The new palace was the Buen Retiro. The count-duke created it to take the king’s and country’s mind off Spain’s imperial problems, and spent money the state could ill afford in building it. The Army of Flanders at this point was costing three million ducats a year. The Retiro palace cost more than three million ducats over nine years. New funds were gathered from the sale of offices and privileges. New excise taxes on wine, meat, and oil were raised in Madrid to help fund the palace. Still, it would make a change from the immense dark fortification that was the Alcázar. The Buen Retiro expanded from small beginnings in rooms kept for the royal family in the monastery of San Jerónimo on the eastern side of the city; Olivares’s wife’s family also owned property in the area that provided space for the new palace, not far from the Prado, the wide avenue popular with the Madrid public for evening promenading. There the count-duke collaborated with an Italian alchemist Vincenzo Massinci in experiments that they hoped would produce gold. There he had gardens where he spent any spare time with his pet birds: swans, pheasants, prize poultry. And there he eventually made available several hundred acres for the Retiro and its grounds.
Construction of the new pleasure palace began in 1630. At its heart were two large courtyards, as at the Alcázar, but surrounded by lower buildings, outlying smaller courtyards, a chapel, a plaza for tournaments and bullfights, and a park; the grounds eventually covered an area half the size of the existing city. The park contained several hermitages, formal gardens, grottoes, ponds with fountains, orchards, and a large ornamental lake. The buildings went up in a hurry, some thought all a bit chapuza (a botched job or jerry-built, we might say). For those allowed inside, like the many royal guests accommodated there, the interior was more approved than the hastily finished outside, which seemed to most of the public too close to the ground and lacking any overall form or grandeur; the Retiro came to be nicknamed El Gallinero, the henhouse or chicken run; an ornate aviary of caged birds stood near its entrance. The Retiro’s architect Giovanni Battista Crescenzi was so exhausted by building problems and the stress of dealing with Olivares, the boss, that he died in 1635. In that year Olivares was quick to defend the cost of the new palace, about which the people of Madrid were complaining and which Olivares explained was needed for the crown in case an epidemic—such as smallpox—required Philip’s family to evacuate the Alcázar. By then, the Retiro had been open over a year. The inauguration party in December 1633 went on for four days of plays, bullfights, and tournaments. Despite the worries of the English ambassador that the hastily constructed buildings held together with “greene mortar” would collapse under the weight of the throng, the Retiro remained standing.
As it was, Velázquez was greatly involved in the much less criticized Retiro interior, and particularly in the large throne room called the Hall of Realms, the Salon de los Reinos. (The king observed, with a note of anguish, “Many kingdoms, many difficulties.”) But here Philip could preside over court happenings while his family and household watched from a balcony. Here, as the Florentine envoy Serrano noted, was “a perpetual round of ceremonies, audiences, and etiquette, with devotional exercises and ‘discipline,’ one following the other like sleep and wakefulness.” The hall had a vaulted ceiling with gilded arabesques. Above the windows were placed the emblems of the twenty-four Spanish kingdoms. And there was plenty of wall space to preoccupy Velázquez as arranger, hanger, and painter. As noted, Velázquez’s equestrian portraits of the king and the infante were displayed here, and so was his portrait of Philip’s queen Isabella. She, now in her early thirties, was also shown on horseback, not cutting any equestrian capers but wearing a huge pendant pearl called La Peregrina. This was said to have been found in an oyster in Panama and—its shell being small—nearly discarded. The pearl got to Spain by galleon and was given by Philip II to Mary Tudor. When that arrangement came to an end, the pearl was returned to Spain and worn by various queens. (During the Napoleonic invasion, it was nabbed by Joseph Bonaparte and carted off to France. In 1969 it was sold for $37,000 to the actor Richard Burton, who gave it to his wife Elizabeth Taylor, despite claims from the Duke of Alba that it wasn’t the real Peregrina that had belonged to King Alfonso XIII’s wife, Queen Victoria Eugenia. This second enormous pearl, now called Peregrina II, has since been worn by the present queen Sofia.)
The Hall of Realms was to be largely devoted to celebrating Spain’s triumphs in the never-ending war against insurgents and infidels. Here Velázquez took over from Calderón as the master of ceremonies. Nine artists were invited to produce paintings for the hall. Over the doorways Velázquez’s Sevillian colleague Zurbarán, known for his religious portraits, painted ten scenes from the life of the semidivine hero Hercules—scenes showing his famous labors. Hercules had succeeded in conquering Discord and was thus apparently close kin to Philip IV; both were also identified with the Sun. Five of Velázquez’s equestrian portraits of the royal family were hung in the hall, and Velázquez nominated himself to paint one of the twelve pictures that were to show battles in which Philip IV’s forces had been victorious around the world. A thousand craftsmen were said to have been employed at the Retiro, and painters, plasterers, and gilders were kept hard at it for a year and a half decorating the Hall of Realms. Velázquez was still occupied with his painting in late March 1635, but the Salon de los Reinos and its contents were ready for the inauguration ceremony soon after Easter.
Olivares conducted the Buen Retiro performance to completion and it was more successful than the Union of Arms he had been promoting since 1626, intended to bring the Spanish realms, whether far-flung or close at hand, into active solidarity against their common enemy—not least by getting them all to help pay for the conflict in the Low Countries. The twelve paintings were in part propaganda—persuasive pictures that allowed their artists to boost the Hapsburg cause in their own ways. In Velázquez’s case this didn’t mean his picture was not art. The paintings, mostly by his less illustrious contemporaries, were meant to demonstrate Philip IV’s staunch defense of his disparate worldwide empire and the Catholic religion, and of course show the influence of the count-duke, the power behind the throne. They were also intended to suggest the magnanimity with which Spain accompanied its victories.
Velázquez found his theme—Breda—without apparent difficulty. We don’t know if he had first choice of the twelve subjects but among those that were picked to be painted were another four occasioned by 1625: the recapture of Bahia in Brazil from the Dutch; the lifting of the French and Savoyard siege of Genoa; the defeat of an English naval attack on Cádiz; and the expulsion of the Dutch from Puerto Rico. Further claimed as Spanish successes were Spinola’s capture of the Rhineland town of Julich in 1622; Gonzalo de Córdoba’s battle at the village of Fleurus in Brabant seven months later (which Córdoba’s opponents Count Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick thought they had won); the temporary recapture of the island of Saint Kitts in 1629; and in 1633—in its way a second year of miracles and hope for Olivares and Spain—the capture of Saint Martin, the relief of Constance and of Breisach,1 and the siege of Rheinfelden. However, Breda was definitely Spain’s greatest military success in the previous decade. It was one in which someone Velázquez had talked with at length had been involved as a chief protagonist. And it was a subject for which the artist came to have an almost physical imagining, and his palette would take him there. In the mix already was his voyage to Genoa with Spinola five years before. There was his contact with the Low Countries through Peter Paul Rubens and the many previous painters of the Hapsburg monarchs. Perhaps he felt that some sort of memorial to Spinola was called for, the general sidelined by the count-duke, a casualty of his policies. And perhaps there were other personal reasons for choosing to celebrate what was both a victory and a surrender.
VII. “BREDA FOR THE KING OF SPAIN!” MADRID. 1634–35
The surrender of Breda took place during the second period of relative success for Spain in the long Low Countries war. This was a short span of a half
dozen years—following the end of the Twelve Years Truce in 1621—when something of a Pax Hispanica prevailed. But it was by no means a general peace: Risings and skirmishes occurred now and then and the Dutch cleverly got others to make economic and military trouble for their Hapsburg overlords. First to celebrate in art the taking of the Brabant city in 1625 was the playwright Calderón, who is thought to have had personal experience as a soldier in the Netherlands morass. Before the end of the year his play El Sitio de Breda was put on at the court in Madrid under the auspices of Olivares. Calderón’s output, like that of his Dutch contemporary Vondel, isn’t entirely accessible today, although Life Is a Dream and The Mayor of Zalamea come to life in the boisterous modern versions of Adrian Mitchell and John Barton. El Sitio particularly seems to be a procession of stilted tableaux vivants, marshaled with antiquated dignity. Lope de Vega also took on the subject of Spanish victory in a play about the reconquest of Brazil—dealt with as well in a painting for the Hall of Realms by Juan Bautista Maino. Maino was a Dominican friar, a drawing master at the court who had given the king painting lessons. His Recapture of Bahia was the only other possible masterpiece among the victory paintings, and was, with Velázquez’s Breda, among the last to be finished and hung.
Although Spinola was no longer alive, Velázquez evidently kept vivid memories of him from the voyage to Italy; he may also have seen some of the numerous portraits that now existed of the captain-general, painted by van Dyck, the Delft artist Michiel van Mierevelt, and Rubens. The latter had painted several likenesses, one in 1627. Rubens had said that although he admired Spinola’s military wisdom, he thought the Genoese lacked any taste for painting—indeed, “understood no more about it than a street porter.” Velázquez perhaps retained sketches he had made of the Genoese general from the voyage to Italy. As for the siege itself, which Velázquez meant to make the subject of his Hall of Realms painting, the artist had presumably heard a good deal about it from Spinola, and by the time he got around to sizing it up there were construction materials other than Calderón’s flat-footed account. Even so, a siege was difficult to picture.
Among Velázquez’s materials was a record of the siege written by Spinola’s chaplain, Herman Hugo. Obsidio Bredana was published a year or two after the surrender in Latin, English, and French versions. There was also the work of Jacques Callot (1592–1635), illustrator, engraver, and war artist. Callot had been invited by the archduchess Isabella to make a map of the siege illustrated with graphic details—and this was produced in six tall sheets (measuring 1,200 × 1,410 mm, or with text 1,280 × 1,810 mm). Callot visited Breda in the summer of 1627. Spinola had paid him an advance of 550 escudos against an agreed-upon price of 850 escudos for the completed map. Callot had Hugo’s text to work with and had studied siege maps of Breda, of which there were already many—special editions, as it were, of the big news of the day—including those by the cartographers Blaeu and Visscher in Amsterdam. Callot’s map was published by the Plantin Press in Antwerp in 1628. In the dedication for the accompanying booklet, credit was given to Spinola’s engineer at the siege, Giovanni Francesco Cantagallina, the Florentine who appeared in Callot’s map at the foot of one sheet, lower left, surveyor’s staff in hand and bending over the figure of the artist. Callot had shown himself seated on the ground, sketching the siege lines, carrying a gentleman’s sword and dagger, and wearing a garment the art historian Simone Zurawski identifies as a collet of buffalo hide, “worn for parrying.”
Jacques Callot, Siege of Breda, illustrated map of the siege, 1628, Trustees of the British Museum.
The sheets of Callot’s map looked like scrolls, which could be unrolled upward and away from the viewer. The ground and the figures on it were displayed as if one were looking into a concave landscape—a landscape that first sloped downhill and then out to a far, more or less flat, horizon. Here and there Callot sketched scenes from various moments of the siege, active and passive. He showed farm cottages, soldiers’ bivouacs, clumps of trees, a group of cavalry, some soldiers looting a farmhouse, men found guilty of such an offense being hanged from gibbets or tortured upon a strappado, pacific flocks of sheep, soldiers playing dice or practicing with their weaponry, a man on crutches, some Dutch supply ships on the Mark River, a field hospital catering for the sick and wounded, and a covered stores wagon. Spanish soldiers foraged and chopped firewood; their womenfolk washed laundry in the streams. The conclusion of the siege figured, too. We are shown the Dutch refugees fleeing Breda on foot and by carriage, leaving, as siege etiquette insisted, through a breach in the city wall, their possessions heaped on wagons. We see troops marching out past the assembled Spanish pikemen, while—an event that in fact happened a week or so after the surrender—the archduchess arrives in triumph from Brussels. Her carriage is guarded by halberdiers. Spinola on horseback looks on, turned self-effacingly toward the infanta, but dressed by Callot a bit too splendidly given the commander’s well-known modestia; he is shown in plumed hat and extravagant scarf. In the center, off-right, Callot gives us a plan of Breda. All in all there is a minimum of violence. Callot clearly brings to our attention the now moderate manner in which Spanish armies were conducting the war, thirty some years long, which had had plenty of brutal moments.
* * *
VELÁZQUEZ TOOK FROM both Callot and Calderón. The painting he made for the Hall of Realms also gave the illusion of a scene depicted from a hill, a viewpoint higher than any in the actual watery flat lowlands around Breda. The upper section of his picture, the Surrender of Breda, sometimes called The Lances, shows an overcast gray-blue sky into which smoke from fires and pyres is rising, and into it—closer to the viewer—the iron tips of a line of sixteen-foot pikes, cut from ash wood, are raised. They number twenty-nine, the Spanish infantry’s basic weapon, and they make what Calderón called an “iron cornfield,” here extending across the right upper half of the painting. They also remind us of the cypresses rising above and behind the balustrade in the Gardens of the Villa Medici. In the distance just left of center, Velázquez painted the calm surface of the flooded Vucht polder, with a faint line stretching from shore to shore, bottom to top, to indicate the causeway known as the Black Dike, which looked as if it, too, was at this moment under water.
The painting is huge, nearly eleven feet high and twelve feet wide (307 cm × 367 cm), and is packed with compressed detail. All the figures are male. By way of them, whole armies are suggested. In the immediate foreground, stage left, a half dozen members of the surrendering Dutch staff and their aides stand with their shorter pikes and pennons. They apparently include Charles Philip le Comte and a son of Prince Emmanuel of Portugal. The spotlight, or the light of history, is on the young man nearest to us who shows us his back, covered by a well-tailored, light-brown, thigh-length coat, pleated. To his left his companion bears on his shoulder an arquebus—a primitive musket—and looks at us (as he looked at the painter), as if to ask in a puzzled way, “Why are you here, too?” Next, to the right of the staff officer in the pleated coat, is a young man wearing a white blouse crossed by a sash and decorated with flowers that, first seen, might be bloodstains, but, reconsidered, look more like embroidered tulips. He is pointing with a raised finger while a companion listens. Behind the youth in the white blouse is the head of a black horse, with thick white muzzle and a disheveled mane falling between its eyes. To the right, a darker mass of figures is given density by a second, more massive horse—a battle charger, evidently the Spanish general’s, which stands with its right rear leg lifted, its gleaming chestnut-brown rump presented to the viewer. Behind this beast crowd the Spanish officers, among them Albert Arenbergh (known also as the Marquis de Balancon), Wolfgang von Neuberg, Count John of Nassau, and Carlos Coloma. Henry van den Bergh had been at the siege as well but between the end of it and Velázquez’s painting of it was declared a traitor and left out of the depiction of this band of honor. Behind them the pikemen jostle shoulder to shoulder to witness, close-up, the victory ceremony. They were the
poor bloody infantry of the time, the picas secas who wore no body armor and received the lowest pay.
The actual moment in which Velázquez depicted the surrender at Breda as taking place is almost buried in the center of the picture. Squeezed in the space between the opposing forces are the main protagonists, at last in intimate contact after more than ten months of siege. In this spot our eye is attracted by the wide white lace collar and cuff of Justin of Nassau, illuminated by the morning sun; the town’s governor bends forward as he presents the large iron key of Breda to the Spanish general. The key is highlighted within a hexagonal window, formed by Spinola’s dark clothing. Beyond Spinola’s right arm, seemingly framed as through the aperture that showed Christ with Martha and Mary through a kitchen hatch in Seville, we see farther off the banners, pikes, hats, and legs of the Dutch garrison marching forth, the surrendering army being allowed to leave the city with drums beating and their weaponry, colors, ensigns, and honor intact.
The surrender ceremony took place near Teteringen, a village just outside Breda, to the northeast of the city. It probably didn’t go exactly as Velázquez—perhaps influenced by Calderón’s account—described it, but the painter had things other than the event itself he wanted to convey. Most such surrender scenes showed the victorious commander on horseback, with the general he has defeated, cap in hand, in the act of kneeling or prostrating himself. Here, Velázquez shows both generals bareheaded. Spinola is remarkably on foot. Justin of Nassau is also on his feet, leaning slightly toward the Genoese general and holding out the key to the city gates. They meet as almost-equals, recent competitors who might in other circumstances have been friends. Spinola obviously wants the Dutchman who is bowing his head to feel just that. The Genoese has his right arm stretched out to clasp Justin’s shoulder, a comradely touch that also prevents the Dutchman from bowing any farther. And he meets Justin’s gesture of submission with a generous look—an expression that says, as Calderón put it, that “the valour of the vanquished confers honour on the victor.” (In the words of Herman Hugo’s English translator a year after the battle, Spinola held that they were “more wise who are more gentle in cruelty, and that the fame of clemency was to be preferred before the name of severity.”) Indeed Spinola’s generous thought soon traveled, being echoed in the 1706 English translation of Don Quixote, where the Knight of the Wood tells Don Quixote, the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, that “the reputation of the Victor rises in proportion to that of the Vanquish’d.” Spinola may well have thought this stage of the conflict could have gone the other way. And Velázquez, painting as required a Spanish victory, faces up to the fact that the victory would not be a lasting one. He was a truth-teller who saw the uncertainty of things. Spinola’s graceful and chivalrous pat on the shoulder gives Justin the sense that he shouldn’t worry overmuch; it will be his turn, or at least the Dutch turn, next—in fact, in less than ten years, in 1637, after a shorter siege. Spinola’s gesture is also as we know an elegiac one, for the captain-general by the time of the Hall of Realms and Velázquez’s painting was dead at Casale.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 12