Diego Velazquez

Diego Velazquez was the first great Spanish painter, and, for many major artists, particularly from the nineteenth century onwards, the most inspiring and relevant "old master" of all. His best-known work, Las Meninas, is often considered to be the world's greatest painting, a testament to Velazquez's technical brilliance. His daring, impressionistic brushwork conjures up exactly the gorgeous trappings of court life; ambiguous psychological undercurrents and intangible mood are created by clever, complex spatial arrangements, colour and lighting. We even suspect Velazquez of somehow pre-empting the invention of photography by catching the characteristic fleeting moment at the Spanish court with such immediacy. Las Meninas has provoked numerous philosophical interpretations by eminent thinkers, and forms part of the artistic consciousness of the entire modern period in painting. Picasso himself paid homage to the importance of the work in his 1957 Las Meninas series. The celebrity status of this tour de force, although justified, perhaps tends to obscure other things that might interest us about Velazquez's art, like his unstinting truthfulness to the subject and deep respect and compassion for the individual. Velazquez's democratic approach to art transcended the artificial, stylized world defining his artistic opportunities and career, in which contrived appearances and rigid etiquette were overwhelmingly important. He created unpretentious, sympathetic and affecting images of often apparently insignificant and otherwise overlooked aspects of human life, which still have meaning for us today. Velazquez's somewhat deadpan, unobtrusive realism is also a fascinating contrast to the emotional overdrive in the idealized extravaganzas of his Baroque contemporaries. Kenneth Clark wrote of Velazquez: "his aim was simply to tell the whole truth about a complete visual impression." Velazquez spent most of his working life at the court of King Philip IV, a main player in the Siglo de Oro - the "Golden Age" of Spanish painting in the first half of the seventeenth century. Under the enlightened patronage of the Habsburg monarchy, Spanish culture blossomed; Velazquez's contemporary was the celebrated writer Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. At the end of the sixteenth century, when Velazquez was born, Spain was the most powerful political entity in Europe, its influence and rule spreading far from the Iberian peninsula. Ironically, up till then, Spain had been largely dominated artistically by others - in particular by Italy. There had been few opportunities for Spanish artists to shine; its sixteenth century rulers, Philip II and III, connoisseurs of the arts, admired and collected works by mainly foreign painters, such as Titian, and local artists were treated as mere craftsmen, serving the needs of the rigidly prescriptive Catholic Church. Velazquez was the first Spanish artist to achieve international recognition - and his artistic life reflected his deep need for social status and nobility in his native country as a practising artist. Velazquez was born in 1599 in Seville, a thriving commercial city with its own artistic identity. He lived and studied in Seville with the painter Francisco Pacheco, whose studio was at the centre of artistic and intellectual life in the city. Velazquez married his daughter Juana in 1618. Velazquez at first painted in the Seville tradition of bodegones, - realistic, closely observed studies of kitchen and tavern scenes, influenced by Flemish painting of everyday life. He gave the ordinariness of these an unusual significance and psychological intensity with dramatic lighting and sensitive use of colour and tone. His teacher wrote that these works were "deserving of the highest esteem. From these beginnings and in his portraits. . .he hit upon the true imitation of nature." In 1618 Velazquez painted the symbolic Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, creating out of a kitchen tableau a religious work full of meaning. Velazquez's innovative approach to the Christian theme is to let the ordinary kitchen people, rather than the biblical figures, dominate the scene. In 1621, Philip IV, a keen patron of the arts, moved the Spanish court and its superb royal art collection from Valladolid to Madrid, creating a new centre of royal activity and power. Velazquez was drawn to the possibility of furthering his career there, and in 1623 he entered the king's service as a court painter. Philip IV immediately admired the subtlety and perceptiveness of Velazquez's portraits (the prime minister, Count Olivares, commented that Velazquez was the first to paint a "real" likeness of the king). By 1628 Velazquez had become pintor de camara, the only artist allowed to paint the king's portrait, thus becoming Spain's most prestigious painter. From then on, Velazquez was engaged almost exclusively in documenting the lives of the royal family and court. Philip IV's family were the last of the great but doomed Habsburg dynasty, severely weakened by inbreeding (Philip IV's second wife was his niece, Mariana of Austria). Velazquez painted them all during the following thirty years, king, queens, princes and infantas, with extraordinary sensitivity, sympathy and often poignancy. These royal portraits are neither pompous nor sycophantic; they manage to convey the tragedy and fragility of human beings trapped in "the gloomy, rigid and vacuous Spanish court where the sickly royal children stifled amid nuns, dwarfs and dogs. . . Velazquez has left a record of court life as terrifying as Saint-Simon's memoirs." (Michael Levey.) Certainly Velazquez acknowledges implicitly the cruelty of a social environment that caged women in horrifically uncomfortable, glittering finery during their waking hours, and exploited dwarfs and people with disabilities as curiosities and human playthings. Among Velazquez's most astute observations of human life are his portraits of court jesters and dwarfs, whose physical reality Velazquez neither ignores nor mocks, treating them as seriously as his royal sitters. Velazquez was born in 1599 in Seville, a thriving commercial city with its own artistic identity. He lived and studied in Seville with the painter Francisco Pacheco, whose studio was at the centre of artistic and intellectual life in the city. Velazquez married his daughter Juana in 1618. Velazquez at first painted in the Seville tradition of bodegones, - realistic, closely observed studies of kitchen and tavern scenes, influenced by Flemish painting of everyday life. He gave the ordinariness of these an unusual significance and psychological intensity with dramatic lighting and sensitive use of colour and tone. His teacher wrote that these works were "deserving of the highest esteem. From these beginnings and in his portraits. . .he hit upon the true imitation of nature." In 1618 Velazquez painted the symbolic Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, creating out of a kitchen tableau a religious work full of meaning. Velazquez's innovative approach to the Christian theme is to let the ordinary kitchen people, rather than the biblical figures, dominate the scene. In 1621, Philip IV, a keen patron of the arts, moved the Spanish court and its superb royal art collection from Valladolid to Madrid, creating a new centre of royal activity and power. Velazquez was drawn to the possibility of furthering his career there, and in 1623 he entered the king's service as a court painter. Philip IV immediately admired the subtlety and perceptiveness of Velazquez's portraits (the prime minister, Count Olivares, commented that Velazquez was the first to paint a "real" likeness of the king). By 1628 Velazquez had become pintor de camara, the only artist allowed to paint the king's portrait, thus becoming Spain's most prestigious painter. From then on, Velazquez was engaged almost exclusively in documenting the lives of the royal family and court. Philip IV's family were the last of the great but doomed Habsburg dynasty, severely weakened by inbreeding (Philip IV's second wife was his niece, Mariana of Austria). Velazquez painted them all during the following thirty years, king, queens, princes and infantas, with extraordinary sensitivity, sympathy and often poignancy. These royal portraits are neither pompous nor sycophantic; they manage to convey the tragedy and fragility of human beings trapped in "the gloomy, rigid and vacuous Spanish court where the sickly royal children stifled amid nuns, dwarfs and dogs. . . Velazquez has left a record of court life as terrifying as Saint-Simon's memoirs." (Michael Levey.) Certainly Velazquez acknowledges implicitly the cruelty of a social environment that caged women in horrifically uncomfortable, glittering finery during their waking hours, and exploited dwarfs and people with disabilities as curiosities and human playthings. Among Velazquez's most astute observations of human life are his portraits of court jesters and dwarfs, whose physical reality Velazquez neither ignores nor mocks, treating them as seriously as his royal sitters. Velazquez met Rubens when he visited Madrid in 1628-9, and they both admired and studied the work of the Venetian artists in the royal collection at El Escorial. According to Velazquez's biographer, Palomino, Rubens "revived the desire Velazquez had always had to go to Italy", and he spent two years visiting Venice, Rome and Naples from 1629 to 31, absorbing lessons from Venetian colour and High Renaissance figure composition. During the 1630s and 40s, Philip IV rewarded Velazquez's talents financially and with courtly honours. Velazquez's desire to achieve social superiority at court meant that he welcomed increasing responsibilities in the royal household. He was appointed to look after the royal art collection, and visited Italy again in 1648-51, entrusted with large sums of money to buy paintings and sculpture for the king's collection. In 1652 Velazquez became Aposentador Mayor de Palacio , supervising Philip IV's quarters and travel arrangements. During this time, despite his onerous court duties, Velazquez produced his best known works. Venus at her Toilet is Velazquez's only known female nude; the painting achieved an unusual significance in 1914 when the British suffragette Mary Richardson slashed it in the National Gallery as a political protest. Velazquez's most sublime and penetrating portrait, Pope Innocent X, was painted when he visited Rome in 1649; Las Meninas was completed in 1656. Velazquez and Philip IV developed a close friendship (the king apparently had a key to Velazquez's studio, and escaped there often, as a distraction from affairs of state). The melancholy that permeates Velazquez's last portraits of Philip IV reflects the king's awareness of both waning Spanish political power and the frailty of his family line. The charming Habsburg children, whose budding personalities Velazquez immortalized so affectionately, lived pitifully short lives: only two of Philip IV's five children survived childhood. We know little about Velazquez's personality, reflecting, perhaps, his unobtrusive approach in his paintings. It has been suggested though, that the most significant element in Velazquez's life was his search for social approval, and eventually nobility, in a rigidly hierarchical, snobbish society. In 1658, after much intervention on his behalf from Philip IV, he finally achieved his aim, admission to the Knighthood of the Order of Santiago. This was as much an acceptance of Velazquez's petition for painting to be considered a liberal, or noble art, implied in visual terms in Las Meninas, as approval of Velazquez's family background and pure blood. Velazquez died in August 1660, still in the king's service, in Madrid; his wife Juana died six days later. Velazquez' s work became most influential in the nineteenth century, mainly because most of his paintings, kept in the Spanish royal collection, weren't publicly accessible until then. Goya, however, was court painter in Spain in the late eighteenth century, and had close access to Velazquez's work. French painters Courbet and Manet saw his work in the mid 1800s when it came to France after Napoleon's victory in the Peninsular wars, and Manet studied Velazquez's painting in Madrid in 1865. Velazquez's work became crucial to the development of Manet's technique: admiring his revolutionary disregard for the conventions of perspective in the background of his portrait of the actor Pablo de Valladolid, Manet remarked that this was "perhaps the most astounding bit of painting ever done." The Impressionists took the spontaneous casualness of Velazquez's brushwork and ran with it to the point where abstraction began. In the twentieth century, Francis Bacon admired Velazquez as "an amazingly mysterious painter," using Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X as a springboard for his own exploration of the human condition. Velazquez's life and art sometimes seem contradictory. His work is acutely sympathetic to the socially and physically disadvantaged in a society in which he himself was desperate to succeed. Velazquez was working in the most vehemently and repressively Catholic country in Europe, but produced hardly any purely religious art (probably through a combination of choice and circumstance). His paintings seem to be simply about authenticity of experience, directness, and truth to the subject - but then there is the quizzical and controversial Las Meninas. Velazquez's work has been described by historian Arthur Danto as an "intermixture of "mystery and mastery, each uncanny in its own but connected way". Perhaps these paradoxes, like the conundrums of who is where and why in Las Meninas, contribute to our enduring fascination for Velazquez's work.