Whether all this hackwork had an ulterior purpose or not, an invitation from the top soon came. Velázquez’s backup plan for gaining entrée to the pope involved gifts that Philip IV had asked him to deliver to the pontiff, but he was glad to be given a direct summons to come to the Vatican with brushes, paints, and palette. According to Palomino, Velázquez still didn’t regard himself as fully prepared for this task, and beforehand decided to get into shape for it by painting a portrait “from the life.” For his model, he chose his slave, Juan de Pareja. The term slave is shirked by some writers on Velázquez; they instead use the words servant and assistant, or put the word slave in quotation marks, as if the condition came about by fanciful choice. Slave, we remember, is what in Shakespeare’s The Tempest the exiled Duke of Milan, Prospero, calls both his servants Ariel and Caliban. Toward the end of the play Prospero sets Ariel free, albeit with a few strings attached or chores to complete. (Poor Caliban, who has some of the best lines in the play, is left pondering merely the idea of liberty: “Freedom, high day! High day, freedom!”) But there is no doubt that Pareja was a slave. Palomino calls him that, and not long after this Velázquez took legal measures to give Pareja his freedom, as Prospero in his ad hoc way gave it to Ariel. Velázquez wouldn’t have needed to do this if Pareja hadn’t been a slave. Pareja at this time was apparently in his late thirties. As noted, he was a Morisco, a half-caste with Arab and Berber blood, born in the Andalusian hill-town of Antequera, which was a place containing many people of Moorish origin. Who his parents were we don’t know, or how he got to Seville and into Velázquez’s ownership.
The wars in north Africa between Spain and the Ottoman Turks, who were allied with Berber tribes, had created a supply of slaves, as did the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609–10 and the colonization of parts of the Americas. Slaves were both an investment and a source of cheap labor, providing people who worked as house servants, cooks, employees in forges and tanneries, and laborers on farms. They were members of an underclass, like apprentices indentured with no possibility of becoming journeymen unless freed. Some, as we’ve seen, were branded on the cheek with their owner’s initials, as was a slave of Velázquez’s maternal grandfather the trouser and stocking maker Juan Velázquez Moreno. A painter in Cádiz named Francisco Núñez owned a Morisco slave whom he got to peddle his works around the streets—and Núñez was upbraided by his guild for this. The Dutch also had black house servants. Frans Hals painted around 1645 a portrait of a Haarlem family complete with an attendant black boy (Thyssen Museum, Madrid). In the southern Netherlands, the Antwerp-born artist Gaspar de Crayer painted a fine Portrait of a Young Moor Boy in the early 1630s (Ghent Museum of Fine Arts). Many Spanish slaves were also treated as part of the family, baptized and turned into “proper” Christians.
The very fact that Velázquez painted Juan de Pareja on a fairly large canvas (32 × 27.5 inches), wearing a white lace-trimmed collar, meeting the gaze of the painter with a serious man-to-man look, and in a dignified attitude, one arm across his chest, the right hand hidden in the folds of his cloak, seems to indicate the terms on which master and slave existed. It was a pose similar to that shown in Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Courtier, a book we assume Velázquez knew well, and a pose also echoed in a work by Titian—a portrait then thought to be of the poet Ariosto—and in a self-portrait by Rembrandt, a decade before Velázquez painted Juan de Pareja. In the Pareja picture there was evidently respect on both sides, between the painter and the person being painted. There was trust. Velázquez had presumably taken Pareja along on the second Italian journey because he was an indispensable studio assistant, helping prepare canvases and pigments—doing the donkey work of background painting and copying. Attending Velázquez, Pareja would have had plenty of opportunity to study the masters. Pareja was also a witness for two legal contracts to do with the making of casts that Velázquez had ordered for the king (the slave had obviously been taught to read and write).
The ancients, Palomino assures us, reserved for “free men” the practice of such liberal arts as painting. The traditional story about Pareja is that, because slaves were not allowed to be painters, he secretly taught himself to paint while working for Velázquez. (This seems unlikely; more likely that Velázquez turned a blind eye.) The story continued that the king, wandering around the Alcázar one day and taking a look in Velázquez’s studio there, examined some stacked-up canvases. Pareja had left one of his own paintings against the wall. As the king reached down to turn it around, Pareja prostrated himself before Philip, begging forgiveness, and pleading not to be punished for committing the forbidden act for a slave of putting paint on a canvas of his own. And the stratagem worked, we are told. Philip admired the painting and said Velázquez should give Pareja his freedom. In Italy, that hadn’t yet happened, but it is perhaps relevant that Velázquez had by then painted his pictures of two men from classical times who were in fact former slaves, Aesop the writer of fables and Menippus the cynic philosopher.
It is unclear exactly why Velázquez chose to decide to free Juan de Pareja now in Rome. Was the painter feeling particularly good about things? Did Rome give him a sense of empowerment, of potential, of his own freedom, of being out from under court necessities? Whatever the reason, the portrait of Juan de Pareja may have been in part an act commemorating not the manumission but the decision to arrange it. On November 23, 1650, Velázquez signed a legal document in Latin whereby he granted Pareja his freedom “in view of the good and faithful service the slave has given him, and considering that nothing could be more pleasing to the slave than the gift of liberty.” (“High day, freedom!”) One qualification was that Pareja had to go on serving Velázquez for four more years; this was, it seems, a clause commonly appended to such acts of liberation, and it apparently caused no great problems for the slave concerned in this case. But as a testimony to how Velázquez felt about him, he could have asked for no better document than the portrait his master did of him. It makes much of black—and of several shades of olive gray. Only the broad white collar gives vivid relief and (as Svetlana Alpers has pointed out) creates a splendid riposte to the young lady in Zaragoza who was upset about Velázquez’s inability, as she saw it, to do justice to her lace collar when he painted her portrait. Pareja’s collar sets off his bushy black hair, wide nostrils, and broad-lipped mouth between thick mustache and bearded chin. His eyes are also black. There is no hint of servitude in his look or stance. His attitude is rather one of pride and curiosity about what Velázquez would make of him in this picture. The brushstrokes flow strongly. For Jon Manchip White they seem “to carry the light with them, determining its direction and the depth of its penetration.”
The slave not only achieved freedom but immortality. Juan de Pareja was exhibited at the Pantheon, where Raphael was buried, in March 1650. Velázquez had been made a member of the Rome painters’ guild two months before and was then elected to the Virtuosi al Pantheon in time for its annual exhibition. There the portrait’s spontaneity was acclaimed. Palomino recorded, “It was the opinion of all the painters [in Rome], of whatever nationality, that everything else seemed like mere painting, but this alone like truth.”
* * *
BY QUICK STEPS now we get to the pontiff himself. In July Velázquez painted Donna Olimpia Maidalchini, the widow of Innocent’s brother, and an ambitious woman whom scandalmongers accused of being the pope’s mistress. A month later, on August 13, Innocent granted Velázquez a one-day audience. Velázquez came as one in a noble succession of painters: Raphael and Titian had portrayed popes before him. Velázquez had met Giovanni Pamphili when he was papal nuncio in Madrid in 1626; it was Pamphili who sent on to Rome Olivares’s request that Velázquez be given an ecclesiastical benefice to increase his income as court painter. Pamphili—now seventy-five—was a member of a well-established Roman family, an effective operator of the system, and a skilled diplomat who had caused papal policy to switch from being largely pro-French to decidedly pr
o-Hapsburg. He had a reputation for being taciturn in private but in public a speaker for whom big audiences were no trial. Many contemporaries thought him ugly if not evil looking, and his allegedly satanic expression had been cited at the papal conclave in 1644 as a reason he should not be elected pope—which he nevertheless was.
Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X was immediately famous. There are nearly twenty versions, on some of which assistants such as Juan de Pareja probably worked. As with the portrait of Pareja, that of the pope gives us an immediate sense not just of what he looked like but of his personality. Velázquez has almost caught the pope in flagrante: Innocent seems to be suddenly, guiltily, remembering something he would rather have not widely known. In the painting believed to be the original (now in the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj in Rome), he sits in a high-backed, gold-decorated papal chair. The immediate impact is of red-on-red, with big drifting areas of white and crimson delimited by gold. The pose is three-quarter length, head-to-knees, taking up almost all of the canvas, a format that had earlier received the imprimatur of Titian and El Greco in ecclesiastical portraits. But whereas Titian’s painting of Pope Paul III (of 1543) looks out of the canvas a bit abstractedly, and El Greco’s Cardinal Niño de Guevara (1596–1601) is wearing Quevedo-type spectacles that seem to be helping him focus, Velázquez’s Innocent arrests the viewer (as he presumably did the artist who had dared to rumble him) with a challenging gaze. It is a look of utter suspicion; they are the cleverest, most untrusting eyes that were ever painted. How Velázquez created that look was masterful. The technique involved only a few barely perceptible brushstrokes, a few rough dabs of paint, but the result was a pair of eyes, swiveling to the pope’s right, a gleam of light on the dark pupils, two blue-gray irises, the whites of the eyes moist and a little bloodshot. The Roman summer heat is perhaps responsible for the gleam of sweat on Innocent’s brow. His thin lips are sealed in a straight line above a wispy gray beard, below a big nose, between florid cheeks that tug downward. Holy Father! But the Vicar of Christ is less a dictator than a headmaster wondering what to say to an unsatisfactory junior schoolteacher, and giving him a baleful glare as he does so.
Among Velázquez’s portraits, one of those he made of himself presents the gaze most similar to that which the pope displays here, the dark-eyed, doubt-filled self-portrait painted around 1636 and now in the Uffizi. And if some of Velázquez’s purportedly religious works give the impression of having been done with only half his mind on his job, this papal picture seems to have been painted with every nerve in his perceptive faculties awake and vibrant. It is the creation of an artist who was fully possessed by art’s power, even if by no means a full believer in the divine authority of the Roman church or its benevolence. The intimidating shadow on the scarlet damask curtain behind Innocent’s left shoulder—is there a Polonius behind the arras?—hints at something nasty lurking close at hand. Nevertheless Innocent was apparently not upset by Velázquez’s perception. It is claimed that he said, on first looking at it, “Troppo vero”—too true. He may have liked the fact that Velázquez made him look younger than his age. The pope tried to pay the Spaniard for his work, but Velázquez told Innocent no money was needed; the king, his master, always paid him from his own purse. So the pope gave Velázquez a gold chain and medallion bearing the papal image to honor the artist’s “extraordinary achievements.” The painting was discreetly signed by Velázquez on a piece of paper that the pope is shown holding rather tentatively between the thumb and bent index finger of his left hand—as if he were about to drop it on the floor. This is probably a petition, inscribed as it is “from Diego de Silva Velázquez of the Court of his Catholic Majesty.” And what was Velázquez petitioning about? The subject may well have been the artist’s ambition to become a knight in one of the Spanish military orders. The Vatican signed up for this notion in December 1650 with a letter from Cardinal Panciroli to the nuncio in Madrid, citing Velázquez’s merits (once again described as “extraordinary”) as was shown in the portrait of His Holiness, and supporting his hopes of gaining the habit of a knight in a military order.
Meanwhile, His Catholic Majesty was beginning to fret about not having Velázquez at court. Frequent letters went from Don Fernando Ruíz de Contreras, the secretary of state, ordering the painter to return to Madrid. (These letters were sent “repeatedly,” Palomino tells us.) In February 1650 Philip wrote to the Duke of Infantado, the Spanish ambassador in Rome, about Velázquez’s assignments: “Since you know his phlegmatic temperament, it would be well for you to see that he does not indulge it but hastens the conclusion of the work and his departure as much as possible.” The king also wanted Velázquez to bring back with him the Italian painter Pietro da Cortona, a specialist in fresco, to work on decorations at the Alcázar. But Cortona couldn’t come and Velázquez, perhaps spinning things out, said he had to look for a substitute. More royal commands followed, and so did more evasions. His statue-collecting and cast-making gave him some excuses, but there may have been other factors. For one thing, Velázquez wanted to return via Paris, the capital of a hostile power, and had to obtain a passport for the purpose; but Philip seemed to think this would lead to further delays and insisted that his painter come back by sea. Even so, Velázquez stretched out his time in Italy as long as he could, for nearly another year.
It now seems likely that at the heart of this procrastination was not “phlegm” at all. Part of the cause may have been pleasure in his freer life in Rome, away from court protocol and irksome duties. And it may have been an actual affair of the heart. Around this time, amid the spurt in Velázquez’s portrait painting and evidence of his disinclination to leave Italy, we find one of his most astonishing works. Whether it was painted just before this second trip to Italy, just afterward, or in Rome itself is a matter on which the experts disagree. The Toilet of Venus or Venus at Her Mirror are the titles art history gives the painting generally known as The Rokeby Venus, from its ownership in the early nineteenth century by John Morritt of Rokeby Hall, Yorkshire. It was earlier listed in an inventory of the collection of Olivares’s great-nephew Gaspar Mendez de Haro, who bought it in 1652 from the estate of a Madrid painter and art dealer named Domingo Guerra Coronel, where it had been the most highly valued work at 1,000 reales. How long before that Velázquez painted it is unclear. The scholar Dawson Carr writes (in a recent catalogue of the National Gallery in London) that the painting could have been “executed at any time during the 1640s or early 50s, in Spain or in Italy.” If in Italy, a location he seems to favor, he asks, “Was it perhaps given to a middle man [such as Guerra Coronel] to distance its creation by Velázquez?”
But why did it need to be so distanced? It was the first painting of a nude woman by a Spanish painter that we know about—and remained so for the next century and a half. When the Italian connoisseur Cavaliere Cassiano del Pozzo was in Madrid in 1626, he noted in his diary that the Venuses and other nude goddesses in the Alcázar had to be shielded from view when the queen passed by. In 1640 the church censorship authority, the Indice expurgatorio, prohibited the importation of paintings of nudes; their artists could be excommunicated and exiled. And as late as 1673, priests and professors at the universities of Alcala and Salamanca were opposed to pictures showing nude women, regarding “the abuse of lascivious and indecent figures in painting as a mortal sin.” Although the Inquisition would have been concerned by the display of this sort of subject, and de Haro in his youth had had the reputation of wenching and extravagant loose living, he was now a member of the court and went along with the king to the fighting in Aragón. (De Haro’s father Luis had been the king’s friend since childhood and had taken over some of Olivares’s steering role after the count-duke got the sack.) Philip himself was said to possess paintings of nudes, one or two possibly by Velázquez. And there was precedence to be invoked in the form of Titian and Rubens, both of whom had painted nudes. If el pintor de rey needed to hide his part in the making of this Venus, in Rome, was it possibly for a
very private reason?
XI. ROME: VENUS OBSERVED. 1650–51
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 18