Velázquez painted The Fable of Arachne in the late 1650s, using the silver-gray ground that he was fond of at that stage in his career. It was the same time in which, in Holland, Rembrandt, who after his first years in the Uylenburg workshop in Amsterdam remained a true freelance throughout the rest of his life, fell into debt because he had been tempted into overextending, ambitiously buying a big house that soon needed expensive repiling, and was forced to have an insolvency sale. The Arachne story may have intrigued Velázquez—who, with his court posts, was more financially secure than Rembrandt—for its aspirational theme: Arachne aimed high, too high as far as Minerva was concerned, setting herself up as equal to an immortal being, but her weaving skills were displayed in the background tapestry and gave evidence of not just craftsmanship but great artistry. Velázquez doesn’t seem to have come up against Rembrandt or his work and his competitive streak would have been exercised not against the great Dutchman but against Michelangelo, Titian, and Rubens. If Minerva won the competition with Arachne, Velázquez—painting a picture that presents the tussle between the contestants and the actual toil of spinning and weaving—puts himself forward as the master artist.
One moral of the story seems to be that human beings shouldn’t get too big for their boots, or sandals: especially when you’re up against a deity, pride comes before a fall. Dawson Carr also notes that Velázquez owned a copy of Pliny’s Natural History, a sourcebook for ancient art that “lauds two painters for capturing movement.” Aristides had managed to show cart wheels turning and Antiphilus had depicted a room in which women were occupied in spinning. So Velázquez, illustrating movement, “achieved something not realised since antiquity, surpassing Titian, and fulfilling a quest that began forty years before when he tried to capture the transformation of an egg in hot oil.” And the Spanish painter may also have been aware of the suggestion made by Viana, a translator of Ovid, that the Arachne story was a parable: It showed an artist frustrated by nonrecognition. Velázquez, this theory supposes, wanted celebrity and honors he hadn’t yet obtained.
Velázquez painted The Spinners for Pedro de Arce. Was the king feeling too poor? Or did he not take to the subject matter? De Arce was a courtier, too, the Master of the Hounds, and a picture collector; he was aposentador normal, a rank below Velázquez’s aposentador mayor. De Arce was to be one of the executors of Juan de Alfaro, Velázquez’s pupil, who along with Palomino provided much of our early information about Velázquez. The Spinners in some ways harks back to the artist as a realist painter of bodegones, of kitchen scenes and taverns. Here in the foreground we see depicted what may well have been a local tapestry workshop—the Saint Isabel workshop in Madrid—with the blur of the fast-rotating spinning wheel taking the place of the bubbling cooking pan and the moisture-covered water jar. There are other details to linger on: the cat; the scraps of wool on the floor; the girl on the left holding aside the curtain.… A lot is wonderfully going on, and one should perhaps resist the urge to complain about a possible lack of cohesion. Velázquez often dared to disrespect the unities. The right questions rather than the right answers were his prime goal. Here he evades the conclusion and leaves us wondering about the final scary moment of Arachne’s story. What happens next? We remember Minerva’s threats. Is Arachne really going to be turned into a spider?
The Spinners was hung first in the Buen Retiro and then moved to the Alcázar palace, where it was damaged in the fire of 1734. The painting was restored with additional canvas on all sides. In the late nineteenth century its animation attracted the approval of Carl Justi, the German art historian and Velázquez biographer; he thought it “a picture in which the representation of motion in the motionless could scarcely be carried further.” But he also noted the unsightly condition of its paint surface, unusual for such a prescient painter as Velázquez, that was perhaps the result of the Alcázar blaze and displayed a network of cracks and welts through which the priming seemed to have welled up. Raphael Mengs, the somewhat earlier German writer on art who had come across Velázquez’s genius in the late eighteenth century, described The Spinners as a work less of the hand than of the will.
* * *
STAYING AT THE Casa del Tesoro while his son-in-law del Mazo went to Italy produced some pangs, one supposes, but it gave Velázquez more time to make paintings as well as arrange and hang them. Classical subjects remained big with him; he had started with a sibyl and moved on via Bacchus, Apollo and Vulcan, and then Venus, to Arachne and Minerva. Mercury and Argus featured as well in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and was also a tale with suspenseful ramifications. The lord of the sky, Jove or Jupiter, was once again up to no good. Playing away from home as he often did, he ravished the nymph Io. Then, scared of how his wife Juno would handle news of this, he turned Io into a heifer. Juno wasn’t fooled but, suspecting the worst, put many-eyed Argus in charge of the transformed nymph. Jove then commissioned his son Mercury, messenger of the gods, to murder Argus. Mercury donned his winged sandals and wide-brimmed hat and flew down to play his pipe music to Argus to make him drowsy; and, when asleep, to behead him with his sword. Velázquez condensed this story into a single image, which he painted with thick broad strokes. The rough impasto resulted in shimmering effects, both free and fluid.
The painting contains more inherent violence even than the Portrait of Innocent X. The viewer naturally finds himself or herself taking the part of Argus, the sleeping sentry beside the dormant heifer; Argus sits with head drooping and a raised right knee, and his reputedly observant eyes, a hundred strong, not visible. (Carel Fabritius’s Sentry of possibly a year or two earlier, showing a soldier who was similarly neglecting his watch outside a gate in Delft, in Holland, comes to mind.) One wants to shake Argus by the shoulder—why doesn’t he wake up and notice the figure crouching just beyond his right leg? The figure is obscure, though one can make out the feathers in his hat that indicate the ability to fly, and then in the shadows a sword grasped in one hand. The light that falls on Argus’s bent right leg, knee, and thigh accentuates his vulnerability. Murder is in the air.
The Mercury and Argus was painted for the Hall of Mirrors in the Alcázar, where it was to hang along with three other mythological narrative pictures by Velázquez that perished in the fire of 1734. It was placed over a window, in Velázquez’s own arrangement, in the ongoing attempts by the crown to show off its artistic wealth—or mask from itself its decline as a power in the world. The painting’s brooding force and rich coloring withstood the effect of the light from the window that radiated from beneath it, light that was also reflected from the hall’s many mirrors. Palomino failed to mention the Mercury and Argus among “the marvellous paintings made by Don Diego Velázquez” he lists at this time though it was surely among the most marvelous. That it had the luck to survive the 1734 fire was fortunate, and we should place in the same category of good news the lines of Ovid that provided for Io, if not Argus, a happy ending. Jove placated Juno with caresses. He promised her that she would have no more vexation caused by his desire for the young nymph. Io herself was returned to human shape. She was thrilled to be able to stand on just two feet again, with hooves dissolved and replaced by toenails. But she was at first frightened to speak in case what came forth from her mouth was the lowing of a heifer. In a while she got the hang of her lost language and eventually she gave birth to a son who was assumed to have sprung from the seed of the sun god.
XIII. MAIDS OF HONOR. MADRID. 1656
Which seventeenth-century artist was the greatest deceiver? A number of painters of the time vie for this role. Vermeer, the grandson of a man who had been charged with making false coinage, seemed to delight in exercising the counterfeiting genes in his system—conterfeitsel being the Dutch word for a portrait. Trompe l’oeil was an illusionist skill that contemporary artists in various parts of Europe enjoyed practicing. Puzzle pictures—works of art that posed for the viewer hard-to-answer questions—were common. “What’s it all about?” Velázquez rose to this challenge, too.
Questions! Velázquez’s painting now known as Las Meninas, the Maids of Honor, begs many of them. The picture has a Kafka-esque clutter in which we can easily get lost. It is a claustrophobic maze with possibly no way out. “La Familia”—that is, the family of Philip IV—was the name the painting had for many years before it acquired its Las Meninas appelation. There are ten living creatures in it and the reflections of two others. Palomino described it in part three of his 1724 El Museo Pictorico as a “large picture with the portrait of the Empress [then infanta of Spain] Doña Margarita María of Austria, when she was very young. There are no words to describe her great charm, liveliness, and beauty, but her portrait itself is the best panegyric. At her feet kneels Doña María Agustina, the queen’s menina, daughter of Don Diego Sarmiento, serving her with water from an earthenware jug.” Palomino goes on, diligently and respectfully, to describe the various figures in the painting. In fact, the “royal family” seems at first to consist of just one person, the small blond princess Margarita, spotlit and stage front. However, as Palomino observes, Velázquez “showed his indisputable talent by revealing … what he was painting” and showing us at the back of the room he is concerned with a mirror that reflects the heads of that family, the king and the queen. They have apparently just walked into the room to see what’s going on. They seem to be standing where we are, the viewers of this painting, and thus immediately incorporate us, too, in what’s going on. That includes Velázquez himself—the painter at work on a very large canvas, which may or not be this same painting, which is in fact about ten feet tall by nine feet wide. Wheels within wheels!
This unseen picture Velázquez is at work on within the picture provokes our decided curiosity. We can’t see the front of the canvas on which Velázquez is painting. Velázquez portrays himself working on it with a long-handled brush in his right hand, one of the round brushes which Beruete says the artist favored, whose hair was “mounted in goose quills fixed to wooden handles.” Part of the back of the canvas he is painting on is visible, a big slice of it, fastened to its stretcher-framework of bare wood and resting on an easel, also made of bare wood. One leg of the easel is shown to us together with the shadows the easel throws on the back of the canvas. The self-consciousness of the artist seems to be one part of Velázquez’s subject here. That long upright edge of the stretcher, fencing off the crowded scene to the right of it, brilliantly delimits things while drawing attention to the fact that this is a painting about painting. The leg of the easel makes us think of the easel Vermeer shows his artist sitting before in his Art of Painting, painted in Delft about ten years after Velázquez’s picture. The rear view of a picture being worked on was also very much Rembrandt’s subject in his rather clodhopping early The Artist in his Studio (ca. 1629, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), where the young painter stands gawkily at the far side of his bare painting room. Between Rembrandt and us is a strange foreground gap dominated by his easel. We see the dark back of the canvas or panel on it. The edge of the picture that is under way is indicated by a long bright gleam of paint remarkably similar in aesthetic function to the upright edge of Velázquez’s stretcher in Las Meninas.
There are three girls in this painting: center stage, the small infanta, about seven years old; immediately to her right (our left) is Doña María Agustina Sarmiento, kneeling so as to bring her head to the height of the infanta’s blond hair and handing her water in a red bucaro mug, made of a soft Portuguese clay; and, on the other side of the princess Margarita, the second menina Doña Isabel de Velasco, the Count of Fuensalida’s young daughter, who is curtsying and apparently about to speak. All three are illuminated by sun from the right, where a window is hinted at. Above and behind Doña María’s head is the painter, holding his palette in his left hand. He is mostly in shadow though we can see his head tipped a little to one side as he focuses on his subjects. Behind Doña Isabel two figures stand watching while they have what looks like a private conversation: a woman in a nunlike habit, Doña Marcela de Ulloa, who had the title of a Lady of Honor, and a man, nameless and even more deeply shadowed, who appears to be a Guarda Damas, his job being to keep a protective eye on the ladies of the royal household. Coming farther forward, at the right before the unseen window, stand two attendants, both dwarfs. One—the bulkiest—is Mari Barbola, a German, short and stocky, with a heavy middle-aged face that speaks of many sorrows, a servant and sometime plaything of the darling infanta who is two steps away. Mari stares directly at the viewer, as if daring him to judgment. Beauty and the Beast, but don’t say it aloud. Her gaze and the infanta’s gaze, directed the same way, form a sort of crossfire, beneath which we may well feel like ducking. The second dwarf is sprightlier, even good-looking. More midget than dwarf, Nicolas Pertusato had the looks of a rosy-cheeked, well-formed small boy and served the king as a valet. Here he has one hand raised and one small foot resting on the uncomplaining back of a dog—one of the royal mastiffs, familiar from portraits Velázquez painted of the king as huntsman. The dog lies drowsing, with head erect, front paws stretched out, and obviously no threat to Nicolas, who seems to be good-humoredly trying to get some sort of reaction from it, with a tap from his foot that the dog ignores. At the back of the room, standing a few steps up and silhouetted in an open doorway against the lightness coming from the room behind, is José Nieto, chamberlain to the queen and presumed subject of the intense portrait (now in Apsley House) painted by Velázquez some years before. In Las Meninas Nieto is also apparently struck motionless by the arrival in the studio of their majesties, who have perhaps called in while taking a stroll through the palace. On his way out, Nieto turns, pausing, to look at them, and at the picture Velázquez is at work on, perhaps comparing the reality and the painted image for likeness.
Between Nieto in the doorway and the painter himself our gaze passes to a mirror hanging on the studio’s back wall. The dark-framed mirror is surrounded by murky representations of paintings. The mirror, researchers tell us, was not listed in inventories of this room, and was most likely an invention of Velázquez, put there to enable him to get the king and the queen discreetly into the picture. (The king, we remember, was at that point a reluctant sitter for his own portrait.) Velázquez shows the royal pair side by side in dim focus, upper halves only, with a splash of red curtain reflected above them. Their images aren’t clear, are in fact as foggy as that of the woman we have taken for Venus regarding herself in her mirror as she lies on her couch. The wall-hung mirror again prompts thoughts of a voyeur king. The arrival of Margarita’s parents on the scene hasn’t led Velázquez to budge from his stance at the easel; he goes on painting, thinking, brush in midair, though his eyes have undoubtedly taken in the royal presence. He is used to Philip coming in to see what he’s up to. He doesn’t have to bow or depart from his routine. After all, he is el pintor real.
The room we are looking at had been part of the apartment of Prince Baltasar Carlos, who died ten years before. Known as the Cierzo room, it had been latterly used as a storeroom in which various objects of the royal collection were kept, including many portraits of the kings of Portugal. Since 1646 it had been Velázquez’s atelier in the Alcázar. It was dark, like most of the rooms in the Alcázar, and rather dark for its present purpose, with gloomy walls and deep-shadowed ceiling. Perhaps it felt cooler that way. It was made darker by the obscure shapes of some of the forty paintings that now hung on its walls, black frame close to black frame as high as the ceiling. Most were copies del Mazo had made of Rubens’s paintings from stories in the Metamorphoses. Velázquez cleverly uses this darkness to squeeze the action in his picture forward, as it were to the front of the stage. The conductor/director stands in half shadow, his brush poised like a baton. What light reaches him does so in the course of falling dimly on his forehead, nose, and left cheek, and on his right brush-holding hand, seeming to bounce off the slanting palette and the maulstick on which he rested his hand when painting details. From these the light passes to the face and right should
er of the kneeling María Sarmiento before falling on the center of attraction, the small infanta.
Velázquez’s presence here shows us what footing he was on with the royal couple, a senior servant who was almost an old friend of the family. At his waist hangs his chamberlain’s key. The red cross of the Order of Santiago on his chest was a later addition, painted at the royal command. Is he thinking about acquiring this honor, still to come, even as he paints—the knighthood that he seems to have coveted above all else? Is he thinking about representing this picture with as much reality as he can muster or is he wondering what more to invent, in a work in which ambiguity and artifice are conspicuously consummate? Palomino wavered on this score, saying one thing, then the other, in fact saying both. Velázquez’s picture, he wrote, is “no lesser [a] work of artifice than that of Phidias, the renowned [classical Greek] sculptor and painter, who placed his portrait on the shield of the statue he made of the goddess Minerva.” And then, a paragraph farther on, Palomino declared that Velázquez’s painting was “truth, not painting.” In which case, what about the artifice? Palomino thought the real subject of Velázquez’s picture was to be seen in the mirror hanging on the back wall, “with its reflection showing our Catholic King Philip and Queen Mariana.” (In the mirror, the royal pair look like a very ordinary couple sitting side by side in the back of a carriage.)
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 21