Something similar is indicated by the presentation of the opposing soldiery. The Dutch participants look relatively clean and handsomely clothed. The Spanish rank-and-file, lined up with their lances behind their commanders, look like vagabonds, unshaved, in motley gear. They have spent months out in the countryside foraging for food and fuel. Their opponents have been housed in the city, on strict rations but until the last moment at least being fed. Don Carlos Coloma observed the decided contrast between the defeated Dutch, well turned out despite the long siege, and the victorious Spaniards, despite their success, miserable and half-dressed in torn and tattered clothing. However, their rewards should have been soon to come: Although Breda hadn’t succumbed to an assault, which would have meant that it could have been sacked and plundered, it had surrendered on terms, and this generally meant the besieging troops would be paid “storm money” to make up for the loss of booty. In the shadow of the pikes there would have been cheerful expressions in the tattered Spanish ranks. Herman Hugo, the Spanish chaplain, noted how Spinola “courteously saluted all the [Dutch] captains at their going forth” and how the Dutch troops “with a modest inclining of their banners, saluted him. No ignominious voice of provoking one another was once heard, but smiles with favourable countenances.” Justin of Nassau was described by Father Hugo as “venerable for his gray hairs.” And Velázquez painted in a touch of gray to Justin’s black hair, though less was made of it than of the gray streaking Spinola’s hair. The full light shines on the Genoese general’s head. It illuminates his features, his lace collar, the gold embroidery of his coat, and the silk, pale pinky-red captain-general’s sash that falls like a peacock’s plumage to knee level. The gilded hilt of his sword can just be seen. In his left hand, he holds his field commander’s wooden baton. The plumes on his hat, which is also held in that hand, make a vivid white mark against the bottom of the sash and his boot tops. The footwear of the opposing chiefs is noticeably different. Justin of Nassau’s boots are dark brown and baggier, coming well above the knee. Spinola’s lighter fawn-colored boots are more dressy, narrower up the calf to the knee. He wears gilded spurs.
Velázquez was always good with material—the Seville water seller’s leather jerkin, for example. The contrast here in how Justin and Spinola are shod is perceptive reporting and brilliant painting. But The Surrender of Breda is splendid in many aspects: in the variety of ways the faces of the participants are shown, in light and shadow, partially, frontally, or in profile; in a composition that conveys the slow mass of military activity among the men and the thoughtful patience of the officers confronting one another. “Hurry up and wait!” has always been a rueful expression among soldiers. Velázquez might well have served, under one flag or other, such is his empathy for his subject. We recall that both Velázquez and Spinola were known for their modestia, their unassertiveness and “phlegm.” And we feel that the very act of surrender aroused a personal response in the artist: He knew what it was to give himself up. Hadn’t he done so when, putting aside the possibility of a freelance career, he quit Seville for the court? He continued to do so as he slowly mounted the court ladder of promotion and painted portrait after portrait of Philip IV and his family. Even if he had needed Olivares or the king to say, in respect of suitable subjects for the Hall of Realms, “What about Breda?,” Velázquez would have recognized that he and this particular idea were meant for each other.
He started by painting a pale, off-white ground, largely of lead white, as the underlayer for his immense canvas. His materials were similar to those used by other artists at the time, but for this picture, mixing his pigments with walnut or linseed oil, he deployed the paints sparingly—so thinly in most places that the ground showed through. For the blue sky that spans the top quarter of the painting he used azurite, an expensive mineral also called copper blue, whose coarse crystals had been employed by artists as far back as the Old Kingdom in Egypt. In more recent times it had been quarried in Hungary, but because of the Turkish occupation had become hard to get. G. McKim Smith, who has studied Velázquez’s materials and technique, says the painter mixed his greens for the Breda background from azurite and yellow pigment. To create Spinola’s splendid sash he painted one very thick layer of red lake, with visible brushstrokes, “rather than a series of many thinner layers.” His medium was drying oils, with which he achieved “greatly increased transparency and depth of colour.” McKim Smith adds that in the Surrender “the principal figures are still solidly constructed, if perhaps more thinly painted [than before this date]; they are firmly outlined and painted with relatively thick, fluid paint. But … in [the] subsidiary figures but most of all in the background and details of the setting, there is a sketchiness not present in his earlier paintings. The landscape in the background of the Surrender of Breda is marvellously evocative, set out in a freer, economical fashion that strongly contrasts with the more labored treatment of the figures.”
The term more detailed rather than more labored might be better suited for the treatment of the figures. Yet in general Velázquez seems to have substituted for the detailed, concentrated ways of his Seville years a more fluid technique: The luminous almost white ground was very like that used by the impressionists two centuries later. It was an economic technique but made evident his awareness of how paint could be handled to make the eye see afresh. In places you can actually note where the paint, including lumps of pigment scraped from the palette, catches the light or throws shadows, as on the rear left leg of the great horse. There the paint appears to have been allowed to run down the canvas. Long before twentieth-century action painting, Velázquez seems to have thrown himself into both the means and method of his art, medium and brushstroke fused in the crucible of eye, hand, and brain. In the course of painting the Surrender Velázquez made numerous changes, adding two men to the right of Spinola, altering legs and hats, lengthening the lances. He has allowed his underdrawing to be seen, for example, in the brilliantly rendered if sketchy painting of Justin’s white cuff, out of which protrudes the hand holding the key. He in fact used preparatory sketches for this picture; a few survive as they do not for most other Velázquez paintings. Justi refers to several drawings in the National Library in Madrid—one “a crayon on white paper, where the outlines are rather vaguely essayed.… The chief figure is the groom behind Spinola’s horse, and near him to the right, but only half the size, the young man listening who here raises two fingers. On the reverse of the same sheet is Spinola himself, but much smaller, in quite faint, blurred contour.” Justi also mentions a drawing in the Louvre “in clean, firm outline” in which one can see Spinola’s horse and the chief group of Spanish officers. The customary lack of sketch material from Velázquez suggests either that he generally did without such preparatory matter or that he or later hands assisted in a bonfire.
Most visitors to the Hall of Realms would have obtained the impression of much money having been spent on materials, decor, and artistry. The setting in the Buen Retiro’s grandest space added to a spectator’s feeling that due respect was being given to the monarchy. And The Surrender of Breda threw back at its admirers the sensation that life could indeed be noble. Partly this may have been because of the evident self-consciousness of some of the painting’s figures, who catch the eye of the viewer as they would have done that of the artist, had he been right there. The composition is cinematic, and the director has signaled his involvement. But this almost contemporary participatory feeling is balanced by a skill in portraying human flesh and human emotion that was very much of that, not this, time. We are without doubt in the company of a painter who could stand alongside the masters of the age: Frans Hals and Rembrandt, say, although their soldiers and guards of the nightwatch were more often members of guilds and only part-time militiamen.
The fires burning here and there in the distance beyond Breda could be from earlier centuries. They remind us of fires and pyres burning in the landscapes of Bosch and Brueghel. As for the eye-catching motif of the lanzas,
these pikes (a form of long-handled spear) had been the late medieval weapon of choice and a common feature in European battle paintings. They were considered to be “the queen of weapons.” The Spanish pikes that helped take Breda do not quite make an evenly topped hedge; a few end slightly below the highest level; a few lean slightly to one side. (Carl Justi saw what he called the “rigid symmetry” of the pikes or lanzas as a symbol of the discipline that had made the Spanish infantry the terror of Europe, but the actual lack of absolute symmetry and rigidity here hints rather at a possibly waning ability to provoke terror, or at the wearying effects of a ten-month-long operation.) Pikes at this stage were still the main defensive weapons, despite the introduction of the arquebus, the predecessor of the musket. Those pikes carried by cavalry were generally called lances, hence the name lancer for the soldiers so employed. The horsemen at the Battle of San Romano, 1432, portrayed by Uccello in three paintings, were armed with lances; at the center of the action in one of these the orange-bonneted commander on his rearing white charger flourishes a broken lance while behind him a man in armor with lowered lance pierces the body of an enemy, the tip of his weapon red with blood. The foreground of Uccello’s picture is lower, flatter than that shown in Velázquez’s after-the-siege-ended scene at Breda. Uccello’s crowded battlefield is set in a dip between two hills, with a pastoral background in which only a few skirmishes and solitary combats are taking place. The lance was a timeless weapon: A French artist known as the Master of the Cassoni Campana, working in Florence, painted The Taking of Athens by Minos and peopled it with warriors wearing medieval armor and carrying lances. There were lances in the Abraham and Melchisadek (1579) of the Antwerp painter Martin de Vos, which Velázquez might have seen in Seville. El Greco’s St. Maurice and the Theban Legion may have provided another source though it was a picture Philip II hadn’t wanted for the Escorial. And Velázquez wasn’t alone in choosing the lance motif for the Hall of Realms: the painting that was hung in the hall two to the left of The Surrender of Breda was Jusepe Leonardo’s Relief of Breisach, in which the tips of the pikes disappear into the sky.
On the ground, Swiss pike-squares had turned the tide against attacks of mounted Burgundian cavalry in the battles of Morat, Grandson, and Nancy in 1475–77. Pikes helped the Saxon soldiery confront the army of Charles XII of Sweden in 1706. And although the British gradually phased out the long pike in favor of the bayonet, whose hilt could be fastened to a musket, lances for a long time remained in service in British dragoon regiments. The belief endured that they could shatter the last stands of demoralized troops. Among the occasions on which lances were used in the last century was the gallant charge in October 1914 of French cavalry dragoons against the German infantry north of Bethune, in Flanders—lances versus machine guns and rifles. The British cavalry despite the often lethal impediment of barbed wire made a number of successful attacks, using the comparative speed of horses to capture German-held ground, and with their Hussars, Lancers, and Dragoons armed with swords and lances, even as late as 1918 when the final German “Kaizer’s Offensive” on the Western Front splintered with cavalry help. On the Amiens road on March 30, 1918, a squadron of Lord Strathcona’s Horse caught a German infantry battalion that had just left the cover of a wood: The squadron commander got his bugler to blow “charge,” the men lowered their lances, the horses broke into a canter, and many Germans were killed with lance and sword. Back in the seventeenth century, Don Quixote’s chivalric equipment as a knight included “a lance in the rack” and at one point, referring to his peerless Lady Dulcinea, he tells his squire Sancho Panza that she is “as tall as a lance.” In Spain Velázquez’s war picture still bears the preferred title Las Lanzas, and perhaps its most remarkable feature, those sixteen-foot pikes, do not disturb its serenity. Near Teteringen all passion is spent. Velázquez was fair—evenhanded—to both sides. We are left meditating the ideals—of loyalty to the king, religious faith, and individual honor—that impelled the warring sides.
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DID VELÁZQUEZ PAINT himself into the picture? He did so in one later masterpiece and some believe he did with this one. Charles Leslie thought so, Constable’s friend and a Royal Academician who in 1855 wrote a first-rate Handbook for Young Painters. In this work, Leslie quotes the traveler in Spain Richard Ford, who said, “Velázquez has introduced his own noble head into this picture, which is placed in the corner with a plumed hat.” Portraits of Velázquez aren’t numerous. Juan de Alfaro, a Córdoban who worked in Velázquez’s studio for ten years or so (ca. 1650–60) and kept notes for a life of the master that he handed on to Palomino, drew one in black chalk of the artist on his deathbed. Velázquez himself according to Pacheco made a self-portrait while in Italy, a painting that is now lost although several versions of the missing original exist, including one in Munich; this is a head-and-shoulders view, dark eyes swiveled toward the viewer, pale face framed by long dark hair parted in the middle, chin resting on the tilted white top edge of a golilla collar, thick lips surmounted by a firm black W of a mustache. A similar head-to-waist self-portrait, also with a golilla, painted around 1636, hangs in the Uffizi in Florence: a picture of a man who looks stressed out and grumpy.
The man who attracts our attention on this score in The Surrender of Breda is the figure farthest to the right, squeezed into a small triangle of space between the great bulk of Spinola’s horse and a drooping Spanish ensign: a mustached man in gray—gray boots, gray coat, gray hat, indeed the only man among those individually picked out who is wearing a hat. He also wears a white lace collar and a hat with a white plume, both providing highlights that catch the eye, as does his gaze. “I am a bit different from all the others here,” his look suggests. “I am the one who is letting you all know what is going on.” The large light blue and white checked flag that hangs above his hat makes an alleviating broad diagonal stroke across the rigid iron hedge of upright lances, interrupted only by the dark brown ears and head of the massive horse. The tilted, curled-up brim of the gray hat meets the intersecting angles of dark mane and pale flag. Full mustaches had been favored by the German-speaking Burgundian troops of Charles V and taken up by their Spanish comrades who called them bigotes, from the German oath bey gott! A fine fellow of some pretensions was un hombre de mucho bigote. Richard Ford claimed that “the renowned Duke of Alva, being of course in want of money, once offered one of his bigotes as a pledge for a loan—one only was considered to be a sufficient security.” Here, in the Breda, it is less the mustache than the wary gaze catching the viewer’s eye that seems to confirm the artist’s presence. Yet he didn’t have to feel shifty about it: Titian had put himself in his pictures, and so had El Greco, standing among the Toledo aristocrats attending the Burial of Count Orgaz. Velázquez had apparently been intending to make clear the name of the Surrender’s artist, for in the lower right corner of the picture, below the heavily planted right hoof of the horse, he painted a sheet of paper lying on some stones. But the blank sheet was left unsigned. Perhaps the self-portrait sufficed.
Self-Portrait, c. 1636, Uffizi, Florence.
VIII. MADRID. 1632–39
The 1630s were probably no more dishonest a decade than many periods the court in Madrid had seen or the taxpayers of Castile had complained about. As the Retiro went up with its slapdash grandeur, Spain’s foreign relations continued to cause worry; and as the gold-framed paintings in the Hall of Realms proclaimed the monarchy’s successes, gold and silver flowed out and the structure of royal power looked increasingly rickety. The Counter-Reformation continued to promote the one true faith in its blinkered way; in Italy in 1633 the Inquisition censured Galileo—the astronomer who was also a painter—for supporting Copernicus’s view that the Earth went around the Sun. (Although threatened with torture, Galileo was sentenced to three days in prison and the penalty of reciting the seven penitential psalms once a week for three years.) Only the rare Hapsburg victory of Nördlingen in Germany in 1634 gave Spinola’s triumph at Breda some militar
y backing. Philip’s cousin Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor, had begged for help to hold off a force under combined Swedish-German command. His request was answered by Philip’s younger brother the Infante Fernando (1609–41). Fernando had been made Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo at the age of ten, a post to which he was then and later by no means suited. He grew up to be a man of high spirits, a good horseman, and a lover of the arts. Velázquez painted him in hunting mode. He was thinner, fitter, and less harassed-looking than his older brother Philip. He put himself at a distance from the court at Madrid and his ecclesiastical duties by accepting the problem-filled job of governor of the Spanish Netherlands.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 13