Indeed, as time passed, Philip—no longer fired up by his energetic young wife—seemed to regard her more as niece than lover, or as soul mate, “whose affection I would be unable to deserve even if I were to live a thousand years.” She had the Hapsburg chin and quite a lot of puppy fat. He referred to Mariana and his daughters collectively as “the girls,” and he went on seeing ladies of the town. As one courtier noted, Philip had better luck in siring bastards than in begetting legitimate heirs. In a portrait now in the Prado that Velázquez painted of the king at this time, circa 1654–55, when Philip wasn’t yet fifty years old, he looks washed out, unhappy, and sorry for himself: a hollow man. The points of his mustache are still upturned, though one doubts if much else is. Although they may make him appear more ridiculous to the modern viewer than they did to contemporaries, the waxed tips of the mustache call attention to the pronounced bags under his watery, lonely eyes, the lined jowls, and the lips he keeps clenched as though to stop himself from bursting into tears. He wears the Order of the Golden Fleece, which his ancestor Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, had founded in 1429, and whose members were sworn to protect the Christian faith and defend the Catholic Church. How good a job had he so far done of that? It was all downhill, he seems to think, downhill all the way. Philip prayed more frequently, and wrote again to Sister María Magdalena de Agreda. In July 1653 he had apologized to her for his inability to send a portrait of himself and seemed to blame Velázquez and his phlegmatic temperament for this, although he admitted he wasn’t desperate for new portraits of himself; he didn’t like seeing the evidence of growing older. The nun wrote back, but Philip’s prayers were only fitfully answered. The fact that Velázquez also painted the king several years after the Prado portrait (a picture now in the London National Gallery), showed that Philip could put aside his worries about his aging looks. Velázquez did not go in for flattery. His deft brushstrokes limned the king honestly and brilliantly.
Philip IV, 1656–57, National Gallery, London.
The “girls,” dressed in their court finery, put Velázquez to tests that he passed with somnambulistic ease. He couldn’t do this with his eyes shut, but he could, consummately, brush in hand, with his eyes open. The portraits he painted of Mariana, her younger cousin the infanta María Teresa (daughter of Philip’s first marriage to Isabella of Bourbon), and eventually of Philip and Mariana’s daughter Margarita, were remarkably similar, save for the faces. There were numerous copies for Brussels, Vienna, and even Paris, where Philip’s sister Anne was getting over their long coolness and Richelieu’s successor Mazarin was thinking of the usefulness to France of a marriage of young Louis XIV to the infanta María Teresa. Velázquez, and his workshop assistants, were kept busy. His professional skills were demonstrated in the portrait he painted around 1653 of The Infanta Margarita in Pink, a painting still in Vienna, where it was sent to the imperial court for the benefit of her cousin Leopold, to whom Margarita had been promised from the start. She was about two years old when Velázquez first painted her, evidently with more pleasure than she got from being painted. The little girl looks very serious as she stands very still, as instructed—how did she remain unmoving long enough for him to complete even a rough sketch to work from? She has a closed fan in her left hand and rests her right hand on a low sideboard covered with blue damask, next to a small glass vase containing flowers, pink and pale blue, roses and irises, and next to the clump of white rose petals that have fallen out of the vase onto the cloth. It could be a symbolic touch—“many a fair has oft declined, by nature’s changing course untrimmed.” (Margarita married Leopold in 1666 and died in 1673, at age twenty-two.) Or it could just be Velázquez painting flowers as no one else could at that point, so lightly and freely you might say, “Here is the birth of impressionism.”
The flowers in their living and fallen state are in contrast to the little girl who is almost imprisoned in her attitude and overstuffed costume. She stands on a slightly raised, carpeted dais. Velázquez, having painted the button eyes and plump red cheeks and an outline of the body, would have been able to let the infanta go off with her attendants and take his time on the dress—hung on a lay figure—and the background and pudgy hands. She already has the unsmiling family hauteur and looks at the painter and therefore at us with only a modicum of curiosity; she is, after all, a princess! We think “How pretty she is—what a lovely dress—so brilliantly painted!” and at the same time “Poor little thing.”
Velázquez in these years more than earned his keep as royal painter. His own life was not very visible but surfaced in his portraits of the royal young women that appeared every year or so. The stance was fairly uniform: standing facing half left; tightly bodiced; arms stiffly held over the elaborate farthingale; the hair ringletted or teased out in a massive headdress; and pearly white and blush red makeup accentuating a sense of make-believe, though fully believed in by the participants. In the 1650s Velázquez portrayed the young queen Mariana like this on several occasions, looking bored or sulky. (The original formal portrait is that in the Prado, but there were several workshop copies.) Perhaps we can be pardoned for thinking “spoiled cow” and concentrating instead on the magically rendered accoutrements: for instance, the scarf that she holds in her be-ringed left hand, a piece of soft white lace that the artist has conjured into reality by rough white and pearl-gray paint strokes. Mariana’s younger cousin María Teresa, the only child surviving from Philip’s first marriage, had been about ten when Velázquez first painted her in 1648, and he painted her again, twice, in the early 1650s, when she was fourteen or so. Margarita, Mariana’s daughter, went on looking like a Dresden doll (or an overstuffed small sofa with a sweet curly-haired head on top) in a portrait Velázquez made in 1659 showing her wearing a blue dress—a similar portrait of the infanta wearing a green dress was probably (some experts think) by his son-in-law Martínez del Mazo. The blue dress painting was sent to Vienna, to join its predecessors in the emperor Leopold’s collection and keep him in touch with the girl he was going to marry, and the green dress went an imperial farther step on to Budapest.
Infante Felipe Próspero, 1659, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Sent with the Vienna shipment was a portrait Velázquez had painted of Philip and Mariana’s son, Infante Felipe Próspero—not yet two, pasty pale, wearing over his white pinafore a number of charms. They include an amulet against the evil eye, an amber ornament in the shape of an apple to ward off infections, and several little bells, which helped his carers keep track of his whereabouts if he wandered off in the maze of the palace. A crimson infant-sized armchair is right there for him to rest a small white hand on. And making itself at home on the chair is a white puppy, its head leaning on the arm. (Palomino tells us that the dog looks like “one for which Velázquez felt great affection.”) Despite the hopes expressed in the infante’s name, the child did not prosper. The Venetian ambassador to the Madrid court reported on the prince’s delicate condition a year or two after this, mentioning his sluggish movements and colorless skin, the head large, the mouth hanging open, and “no bounce in the knees.” Infante Felipe Próspero was guarded rather precariously by an elderly Franciscan, Father Antonio de Castilla, who was charged with carrying him in his arms. The ambassador added that although Father Antonio’s “inexperience put him frequently in danger of dropping the Infante, the priest was not allowed to leave him alone.”
Velázquez may have been as kind as he could be in this portrait—the child stands, his mouth doesn’t hang open, the blue eyes are limpidly alert—but the suggestion of fragility and a very short future comes through. One might have thought that with the arrival of the new heir to the throne Philip and his advisers would have reflected seriously about the Hapsburg line and how best to maintain it, and this didn’t mean marrying your niece. Genetic imperatives may still have been in the distance, but biblical prohibitions were well known. And although they knew how family characteristics showed up in each generation, with the chins and lips clear signs of Hapsb
urg blood, there was less recognition of the cumulative effect of consanguinity. “My word, he looks a lot like you!” was a congratulatory remark that should have been taken as a fatal warning. Half of the Hapsburg royal children died before the age of ten, twice the rate of deaths among the children in the common pueblos of Spain. The king’s daughters tended to live longer than the sons, but were by no means of vigorous health. (Queen Mariana had a second daughter in 1656 who died soon after her birth.) The sickliness of Infante Felipe Próspero had no cure; the amulets didn’t help; he died when not yet four. After him, things went from bad to worse. Philip and Mariana’s next production was the infante Carlos, born in 1661. He made it to the age of thirty-nine, becoming king, but was nicknamed El Hechizado, the Hexed or Cursed, and suffered from all sorts of problems, mental and physical, including rickets, blood in the urine, what seems to have been inherited syphilis, and—as would become clear (and because of all this clearly a good thing)—impotence. This brought about the end of the dynasty.
Meanwhile, aided by his assistants, in the setting light of the Hapsburg sun, Velázquez rearranged the royal art collection and redecorated the gloomy rooms of the Alcázar and Escorial in which much of it was to be found. The Escorial hadn’t suited the king’s mood in his man-about-town years but did fit in with his more religiously inclined days following the dismissal of Olivares. The Escorial also contained the burial place of the Hapsburgs, the Pantheon crypt. When Philip had the bodies of his ancestors reinterred he was amazed to find that the corpse of Charles V, dead ninety-six years, was still whole, and in consequence he wrote to Sister María de Agreda begging her to not allow him to forget this sight. He wanted her to help him attain salvation. Philip put Velázquez in charge of the decorating and furnishing of the Pantheon with its side chambers, a sacristy, study, and prior’s chapter room, as he got rid of many bad pieces and replaced them with good ones and put them in gold frames: pictures by Titian, Raphael, Veronese, Tintoretto, Van Dyck, among others. And the Alcázar was similarly transformed into a space, both real and potent with illusion, full of “precious and admirable paintings and statues of bronze and marble,” so Velázquez’s friend the court musician Lázaro Díaz del Valle wrote. In the Escorial and the Alcázar the king, despite the less attractive reality of things, looked like a great monarch: No other prince in the world, thought Díaz, had palaces so adorned. Philip actually spent a lot of time with the collection; he loved paintings and he seems to have loved being with the royal painter while he supervised the decorating. Camillo Massimi, the papal nuncio whom Velázquez had come to know and had portrayed on his second trip to Rome, noted that the king had caught a fever in February 1658 “by having spent a long time the previous day watching pictures being hung in the summer apartments.” Philip liked discussing attributions, for example, with Michelangelo Colonna, the Italian fresco painter Velázquez had had a hand in bringing from Bologna with his colleague Agostino Mitelli and housing in the Casa del Tesoro, while they painted trompe l’oeil images on the walls and ceilings of several apartments in the palace. Velázquez helped plan a series of paintings to illustrate the fable of Pandora, which they helped execute. When Colonna and Mitelli were working in the Salon Grande, above the main entrance to the Alcázar, the king (according to Palomino) “went up every day to see how the work was progressing,” sometimes with Queen Mariana and the infantas, and asked the artists many questions.
Not many who worked in Velázquez’s studio-cum-workshop left their names on a roll of honor. We know of Diego de Melgar, apprenticed in 1620, but he is here one second and then gone, somewhere in Seville. Juan de Pareja’s celebrity is helped by Velázquez’s masterful portrait of him. It was a time requiring many hand-painted copies, reproductions well before the age when they could be turned out mechanically or chemically, and possibly involved in painting them were Francisco de Palacios and three well-born assistants, Diego de Lucena, Francisco de Burgos Mantilla, and Nicolas de Villacis—all “dons” so Palomino tells us, though one recalls Cervantes’s remark in Don Quixote that the title “don,” which belonged properly to families of note, had grown “very common.” More is known about Juan de Alfaro, Velázquez’s pupil, who was permitted to copy masterworks by Titian and Rubens in the Alcázar. After Velázquez’s death Alfaro wrote an admiring account in Latin of Velázquez’s career that Palomino incorporated in his Life. Apart from Pareja, who had the good fortune to be immortalized by Velázquez, the assistant who came out best was probably his son-in-law. He achieved an independent reputation for his hunting scenes and city views, and contemporaries admired his skill in painting small figures. Velázquez turned to him often for copies of royal portraits and he took over from his father-in-law as painter to the king. Del Mazo had been drawing master to Prince Baltasar Carlos and he succeeded to some of Velázquez’s duties in the royal household, taking on the post of Usher of the Chamber and the job of making an inventory of the royal artworks. But the artistic family suffered the dire loss in 1654 of Velázquez’s only surviving daughter Francisca, del Mazo’s wife, and mother of several Velázquez grandchildren. Her death may have given Velázquez cause to brood about families, their successes, their disasters—one of his most intricate pictures of this period bears witness to such thought. After Velázquez’s granddaughter Inés was widowed, his son-in-law del Mazo was allowed in 1657 to go to Italy to reclaim her dowry, which had been partly subsumed we gather in the valuable city council post that had been given to her husband, Onofre di Lifrangi. We recall that Philip had refused to allow Velázquez to make a similar trip at this time. Velázquez’s only child at that point was presumably Antonio, in Rome, if he had survived infancy. Since Velázquez’s Italian lawyers seemed to keep good records of transactions to do with him, we should know of any maintenance payments he sent for Antonio.
Some of the pictures del Mazo had been copying were those that Rubens had painted on subjects from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and that were hung in Velázquez’s studio in the palace. The royal painter owned two copies of Ovid’s work, one in Spanish, one in Italian. “Transformations” were bestselling subjects in the classical world and they struck responsive notes with Velázquez; perhaps the Rubens paintings had their subliminal effect as well. He had already used Ovid material in The Forge of Vulcan and the classical scholar in him came again to the fore in several complicated paintings he did at this time that make evident his brilliance as a painter who thought as profoundly as he felt. Jon Manchip White has wondered whether Velázquez was drawn to the Metamorphoses by his “interest in the dualities of human existence: mortal and immortal, earthly and divine, sacred and profane, reality and illusion.” It’s remarkable that as Spain’s power declined and the Madrid court seemed held captive by its own ceremonies, the king’s painter struck out independently and boldly with paintings that fused (in Denys Sutton’s description of the process) “different fields of vision in one composition.”
One such picture was Las Hilanderas, The Spinners, or The Fable of Arachne. Scholars have set various dates on this painting: Dieter Beaujean follows J. López-Rez in suggesting circa 1644 to 1648. Enriqueta Harris and the catalogue of the 2006 exhibition at the London National Gallery edited by Dawson W. Carr go for a decade later, ca. 1656–58. The story as Ovid tells it was that of a Lydian girl named Arachne, a talented weaver, who made the mistake of claiming to be as skilled in working with wool as Minerva, known to the Greeks as Pallas Athena, the gray-eyed goddess of wisdom. Arachne was proud and conceited. Nymphs came to admire her handiwork as she shaped the wool into threads for embroidering a picture. Arachne then dared Minerva to a weaving contest. She didn’t recognize the goddess when she first appeared disguised as a hag, “with hoary looks,” and hobbling with a stick. Arachne stuck to her guns when Minerva suggested that the girl might be the best of all humankind but should modestly yield the palm to a deity, the goddess of wisdom—indeed, should beg the forgiveness of Minerva for boasting in the way she had done. Arachne said even more rashly, “Leave me
alone, you stupid old woman!” At that point Minerva dropped her disguise. Faced with the goddess, Arachne was taken aback enough to blush, but nevertheless continued to claim that she, Arachne, was the best. The contest went ahead. Minerva wove scenes illustrating the troubles that befell those who dared to compete with the gods—for example, the pickle that Antigone, the Trojan king’s daughter, got into, and as a result was punished by Juno and turned into a white-feathered stork. But Arachne wasn’t to be thwarted by these warnings. Insolent to the end, she created a tapestry that showed the gods at their worst, particularly the father of the gods himself—Jove as a bull stealing Europa, Leda carried off by Jove who had taken the shape of a swan, and Danae being seduced by Jove in the form of a shower of gold. Minerva was so upset by this lèse-majesté that she struck Arachne on the head, cursing her but not killing her. Instead she sprinkled on her the poisonous juice of a plant that turned her into a spider. Thus Arachne went on spinning and weaving though no longer in human form.
Velázquez gave us for the occasion one of his split-screen performances. He shows us a stage in this drama before the final transformation of Arachne, and also a scene in “real life” that was somewhat removed from her metamorphosis. We see in the foreground of his painting a room in which five women—the spinners—are at work making wool. Through the central archway behind them, on a sort of dais in a large alcove, is an atelier, or what looks like a stage set for a studio in which an immense tapestry is hanging. There Arachne is to be seen, attended by several elegantly costumed women, with a musician ready to play a viola da gamba to keep them entertained. And there, too, in a beam of light that streams in from a high unseen window on the left, Minerva—Pallas Athena—stands, helmeted, with a raised spear, preparing to belabor the uppity misguided weaving girl. Arachne assumes a suddenly suppliant pose before her tapestry, for which Velázquez has borrowed much from Titian’s Rape of Europa, a painting he had access to in the Spanish royal collection. In the immediate foreground a woman in a white scarf sits behind a spinning wheel that whirrs, spokes invisible, in a brilliantly rendered blur. In another wonderfully homely touch, one of the young women on the right, black-haired and wearing a white blouse and black skirt, reminds us of the young woman with a white scarf over her shoulders shown sewing fifteen years or so earlier (1635–43). This woman is at work wrapping wool from a frame onto a ball; she leans sideways, steadying herself with an outstretched left foot whose heel is lifted off the floor just sufficiently to bring this part of the picture to vibrant life.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 20