Velázquez’s mother had died on March 29, 1640, and his father some three years later. We haven’t heard much of them since Velázquez became an apprentice with Pacheco—a substitute father for him as well as a future father-in-law—and we know little of contact between Velázquez’s parents and their most distinguished child. However, Pacheco tells us that over seven years the king gave Juan Rodríguez de Silva three secretarial posts in Seville, each worth an annual thousand ducats. After his father’s death, Velázquez’s brother-in-law (the husband of his sister Francisca) took over the management of the Velázquez and Pacheco properties in Seville. It looks as if Velázquez went on trying to help his father, as he had done his brothers Juan and Silvestre when they followed him to Madrid. When writing of Velázquez’s first trip to Italy, Pacheco (who also died in 1644) said he had a Velázquez self-portrait—which was painted in Rome—hanging in his house in Seville. Meanwhile the court went on keeping the royal painter busy in the household bureaucracy. Justi reminds us that in the fifteenth century the great painter Jan van Eyck had been varlet de chambre to the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good. In 1642 Velázquez was also made Gentleman of the Bedchamber—Ayuda de camara sin ejercicio—an office as honorary valet normally held only by noblemen. Palomino says he took up this post in the year 1643. He was sworn in on the Feast of the Three Kings, January 6, in the presence of Olivares, still head of the chamber, and a year later the king presented Velázquez with an actual key to his chambers, “a thing which many knights of military orders covet,” according to Palomino, though the job didn’t involve any real duties. In the same year he was appointed Superintendent of Works in the Alcázar Palace. His job can perhaps best be described as combining those of arranger, decorator, and curator of collections. As such, he had to assist the Marquis of Malpica, who was officially in charge of the works, though office politics occasionally turned nasty. Velázquez was meant to be paid sixty ducats a month but the Board of Works and Forests didn’t have the funds to pay him. The marquis and his bookkeeper Bartolomé de Legasa frequently got in the way of payment and Velázquez had to petition the king for the receipt of his salary. In 1646 and 1647 several other posts fell into his hands, one being that of Inspector and Treasurer of Works in the palace’s Octagonal Room—this reduced de Legasa’s sphere of authority. When and how Velázquez got paid remained uncertain. In 1647, when the government once again went through one of its periodic declarations of bankruptcy, he had to ask for monies he was due for two years past. The following year he requested salary owed him as el pintor real for as far back as 1630–34, together with payment for pictures he had delivered between 1628 and 1640. Philip ordered that Velázquez be paid via the Dispensa, a court office that seems to have handled royal household accounts, rather than via the hard-up Board of Works. Other sums seemed to have reached him under the counter, or via what the Spaniards called “the hidden pocket.”
After Seville and the first years in Madrid, Velázquez was never the most full-time of painters. He seems to have had long periods when he was happy to wander around palaces, in Madrid, in Italy, absorbing the presence of pictures and statues, and giving his opinion about what he wanted to take home for the king or about the location where an object should be placed or hung. It was as if he knew that one day he might need to deny the fact that he had ever been a professional artist who made things for money. But his preferred role was that of a gentleman, an hidalgo, who was trusted to advise the monarch about his art. So he helped decide what should go in the Retiro, or the Torre de la Parada, or what should be shoehorned into the Alcázar. In the late 1630s more paintings arrived from Flanders, sent by the cardinal-infante. Philip IV had commissioned, among other things, 112 works based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Rubens made many of the preparatory sketches for these but left the actual painting work to assistants. Philip’s passion was pictures; the constant expansion of the royal collection aroused amazement, for example from Sir Arthur Hopton, the English ambassador, in 1638, when Titian’s Bacchanals and many Rubenses were acquired. Velázquez saw that the finished pictures by Rubens shared the walls of the Torre de la Parada with ten works of his own. But during the following decade, the 1640s, his own creativity lost momentum. He became more than ever a part-time painter. Altogether his surviving works are believed to amount to 120, painted over some forty years, but in the last half of that time, a period of twenty years, just forty paintings came into being—about two per year.
In 1643, when he was promoted to the post of Gentleman of the Bedchamber, he was distracted as many in the household were by matters arising from a long-running political crisis in the court. The troubles abroad had resulted in big trouble at home. The centralizing policies of the count-duke had had a contrary effect, and Olivares’s efforts to maintain Spain’s position as a great power were blowing up in his face. As we’ve seen, Tromp’s warships had devastated the Spanish fleet at the Battle of the Downs in 1639. In Spain’s many realms, both close by and far-flung, dissent was brewing, from Sicily to Portugal, from Navarre to Peru. One of the least tractable parts of the empire was Catalonia, and the Cataláns, keen on their own autonomy, boiled over. It was a bad omen when, in late February 1640, as the court residing at the Retiro got ready for Philip IV to visit Catalonia and stiffen the authorities’ attempts to keep control, fire broke out in the Retiro’s royal apartments. Paintings were dropped from windows to save them from the conflagration. Olivares himself took charge of the firefighters. Next day the show went on: Theater productions went ahead as planned while workmen set about repairing the damage. Meanwhile in Barcelona armed insurgents murdered the viceroy and declared an independent state. French troops arrived to protect Catalonia and neighboring Aragón. The French king, Louis XIII, was proclaimed Count of Barcelona, a title Philip IV thought belonged to himself. And then it was time for Portugal to join the house of cards. The Duke of Braganza took only three hours to throw the Spanish out of Lisbon and get himself crowned king of Portugal. Philip IV heard about this when returning from a bullfight; Olivares called it “good news”—the Duke of Braganza had gone crazy, and this would give Philip the chance to confiscate all his possessions! As for the king, 1641 ended with the news of the death from smallpox of his brother Fernando, the cardinal-infante, just thirty-two, in the Low Countries. Philip lost his famous composure and shook with sobs.
Meanwhile money was even harder to come by at the court in Madrid. Olivares imposed new taxes and retained for the crown interest payments on government bonds. Treasure from the Americas and gold and silver items belonging to churches and the well-to-do were seized. Inflation and crime were rising. Courtiers were leaving the court for the country. The poet, satirist, and critic of the regime Don Francisco de Quevedo, who had been portrayed in his famous circular spectacles by Velázquez, was arrested by court officials and confined in a convent cell for four years, the first two solitarily. Quevedo was by now paranoiac; he believed that Spain was in a state of decline because of foreigners, Jews, and heretics. Among the country’s mounting problems, the army in Catalonia needed forty thousand men and had trouble recruiting them. Troops also had to be found to suppress the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s rebellion in Andalusia. It was time—as the count-duke recognized—to sink or swim. But his buoyancy was going. For some years people had wondered about the pictures he had hung in the antechamber to his apartment in the palace, pictures of madmen. It was a puzzling art collection. Yet now it suddenly seemed appropriate. At the end of 1642 the count-duke was having severe dizzy spells and headaches. He couldn’t sleep. He was coming apart, and Philip finally recognized that it was time to take some control. On January 17, 1643, Olivares was “given permission” to leave the court. The sacked grandee was ordered to retire, first to Loeches, eighteen miles east of Madrid, and then to his estate at Toro, near Valladolid. There, not unlike his former captain-general Ambrogio Spinola, he found the shame of dishonor and the suppressed outrage too much to bear. Madness engulfed him. Within three years he was dead.
Pieter Snaeyers, The Capture of Aire-sur-le-Lys, 1641, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
When troubles come they come aplenty: In May 1643 the once great Army of Flanders, now commanded by Don Francisco de Melo, was attempting to besiege the small town of Rocroi on the western edge of the Ardennes when a French relief force arrived outside of the town. The armies were equally matched, some twenty thousand on each side, though the Spanish were veterans. But the French cavalry under Condé routed the Spanish pikemen, whose slaughter was hastened by French artillery. Six thousand died, four thousand surrendered. De Melo was captured and the Spanish army’s working cash was taken. It was a total disaster for Spain. The discipline that had carried the Spanish tercios to victory in so many battles seemed to have been exposed as hollow—a single push was apparently all it took to bring down the whole jerry-built imperial affair.
Although Olivares had been told not to leave Toro “without the king’s express permission,” the order did not prevent his dead body from being taken to Madrid, where Velázquez was among the mourners. For us, it is noteworthy that the royal painter, a fellow Sevillian, survived unscathed the fall of the count-duke, despite having been his protégé. How was this? Other courtiers-cum-men of the arts such as Quevedo, as we’ve seen, weren’t spared. Jerónimo de Villanueva, who had admitted to Jewish ancestors, managed Philip’s secret expense account, and commissioned twelve large silver lions for the Hall of Realms from Juan Calvo, a silversmith, fell with Olivares, and was put on trial before the Inquisition. The silver lions were melted down to mark extravagance overstepped. The Retiro, critics claimed, had been built by Olivares with the blood of the poor; Velázquez had played an intimate part in the palace’s decoration. The painter was not simply a propagandist for the regime, despite being a royal portraitist whose pictures were at once complicated and honest—but this didn’t harm him either. What it apparently came down to was that Velázquez and Philip got along. Unlike Olivares, Velázquez didn’t boss Philip around. That was all that mattered.
Without Olivares, the king had to “grasp the reins” to a greater degree. Philip sought counsel from the count-duke’s nephew Don Luis de Haro and—this was new—from the queen, Isabella. Spiritual advice came regularly from a respected nun in Aragón, Sister María Magdalena de Agreda (1602–65), who wrote to him often. She told him to shape up, trust in the Lord, and set a good example to the people of Spain. (She also suggested he govern alone, that is, without favorites, and told him that he’d be better off not acting like King David and keeping a harem.) Sister María was known for going into trances; in one she claimed to have been carried bodily by angels to preach to the Indians in New Mexico. In 1643 the French had advanced almost to Zaragoza and to counter them Philip, shaping up, led his army into Aragón, achieving a victory at Monzon in early December. The king spent a sober Christmas at the Alcázar, not the Retiro, buoyed by the news that the silver fleet had arrived with nearly ten million ducats of treasure from the New World; he then returned to Aragón. Velázquez went with him. Also on hand was Philip’s military chaplain Baltasar Gracián, the Jesuit writer of popular homilies whose 1630 book The Hero had favorably alluded to Velázquez.
In the frontier town of Fraga, between Aragón and Catalonia, while his army besieged the French in Lérida, Philip got Velázquez to paint his portrait. Three days of sittings took place in June. The studio was a simple room with an earth floor covered in rushes and so dark that workmen were hastily brought in to hack two windows in the outside wall. An easel had to be constructed for the painter. The doorway was enlarged, and this enabled curious members of the court—some five hundred had been brought along—to peek at the artist at work. (This didn’t seem to bother Velázquez.) Philip, now thirty-nine, wore for the occasion a scarlet red and silver suit with a wide Walloon collar made of lace, a valona, not a golilla. The silver-sleeved jacket was gleamingly rendered, the paint splayed on the canvas in many small silver blobs that made it look like needlework. The background was a featureless, top-to-bottom expanse of olive brown. Philip held his baton with one hand at the end of a silver-sleeved arm, the base of the baton resting against one thigh and sticking upward as if it were the jib of a crane, capable of lifting heavy weights. Philip did in fact look like a man much burdened by care, even if in full field marshal’s kit. The picture took Velázquez four weeks to paint, and was then carried down to Madrid as a present for the queen, who had it exhibited outside the church of Saint Martin in the capital during August, when celebrations were being held to mark the capture of Lérida. Other copies were made of the picture, obviously useful for public relations. One other portrait Velázquez made on the Aragón journey in Zaragoza had a less satisfactory outcome. According to Jusepe Martínez, appointed an honorary painter to the king that April with Velázquez’s approval, a young Zaragozan woman asked Velázquez to paint her portrait while he was in the town. After painting her head, he told her he would finish it without her, so as not to tire her. But he apparently rendered her valuable lace collar—specially worn for the occasion—in a sketchy, “impressionistic” way, and this displeased her.
Isabella’s display to the people of Madrid of Velázquez’s portrait of her husband as the heroic commander-in-chief was among her last acts of kindness to Philip. In the early spring of 1644 she had miscarried, and serious illness followed. Although a Bourbon, a daughter of Henry IV of France, Isabella had stoutly taken the Spanish side in the war between the two powers. She was struck by what seems to have been diphtheria and despite being bled and allowed to touch relics from the body of Saint Isidore, patron saint of Madrid, she died in October, before Philip managed to reach Madrid. He left town again to mourn on his own, first at the Torre de la Parada, and then, drawn back to Madrid, at the Hermitage of Saint Jerónimo in the Retiro Park. The queen’s body was clothed in the vestments of a Franciscan nun and interred in the royal crypt at the Escorial. Her husband went on writing disconsolately to Sister María de Agreda, telling her that he had “lost in one person everything that can be lost in this world.” He felt God was punishing him for his many sins. Sister María replied that her nuns were praying for him seven times a day, seven days a week.
When the king went back north to lead the fight against the French the following year, Velázquez stayed in Madrid. He had had his own loss in 1644 with the passing of his father-in-law. Francisco Pacheco hadn’t become a notability at court as he had hoped, but vicariously, through his apprentice, he had achieved much, and he felt honored on that account. “I consider it no crime for a pupil to surpass the master,” he wrote in his Arte de la Pintura, which was published in Seville five years after his death. The pupil was kept busy: There were building problems at the Alcázar and a quarrel with the architect, who thought that Velázquez—the assistant superintendent of these particular works—was ignoring the plans in a way that would cause structural weaknesses. Velázquez pleaded his case but was overruled by the king. Velázquez then objected that he hadn’t received his salary for the post for the last two years. Velázquez was paid. Even a genius needs a streak of visible and voluble obstinacy.
Knocked back by his queen’s death, Philip was then further shattered by the loss of his cherished son and heir, seventeen-year-old Prince Baltasar Carlos, from smallpox. This happened in Zaragoza, without much warning, in October 1646. The king said, “I have lost my only son, whose presence alone comforted me in my sorrows.… It has broken my heart.” The infante had only recently been betrothed to his cousin, Princess Mariana, the emperor of Austria’s daughter. Although she was but twelve, the marriage arrangement was thought helpful for improving the links between the two Hapsburg monarchies; the downside, the consanguinity, was not taken into account. Philip IV was not only the cousin of Mariana’s father, Ferdinand III, but his brother-in-law and son-in-law. The results of the inbreeding were beginning to appear—and did so with a vengeance in the next generation. It became visible, as it does with the exaggerated mutations of so-called pedigree dogs, i
n jowls, lips, chins.
As it was, father took the place of son; at age forty-four uncle married niece age fifteen a few years later in 1649. Mariana was to come to Madrid to be Philip IV’s second wife and maintain the dynasty “for the greater good of the Spanish kingdoms.” By then, Philip may have felt he at last had a breathing space. The year 1648 had seen the final stages of prolonged peace negotiations in The Hague and in Munster and Osnabruck to bring the Thirty Years War to an end. (The Catholic delegations met at Munster, the Protestants in Osnabruck, and negotiators traveled between them.) In the United Provinces, Zeeland and Utrecht held out in opposition to peace, but eventually went along with those who wanted the long Low Countries conflict ended. There were seventy-nine articles to be ratified. Among them was one that finally ceded Breda—as noted, in Dutch hands since 1637—to the United Provinces. For the occasion, the Dutch artist Gerard Terborch made a rather fussy painting of the treaty for the Peace of Westphalia being signed, although this sort of public event wasn’t the kind of intimate, one-to-one occasion he was so good at depicting. On May 5, celebrations were held all through the northern Netherlands and in Breda a large candelabra-like bonfire was lit outside the east gate of the castle. Rejoicing in Spain and the Spanish Netherlands was a good deal more muted.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 16