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MANY OF VELÁZQUEZ’S paintings in his late thirties and forties—which came to be seen as his middle period—show signs of being commissioned work that didn’t wholly engage the artist and therefore skate over the attention of the viewer. Some of these paintings seem illustrational. He was always interested in theatrical effects—in what would now be regarded as cinematic effects. Several of these pictures are of actors taking the parts of antique characters in plays by his colleague Calderón, for example Aesop and Menippus, both canvases that carry painted inscriptions of those names. They were probably made for the Torre de la Parada. There paintings by Rubens of the classical philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus, and of gods such as Vulcan, were hung, along with Velázquez’s Mars. As in that picture, so in the Aesop and Menippus, we get a hint of sarcasm, certainly of satire, but little profundity. However, our response is quite different with the Portrait of a Man who is thought to be the court official José Nieto. Here a fellow denizen of the royal household clearly arouses strong feelings in Velázquez. He sits facing left, head turned toward the artist, all black below, his head separated from his shoulders by the slanting upward slash of the white golilla, with black beard, black mustache, black eyebrows, and black hair. His light-skinned hollow cheeks, straight nose, and high forehead provide a powerful focal point against the dark brown background. His eyes pierce us. Only Rembrandt was up to this sort of rapport with his sitter and thereby his viewers. There is an immediate connection, one human being seen by another up close. And therefore reverberations.
Nieto, assuming it is he, is the pick of the bunch of male subjects for the king’s painter during this period. Among other establishment figures who weren’t necessarily in favor were Quevedo, already noted, whose picaresque novel El Buscón had been a success in 1626. The writer, who had fallen foul of the count-duke, gave his name to the circular eyeglasses he wore that were thereafter commonly called quevedos. Quevedo collected paintings and applauded Velázquez’s “distant blobs of colour,” with which the artist “achieved truth rather than likeness.” Less irksomely owlish but rather aloof was Fernando de Valdés, archbishop of Granada and President of the Council of Castile, who lived in Madrid for seven years in the 1630s. Once again the sitter was placed facing half-left, head turned toward the artist. For those aware of what Velázquez would a few years later be most celebrated for in ecclesiastical portraits, the archbishop’s picture acts as a tantalizing forecast of things to come. For the moment, it is perhaps enough to say that it is an honest description of a somewhat suspicious man—a portrait that might have interested his contemporaries and colleagues but that for us has a somewhat indirect attraction, less involved with the realistic presentation of a personality who means little to us and more with how Velázquez arranged the spaces and colors on his canvas: black; faded scarlet; gray (Velázquez gray); pink and silver; and black again. The painting is portioned abstractly. The archbishop himself seems skeptically withdrawn from the situation he has been dropped into. We are told that Velázquez’s picture was probably part of a larger painting, painted after Valdes’s death in 1639. And a writer in the London National Gallery 2006 exhibition catalogue believes that “the extremely drawn expression, the flattening of the moustache and the unnatural pressure of the lips suggest the use of a death mask.” In other words Valdés wasn’t on hand for the sitting. In more ways than one Velázquez re-created him.
Portrait of a Man, perhaps José Nieto, 1635–45, Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Apsley House, London.
Other male portraits of this time include Cardinal Borja of Toledo; Don Juan de Pimentel; and an unnamed Knight of Santiago. They help put Velázquez high in a distinguished list of Hapsburg portraitists that included Titian and Antonio Mor. But none of them have quite the stern tangibility of the Luis de Góngora, which Velázquez had painted some twenty years before. And none provoke the reactions we feel at viewing the women he painted during this period.
The picture that sets off possibly the lowest charge in this category, The Coronation of the Virgin by the Trinity, seems—as do several of Velázquez’s religious works—in some ways routinely Old Masterish, to be compared with Raphael’s Sistine Madonna of 1512–13 (now in Dresden), also cloud-borne, with its famous pair of small pesky-looking angels at its base. But Velázquez’s Coronation has a sumptuous Venetian feeling, without Spanish agonizing. It was meant for Queen Isabella’s prayer room in her Alcázar apartment, and it showed God the Father together with Christ, the Son of God, holding a crown of rose petals over the Virgin’s head while a white dove hovered in a burst of radiant light above the crown. Mary is more like a Rubens than a Raphael, a plump young woman whose downturned eyelids and hands modestly suggest “Why me?”—yet with a slight implication of demure complacency, of acting the role of Virgin. Velázquez has a flock of angels here, four of them heads-only, with wings under their chins, disporting among the celestial clouds. God the Father, God the Son, and the Virgin are richly gowned, all sitting on invisible chairs in space. Both the first and second persons of the Trinity are sallow faced and hirsute; the balding, elderly God the Father with a bushy white Papa Noel beard, and God the Son with long, matted hair and much stubble. Mary herself is a rosy-cheeked, down-to-earth beauty, Miss Madrid 1640. Pacheco had decreed that the Virgin be shown flawless, without illness or injury. She was presumed on her Assumption to be under thirty years of age. The whole Coronation picture is conspicuously more panoply than prayer, but must have made a sight the queen could easily rest her eyes on while getting through her liturgical chores each day.
Who was Velázquez’s model for his Queen of Heaven? Wives and daughters are generally close at hand for painting purposes, as Vermeer among many artists shows us. Velázquez’s Virgin bears a close family resemblance to Velázquez’s granddaughter María Teresa Martínez del Mazo, painted by del Mazo in his Portrait of the Artist’s Family, and this suggests that María Teresa’s mother, Velázquez’s daughter Francisca, may have been the model for the Virgin. A somewhat older and slightly more careworn woman appears in the Lady with a Fan of 1638–39. Despite carrying a rosary with a cross over one wrist, sheathed in a fine kid glove and lace cuff, this is not a woman primarily intent on religious experience. She holds her open fan in her other hand, wears a garnet necklace, and has a well-exposed décolletage, with a few bits of lace peeking above it. “A lady of quality,” one surmises. How much more Velázquez invests in her than in his pious Virgin! Low-necked revelations of this kind were proscribed by royal decree in April 1639, Enriqueta Harris tells us, “except in the case of licensed whores.” This lady clearly wasn’t one of those and must just predate the proscription. She in turn looks a lot like the Young Woman Sewing, an unfinished but luminous work that has a lot in common with Vermeer’s pictures of young women at household tasks or their toilette: the same downturned eyes, the same absorption in their thoughts. However, it is Velázquez of the two who here seems more modern, with sketchy brushstrokes, and restrained coloring—black, white, gray, flesh, and a small crescent of pale red in the tied head scarf of the woman who is sewing. An impression is brilliantly put together, and we don’t mind the lack of completion.
Two women next who have been called sibyls, classical prophetesses who let us know their profession by carrying blank tablets or books in which their invisible predictions were mysteriously to be found. In the early 1630s Velázquez had painted one such, a woman who looked as if she were presenting her profile for a design of a medallion, with a thick clump of black hair hanging at the back of her head. His second sibyl, painted around 1648, is altogether less rigid and much more freely rendered. She is also more skimpily dressed, with a gauzy sweep of stuff, a sort of muslin wrap, across her shoulders and revealing the soft fullness of one breast. Her head is inclined forward and just a touch to one side, eyes mostly closed, lips just parted, as she traces with one finger the unseen writing on the tablet. She seems to be about to tell us what it says. Her black hair i
s charmingly messy. She looks as if she has just risen from her bed. The model for Velázquez’s first sibyl was perhaps Juana Pacheco, and some have suggested that this second may have been his daughter Francisca, although the name is also mentioned of Flaminia Triva, an “excellent” woman painter whom Palomino tells us Velázquez painted a portrait of in Italy at the end of this decade. Whatever, this sibyl was a real woman. Her tangibly, even seductively rendered femininity seems to make it more likely that she wasn’t a member of his immediate family. She makes it clear how between Seville and now, between the Waterseller and the Woman Sewing, Velázquez’s work had become soft-edged, the brushstrokes fluid. Despite the refrain of “Titian, Titian” that often accompanies Velázquez, this Sibyl with Tabula Rasa prompts a looking forward rather than a looking back. It will be “Goya, Goya,” or even “Manet, Manet.”
A Sibyl with Tabula Rasa, c. 1648, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.
X. ROME AGAIN. 1649–50
He was fifty—in those days, late middle-aged. He was painting rarely and sparsely. A portrait of royalty as expected still came forth now and then. Velázquez had let himself be preoccupied with the making-over of certain areas of the Alcázar and Escorial. It was necessary to give the king what he wanted in the way of Italian glamor and Baroque splendor. Many of the eighty-two Rubenses Philip had bought in the last four years were still to be hung, as were some acquired earlier on. (Rubens had died in May 1640.) In some royal apartments, such as the Octagonal Room in the south wing of the Alcázar, built over the entrance near the former Old Tower, Velázquez had things very much his own way, but other areas were more contentious. The court architect Juan Gómez de Mora as project manager had to be dealt with, and senior to him the Marquis de Malpica. When Velázquez made a fuss about one particular problem, Malpica asked the king to intervene because Velázquez could be “troublesome.” Malpica explained that, knowing Velázquez, “I always try to avoid debating with him.” Perhaps Philip thought it would be a good idea to reduce friction in the court now by letting Velázquez do what he wanted, which was to travel to Italy again. The king may well have been persuaded that the redecoration of the Octagonal Room would proceed faster if the king’s painter was permitted to go shopping for works of art on the Italian peninsula. Velázquez intended to obtain pictures by Titian and Veronese, Raphael and Parmigianino. He told the king that few princes possessed paintings by these masters, and even fewer possessed them in the numbers he could acquire for His Majesty. Antique statuary was also on the wanted list.
Velázquez said good-bye to Juana once again in November 1648. On the twenty-fourth of that month he signed a power of attorney so that she could look after his affairs while he was away. For travel money, Velázquez was given two thousand ducats, together with a carriage, “due him because of his position” as Usher of the Chamber, and a mule to carry extra stuff, such as the gifts he was taking Pope Innocent X from the king. A great plague was sweeping Spain, devastating Castile and Andalusia; Seville was said to have lost half its people to the disease. Famine was everywhere. The French had recently occupied Barcelona so Velázquez joined a convoy in Málaga to carry him eastward to Genoa across a sea infested by pirates, privateers, and French warships. No Spinola for company this time, of course, but the Duke of Nájera, who was on important business for the crown, heading for Trento in Austria to collect Princess Mariana, intended bride of King Philip. Velázquez was stuck in Málaga for nearly six weeks, either waiting for favorable weather or further passengers. They sailed on January 21, and after a protracted voyage arrived in Genoa in early March. When John Evelyn, the English diarist, had arrived here by sea four years before on a bark that had been storm-tossed by a mistral, he saw the villas and orchards of the Ligurian coast and gratefully “smelt the peculiar joys of Italy, in the natural perfumes of Orange, Citron, and Jassmine flowers.” His vessel steered finally for the high lighthouse that marked the way into the harbor of Genoa. The town struck Evelyn as jammed full of merchants’ palaces. He greatly admired the street, “built of polish’d marbles, in which stood the house of the old Marquis Spinola.”
In Genoa—Palomino tells us—Velázquez gazed again at the statue of the renowned admiral Andrea Doria in armor, standing on a high pedestal, with Turks at his feet. The artist journeyed on through a country of olive groves to Milan, where he went to see Leonardo’s Last Supper. Then by way of Padua to Venice, where since his last visit nearly twenty years before, the Santa Maria della Salute church had begun to rise next to the Grand Canal in an act of thanksgiving for the end of their great plague. Venice was home to the painters he most admired. The Marquis de la Fuente, the Spanish ambassador there, arranged for him to see works by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, and Velázquez bought several paintings by these artists for his king. However, it wasn’t always easy for Velázquez to prize loose some of the masterpieces Philip may have hoped for; in any event, in Velázquez’s opinion, few worthwhile pictures were being offered for sale. He next traveled westward again and south to Parma, Modena, Bologna, and Florence. He ran into a mixed reception, staying with some who couldn’t do enough for him and with others who, knowing he was coming, locked up not their daughters but their pictures. Velázquez’s hopes of acquiring a Correggio Nativity in Modena were thwarted, although the duke had been a friendly enough patron in Madrid twelve years before. In Bologna the Count of Siena rode out to meet him and opened the doors of his palace to accommodate him. He arrived in Rome in time to be told “Don’t stop, you’re wanted in Naples.” There he had to present his papers to Count de Onate, the Spanish viceroy, and the count handed over funds the king had ordered be paid by the Council of Italy for Velázquez’s subsistence and expenses, together with sums owing Velázquez since 1642, when the king in Zaragoza had arranged a further settlement on the painter. In Naples on his previous Italian trip Velázquez had met the Valencian painter José de Ribera, Il Spagnoletto, who had become a Neapolitan resident. Ribera was—along with Zurbarán—among the most celebrated of Velázquez’s Spanish contemporaries, although his paintings were more strenuous in their realism than the works of Velázquez. The artists shared a similar range of subjects although Ribera was more regularly a painter of religious subjects, whether altarpieces, holy families, or martyrdoms. Ribera already preferred Naples to Madrid but at the time of Velázquez’s second visit was probably in no Hispanophile mood. His younger daughter María had modeled for Ribera’s 1646 painting of The Immaculate Conception. A visitor to Ribera’s house, sitting for his portrait, had been Don Juan II, natural son of Philip IV and María Calderón, and like father, like son, the young Don Juan seduced María Ribera. Ribera’s daughter was now sheltering in a Palermo convent at her lover’s behest, hoping that her furious father wouldn’t prevent Don Juan from continuing to have his way with her. Ribera had painted many religious agonies but he also had personal experience of grief. He and Velázquez must have had plenty to talk about.
It was then back to Rome for a lengthy stay. Velázquez had many pictures and sculptures to collect. He had many letters of introductions to present to churchmen such as the pope’s nephew Cardinal Pamphili and Cardinal Barberini, and to artists such as Nicolas Poussin and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. It was presumably almost by rote that Philip IV or his secretary of state Fernando Ruíz de Contreras told Spain’s ambassador in Rome, the Duke of Infantado, to see that Velázquez got on with his mission to collect classical objects. “He should be roused from the flema, which they say he has.” But Velázquez also had paintings to paint. Being in Rome seemed to fire him up again and the flema—the phlegmatic attitude he was often accused of—was discarded.1 At that moment Rome was getting ready to celebrate a Year of Universal Jubilee and nearly three-quarters of a million pilgrims were heading for the city called Eternal. Palomino gives us much detail about the casts and statues Velázquez collected for the king on this second Italian journey, and about the portraits he made of distinguished papal officials, but he says nothing about where Veláz
quez stayed. One may hazard that his lodgings were once again close to the Duke of Florence’s Villa Medici, where he had painted those two small seemingly impromptu oil sketches of the garden buildings and statuary in 1630. He intended now to have molds and then casts made of statues in the villa’s grounds, one being The Wrestlers. From other sites in the city copies were made of the Laocoon, the Hércules, the Hermaphrodite, and the Dying Gladiator (which had recently been dug up); all those—thirty or so—were antique, and they were joined by a cast of the head of Michelangelo’s relatively modern Moses.
Palomino says that in Rome Velázquez was befriended by some of the best artists there; they included the painters Pietro da Cortona, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa, and the sculptors Algardi and Bernini. He spent a day with the Neapolitan painter Salvator Rosa, whose wild and supposedly savage paintings had made him a celebrity. Rosa asked Velázquez what he thought of Raphael. Now that the Spaniard had seen all the fine things Italy had to offer, didn’t he think Raphael was the very best? Velázquez replied, “To tell you the truth, I have to say I don’t like him at all.” A shocked Rosa said, “Then there can’t be anyone in Italy who suits you, for we grant Raphael the crown.” Velázquez answered that he thought the top Italian paintings were in Venice. “There, in my view, is the finest brushwork. And Titian is the one who stands above them all.”
Velázquez found evidence in Rome of the truth of the old saw, work made for more work. He was swamped with commissions from high ecclesiastics and papal officials. However, not all in the Vatican approved of the king of Spain’s painter; for example, Cardinal Alonso de la Cueva, “an old diplomatic hand” and sometime aide to the Spanish ambassador to the papacy, regarded Velázquez as an upstart, calling him (in letters to his brother the Marquis of Bedmar) “a certain Velázquez, Usher of the King’s Chamber.” The cardinal didn’t take at face value Velázquez’s claim to be looking for art for Philip IV and regarded what was being called his royal mission as some sort of “swindle.” Despite this, others in papal circles clamored for Velázquez to paint their portraits. Palomino tells us these pictures were painted “with long-handled brushes”—which allowed Velázquez to work well back from the canvas, without having to keep stopping to contemplate what he was doing—“in the vigorous manner of the great Titian; nor were they inferior to Titian’s heads.” The pope since 1644 had been Innocent X, and those wanting Velázquez to paint them included Cardinal Pamphili, the pope’s adopted nephew; Donna Olimpia Pamphili, Innocent’s widowed sister-in-law; Monsignor Abbot Hippoliti, one of his chamberlains; Monsignor Cristoforo Segni, a majordomo to His Holiness; Ferdinando Brandano, chief executive in the papal secretariat; a Roman gentleman named Girolamo Bibaldo; the “excellent” woman painter Flaminia Triva, who assisted her artist brother Antonio Triva and whom we have encountered in respect of the Sibyl with Tabula Rasa; and not least Monsignor Camillo Massimi, another papal chamberlain and camariere segreto. Massimi was himself a painter, a celebrated and learned patron of artists and a collector of paintings; he took a great interest in Velázquez and eventually owned six portraits by him. (Among Velázquez’s few surviving letters is one welcoming Massimi to Spain in 1654. In the four years after that, when Massimi was in Madrid, he saw a lot of Velázquez.)
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 17