as The Order of Things, with a sustained analysis of Las Meninas. He argued that the painting systematically problematizes representation itself through its mirrors, its screens, and the oscillations it creates between the image's interior, surface, and exterior.

  The Cross of Saint James on Velázquez's chest in the painting has its own complicated history. Tradition holds that Philip IV painted it on the canvas himself, yet Velázquez did not actually receive that honor of knighthood until 1659, three years after the painting was made. His qualification required an inquiry into the purity of his lineage, conducted by a commission of the Order of Santiago. The records of that commission survive in the order's archives. Velázquez's claim to lesser nobility was accepted; his occupation as a painter was justified on the grounds that, as painter to the king, he was not involved in the commercial practice of selling pictures.

• 7. Legacy and Later Reach

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  Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos wrote in an essay published in 1781 that when Velázquez died, the glory of painting in Spain died with him. In 1778, Francisco Goya made a set of etchings after Velázquez's paintings as part of a project to produce prints of works in the Royal Collection. Those free copies show Goya searching the older master's methods in a way that stayed with him for the rest of his career.

  Velázquez's influence moved through the nineteenth century largely through Édouard Manet, who called him the painter of painters. Manet built upon Velázquez's motifs in his own work and was struck particularly by the background of the Portrait of Pablo de Valladolid, which he described as possibly the most surprising fragment of painting that had ever been made. The impressionists considered Velázquez a precursor to pure vision and a pioneer of modern art. James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent both acknowledged his influence in the late nineteenth century.

  In the twentieth century, the responses became more formal acts of tribute. Picasso in 1957 recreated Las Meninas in 44 variations, the largest works he had made since Guernica in 1937. Dalí, anticipating the tercentennial of Velázquez's death, created a work in 1958 entitled Velázquez Painting the Infanta Margarita With the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory, using it partly as a vehicle for his theory of nuclear mysticism. Francis Bacon, who called Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X one of the greatest portraits ever made, produced a series of expressionist variations of it in the 1950s. His Figure with Meat, painted in 1954, places the Pope between two halves of a bisected cow.

  More recently, scholars have continued to expand the catalogue. In October 2011, art historian Dr. Peter Cherry of Trinity College Dublin confirmed through X-ray analysis that a portrait found in the United Kingdom, formerly in the collection of the nineteenth-century painter Matthew Shepperson, is a previously unknown work by Velázquez. It sold at auction on the 7th of December 2011 for three million pounds. The subject, an unidentified man in his fifties or sixties, could possibly be Juan Mateos, the Master of the Hunt for Philip IV.