Diego Velázquez

gigatos | February 6, 2022

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Summary

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, known as Diego Velázquez, born and baptized in Seville on June 6, 1599 and died in Madrid on August 6, 1660, was a Spanish Baroque painter.

He is considered one of the main representatives of Spanish painting and one of the masters of universal painting.

He spent his early years in Seville, where he developed a naturalist style based on chiaroscuro. At the age of 24, he moved to Madrid, where he was appointed painter to King Philip IV and, four years later, became Painter of the King”s Chamber, the most important position among royal painters. As an artist of this rank, he mainly painted portraits of the king, his family and the Spanish grandees, as well as canvases to decorate the royal apartments. As superintendent of royal works, he acquired numerous works for the royal collections in Italy, including antique sculptures and master paintings, and organized the travels of the Spanish king.

His presence at court allowed him to study the royal painting collections. The study of these collections, together with the study of Italian painters during his first trip to Italy, had a decisive influence on the evolution of his style, characterized by great luminosity and rapid brushstrokes. From 1631 onwards, he reached artistic maturity and painted great works such as The Surrender of Breda.

During the last ten years of his life, his style became more schematic, achieving a notable domination of light. This period began with the Portrait of Pope Innocent X painted during his second trip to Italy, and saw the birth of two of his masterpieces: The Meninas and The Spinners.

His catalog contains 120 to 125 painted and drawn works. Famous long after his death, Velázquez”s reputation reached a peak from 1880 to 1920, a period that coincided with the French Impressionist painters for whom he was a reference. Manet was amazed by his painting and described Velázquez as “the painter of painters” and later as “the greatest painter who ever lived”.

Most of his paintings, which were part of the royal collection, are kept in the Prado Museum in Madrid.

First years in Seville

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was baptized on June 6, 1599 in the church of St. Peter in Seville (es). The exact date of his birth is unknown, but the Italian critic Pietro Maria Bardi suggests that it took place the day before, on June 5, 1599.

Velázquez was the oldest of eight siblings. His father, Juan Rodriguez de Silva, was a native of Seville, although of Portuguese origin. His grandparents had settled in Porto. His mother, Jerónima Velázquez, was also from Seville. João and Jerónima were married in the church of St. Peter on December 28, 1597. Following the Andalusian custom of the time, Velázquez signed his legal documents with his mother”s name. Although he did not usually sign his paintings, he sometimes signed them under the name “Diego Velazquez” and more exceptionally under the expression “de Silva Velázquez”, using the names of both his parents.

The family was part of the small nobility of the city. The source of his father”s income is not known, as he probably lived on annuities. As early as 1609, the city of Seville began to reimburse his great-grandfather for the tax that was levied on the “white meat”, a consumption tax that only pecheros had to pay, and in 1613 the city did the same with Velázquez”s father and grandfather. He himself was exempted from the tax when he came of age. However, this exemption meant that his credits were not considered sufficient by the Council of Military Orders when, in the 1650s, it sought to determine the origins of his nobility, which was recognized only by his paternal grandfather, who said he had received it in Portugal and Galicia.

At the time of the painter”s training, Seville was the richest and most populous city in Spain, the most cosmopolitan and open of the Spanish empire. It enjoyed a commercial monopoly with the Americas and had a large population of Flemish and Italian merchants. Seville was also an ecclesiastical center of great importance, as well as a hotbed of art with great painters. Many local schools were concentrated there since the 15th century.

Velázquez”s talent was revealed at an early age. At the age of ten, according to the historian and biographer of the painter Antonio Palomino, he began his training in the studio of Francisco de Herrera the Elder, a prestigious painter of 17th-century Seville, but who was so ill-tempered that his young pupil could not stand him. The stay in Herrera”s studio, about which there is no precise documentation, was necessarily short, since in October 1611 Juan Rodríguez signed his son Diego”s “letter of apprenticeship” with Francisco Pacheco, committing himself to him for a period of six years, starting in December 1611. Velázquez would later become his son-in-law.

At Pacheco”s studio, Velázquez acquired his first technical training and aesthetic ideas. The apprenticeship contract established the usual conditions of the servant: the young apprentice, installed in the master”s house, had to serve him “in the said house and in everything you say and ask that is honest and possible to do”, provisions that usually included, among other obligations, grinding the colors, preparing the glues, decanting the varnishes, stretching the canvases, and assembling the frames. The master was obliged to provide the apprentice with food, a roof and a bed, clothes, shoes, and the teaching of “the beautiful and complete art according to what you know, without hiding anything”.

Pacheco was a man of great culture, author of the important treatise The Art of Painting, which was published after his death in 1649 and which “…sheds light on the working methods of the painters of his time.” In this work, he shows himself faithful to the idealist tradition of the previous century, and little interested in the progress of Flemish and Italian naturalist painting. Among the works that constituted his library, if there were many ecclesiastical books and several works on painting, none dealt with perspective, optics, geometry, or architecture. As a painter, he was quite limited. He was a faithful successor of Raphael and Michelangelo, whom he interpreted in a harsh and dry manner. However, he drew excellent pencil portraits of the poets and writers who came to his house, with the intention of making a book of Eulogies which was published in facsimile only in the 19th century. An influential man, nephew of a humanist canon, he had the merit of not limiting his pupil”s abilities, and of giving him the benefit of his friendships and influence. But Pacheco is best remembered as the teacher of Velázquez. He is better known for his writings than for his paintings. Pacheco had great prestige among the clergy, and he was very influential in the Sevillian literary circles that brought together the local nobility. On March 7, 1618, Pacheco was charged by the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition with “watching over and visiting the sacred paintings found in stores and public places, and bringing them before the Tribunal of the Inquisition if necessary.

Carl Justi, the first great scholar of the painter, considered that the short time that Velázquez spent with Herrera was enough to give him the initial impulse that gave him his greatness and uniqueness. He probably taught the “freedom of hand” that Velázquez did not achieve until several years later in Madrid. It is possible that Velázquez”s first master served as an example to him in the search for a personal style, and the analogies that can be perceived between the two painters are only general. In Diego”s early works, we find a strict drawing that seeks to capture reality with precision, with a severe plasticity, totally opposed to the floating contours and the tumultuous fantasy of the characters of Herrera, who despite his bad character, was a fiery artist, and of more modern vision than Pacheco.

Justi concluded that Pacheco had little artistic influence on his student. On the other hand, he affirmed that Pacheco had an influence on the theoretical aspects, both from the iconographic point of view – the Crucifixion with the four nails – and in the recognition of painting as a noble and free art, as opposed to the essentially artisanal character with which this discipline was perceived by the majority of his contemporaries.

The American art historian Jonathan Brown does not consider the formative stage with Herrera, and points to another possible influence in Velázquez”s early years, that of Juan de Roelas, who was present in Seville during those formative years. With important ecclesiastical responsibilities, Roelas introduced to Seville the naturalism of the Escorial, then incipient and distinct from that practiced by the young Velázquez.

After his apprenticeship, on March 14, 1617, he passed the examination that allowed him to join the painters” guild in Seville. The jury was composed of Juan de Uceda and Francisco Pacheco. He received his license to practice as a “master of embroidery and oil” and was able to practice his art throughout the kingdom, opening a public store and hiring apprentices. The sparse documentation preserved from this period in Seville comes almost exclusively from family archives and economic documents. It indicates a certain affluence of the family, but contains only one piece of information related to his function as a painter: an apprenticeship contract signed by Alonso Melgar at the beginning of February 1620 for his son Diego Melgar, aged thirteen or fourteen, to be apprenticed to Velázquez.

Before he turned 19, on April 23, 1618, Diego married Pacheco”s daughter Juana, who was then 15 years old. Their two daughters were born in Seville: Francisca was baptized on May 18, 1619, and Ignacia on January 29, 1621. It was common for Sevillian painters of the time to marry their children in order to create a network that would allow them to have work and responsibilities.

The great quality of the painter Velázquez was shown in his first works, when he was only 18 or 19 years old. These are still lifes such as The Breakfast in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg or The Old Woman Frying Eggs, now in the National Gallery of Scotland, which depict simple people in an inn or in a peasant”s kitchen. The themes and techniques he used in these paintings were totally foreign to what was being done in Seville at the time, not only in contrast to the usual models, but also to the technical precepts of his master, who nevertheless defended the still life as a genre:

“Shouldn”t still lifes be appreciated? Of course they should, when they are painted as my son-in-law does when he grows up with this theme, without leaving room for others; they deserve a very high esteem. Besides, with these principles and portraits, what would we talk about afterwards? He has found a true imitation of nature, encouraging many people with his powerful example.”

During these early years, he developed a great mastery in the imitation of nature. He was able to depict relief and texture with a chiaroscuro technique reminiscent of Caravaggio”s naturalism, although it is unlikely that the young Velázquez would have known his work. In these paintings, strong directed light accentuates the volumes and simple objects seem to stand out in the foreground. Velázquez had seen genre scenes and still lifes from Flanders with engravings by Jacob Matham. Pittura ridicola was practiced in northern Italy by artists such as Vincenzo Campi and depicted everyday objects and vulgar types. The young Velázquez was able to draw inspiration from this to develop his chiaroscuro technique. This type of painting was quickly accepted in Spain, as evidenced by the work of the modest painter Juan Esteban, who lived in Úbeda. Through Luis Tristán, a pupil of El Greco, as well as through Diego de Rómulo Cincinnato, a portrait painter who is not well known today and who is praised by Pacheco, Velázquez was able to get to know the works of El Greco, who practiced a personal chiaroscuro. The St. Thomas in the Orleans Museum of Fine Arts and the St. Paul in the National Museum of Art of Catalonia highlight the knowledge of the first two.

The Sevillian clientele, mostly ecclesiastical, demanded religious themes, devotional canvases and portraits, which explains why the production of this period was concentrated on religious subjects such as the Immaculate Conception in the National Gallery in London and its counterpart, St. John on Patmos in the Carmelite convent in Seville. Velázquez shows a great sense of volume and an obvious taste for the textures of materials, as in the Adoration of the Kings in the Prado Museum or the Imposition of the Chasuble on Saint Ildefonso in the Seville Town Hall. However, Velázquez sometimes approached religious themes in the same way as his still lifes with figures. This is the case in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in the National Gallery in London or in The Last Supper at Emmaus, also known as The Mulatto, which is in the National Gallery of Ireland. An autograph replica of this painting is kept at the Art Institute of Chicago; the author removed the religious motif from this copy and reduced it to a profane still life. This way of interpreting nature allowed him to get to the bottom of his subjects, showing early on a great aptitude for portraiture, capable of conveying the inner strength and temperament of the characters. Thus, in the portrait of Sister Jerónima de la Fuente in 1620, of which there are two copies of great intensity, he transmitted the energy of this sister who, at the age of 70, left Seville to found a convent in the Philippines.

The masterpieces of this period are considered to be the Old Woman Frying Eggs of 1618 and The Water Bearer of Seville of 1620. In the first painting he demonstrates his mastery in the fineness of foreground objects by means of strong light that detaches surfaces and textures. The second produces excellent effects; the large earthen jar catches the light by making horizontal striations while small transparent drops of water ooze from the surface. He took this last painting to Madrid and offered it to Juan Fonseca, who helped him to join the court.

His works, especially his still lifes, had a great influence on contemporary Sevillian painters, who produced a large number of copies and imitations of these paintings. Of the twenty works that are preserved from this Sevillian period, nine can be considered still lifes.

Quick recognition of the court

In 1621, Philip III died in Madrid, and the new monarch, Philip IV, favored a nobleman of Sevillian descent, Gaspar de Guzmán Count-Duke of Olivares, to whom he left the administration and who became in a short time the all powerful favorite of the king. This undeserved fortune soon proved to be a disaster for Spain. Olivares pleaded for the court to be composed mainly of Andalusians. Pacheco, who belonged to the Sevillian clan of the poet Rioja, of don Luis de Fonseca, of the Alcazar brothers, seized this opportunity to introduce his son-in-law to the court. Velázquez went to Madrid in the spring of 1622 under the pretext of studying the painting collections of El Escorial. Velázquez must have been introduced to Olivares by Juan de Fonseca or Francisco de Rioja, but according to Pacheco, “he was unable to paint a portrait of the king, although he tried to do so,” since the painter returned to Seville before the end of the year. However, at the request of Pacheco, who was preparing a book of portraits, he did one of the poet Luis de Góngora, the king”s chaplain.

Thanks to Fonseca, Velázquez was able to visit the royal collections of paintings, of great quality, where Charles V and Philip II had gathered paintings by Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto and Bassano. According to the Spanish art historian Julián Gállego, it was at this time that he became aware of the artistic limitations of Seville and that beyond nature there was a “poetry of painting and beauty of intonation”. The study of Titian in particular, after this visit, had a decisive influence on the stylistic evolution of the painter, who went from the austere naturalism to the severe, tenebrous ranges of his Sevillian period, to the luminosity of the silver-grays and the transparent blues of his maturity.

Shortly afterwards, Pacheco”s friends, mainly the royal chaplain Juan de Fonseca, got the Count-Duke to call on Velázquez to paint the king, whose portrait was completed on August 30, 1623, and which was widely admired: “until now, no one had known how to paint his majesty. Pacheco describes it as follows:

“In 1623, the same Don Juan (lodged in his house, where he was regaled and served, and he made his portrait. A child of the Count of Peñaranda – the servant of the Infante Cardinal – took the portrait during the night, and took it to the palace. In one hour, all the people of the palace saw it, the infants and the King, which was the best recommendation he had. He made himself available to paint the portrait of the infant, but it seemed more convenient to paint the portrait of His Majesty beforehand, although it could not be done so quickly because of the great occupations. He did it on August 30, 1623, according to the goodwill of the king, the infants and the Count-Duke, who affirmed that he had never seen the king painted until that day; and all those who saw the portrait gave the same opinion. Velázquez also made a sketch of the Prince of Wales, who gave him a hundred ecus.”

None of these portraits have been preserved, although some have tried to identify a Portrait of a Knight (Detroit Institute of Arts), whose signature was controversial, with that of Juan de Fonseca. We also do not know what happened to the portrait of the Prince of Wales, the future Charles I of England and an excellent lover of painting, who had gone to Madrid incognito to discuss his marriage to the Infanta Maria, sister of Philip IV, an operation that did not take place. The protocol obligations of this visit must have been the ones that delayed the portrait of the king, which Pacheco described as great occupations. According to the precise date of August 30, Velázquez made a sketch and then developed it in his studio. This was also the basis for a first equestrian portrait – also lost – which in 1625 was exhibited in the “high street” of Madrid “with the admiration of the whole court and the envy of those in the art world”, according to Pacheco”s account. Cassiano dal Pozzo, secretary to Cardinal Barberini, whom he accompanied on his visit to Madrid in 1626, informs us that the painting was exhibited in the Salon Nuevo of the Alcázar next to Titian”s famous portrait of Charles V on horseback in Mühlberg. He testified to the “greatness” of the horse with the words “è un bel paese” (“it is a beautiful landscape”). According to Pacheco, it was painted from life, like everything else.

Everything indicates that the young monarch, who was six years younger than Velázquez and who had received drawing classes from Juan Bautista Maíno, immediately appreciated the Sevillian”s artistic gifts. As a result of these first encounters with the king, in October 1623 he ordered Velázquez to move to Madrid as the king”s painter with a salary of twenty ducats per month, and to occupy the vacant post of Rodrigo de Villandrando, who had died the previous year. This salary, which did not include the remuneration to which he was entitled with his paintings, was soon increased by other benefits, such as an ecclesiastical benefit in the Canary Islands worth 300 ducats annually, obtained at the request of the Count-Duke from Pope Urban VIII.

The talent of the painter was not the only reason that allowed him to obtain all these advantages. His nobility, his simplicity, the urbanity of his manners seduced the king, whom Velázquez would paint tirelessly for 37 years.

Velázquez”s rapid rise to fame caused resentment among other older painters, such as Vicente Carducho and Eugenio Cajés, who accused him of only being able to paint heads. According to the painter Jusepe Martínez, these tensions led to a competition in 1627 between Velázquez and the other three royal painters, Carducho, Cajés and Angelo Nardi. The winner was to be chosen to paint the main canvas of the Great Hall of the Alcázar. The subject of the painting was the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. The jury, presided over by Juan Bautista Maíno, declared Velázquez the winner on the basis of the sketches submitted. The painting was exhibited in this building, and was lost in a fire on Christmas night 1734. This competition contributed to a change in the court”s tastes, which abandoned the old style and adopted the new.

“The popular triumph of Velázquez was soon followed by the official rout of his rivals in a competition organized at the palace. The new Spanish painting was going to defeat the academicism of the Italians of the court, the Italians who made up the jury did not hesitate to award him the prize the provincial author of humble still lifes, the precocious portraitist turned history painter, now occupied the office that came closest to the king: chamber usher.”

He received a salary of 350 ducats per year and, from 1628, the post of Painter of the King”s Chamber (or “chamber painter”, i.e. the court painter), which was vacant after the death of Santiago Morán, and was considered the most important position among royal painters. His main job was to paint portraits of the royal family, which is why these paintings represent a significant part of the production of this period. His second task was to paint decorative frames for the royal palace, which gave him more freedom in the choice of themes and their depictions. Other painters, whether at court or not, did not enjoy this freedom and were constrained by the tastes of their clients. Velázquez could also accept commissions from private individuals, and in 1624 he painted portraits for doña Antonia de Ipeñarrieta, whose late husband he painted. During this period he also painted for the king and the Count-Duke, but once he settled in Madrid, he only accepted commissions from influential members of the court. It is known that he painted various portraits of the king, the Count-Duke, and that some were sent out of Spain, such as the equestrian portraits of 1627 that were sent to Mantua by the ambassador in Madrid of the house of Gonzaga. Some of these portraits were destroyed in the Alcazar fire of 1734.

Among the works preserved from this period, The Triumph of Bacchus is one of the most famous. It is also known as The Drunks. Velázquez refers in this painting to Caravaggio”s Bacchus. This was Velázquez”s first mythological composition, for which he received 100 ducats from the king”s household in 1629.

Among the portraits of members of the royal family, the most notable is The Infant Don Carlos (Prado Museum), which has a gallant and somewhat indolent appearance. Of the notable portraits of people outside the royal family, the unfinished Portrait of a Young Man is the most important. It is exhibited in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The Geographer in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen may also belong to this period. It was inventoried in the collection of the Marquis of Carpio in 1692 as “Portrait of a Laughing Philosopher with a Stick and Globe, Original by Diego Velázquez. It was also identified as Democritus and sometimes attributed to Ribera, with whom it bears a close resemblance. It has caused some perplexity among critics because of the different ways in which the hands and head are treated, from a very loose brushstroke to a very tight treatment of the rest of the composition, which could be explained by a reworking of these parts around 1640.

During this period, Velázquez”s technique emphasized light in relation to color and composition. In all his portraits of monarchs, according to Antonio Palomino, he had to reflect “the discretion and intelligence of the artifice, to know how to choose, the light or the happiest outline that for the sovereigns required to deploy a great art, to reach his defects, without pouring in the adulation or risking the irreverence”.

These are the norms of court portraiture that the painter was obliged to respect in order to give the portrait the appearance that corresponded to the dignity of the people and their conditions. However, Velázquez limited the number of traditional attributes of power, reduced to the table, the hat, the fleece or the pommel of the sword, in order to emphasize the treatment of the face and the hands, which were more luminous and gradually subjected to greater refinement. Another characteristic of his work is his tendency to repaint, rectifying what has already been done, as in the portrait of Philip IV in black (Prado Museum). This approach makes the precise dating of his works more complex. This is due to the lack of preliminary studies and a slow working technique linked to the painter”s phlegm, as the king himself stated. With time, the old layers remained underneath, and above appeared the new paint that is immediately perceptible. This practice can be seen in the portrait of the king on the legs and coat. X-rays reveal that the portrait was completely repainted around 1628, introducing subtle variations to the original version, of which there is another slightly earlier and probably autograph copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Many later paintings were retouched in this way, especially of monarchs.

Peter Paul Rubens was both court painter to the Infanta Isabel and governor of the Netherlands. In 1628, he arrived in Madrid on diplomatic business and stayed there for almost a year. He became friends with Velázquez, who took him to visit the Escorial and the royal collections. It is known that he painted ten portraits of the royal family, most of which have been lost. Comparing the portraits of Philip IV painted by the two painters, we can see some differences: Rubens paints the king allegorically, while Velázquez represents him as the essence of power. This made Pablo Picasso say, “The Philip IV of Velázquez is a very different person from the Philip IV of Rubens.” During this trip, Rubens also copied works from the royal collection, particularly by Titian. He had already copied these works on other occasions; Titian was his first source of inspiration. This copying work was especially intense at the court of Philip IV, which had the most important collection of works by the Venetian painter. The copies that Rubens made were bought by Philip IV and, logically, also inspired Velázquez.

Rubens and Velázquez had already collaborated in some way before this trip to Madrid, when the Fleming used a portrait of Olivares painted by Velázquez to provide the design for an engraving made by Paulus Pontius and printed in Antwerp in 1626. The allegorical mark was designed by Rubens and the head by Velázquez. The Sevillian must have seen him paint the royal portraits and copies of Titian; given the experience that it must have been for him to observe the execution of these canvases, it was he who was more influenced by the other. In fact, Pacheco states that Rubens in Madrid had little contact with other painters except with his son-in-law, with whom he visited the Escorial collections, and suggested, according to Palomino, a trip to Italy. For the English art historian Enriqueta Harris, there is no doubt that this relationship inspired Velázquez to paint his first allegorical canvas, The Drunkards. However, the Spanish historian Calvo Serraller points out that, while most scholars have interpreted Rubens” visit as the first decisive influence on Velázquez, there is no evidence of a substantial change in his style at this time. On the other hand, for Calvo Serraller, Rubens probably motivated Velázquez to make his first trip to Italy. Indeed, the Spanish painter left the court soon after, in May 1629. At the same time as he was completing The Triumph of Bacchus, he obtained a permit to make the trip. According to the Italian representatives in Spain, the purpose of the trip was to complete his studies.

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First trip to Italy

After Rubens” departure, and probably under his influence, Velázquez requested a license from the king to travel to Italy and complete his studies. On July 22, 1629, the king offered him a two-year trip by providing 480 ducats. Velázquez also had another 400 ducats from the sale of various paintings. He traveled with a clerk who carried letters of recommendation for the authorities of the places he wanted to visit.

This trip to Italy was to mark a decisive change in Velázquez”s painting; as painter to the King of Spain, he had the privilege of admiring works that were only available to a privileged few.

He left the port of Barcelona in the ship of Ambrogio Spinola, a Genoese general in the service of the King of Spain, who was returning to his country. On August 23, 1629, the ship arrived in Genoa, where the painter did not linger and went directly to Venice, where the Spanish ambassador arranged for him to visit the main art collections in the city”s palaces. According to Antonio Palomino, the painter”s biographer, he copied works by Tintoretto that attracted him above all else. As the political situation in the city was delicate, he stayed there for a short time and soon left for Ferrara, where he discovered the paintings of Giorgione.

He then went to Cento, still in the region of Ferrara, interested in the work of Guerchino, who painted his canvases with a very white light, treated his religious figures like others and was a great landscape painter. For Julián Gállego, the work of Guerchino was the one that most helped Velázquez to find his personal style. He also visited Milan, Bologna and Loreto. We can follow his journey through the dispatches of the ambassadors who took care of him as an important person.

In Rome, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, whom he had had the opportunity to paint in Madrid, obtained for him an entrance to the Vatican chambers, where he spent several days copying the frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael. In April 1630, with the permission of Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany, he went to the Villa Medici in Rome, where he copied the collection of classical sculptures. The grand duke was a patron of the controversial figure Galileo, and it is possible that the painter and the astronomer met. Velázquez did not only study the old masters. He probably also met the Baroque painters Pietro da Cortona, Andrea Sacchi, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Gellée and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and the Roman avant-garde artists of the time.

The influence of Italian art on Velázquez is particularly noticeable in his paintings The Forge of Vulcan and The Tunic of Joseph, which he painted on his own initiative, not on commission. The Forge of Vulcan heralded an important break with his earlier painting, despite the persistence of elements from his Seville period. The changes were remarkable in particular in the organization of space: the transition to the background became gradual and the interval between the figures very measured. The brushstrokes, previously applied in opaque layers, became lighter, more fluid, with reflections that produced surprising contrasts between areas of light and shadow. Thus, the contemporary painter Jusepe Martínez concludes: “he improved enormously from the point of view of perspective and architecture”.

In Rome, he also painted two small landscapes in the garden of the Villa Medici: The Entrance to the Grotto and The Cleopatra-Arian Pavilion, but historians do not agree on the date of their execution. Some maintain that they were painted during his first trip, José López-Rey refers to the date of the painter”s residence at the Villa Medici in the summer of 1630, while the majority of scholars prefer to situate the realization of these works during his second trip, considering that his technique was very advanced, almost impressionistic. The technical studies carried out in the Prado Museum, although not conclusive in this case, show that the execution took place around 1630, and according to the painter Bernardino de Pantorba (1896-1990), he wanted to capture fleeting “impressions” in the manner of a Monet two centuries later. The style of these paintings is frequently compared to the Roman landscapes that Jean-Baptiste Corot painted in the 19th century. The modernity of these landscapes is surprising.

At that time, it was uncommon to paint landscapes directly from life. This method was used only by a few Dutch artists established in Rome. Some time later, Claude Gellée made some famous drawings in this way. But, unlike them, Velázquez painted them directly in oil, developing an informal drawing technique.

He stayed in Rome until the fall of 1630 and returned to Madrid via Naples, where he painted a portrait of the Queen of Hungary (Prado Museum). There he got to know José de Ribera, who was at the peak of his art, and with whom he became friends.

Velázquez was the first Spanish painter to form relationships with some of his greatest colleagues, among whom, in addition to Ribera, were Rubens and the Italian avant-garde artists

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Maturity in Madrid

At 32, he reached his artistic maturity. According to Michel Laclotte and Jean-Pierre Cuzin, he was at the peak of his art: “Back from Italy, Velázquez learned the “great style”, he was at the top of his art. He softened his drawing, sharpened his eye even more”. His training, completed in Italy by the study of works of the Renaissance masters, made him the Spanish painter with the most important artistic education that a Spanish painter had ever achieved.

Early in 1631, back in Madrid, he began to paint royal portraits again for a long period of time. According to Palomino, immediately after his return to court he presented himself to the Count-Duke, who asked him to thank the king for not having hired another painter during his absence. The king also waited for Velázquez to return so that he could paint Prince Baltasar Carlos, who was born during his stay in Rome and whom he subsequently painted at least six times. Velázquez established his studio in the Alcázar and had apprentices. At the same time his rise to the court continued: in 1633 he received the honorary title of Grand Usher of the Court, in 1636 he became valet of the King”s wardrobe and in 1643 valet of the King”s chamber. Finally, the following year, he was appointed superintendent of royal works. The dates and titles differ slightly in the various works: Lafuente Ferrari declares him to be an aide de chambre from 1632 onwards, but these slight differences do not affect the fact that very early on Velázquez enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame with the favor of the king. The documentation for this stage is relatively abundant and was compiled by the art critic José Manuel Pita Andrade (1922-2009). However, it suffers from significant gaps in the artistic work of Velázquez.

In 1631, a twenty-six year old apprentice entered his workshop, Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, a native of Cuenca, whose initial training as a painter is not known. Mazo married Velázquez”s eldest daughter, Francisca, on August 21, 1633. In 1634, Velázquez gave up his position as valet to his son-in-law in order to provide his daughter with a sufficient income. Mazo appeared to be closely linked to Velázquez from then on, and was his main valet. However, his paintings remained copies or adaptations of the Sevillian master, although according to Jusepe Martínez, they reflect a particular mastery in the painting of small subjects. His ability to copy the master”s works is noted by Palomino, and his intervention in some of the unfinished paintings after Velázquez”s death is the source of uncertainty that still fuels debates among critics about the attribution of certain paintings to Velázquez or to Mazo.

In 1632, he painted a Portrait of Prince Baltasar Carlos that is in the Wallace Collection in London. The painting derives from an earlier one, Prince Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf, which was completed in 1631. For the art critic José Gudiol, a specialist in Velázquez, this second portrait represents the beginning of a new stage in Velázquez”s technique that would gradually lead him to a period known as “impressionism”. “It was impressionism that could also have invoked Velázquez in a certain sense. (…) Velázquez”s realism is always impregnated with transcendence. In some parts of this painting, particularly in the clothing, Velázquez ceases to model the form realistically, and paints according to visual impression. He sought a pictorial simplification, which required a deep knowledge of the effects of light. In this way, he achieved a great technical mastery, especially of chiaroscuro, which made the sensation of volume more evident. He consolidated this technique with Portrait of Philip IV of chestnut and silver, where, by means of an irregular arrangement of light brushstrokes, he suggested the edges of the monarch”s costume.

He participated in the two great decorative projects of the time: the new Buen Retiro palace promoted by Olivares and the Parada tower, a hunting lodge of the king on the edge of Madrid.

For the Buen Retiro Palace, Velázquez painted a series of five equestrian portraits of Philip III, Philip IV, their wives and the crown prince between 1634 and 1635. These paintings decorated the extreme parts of the two large royal salons, and were designed with the objective of exalting the monarchy. The side walls were decorated with a series of paintings celebrating the recent battles and victories of the Spanish troops. Velázquez was responsible for some of these paintings, among them the Surrender of Breda, also known as the Spears. The two equestrian portraits of Philip IV and the Prince are among the painter”s masterpieces. It is possible that Velázquez received help from his apprentice for other equestrian portraits, but in all of them the same details can be observed in Velázquez”s hand. The arrangement of the equestrian portraits of King Philip IV, the queen and Prince Balthazar Carlos in the Salon of the Kingdoms was reconstructed by Brown from descriptions of the period. The portrait of the prince, the future of the monarchy, was between those of his parents:

For the Tower of La Parada, he painted three hunting portraits: of the king, of his brother the cardinal-infant Ferdinand of Austria, and of Prince Balthazar Carlos. For the same hunting lodge he painted the pictures entitled Aesop, Menippus and The Rest of Mars.

Until 1634, and also for the Buen Retiro Palace, Velázquez would have painted a group of portraits of court jesters and “men of pleasure”. The inventory of 1701 mentions six vertical paintings of whole bodies that could have been used to decorate a staircase or a room adjoining the queen”s lodgings. Of these, only three could be identified with certainty. All three are in the Prado Museum: Pablo de Valladolid, The Jester Don Juan of Austria and The Jester Barbarossa. The last one, The Porter Ochoa, is only known through copies. The Jester with Calabashes (1626-1633), in the Cleveland Museum of Art, may have belonged to this series, although its attribution is disputed and its style is earlier than this period. Two other paintings of seated jesters decorated the window tops of the queen”s room in the Parada tower and are described in the inventories as seated dwarfs. One of them in a “philosopher”s costume” and in a study pose has been identified as the Jester don Diego de Acedo, the cousin. The other is a jester sitting with a deck of cards. It can be recognized in the painting Francisco Lezcano, The Child of Vallecas. The Seated Jester with Calabashes could have the same origin. Two other portraits of jesters were inventoried in 1666 by Juan Martinez del Mazo in the Alcázar: The Cousin, which was lost in the fire of 1734, and The Jester Don Sebastian de Morra, painted around 1644. Much has been said about this series of jesters, in which Velázquez compassionately portrayed their physical and psychological deficiencies. Integrated into an implausible space, he was able to experiment stylistically on these canvases with complete freedom. “The full-length portrait of Pablillos de Valladolid, around 1632, is the first representation of a figure surrounded by space without any reference to perspective. Two centuries later, Manet remembered this in The Fifth.”

Among the religious paintings from this period are Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul, the first hermit, painted for the hermitage in the gardens of the Buen Retiro Palace, and The Crucifixion painted for the San Placido convent. According to José María Azcárate, the idealized, serene and calm body of this Christ reflects the painter”s religiousness. Beyond his social ascension, Velázquez”s presence at court gave him a certain independence from the clergy that allowed him not to dedicate himself exclusively to this type of painting.

More common figures passed through the artist”s studio, including horsemen, soldiers, clergymen and court poets. Unlike the Italian tradition, the Spaniards of the time were reluctant to immortalize the features of their most beautiful women. If queens and infantes were frequently represented, such favor was much more rarely granted to the simple ladies of the aristocracy.

The decade of 1630 was the most prolific period for Velázquez: almost a third of his work was produced in this period. Around 1640, this intense production decreased drastically, and did not increase thereafter. The reasons for this decline in activity are not known with certainty, but it seems likely that he was consumed by court obligations in the service of the king. Although these duties gave him a better social position, they prevented him from painting. As superintendent of the king”s works, he had to take care of the conservation of the royal collections and to direct the works of installation and decoration in the Royal Alcazar.

Between 1642 and 1646, “he accompanied the king to Aragon during the campaign against the rebellious Catalans (1644). He painted a new portrait of the king to commemorate the lifting of the siege of the city by the French army during the Battle of Lleida. This painting is considered by the art critic Lafuente Ferrari to be a masterpiece: “Velázquez was never a greater colorist than in the portrait of Philip IV in military costume (Frick Collection, New York) and in that of Pope Innocent X (Doria-Pamphilj Gallery, Rome). The painting was immediately sent to Madrid and exhibited in public at the request of the Catalans at the court. It is the painting Philip IV in Fraga, named after the Aragonese town where it was painted. In this painting, Velázquez achieved a balance between precision and reflections. Perez Sanchez even sees in it an impressionist technique in Velázquez.

The position of chambermaid, which the painter held from 1642, was a considerable honor, but it obliged Velázquez to accompany his master everywhere: to Zaragoza in 1642, to Aragon, to Catalonia, and to Fraga in 1644. Velázquez also had to overcome several trials, including the death of his father-in-law and teacher, Francisco Pacheco, on November 27, 1644. In addition to this event, there were other trials: the fall of the powerful favorite of the king, the Count-Duke of Olivares, who had been his protector (although this disgrace did not affect the painter”s situation), the death of Queen Isabel in 1644, and the death of the 17-year-old Prince Baltasar Carlos. In this same period, in addition to the rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal and the rout of the Spanish tercios at the battle of Rocroi, Sicily and Naples rose up. Everything seemed to collapse around the monarch, and the Treaties of Westphalia consecrated the decline of Spanish power.

“Following his plan to form a painting gallery, Velazquez proposed to travel to Italy to acquire first-rate paintings and statues that would give new prestige to the royal collections, and he was to hire Pietro da Cortona to paint frescoes on various ceilings of the newly reformed rooms of the Royal Alcazar in Madrid. The stay was to last from January 1649 to 1651. In reality, the painter should have been back in Madrid in June 1650, but despite the king”s injunctions through his ambassador, the Duke of Infantado, Velázquez extended his stay for another year.”

Accompanied by his assistant and slave Juan de Pareja, Velázquez boarded a ship in Malaga in 1649. Juan de Pareja, was a simple slave and valet of Velázquez. He was a Moor, “of mixed race generation and of a strange color” according to Palomino. It is not known when he entered the service of the Sevillian master. But as early as 1642, Velázquez had given him the power to sign on his behalf as a witness. Then, in 1653, he signed a will on behalf of Velázquez in favor of Francisca Velázquez, the painter”s daughter. According to Palomino, Pareja helped Velázquez with his repetitive tasks, such as grinding the colors and preparing the canvases, without the painter ever allowing him to concern himself with what touched the dignity of his art: drawing or painting. He followed his master to Italy, where Velázquez painted his portrait and freed him in Rome on November 23, 1650 with the obligation to work for him for four years at most.

“Velázquez landed in Genoa, where he left the embassy to return to the cities that had captivated him on his first trip: Milan, Padua, Modena, Venice, Rome, Naples. In Venice, where he was received as a considerable figure, Velázquez was very much surrounded. The art theorist Marco Boschini asked him to give his opinion on the Italian painters. Velázquez praised Tintoretto, but had reservations about Raphael. His main acquisitions were works by Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese. But he could not convince Pietro da Cortona to take charge of the frescoes of the Alcazar, and hired in his place Angelo Michele Colonna and – Agostino Mitelli, experts in trompe-l”oeil.

His next stop was Rome. “In Rome, he acquired statues and casts to send to the founders. In Rome he painted important pictures, among them the one of his servant Pareja, which won him a public triumph and was exhibited in the Pantheon on March 19, 1650. Appointed member of the Academy of Saint Luke, he then painted Pope Innocent X.

During his stay, Velázquez also went to Naples, where he again met Ribera, who advanced him funds before he returned to the “Eternal City”.

Velázquez”s membership in the Academy of Saint Luke and the Congregation of Virtuosi gave him the right to exhibit on the portico of the Pantheon on February 13, where he first exhibited the portrait of Juan Pareja (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and then that of the Pope. However, the art historian Victor Stoichita believes that Palomino reversed the chronology to accentuate the myth:

Once he was determined to paint the Pontiff, he wanted to train himself by painting a natural head; he did that of Juan de Pareja, his slave and spiritual painter, so brilliantly and with so much vivacity that when he sent the portrait with the said Pareja to receive the criticism of some of his friends, they remained looking at the painted portrait, and the original, with admiration and amazement, without knowing with whom they should speak, and who should answer,” said Andres Esmit… On St. Joseph”s Day, the cloister of the Rotunda (where Raphael Urbino is buried) was decorated with eminent ancient and modern paintings. This portrait was installed under universal applause, in this place, on behalf of all the other painters of the different nations, everything else seemed to be painting, but this one seemed real. These are the circumstances under which Velazquez was received by the Roman Academy, the year 1650.”

Stoichita notes that the legend forged over the years around this portrait has several levels of reading: the opposition portrait-preparatory study, the antagonism slave-pope, the almost sacred place (the tomb of Raphael) contrasting with universal applause, and finally, the relationship between ancient and modern paintings. In reality, we know that several months passed between the portrait of the slave and that of the Pope, since on the one hand Velázquez did not paint Innocent X until August 1650, and on the other hand, his admission to the academy had already taken place at the time of the exhibition.

The most important portrait painted by Velázquez in Rome is considered by most art historians to be that of Innocent X. The Viennese iconographer Ernst Gombrich believes that Velázquez must have considered this painting a great challenge; in comparison with the portraits of popes painted by his predecessors Titian and Raphael, he was aware that he would be compared with these great masters. Velázquez painted a great portrait of Innocent X, interpreting the pope”s expression and the quality of his clothing. He was all the more aware of the difficulty that the pope offered an ungrateful and intimidating face. For this reason, he decided to paint the portrait of his servant Juan Pareja first, “to get his hand in”, as he had not painted for some time.

The success of his work on the portrait of the pope unleashed the envy of other members of the papal curia. The entire entourage of the pontiff wanted to be portrayed in turn. Velázquez painted several figures, including Cardinal Astalli-Pamphilj. He also painted the portrait of Flaminia Trionfi, the wife of a painter and friend. But with the exception of the portraits of the pope and the cardinal, all the works have been lost. Palomino says that he painted the portraits of seven people he named, two he did not name, and that other paintings remained unfinished. This represented a surprising amount of activity for Velázquez, who was a painter of little production.

Many critics associate the Venus in the Mirror with Velázquez”s Italian period. He must have done at least two other female nudes, probably two more Venuses. Exceptional in Spanish painting of the time, the theme of the work is inspired by Velázquez”s two principal masters, Titian and Rubens, who were abundantly present in the Spanish royal collections. The erotic implications of their paintings, however, were met with reluctance in Spain. Pacheco advised painters to use “honest” ladies as models for the hands and portraits, and to use statues or engravings for the rest of the body. Velázquez”s Venus brought a variation to the genre: the goddess is depicted from behind and shows her face in a mirror.

British photographer and art historian Jennifer Montagu discovered a notary document about the existence in 1652 of a Roman son of Velázquez, Antonio de Silva, the natural son of Velázquez and an unknown mother. Research has speculated on the mother and the child. Spanish art historian José Camón Aznar noted that the mother may have been the model who posed for the nude Venus in the Mirror and that it was possible that she was Flaminia Triunfi, whom Palomino called “an excellent painter” and who was painted by Velázquez. However, no other information on Flaminia Triunfi allows us to identify her, although Marini suggests that she was one with Flaminia Triva, then twenty years old, and collaborator of her brother, a disciple of Guerchino, Antonio Domenico Triva

The correspondence that has been preserved shows that Velázquez continually delayed his work in order to push back the date of his return. Philip IV was impatient. In February 1650 he wrote to his ambassador in Rome to hurry the painter”s return “but you know his laziness, and make him come by sea, and not by land, because he could linger even longer”. Velázquez remained in Rome until the end of November. The Count of Oñate communicated his departure on December 2, and two weeks later he stopped at Modena. However, he did not embark in Genoa until May 1651.

Also read, biographies – Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Last years and artistic plenitude

In June 1651, he returned to Madrid with many works of art. Shortly thereafter, Philip IV appointed him royal aposentador, court marshal. This position elevated his position at court and provided him with additional income. This was in addition to his pension, to the salaries he already received for his functions as painter, royal aide de chambre and superintendent, and to the sums he charged for his paintings. His administrative duties were increasingly absorbing him, especially the new position of royal aposentador, which took up much of his free time at the expense of his painting. However, despite these new responsibilities, during this period he painted some of his best portraits and his masterpieces, the Meninas and The Spinners.

The arrival of the new queen, Maria Anna of Austria, allowed him to paint several portraits. The infanta Maria Theresa was painted on several occasions in order to be able to send her portrait to the different parties and suitors of the European courts. The new infants, sons of Maria Anna, were also painted, especially Margarita Teresa, born in 1651.

At the end of his life, he painted his largest and most complex compositions, the Legend of Arachne (1658), also known as the Spinners, and the most famous of all his paintings, the Family of Philip IV, or the Meninas (1656). The last evolution of his style appears in these paintings where Velázquez seems to represent the fleeting vision of a scene. He used bold brushstrokes that, up close, seem separate, but which, with distance, give the whole meaning of the canvas, anticipating the techniques of Manet and the impressionists of the nineteenth century on whom he had a great influence. The interpretation of these works is the source of many studies. They are considered to be among the masterpieces of European painting.

The last two official portraits he painted of the king are very different from the previous ones. The bust in the Prado, like the one in the National Gallery in London, are intimate portraits in which the clothes are black. The golden fleece is only represented in the latter. According to Harris, these paintings depict the physical and moral decrepitude of the monarch, of which he was aware. It had been nine years since the king had allowed himself to be painted, and Philip IV explained his reluctance as follows: “I do not stoop to pass by the brushes of Velázquez, not to see me aging”.

Velázquez”s last commission for the king was a set of four mythological scenes for the Mirror Room, where they were exhibited along with works by Titian, Tintoretto and Rubens: Philip IV”s favorite painters. Of these four works (Apollo and Mars, Adonis and Venus, Psyche and Cupid and Mercury and Argos), only the last one has survived. The other three were destroyed in the fire at the Royal Alcazar in 1734. The quality of the preserved canvas, the rarity of the theme of mythology and nudes in Spain at the time, make these losses particularly damaging.

As a man of his time, Velázquez wanted to be knighted. He managed to join the Order of Santiago (Santiago de l”Épée) with the support of the king, who on June 12, 1658, allowed him to take the knighthood. However, in order to be admitted, the applicant had to prove that his direct grandparents had also belonged to the nobility, that none of them was Jewish or converted to Christianity. In July, the council of military orders opened a study on lineage and collected 148 testimonies. A significant part of these testimonies stated that Velázquez did not live from his profession as a painter, but from his activities at court. Some of them, sometimes painters, went so far as to claim that he had never sold a painting. In early 1659, the council concluded that Velázquez could not be a nobleman because neither his paternal grandmother nor his paternal grandparents were noble. This conclusion meant that only a papal dispensation could admit Velázquez to the order. At the king”s request, Pope Alexander VII issued an apostolic brief on July 9, 1659, ratified on October 1, granting him the requested dispensation. The king granted him the title of hidalgo on November 28, thus overcoming the objections of the council, which gave him the title on the same date.

In 1660, the king and the court accompanied the infanta Maria Teresa to Fontarrabia, a Spanish city on the border between Spain and France. The infanta met her new husband Louis XIV for the first time in the middle of the Bidasoa River, in a territory whose sovereignty had been shared between the two countries since the previous year: Pheasant Island. Velázquez, as royal aposentador, was responsible for preparing the accommodation of the King of Spain and his retinue in Fontarrabía and for decorating the Conference pavilion where the meeting on Pheasant Island was held. The work must have been exhausting and on his return Velázquez contracted a virulent illness.

He fell ill at the end of July and a few days later, on August 6, 1660, he died at three in the afternoon. The next day he was buried in the church of St. John the Baptist in Madrid, with the honors due to his rank as a knight of the Order of St. James. Eight days later, on August 14, his wife Juana also died. Diego Velázquez and Juana Patcheco are the descendants of Sophie, Queen of Spain, Philip, King of the Belgians, and William Alexander, King of the Netherlands.

Evolution of his pictorial style

In his early days in Seville, the painter”s style was naturalistic, using chiaroscuro and intense, directed light. Velázquez”s brushstrokes are densely filled with paint, he models the forms with precision, his dominant colors are dark and the flesh is coppery.

According to the Spanish art historian Xavier de Salas, when Velázquez moved to Madrid, studying the great Venetian painters in the royal collection, he modified his palette and began to use grays and blacks instead of the darker colors. However, until his first Madrid period, and more precisely until the Ivrognes, he continued to paint his figures with precise contours, separating them clearly from the background with opaque brushstrokes.

During his first trip to Italy, he radically transformed his style. The painter tried new techniques, seeking luminosity. Velázquez, who had developed his technique during the previous years, concluded this transformation by the mid-1630s, when he considered that he had found his own pictorial language based on a combination of separate brushstrokes, transparent colors and precise pigment strokes to enhance details.

From the Forge of Vulcan, painted in Italy, the preparation of the canvases changed and remained so until the end of his life. It consisted simply of a layer of lead white applied with a spatula that formed a very bright background, completed by increasingly transparent brushstrokes. In the Surrender of Breda and the Equestrian Portrait of Baltasar Carlos, painted in the 1630s, he completed these developments. The use of light backgrounds and transparent brushstrokes to create great luminosity were common among Flemish and Italian painters, but Velázquez developed his own technique, taking it to unprecedented extremes.

This evolution occurred on the one hand thanks to the knowledge of the works of other artists, especially those of the royal collection and the Italian paintings. On the other hand, his direct encounters with other painters – Rubens in Madrid and others on his first trip to Italy – also contributed. Velázquez did not paint as the artists in Spain worked, layering colors. He developed his own style based on quick, precise brushstrokes and strokes in small details that have great importance in the composition. The evolution of his painting continued towards greater simplification and speed of execution. His technique, with time, became both more precise and more schematic. This was the result of an extensive process of inner maturation.

The painter did not begin his work with a totally defined composition and preferred to adjust it as his canvas progressed, introducing modifications that improved the result. He rarely made preparatory drawings, and was content with a rough outline of his composition. In many works, his corrections are visible. The outlines of the figures were formed as he changed their positions, adding or removing elements. Many of these adjustments can be seen without difficulty, especially in the positions of the hands, sleeves, necks and clothing. Another of his habits was to retouch his paintings after he had finished them, sometimes after a long break.

The palette of colors he used was very small. The physical-chemical study of the paintings shows that Velázquez changed some of his pigments after he moved to Madrid and then after his first trip to Italy. He also changed the way he mixed and applied them.

Drawings

Few of Velázquez”s drawings are known, which makes their study difficult. Although the notes of Pacheco and Palomino speak of his work as a draftsman, his technique as a painter alla prima (“in one go”) seems to exclude numerous preliminary studies. Pacheco refers to drawings made during his apprenticeship of a child model and tells us that during his first trip to Italy, he stayed at the Vatican, where he was free to draw the frescoes of Raphael and Michelangelo. Several years later he was able to use some of these drawings in the Legend of Arachne, using, for the two main spinners, the drawings of the ephebes on the pillars that frame the Persian Sibyl on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Palomino, on the other hand, says that he made drawings of the works of the Venetian painters of the Renaissance “and particularly of many figures in the frame of Tintoretto, of the crucifixion of Christ, Our Lord”. None of these works have been preserved.

According to Gudiol, the only drawing for which there is complete certainty of attribution to Velázquez is the study for the portrait of Cardinal Borja. Drawn in pencil when Velázquez was 45 years old, Gudiol affirms that it “was executed with simplicity, but giving precise values to the lines, shadows, surfaces and volumes in a realistic manner”.

For the rest of the drawings attributed to or related to Velázquez, there is no unanimity among historians because of the diversity of the techniques used. In addition to the portrait of Borja, Gudiol considers that a child”s head and a female bust are also by the painter. Both are drawn in black pencil on thread paper and probably by the same hand. They are kept in the National Library of Spain and probably belong to the painter”s Sevillian period. Two very light pencil sketches, studies for figures in the Surrender of Breda, are preserved in the same library, and are considered authentic by López-Rey and Jonathan Brown. Recently, Gridley McKim-Smith also considered authentic eight drawings of the pope sketched on two sheets of paper preserved in Toronto. He claims that they served as preparatory studies for the Portrait of Innocent X.

This absence of drawing supports the hypothesis that Velázquez began most of his paintings without preliminary studies, and traced the general lines of his compositions directly on the canvas. Some parts of the paintings that he left unfinished corroborate this hypothesis. The unfinished left hand of the Portrait of a Young Man in the Munich Picture Gallery or the head of Philip IV in the Portrait of Juan Montañés show vigorous lines drawn directly onto the canvas. Four of the painter”s paintings in the Prado Museum, studied by infrared reflectography, show some of the initial lines of the composition.

Recognition of his painting

The universal recognition of Velázquez as a great master of Western painting was relatively late. Until the beginning of the 19th century, his name was rarely mentioned outside Spain and rarely among the major painters. In eighteenth-century France, he was often considered a second-rate painter, known only to scholars and painting enthusiasts through a handful of paintings in the Louvre of the House of Austria, as well as through a few well-known works: The Water Bearer, The Ivrognes, The Spinners and the Portrait of Pope Innocent X. The reasons for this are varied: most of the painter”s work came from his service to Philip IV, and as a result, almost all of his work remained in the Spanish royal palaces, places that were not very accessible to the public. Unlike Murillo or Zurbarán, Velázquez did not depend on ecclesiastical clients, so he did not produce many works for churches and other religious buildings.

He shared the general lack of understanding of late Renaissance and Baroque painters, such as El Greco, Caravaggio and Rembrandt, who had to wait three centuries to be understood by the critics, who praised other painters such as Rubens, Van Dyck and, more generally, those who had persisted in the old style. Velázquez”s bad luck with the critics probably began quite early; in addition to the criticism of the court painters, who censured him for knowing how to paint “only a head”, Palomino tells us that the first equestrian portrait of Philip IV submitted to the public censorship was very criticized. The censors argued that the horse was against the rules of art. The angry painter erased a large part of the painting. However, in other circumstances, the same work was very well received by the public, which earned it the praise of Juan Vélez de Guevara in one of his poems. Other critics criticized Velázquez for rendering with a sometimes cruel truth the ugliness and defects of the powerful: È troppo vero said Innocent X of his portrait.

Pacheco, at that time, emphasized the need to defend this painting from the accusation of being mere patches of color. If nowadays any art lover would take a close look at a myriad of colors that only makes sense with distance, at that time the optical effects were much more disconcerting and impressive. The adoption of this style by Velázquez after his first trip to Italy was a reason for constant dispute and placed him among the supporters of the new style.

The first recognition of the painter in Europe is due to Antonio Palomino, who was one of his admirers. His biography of Velázquez was published in 1724 in Volume III of the Musée pictural et échelle optique. An abridgement was translated into English in 1739 in London, into French in Paris in 1749 and 1762, and into German in 1781 in Dresden. It served as a source for historians. Norberto Caimo, in the Lettere d”un vago italiano ad un suo amico (1764), used Palomino”s text to illustrate the “Principe de”Pittori Spagnuoli”, which had masterfully combined Roman drawing and Venetian color. The first French criticism of Velázquez is earlier, and is found in volume V of the Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes published in 1688 by André Félibien. This study is limited to the Spanish works kept in the French royal collections, and Félibien can only mention a landscape of “Cléante” and “several portraits of the House of Austria” kept in the lower apartments of the Louvre and attributed to Velasquez. Answering his interlocutor who had asked him what he found so admirable in the works of these two unknowns of second rank, Félibien praised them affirming “that they chose and looked at nature in a very particular way”, without this “beautiful air” of the Italian painters. Already in the XVIIIth century, Pierre-Jean Mariette qualified the painting of Velazquez of “inconceivable audacities, which, at a distance, gave a surprising effect and managed to produce a total illusion”.

Also in the 18th century, the German painter Anton Mengs considered that Velázquez, despite his tendency towards naturalism and the absence of the notion of ideal beauty, was able to make the air circulate around the painted elements, and for this he deserved respect. In his letters to Antonio Ponz, he praised some of his paintings where he noted his ability to imitate nature, especially in The Spinners, his last style, “where the hand does not seem to have taken part in the execution. The news transmitted by English travelers like Richard Twiss (1775), Henry Swinburne (1779) and Joseph Townsend (1786) also contributed to a better knowledge and recognition of his painting. The last of the three travelers asserted that in the traditional praise of nature imitation, Spanish painters were not inferior to the main Italian or Flemish masters. He emphasized the treatment of light and aerial perspective, in which Velázquez “leaves all other painters far behind”.

With the Enlightenment and its educational ideals, Goya – who claimed on several occasions to have no other masters than Velázquez, Rembrandt and Nature – was commissioned to make engravings of some of the Sevillian master”s works held in the royal collections. Diderot and D”Alembert, in the article “painting” in the Encyclopedia of 1791, described the life of Velázquez, as well as his masterpieces: The Water Bearer, The Drunkards and The Spinners. A few years later, Ceán Bermúdez renewed the references to Palomino”s writings in his Dictionary (1800), adding some of the paintings from Velázquez”s Sevillian stage. According to a 1765 letter from the painter Francisco Preciado de la Vega to Giambatista Ponfredi, many of Velázquez”s paintings had already left Spain. He referred to the “Caravaggio” that he had painted there “in a rather colorful and finished manner, after the taste of Caravaggio” and that had been taken away by foreigners. Velázquez”s work became better known outside Spain when foreign travelers visiting the country were able to view his paintings at the Prado Museum. The museum began to exhibit the royal collections in 1819, and a special permit was no longer required to view his paintings in the royal palaces.

Stirling-Maxwell”s study of the painter, published in London in 1855 and translated into French in 1865, helped to rediscover the artist; it was the first modern study of the painter”s life and work. The revision of Velázquez”s importance as a painter coincided with a change in artistic sensibility at that time.

It was the impressionist painters who allowed the master”s definitive return to fame. They understood his teachings perfectly. This was particularly true of Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who went to the Prado to discover and understand Velázquez. When Manet made this famous study trip to Madrid in 1865, the painter”s reputation was already established, but no one else felt so much wonder for the paintings of the Sevillian. He was the one who did the most for the understanding and appreciation of this art. He called him “the painter of painters” and “the greatest painter that ever existed”. Manet admired his illustrious predecessor”s use of very vivid colors, which distinguished him from his contemporaries. The influence of Velázquez can be seen, for example, in The Fife Player, where Manet was openly inspired by the Spanish painter”s portraits of dwarfs and jesters. One must take into account the considerable chaos that existed at the time in the artist”s collections, the lack of knowledge and the profound confusion between his own works, the copies, the replicas from his studio, and the erroneous attributions. Thus, between 1821 and 1850, 147 works by Velázquez were sold in Paris, of which only The Lady with a Fan, preserved in London, is now recognized by specialists as authentically by Velázquez.

During the second part of the century he was considered a universal painter, the supreme realist and the father of modern art. At the end of the century, Velázquez was interpreted as a proto-impressionist painter. Stevenson, in 1899, studied his paintings with a painter”s eye and found many technical similarities between Velázquez and the French Impressionists. José Ortega y Gasset placed the peak of Velázquez”s reputation between the 1880s and the 1920s, the period corresponding to the French Impressionists. After this period, an ebb began around 1920, when Impressionism and its aesthetic ideas declined, and with them, the consideration of Velázquez. According to Ortega, a period began that he calls “Velázquez”s invisibility”.

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Modern influences and tributes

The essential step that Velázquez constitutes in the history of art can be seen to this day, through the way in which 20th century painters have judged his work. Pablo Picasso paid the most visible homage to his compatriot, when he completely recomposed Las Meninas (1957) in his cubist style, while maintaining the original position of the figures with precision. Although Picasso feared that such a work would be considered a copy, this work, of considerable magnitude, was quickly recognized and appreciated. In 1953, Francis Bacon painted his famous series Study after Velázquez”s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. In 1958 Salvador Dalí painted a work entitled Velázquez Painting the Infanta Margarita with the lights and shadows of his own glory, followed by Meninas (1960) and a Portrait of Juan de Pareja Repairing a String on his Mandolin (1960) to celebrate the tercentenary of his death, in which he used Velázquez”s colors.

The influence of Velázquez is felt even in the cinema. This is notably the case with Jean-Luc Godard who, in 1965, in Pierrot le fou, directed Jean-Paul Belmondo reading a text by Élie Faure dedicated to Velasquez, extracted from his book L”Histoire de l”Art :

“Velázquez, after fifty years, never painted a definite thing. He wandered around the objects with the air and the twilight. He would surprise in the shadows and transparency of the backgrounds the colored palpitations of which he made the invisible center of his silent symphony.”

This section presents four of the painter”s masterpieces that are proposed to give a vision of his style in his maturity for which Velázquez is world famous. First, The Surrender of Breda of 1635, in which he experimented with luminosity. Next, one of his best portraits – a genre in which he was a specialist – is that of Pope Innocent X, painted in 1650, and finally, his two masterpieces The Menines of 1656 and The Spinners of 1658.

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The Surrender of Breda

This painting depicts the siege of Breda and was intended to decorate the great Hall of the Kingdoms in the Buen Retiro Palace, along with other epic paintings by various painters. The Hall of the Kingdoms was intended to exalt the Spanish monarchy and Philip IV.

This is a work in which the painter reached the maximum mastery of his art, finding a new way to capture light. The Sevillian style disappeared and Velázquez no longer used chiaroscuro to treat the illuminated volumes. The technique became very fluid, so much so that in some areas the pigment does not cover the canvas, and leaves the preparation visible. In this painting, Velázquez completed the development of his pictorial style. After this painting, he always painted with this new technique, which was later only slightly modified.

The scene shows the Spanish general Ambrogio Spinola receiving the keys of the conquered city from the Dutchman Justin de Nassau. The conditions of the surrender were exceptionally generous and allowed the defeated to leave the city with their weapons. The scene is a pure invention since there was no act of handing over the keys.

Velázquez retouched his composition many times. He erased what he didn”t like with light superimpositions of colors that X-rays allow us to distinguish. The most significant of these was the addition of the spears of the Spanish soldiers, which are the most important elements of the composition. These are articulated in depth on an airy perspective. Between the Dutch soldiers on the left and the Spaniards on the right, there are strongly illuminated faces. The others are treated with various levels of shadows. The character of the defeated general is treated with nobility, which is a way of enhancing the victor.

To the right, Espinola”s horse is chirping impatiently. The soldiers are either waiting or distracted. These small gestures and movements take away the rigidity of The Surrender of Breda and give it a great naturalness.

Portrait of Pope Innocent X

The most acclaimed portrait of the painter”s life, and one that still commands admiration today, is the one he painted of Pope Innocent X. Velázquez painted this canvas during his second trip to Italy, when he was at the height of his reputation and technique.

It was not easy to get the pope to pose for a painter. It was a very unusual privilege. For Henrietta Harris, the paintings that Velázquez took to her as a gift from the king must have put the pope in a good mood. He was inspired by Raphael”s portrait of Julian II, painted around 1511, and by Titian”s interpretation of his portrait of Paul III, both of which are very famous and much copied. Velázquez paid tribute to his Venetian masters in this painting more than in any other, although he tried to make it an independent creation. The depiction of the figure standing upright in his seat gives it great strength.

By separate brushstrokes, many shades of red combine, from the farthest to the closest. The dark red background of the curtains is followed by the slightly lighter red of the armchair, to end in the foreground by the impressive red of the mosaic and its luminous reflection. The whole is dominated by the head of the sovereign pontiff, with strong features and a severe look.

This portrait has always been admired. It has inspired painters of all periods from Pietro Neri to Francis Bacon with his tormented series. For Joshua Reynolds it was the best painting of Rome and one of the first portraits in the world.

Palomino says that Velázquez took a replica with him when he returned to Madrid. This is the version in Wellington”s museum (Apsley House, London). Wellington seized it from the French troops after the battle of Vitoria. They themselves had stolen it from Madrid during the Napoleonic occupation. It is the only copy considered original by Velázquez among the many replicas of the work.

The Meninas

After his second trip to Italy, Velázquez was at the height of his artistic maturity. In 1652, his new duties as aposentador – marshal – of the palace left him little time to paint; but even so, the few paintings he produced during this last period of his life are considered exceptional. In 1656, he painted The Meninas. It is one of the most famous and controversial paintings even today. Thanks to Antonio Palomino, we know the names of almost all the characters in the painting. In the center is the Infanta Margarita, assisted by two ladies-in-waiting or Meninas. On the right are the dwarfs Maribarbola and Nicolas Pertusato, the latter teasing a dog sitting in the foreground with his foot. Behind them, in the half-light, we see a lady-in-waiting and a bodyguard. In the background, in the doorway, is José Nieto Velasquez, in charge of the queen”s wardrobe. On the left, painting a large canvas from behind, is the painter, Diego Velázquez. The mirror at the back of the room reflects the faces of King Philip IV and his wife Mariana. The painting, despite its intimate nature, is, in the words of Jean Louis Augé, a “dynastic work” that was painted to be displayed in the king”s summer office.

For Gudiol, Las Meninas is the culmination of Velázquez”s pictorial style, in a continuous process of simplification of his technique, privileging visual realism over drawing effects. In his artistic evolution, Velázquez understood that in order to render any form with accuracy, he needed only a few brushstrokes. His extensive technical knowledge allowed him to determine what those brushstrokes were and where to apply them on the first try, without reworking or rectifying.

The scene takes place in the former apartments of Prince Balthasar Carlos, in the Alcazar Palace. According to Palomino”s description, Velázquez used the reflection of the kings in the mirror to ingeniously convey what he was painting. The gazes of the infanta, the painter, the dwarf, the ladies-in-waiting, the dog, the Madonna Isabel and Don José Nieto Velázquez at the back door, are all directed towards the viewer who is observing the canvas, occupying the focal point where the sovereigns must have been. What Velázquez paints is outside of him, outside of the canvas, in the real space of the viewer. Michel Foucault in Words and Things draws attention to the way in which Velázquez integrated these two spaces, confusing the real space of the viewer with the foreground of the canvas, creating the illusion of continuity between one and the other. He achieved this through strong illumination in the foreground and a neutral, uniform ground.

X-rays show that where the painting is located in progress was the infanta Maria Theresa, probably erased because of her marriage to Louis XIV. This deletion, as well as the presence of the painter decorated with the red cross of the Order of Santiago among the royal family, has, according to Jean-Louis Augé, chief curator of the Goya Museum in Castres, “immense symbolic significance: at last the painter appears among the greats at their level.

The Spinners

One of the artist”s last works, The Legend of Arachne, more commonly known as The Spinners (Las hilanderas in Spanish). It was painted for a private client, Pedro de Arce, who belonged to the court, and was completed around the year 1657. The painting represents the myth of Arachne, an extraordinary weaver that Ovid describes in The Metamorphoses. The mortal challenged the goddess Minerva to show that she could weave like a goddess. The two competitors were declared equal, Arachne”s tapestry was of the same quality as Minerva”s. In the foreground, the canvas shows the two weavers – Arachne, Minerva and their helpers – working at their spinning wheels. In the background, the conclusion of the competition is represented, when the two tapestries are exposed on the walls and declared of equal quality.

In the foreground, five spinners are spinning wheels and working. One of them opens the red curtain in a theatrical way, bringing in the light on the left. On the right wall, balls of wool are hanging. In the background, in another room, three women converse in front of a tapestry hanging on the wall representing two women, one of whom is armed, as well as Titian”s Abduction of Europa in the background. The painting, full of light, air and movement, is full of shimmering colors and seems to have been the object of considerable care on the part of Velázquez. As Raphael Mengs has shown, this work does not appear to be the result of manual labor, but of pure abstract will. It concentrates all the artistic know-how accumulated by the painter during his long career of forty years. The plan is relatively simple, however, and is based on a varied combination of red, bluish-green, gray and black colors.

“This last Velasquez, whose poetic, somewhat mysterious world has for our time a major seduction, anticipates the impressionist art of Claude Monet and Whistler, while the previous painters saw in it an epic and luminous realism.”

After Velázquez had painted it, four more strips were added to the edges of the canvas. The top edge was enlarged by 50 cm, the right edge by 22 cm, the left edge by 21 cm and the bottom edge by 10 cm. The final dimensions are 222 cm high by 293 cm wide.

The execution was very fast, on an orange background, using very fluid mixtures. Seen up close, the figures in the foreground are diffuse, defined by quick strokes that create a blur. In the background, this effect increases, caused by even shorter and more transparent brushstrokes. On the left, we note a spinning wheel whose spokes can be seen in a blur that gives an impression of movement. Velázquez enhances this effect by placing flashes of light inside the spinning wheel that suggest the fleeting reflections of the moving spokes.

He introduced many changes in the composition. One of the most significant is the woman on the left holding the curtain, which was not originally on the canvas.

The painting has come down to us in very poor condition, alleviated during the restoration of the 1980s. According to several studies, this is the work in which the color is the most luminous and in which the painter achieved his greatest mastery of light. The contrast between the intense luminosity of the background scene and the chiaroscuro of the foreground is very strong. There is another powerful contrast between Arachne and the characters in the shadows, the goddess Minerva and the other weavers.

It is estimated that there are between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and twenty-five works by Velázquez preserved, a very small quantity compared to the forty years of production. If we add the referenced but lost works, we estimate that he must have painted about one hundred and sixty canvases. During the first twenty years of his life, he painted about 120 works at a rate of 6 per year, while in his last twenty years, he painted only forty canvases at a rate of two per year. Palomino explains that this reduction occurred because of the multiple activities of the court that took his time.

The first catalog of Velázquez”s work was made by Stirling-Maxwell in 1848, and included 226 paintings. The catalogs of successive authors gradually reduced the number of authentic works until the current figures of 120-125 were reached. The most widely used contemporary catalog is that of José López-Rey, published in 1963 and revised in 1979. In its first version it included 120 works, and 123 after revision.

The Prado Museum possesses some fifty works by the painter, the fundamental part of the royal collection; other Madrid collections such as the National Library of Spain (View of Granada, sepia, 1648), or the Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza (Portrait of Maria Anna of Austria), a deposit of the Museu Nacional d”Art de Catalunya (National Museum of Art of Catalonia), or the Villar-Mir Collection (The Tears of St. Peter”s), total another ten works by the painter.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has ten other paintings, including five portraits from the last decade. The majority of these paintings are portraits of the infanta Margherita Theresa, which were sent to the imperial court in Vienna so that the cousin of Emperor Leopold, who had pledged to marry her at her birth, could see her growth.

The British Isles also preserve about twenty paintings. During Velázquez”s lifetime, there were already collectors of his paintings. It is here that most of the paintings from the Sevillian period of the painter, as well as the only surviving Venus, can be found. They are exhibited in public galleries in London, Edinburgh and Dublin. Most of these paintings were taken out of Spain during the Napoleonic Wars.

Twenty other works are preserved in the United States, including a dozen in New York.

In 2015, an exhibition on Velázquez was held at the Grand-Palais in Paris under the direction of Guillaume Kientz from March 25 to July 13, 2015. The exhibition, which included 44 paintings by or attributed to Velázquez and 60 to his students, welcomed 478,833 visitors.

The first biographers of Velázquez provided important documentation on his life and work. The first was Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644), a person who was very close to the painter as he was both his teacher and father-in-law. In his treatise The Art of Painting, completed in 1638, he gave extensive information about the painter up to that date. He gave details of his apprenticeship, his early years at court, and his first trip to Italy. The Aragonese Jusepe Martínez, painted by the master in Madrid and Zaragoza, includes a brief biographical account in his Practical Discourse on the Very Noble Art of Painting (1673), with information on Velázquez”s second trip to Italy and the honors he received at court.

We also have a complete biography of the painter by Antonio Palomino (1655-1721), published in 1724, 64 years after his death. This late work, however, is based on notes taken by a friend of the painter, Lázaro Díaz del Valle, whose manuscripts have been preserved, as well as on other notes, lost, by one of his last disciples Juan de Alfaro (1643-1680). In addition, Palomino was a court painter, and he was familiar with the work of Velázquez and the royal collections. He spoke with people who had known the painter when he was young. He gave abundant information about his second trip to Italy, his activities as painter of the king”s chamber, and his employment as a palace official.

There are various poetic praises. Some of them were written very early, such as the sonnet dedicated by Juan Vélez de Guevara to an equestrian portrait of the king, the panegyric praise by Salcedo Coronel to a painting by the Count-Duke, or the epigram by Gabriel Bocángel to the Portrait of a Lady of Superior Beauty. These texts are complemented by a set of news about specific works and give an idea of the rapid recognition of the painter in the circles close to the court. Velázquez”s reputation went beyond the circles of the court. Other reviews are provided by contemporary writers such as Diego Saavedra Fajardo or Baltasar Gracián. Likewise, the comments of Father Francisco de los Santos, in his notes on the painter”s participation in the decoration of the monastery of El Escorial, are indicative of this.

We also have numerous administrative documents on the episodes of his life. However, we know nothing of his letters, his personal writings, his friendships or his private life and more generally of the testimonies that would allow us to better understand his state of mind and his thoughts to better understand his work. The understanding of the artist”s personality is difficult.

Velázquez is known for his bibliophily. His library, very rich for its time, consisted of 154 works on mathematics, geometry, geography, mechanics, anatomy, architecture and art theory. Recently, various studies have attempted to understand the personality of the painter through his books.

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External links

Sources