In 1604 the Spanish poet and satirist Francisco de Quevedo wrote to a correspondent in the Netherlands: “In your country we consume our soldiers and our gold; here we consume ourselves.” Four hundred years later it seems curious that two such seemingly dissimilar countries, linked largely by dynastic inheritance and war, should have had artistic golden ages at the same time. Both countries experienced a like flowering in adventurous expansion, an outgoing impulse that saw both exploring in Brazil and the Spice Islands. Both countries had great highs and lows, though it was the Spanish not the Dutch siglo de oro that Cervantes (who lived through it) could refer to as “these deprav’d Times.” The Dutch golden age possibly lasted a little longer but both ages burned out before the seventeenth century was over, and the flame that also burned vividly within their greatest artists exhausted its fuel in both nations. Perhaps the most notable paradox where Breda was concerned—a city in which both countries had their interest—was that it was a Spanish not a Dutch painter who created a masterpiece out of a military campaign focused on it.
II. A BOY FROM SEVILLE. 1599–1621
Nine years after the turfship episode, a thousand kilometers away from Breda, a child was born in southern Spain. This arrival occurred in Seville, capital of Andalusia, through which the Guadalquivir, a much greater river than the Mark, bends its long course toward the sea. Above the quaysides the masts and rigging of oceangoing ships festooned the Seville skyline. A number of church bell towers climbed out of the packed shoulder-to-shoulder white houses with orange-red roofs between which one could just make out streets and alleyways. Among the highest buildings were the thirteenth-century Torre del Oro, from which a chain could be stretched across the river to keep out marauding vessels; the Giralda, the twelfth-century minaret of what had been one of the largest mosques in Islam; and the more conventional late-medieval pointed yet low-pitched roof of the tower of San Pedro church. The Muslim tide that had flooded Spain for seven centuries had now been at full ebb for 350 years, leaving a visible legacy of intricate architecture, fluent design, and a partly Moorish populace. It also left a Spanish language in which some 300,000 words came from Islamic terms, including “flamenco” and “Olé!” Proximity to Africa was evident in the hot, dry climate as well as in the number of dark-skinned workers. Seville at this point was the largest city in Spain. It held 150,000 people in 1598. It also had much of the lucrative trade with America. From Seville (fifty miles from the open sea) and Cádiz fleets of galleons sailed in convoy twice a year, escorted by half-a-dozen armed ships, taking out essential supplies of cereals, oil, and wine, and bringing back bullion. In Seville the silver fleet landed most of its rich cargoes from Mexico and Peru, booty that would in great part clunk into the coffers of the Spanish crown, providing about a fifth of its yearly revenues. As the sixteenth century ended, this easy source of income was starting to contribute toward inflation; prices were rising, the coinage was losing value. And when for one reason or other the silver fleet didn’t make it home, the crown had less to pay its teeming court and all of Castile squealed. So did the soldiers in Flanders.
Nevertheless it was for some a siglo de oro, a golden age, if you ignored diseases and the black shadow cast by the Inquisition, the agency of clerical orthodoxy that was mostly bureaucratic but now and then malevolent and lethal. Seville was prosperous: For a century it had had the wealth of the Americas passing through it. It was either the new Rome or the new Babylon. It was a city where art followed trade, and high aspirations came in the wake of serious endeavor. And despite the onset of plague in 1599, Seville was a fortunate place to be born if you were Diego Velázquez, baptized on June 6 that year in San Pedro parish church—a church that showed Mudéjar influence, which is to say the effect of Muslim style after the Christian reconquest. It was the church where Diego’s parents had been married at the end of December 1597.
The child survived infancy. He was given his mother’s surname though he would later sometimes fit his father’s name de Silva in front of it. His first name Diego honored the apostle James, Jesus’s brother, who—legend had it—came to Spain to preach and left his body to be found by a miracle in Galicia in 813, making him an appropriate patron saint. For Velázquez’s father, Juan Rodríguez de Silva, and his mother, Jerónima Velázquez, Diego was the first of seven children. Juan Rodríguez was a church scribe and notary, his mother the daughter of a garment worker who made trousers and stockings and did well enough to buy a few properties, which he rented out, and the family house in which Diego was born in the Calle Gorgoja, just off the Plaza Buen Suceso. It was a small two-story house in a maze of little streets, with an interior courtyard and small iron-barred and thick-shuttered windows that balanced coolness against light; the house had something of the character of a cave, with dim recesses.
The child survived the plague of 1599, which apparently killed his maternal grandparents. At what point his mother and father realized they had a prodigy on their hands we don’t know. Seville believed in its classical connections: The city’s legendary founder was the god Hercules; the emperor Trajan had been born in Triana, the city district across the Guadalquivir River. The city had been a western focus for the Roman empire. The Velázquez boy had a proper grounding in the classics. He grew up knowing that Seville’s Giralda was the tallest tower in the world at 322 feet and that the adjacent huge castlelike cathedral, built using some of the material from the knocked-down mosque, contained the supposedly uncorrupted body of Ferdinand III, the king-made-saint who liberated the city from the Moors and died from fasting. But Diego would have been more aware of all the local convents and churches, San Pedro his place of baptism, and San Vicente in the neighborhood closer to the river his family next moved to. Seville took religious observance with fervent seriousness, with daily demonstrations of faith and occasional spectacular processions devoted to the Virgin Mary. Possibly, although we have no way of saying precisely how they were made evident, there may have been special reasons for Diego’s family to pay careful attention to showing they were good Catholics. Childhood meant catechism, sacraments, communion, confession; many dark spaces, much fear, and much beauty.
Their circumstances were modest but his parents also made a point of letting it be known that they had, somewhere, an old Christian past. The family decision to stress his mother’s Velázquez name suggested an attempt to follow Andalusian and Portuguese tradition, although Diego’s father and grandfather also had the name of Rodríguez, and his paternal grandmother’s de Silva provided a superior note. (Using this name also followed Portuguese and Andalusian custom.) Diego’s father’s work as a church scribe meant he was a skilled penman. His mother was almost certainly illiterate. One suspects that the young Diego heard a great deal about his distinguished ancestors and his roots in “Portugal.” The crowns of Castile and Portugal had been joined in 1580, which had made for simpler emigration to Seville and the prosperity it held out. At that time childhood was short. At the age of six, at the most seven, real life began. The Velázquez de Silvas’ first child was evidently an apt pupil and there must have been early signs of a special bent for painting. Palomino, a court painter in Madrid who became in 1724 one of Velázquez’s first biographers, tells us that “his school notebooks served him as sketchbooks for his ideas.” His parents don’t seem to have been bothered by any conflict between what Palomino later suggested was the boy’s purported noble background and the artisan or craftsman aspects of his proposed occupation, that is, in a trade. Indeed, one has to credit them with perception, in seeing that their son had a special talent for drawing that could be nurtured. They were probably impelled not just by destiny but by the press of his younger siblings coming along into soon finding gainful employment for Diego. (Two of his younger brothers also trained as artists.) As a family, they had industrious habits—the habits, one might hazard, almost of the Jews and Moriscos rather than of the proud if impoverished and often indolent hidalgos who strutted their stuff throughout Spain. Many of them, as Gerald
Brenan observed, preferred starvation “to the ignominy of working.”
The young Velázquez may later have wondered if he really saw what he did in Seville in 1610, which was similar to what was happening then through much of southern Spain—or did he only think he had seen it? Was it simply a hot-weather mirage? But as a boy of ten, going on eleven, he would have been aware of the sadness and the horror of people from the streets around him as they were rounded up and forced to pack and go. Certainly afterward he was able to imagine, to visualize, on this and other occasions what it was like to be somewhere without being on the spot. He could identify with people and represent their feelings. In 1610 word spread fast, winged by fear if not terror. In his family’s kitchen, he may have been aware of the panic showing in the countenances of one or other of the dark-skinned servant girls. But he may also have walked in person from his family’s house in the parish of San Vicente to the close-at-hand riverfront and seen the waiting vessels, mostly oared galleys and lateen-sailed feluccas, tethered to the banks of the Guadalquivir, while on the floodplain outside the city walls, in view of Seville’s resplendent spires and towers, some belonging to former mosques, the groups of tearful about-to-be emigrants were camped.
It had taken time to get the Moriscos’ expulsion organized. It had been proclaimed in 1609 by the king, Philip III, seemingly brainwashed by his confessors, but such calls for the “Little Moors” to be thrown out of Spain had been heard for more than a century. After reconquering most of the peninsula from the North African Muslims, the Christian monarchs of the country had wavered between century-long periods of toleration and persecution of both Jews and Moors. Church leaders could be saintly like Archbishop Talavera of Granada, or hard-line fanatics, like Archbishop Jiménez of Toledo. Some Moriscos were in fact descended from Iberian stock, from people who had converted to Mohammedism on the arrival of the Moors in Spain. Many looked, dressed, or talked like Christians. Many spoke only Spanish. Both Jews and Moors, from notionally Eastern races, were visibly more industrious and productive than the Christian majority. As menial farmworkers or as literate and numerate lawyers and accountants, they pitched in, unashamed to work. Their energy made them invaluable, you would have thought, but also rendered them suspect for their Catholic employers. Suspicious, too, was their habit of washing themselves a lot. They were skilled producers; the Christians idle consumers. This also made for jealousy. Moreover, many in the Church wanted to keep the races apart—any friendship with infidels was a denial of Christ. So there were demands from time to time to get rid of them or mark them with badges or gather them in ghettoes, in specific areas of the city called juderías and morerías. (A morería was generally surrounded by a wall with only one door.) But even as conversos who had been baptized as Christians, could they really be trusted? Wouldn’t they go on refusing to eat pork or drink wine, and practicing their horrid rites in secret?
The Spanish Inquisition, set up at episcopal behest in Castile by Queen Isabella in 1478, was fierce in its repressive measures, taken mostly against conversos who were thought to be backsliding into Judaic practices. In Seville alone, the Inquisition’s tribunals ordered the burning of some seven hundred people from 1480 to 1488; thousands more were severely punished. Moorish religious books were burned. There was useful cash to be collected from fines, from confiscated property, and from denouncing neighbors. Mere arrest by the Holy Office was a savage punishment because its processes were secret and prisoners were held incommunicado. The tribunal’s objective was clearly to rid the Church of all taint of Jewish and Moorish blood, “New Christians” included. Study abroad was prohibited for any who weren’t of pure blood. Despite this, some Spanish scholars and artists fled to France and Italy. Under Philip II the Moriscos continued to be coerced into conversion, ordered to renounce their Moorish ways and give up their children to be educated by Christian priests. There was rebellion in Granada and many fled to North Africa, often taking a longer and supposedly lawful route through France to Tunisia.
What to do with the Moriscos became a serious issue after Philip III’s expulsion order. Plans to put them in ships and scuttle the vessels at sea, and mass castrations of all males, were considered. Straightforward massacre was recommended by many clerics. Eventually nearly three hundred thousand Moriscos from Castille and Aragón were expelled, though many others—as the Jews had done in similar circumstances in 1492—chose to stay behind, to accept conversion and slavery, or, after converting, finding themselves expelled anyway. Some, getting no safe refuge in North Africa, decided to return to slavery and enforced conversion. In Algiers, a number of Christianized Moriscos were stoned to death on arrival. Many also died in Spain on the roads to the coasts, or were killed by locals who looted their possessions. (The population of Spain at this time was probably a bit more than eight million.) Many of the Andalusian Moriscos were sent from the Granada coast across the Mediterranean to Morocco. Those in and around Seville are thought to have been among the best integrated and were treated more charitably than, for example, the less assimilated Moriscos of Valencia. Many seem to have managed to duck back under the workaday surface of things, possibly by becoming slaves rather than employees of their long-term masters. As it was, after the expulsions the omens weren’t particularly propitious: In Zaragoza, a vase full of fluid—miraculously retrieved from sweat exuded by religious images and faithfully kept since the forcible conversion of the Aragonese Moors in 1520—suddenly evaporated. Indeed it was soon evident that by the expulsion Spain had cut off its nose to spite its face. Few ambitious Spaniards claiming pure blood brought up their children to honest industry. Landlords now lost essential workers and tenants; many houses were left empty; some almost wholly Morisco villages were destroyed by their aggrieved inhabitants as they were forced to leave; fields were left unsown and cattle unfed. Meat became scarce in the cities; the roads between them were infested with vagabonds and thieves. In Toledo, whole districts were desolate and grass grew in the streets. Among Spain’s occupied classes, the clergy alone had more rather than fewer people in its midst (Seville is said to have had some fifteen thousand priests in 1585, making up about a tenth of its population); church lands weren’t subject to taxation; a petitioner to King Philip IV complained in 1621 that “It is only in the convents that people are not dying of hunger.” Seville’s population included at this date 7,503 Moriscos, but more were sent there to be loaded on the ships for a fee of ten reales a head—in all, 18,471 were shipped out from the Andalusian city where Velázquez had been born. His biographer Palomino later opined that the expulsion was “a well-deserved punishment for such infamous and seditious people.” The Moriscos had often been coerced into conversion; they had been unfairly taxed; they were treated like spies in the house; and now they were to be compelled to leave. And many did so, though some stayed as slaves or after paying bribes.
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AT AGE ELEVEN, the Velázquez boy was apprenticed to a master painter. Diego’s father had performed legal services for the Herrera family, and Diego apparently went to work for the artist Francisco Herrera—the records aren’t precise because Herrera wasn’t yet a member of the Saint Luke’s Guild and legally wasn’t permitted to have apprentices. In any event, the arrangement didn’t last. Herrera was said to have been so bad-tempered that his wife and children walked out on him: They claimed that life with him was hell on Earth. His daughter took shelter in a convent and his son fled to Italy. Herrera allegedly counterfeited coins, just as Vermeer’s grandfather did; artistic talent in deceiving the eye came forth in many forms. (Velázquez’s maternal grandfather was also in jail for debt at one point.) For his crime, Herrera had to shelter in a monastery until the king pardoned him in 1624, after admiring an altarpiece Herrera had done of Saint Hermenegild, the sixth-century Visigoth king’s son who converted from Arianism to Catholicism in Seville and was later beheaded. Diego was moved to another local painter, forty-seven-year-old Francisco Pacheco. The contract was definitely aboveboard this time, signed
on September 17, 1611, for a five-year apprenticeship; since apprenticeships were generally for six years, the year with Herrera seems to have been taken into account. The customary terms were board and clothing—including two shirts, a hat, and a cape—and artistic instruction in return for the apprentice’s labor: grinding pigments, preparing canvases and panels, and putting up with various indignities. Do this! Don’t do that! Why on earth are you doing such-and-such? If you really want to become a painter, you’re going to have to pull yourself together.… Between childhood and adolescence lay many humiliations. But he stuck it out and more than that, he won Pacheco’s respect. He became a member of the master’s family. His own parents, the Velázquez de Silvas, busy with further offspring, moved backstage, though there are occasional reminders of them. Diego’s father later served as executor of Pacheco’s estate.
Religious art was meat and drink for artists in Seville, as it was for painters and sculptors through most of Spain at this time. Spaniards took their religion seriously and its sacraments and saints, ceremonies and imagery, were central to human life. Velázquez was born into a world where for several centuries art had been inspired by the dogmatic and often doom-laden teachings of the Catholic Church. The art that was spawned by this fierce above-all-remember-heaven-and-hell devotion was to a large degree dourly or sentimentally conventional, although some of the practitioners were dutiful, and a few, like Velázquez’s contemporary Zurbarán, were in their chosen tasks brilliant. Now and again there were lightning-lit pockets of perverse genius, such as that of El Greco, Cretan-born and Venice-taught, who was taken up by Philip II, lived for many years in Toledo, but was soon discarded by the court. (He died in 1614.) El Greco thought Michelangelo’s works were indecent; the Greek’s ecstatic and exaggerated mannerism was too disturbing and violent for the king. His pictures often seemed carved rather than painted. In that respect, Seville had its own unsettling close-at-hand talent in Juan Martínez Montañés, whose wooden statuary provided the most exceptional examples of art that was at once religious, passionate, and necrophiliac—its liveliness seemed focused on death; every work in its own way a crucifixion.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 3