Other viewers are less sure about the subject. What was the picture he was painting within this picture, the painting being painted on the other unseen side of the tall canvas he is working on? Is it a portrait simply of the little princess, like the portrait of the infanta Margarita—now in Vienna—that is ascribed to this same year? (Margarita here has a self-regarding look, as if she were taking note of her own reflection in a mirror.) Or was the picture he was painting this very picture—Las Meninas? A painting of what he was painting? A mirror image of what he could see in a second larger mirror, showing this whole small crowd of fellow creatures and the king and queen who were visible twice, out front in person and reflected in the mirror on the back wall? At this point dizziness possibly sets in.
Another mirror Velázquez would have known well was that in The Arnolfini Marriage from the Netherlands, then in the royal collection in the Alcázar, and again a picture in which a mirror, a round one, hangs on a back wall. Jan van Eyck’s painting of 1434 has only two human figures, though his couple fill much more of the painted space than Velázquez’s royal pair. Both pictures contain a dog. Both have a rather cramped effect, a feeling of the walls and ceiling closing in and the light coming from only one side. Another court painter of the next generation after Velázquez, the Neapolitan Luca Giordano, when brought into the king’s private apartments to look at Las Meninas, was asked for his opinion for it and said he thought it represented “the theology of painting,” meaning—so Palomino assures us—that just as theology was superior to all other branches of knowledge, so this picture was the greatest example of the art of painting. Theology was also of course the study of religion and Giordano may have meant to suggest that Las Meninas furnished the material for a profound study of art by a believer in the power of art. In our time, the French thinker Michel Foucault has said, in 1966, that the painting could be “a representation, as it were, of classical representation,” and therefore a worthy subject for students of philosophy to wrestle with. Jonathan Brown echoed this when he wrote even more recently that the painting was “in part a meditation on the nature of representation and reality.” It was an attempt “to create art without apparent artifice and thus reduce the gap between what the eye sees in nature and what the eye sees in art.” Or was it in fact the greatest achievement in naturalism made in the seventeenth century? The jury will probably always remain out, but for now, the theory of choice has come to be that in Las Meninas Velázquez intended to create a work that would symbolize the nobility of the art he was practicing, the art of painting. This would fit in with the ceremonial proclivities of the court and the aspirations of a man who was both painter and courtier.
There are other possibilities about its origins. One is that it could have been a chance arrangement, all these people coming together by accident in Velázquez’s studio, and someone, the king maybe, saying “That’s a picture.” The light might then have been adjusted to help with a scene decreed by circumstance. A mirror may have been brought and hung in the crucial spot in place of a painting. Or it may have been Velázquez himself who looked around the room at this unique collection of individuals—the infanta, her parents, the royal retainers, dwarfs, dog, and a painter at his easel—and suddenly thought, Hola! This is my life! Here I am, one of this collection of curiosities. In some ways it was a snapshot, a seizure of a moment in a form that still lay in the future. It was also, as Carl Justi noted, a tableau vivant, in which “the figures might … have been more naturally and effectively grouped in a semi-circle about the canvas on the easel.” But that’s not how Velázquez found them and saw them when the shutter of his mind’s camera clicked.
The painting pushes at its own borders. It not only asks why this strange coming together has taken place in the way it has, but why so many things. Why beauty, why deformity? Why man, why God? Let me quote Milan Kundera, who was prompted to say, after reading Cervantes: “When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes.… The novelist teaches its reader to comprehend the world as a question.” As does our artist. And the-world-turned-into-a-mystery in turn provokes another question: Is Las Meninas the painting of a dream? Possibly a workplace dream, in which subconscious concerns about one’s working life coalesce in a surreal pattern? A not uncommon concept then was that life itself was an “insubstantial pageant,” to use Shakespeare’s phrase in The Tempest. Human beings were “such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life / is rounded with a sleep.” Shakespeare’s Spanish contemporary the playwright Calderón de la Barca played with the same notion. Calderón was roughly the same age as Velázquez. He was a court official’s son who is said to have been a soldier in Flanders in the mid-1620s, an experience that gave little authentic grist to his masquelike play El Sitio de Breda, performed soon after the siege ended; he became a colleague of Velázquez at the palace, serving the court as director of theatrical events. Calderón had been made a knight of Santiago after the zarzuela he arranged for the grand opening of the Buen Retiro, an honor the painter presumably envied him for. Knights were still required to perform military service, and Calderón went with Philip’s army to suppress the revolt in Catalonia in the 1640s. After resigning from the court he joined the priesthood, but continued prolifically writing plays, often several a month, until his death in 1681. His La Vida es Sueno, Life Is a Dream, written in the 1630s at about the time Velázquez was painting his Surrender of Breda, featured a heroine—Rosario—who disguises herself as a man, and a hero, Sigismundo, an imprisoned Polish prince who threatens to dishonor Rosario but in the end helps her out.
For the modern reader Calderón’s work is overweighted with allegories. The play’s design is unclear, its meanings incomplete, its actions—such as they are—set largely in the past or in the wings. (Rape, abandonment, acts of vengeance, and even murder are talked about rather than seen.) The language often seems stilted for the great emotions it is meant to convey. Drugged with opium, Sigismundo dreams of freedom and believes he is free—or is this just a dream? He wonders if it will be worthwhile to try to get back his rightful title. Later Sigismundo is a captive in chains once again and (at the end of act 2 in the English version by Adrian Mitchell and John Barton) reflects:
The King dreams he’s a King,
Lives, orders, governs in a royal illusion,
Because his fame is written in the wind.
For every King that rules men in his King-dream
Must wake at last in the cold sleep of death,
The rich man dreams his riches which are cares,
The poor man dreams his penury and pain.…
All dream. So what’s this life? A fraud, a frenzy,
A trick, a tale, a shadow, an illusion.
And all our life is nothing but a dream.…
Scholars have been forced into complex contortions by Las Meninas. E. L. Ferrari wrote: “The subject of the picture is not on the canvas but in the space where the beholder stands. The figures themselves are looking at what is presumably the subject, whose place we ourselves occupy as we look at them.” As for the canvas that the painter in the picture is seen to be working on, though only the back of it is revealed to us, that—the philosopher John Searle believed—is this very painting, Las Meninas. Kenneth Clark took special note of the fact that, “as we step back and forth between the casual brushwork closely viewed and the real appearance of the painted world, distantly viewed, it is impossible to locate the art in Las Meninas.” Clark had walked to and fro in front of Las Meninas, seeing it from various angles and distances, trying to grasp how it hung together and work out at what point “a salad of beautiful brush strokes turned into an illusion of hands, ribbons, pieces of velvet.… I thought I might learn something if I could catch the moment at which this transformation took place, but it proved to be as elusive as the moment between waking and sleeping.” (Note the word transformation.) J. M. White has compared Las Meninas to the small stage scenes one can see, as through the glass of a telescope
, in one of Samuel van Hoogstraten’s peep-show boxes (Dutch, of course, and of this time). In the nineteenth century, Théophile Gautier had tried to put his finger on this “blurring of the boundaries between subject and object” when he asked “Where, then, is the picture?” Estrella de Diego has commented, astutely, “Everything in the painting is slippery, every action is suspended: it is about to happen or it has just happened.” (Once again, how like Vermeer.) As I stand before Las Meninas I find a need to pinch myself. Am I awake? Have I got here by walking in my sleep?
And who is to blame for all this? Velázquez, the dreamer and artist, was fifty-seven at this point. He pictures himself among La Familia, not in the front rank but in the half light, half a pace behind. His long hair, parted in the middle, falls on either side of his face in dark brown waves. He is dressed like a gentleman, a proud hidalgo, certainly not as an artisan in overalls or even as a painter who gets paint on his hands and clothes. But the poised brush and sidelong look toward the second, unseen mirror or toward the king and queen positioned where we are, suggest that he is pulling the strings. He is why all this is happening. If it is a dream, it is his dream. He is happy in it. Everyone and everything in this picture is at his beck and call. His contemplative stare is that of a man absorbed in his task, thinking about the color and placing of his next brushstroke. Dawson W. Carr has authoritatively described the “minimum means” Velázquez used here: “The ground colour serves as a mid-tone and broad washes are broken up with strokes and dabs, some long and gestural, others short and staccato. The delicate hand gestures emerge from the barest suggestion of form and the hazy definition of features increases in the darkness behind.” As noted, the red cross of the Order of Santiago must have been painted in several years later, perhaps by Velázquez himself, for he hadn’t yet been honored with it. His moment of hesitant contemplation prompts us to a similar act, pausing and inviting the spectator (as Enriqueta Harris has written) to “put himself in the position of the King and Queen, the position from which they could see themselves dimly reflected in the mirror in the background, and from which they could take in the whole scene before them.”
XIV. KNIGHT ERRANT. MADRID. 1658–59
The knight who first comes to our mind in early-seventeenth-century Spain is that most learned proponent of chivalry, Don Quixote de la Mancha, known also as the Knight of the Woeful Countenance. Don Quixote was a self-created knight whose ambition was to be a hero, achieving noble deeds; his enchanted story has frequent correspondences with that of Diego Velázquez—though that of Don Quixote is leavened with greater humor. And Diego Velázquez, one suspects, wouldn’t have been amused by the comparison. Don Quixote’s creator Miguel de Cervantes had a problematic past; his obituarists and biographers tried but failed to uncover an illustrious genealogy; and although the novel was still young as a literary form, Cervantes was already pulling it about in 1605, when the first part of his masterpiece was published, stretching its dimensions, playing with its structure, teasing the reader, much as Laurence Sterne would with Tristram Shandy. So his character Carrasco (as we’ve seen) at one juncture seems to know more about what Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have been up to than they do themselves; so Cervantes’s duchess disputes with Don Quixote the fact of his lady Dulcinea’s existence, citing what she knows from the history of Don Quixote’s life, “lately publish’d”; and so his Scholar, who helps Don Quixote find Montesino’s Cave, claims to be a great admirer of books on Knight Errantry, Don Quixote’s subject, and is writing a Metamorphosis or Spanish Ovid. Often in Spain today one finds that the history of the La Manchan knight still serves as a guidebook. In the course of puzzling away at the subject of Velázquez one comes on serendipitous fragments in this first great novel that blend the real and the dreamlike. Here are metamorphoses, such as the transformation of the barber’s brass washbasin into the golden helmet of Manbrino. Here are lances aplenty, used against many enemies, real and imaginary, and occasionally even against Quixote’s now and then stalwart squire Sancho Panza. On one occasion, when the squire appears to belittle Dulcinea’s peerless beauty, Sancho is hit by Don Quixote with two blows of his lance.
A good deal of scene shifting goes on in Cervantes’s book. We also find the Spain where purity of blood comes foremost in a man’s estimation of other men and himself, as in Sancho’s claim to have a soul covered “four fingers thick with good Old Christian fat”—in other words, with pork fat and without any taint of Jewish or Moorish blood, which was considered to be black blood. (Cervantes would have felt this closely, since he is reckoned now by several scholars to have come from a converso background.) It was a Spain, moreover, where the ambition for higher rank was common. The desire to be considered of high status was such that Cervantes’s translator into English, P. A. Motteux (born in France), noted in a wry footnote circa 1700–1703 that “In Spain all the gentry are call’d Noble.” This was also the case in England. Shakespeare ensured that his father was granted the right to a coat of arms by the College of Heralds in 1596, so that he, his son William, could be called “gentleman.” In Spain the court was a destination devoutly wished for, though it helped to have achieved fame in other places first, and Don Quixote recognized that not all knights could be courtiers, nor all courtiers knights-errant. But he believed it was a world in which the son of the meanest water-carrier could rise “to the very Top of human Greatness.”
Velázquez (as outlined earlier) seems to have been brought up with a sense that he was born under a high star. Palomino asserted that the artist’s origins were noble on both his father’s and his mother’s sides, “although his circumstances were modest.… From his earliest years [he] showed signs of his good disposition and of the good blood which flowed in his veins.” The little preposition “de” in his full name, de Silva, appeared to suggest noble ancestry—though many conversos, burying their identities, took surnames including places; a Portuguese village called Silva lies north of Oporto, just across the border from Galicia. Did Velázquez grow up with the impression that he was the scion of an ancient Portuguese house, although one whose family pedigree had dwindled in recent times? This conviction, this sense of aristocratic connections, making almost for an aura, went on surrounding him, buoying up his name well into the twentieth century. Palomino’s assertions were followed by Carl Justi and many biographers, and amplified by the twentieth-century Spanish philosopher and historian José Ortega y Gasset, who felt “the principal motivating force in Velázquez’s life was the desire to be a nobleman.” Ortega wrote that Velázquez’s family had believed it could trace its roots back to legendary times as far as Aeneas Silvia, “king of Alba Longa.” Taking Velázquez at his own word, Ortega saw him as a man with noble qualities, “a genius in the matter of disdain.” He came “of a noble family which had emigrated and become impoverished, and in which moreover the preoccupation with their lineage must have been obsessive.… In the initial and deepest layer of his soul, Velázquez found this commandment: ‘You must be a nobleman.’” Just how this supposedly aloof aristocrat could become a working painter, who was paid for his skills, yet who later claimed that he didn’t really practice a craft, would become a matter of dispute not long after he had put paint to canvas in Las Meninas. The facts of his ancestry continued to be swallowed in the fog of the artist’s upwardly mobile aspirations and even now arouse scholarly argument.
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I FOLLOW HERE not Palomino or Ortega but two living historians, the Spaniard Julian Gallego and Kevin Ingram, an American professor of Spanish history in Madrid, who have both delved deeply into Velázquez’s actual origins. According to Ingram, in an article for the Boletín del Prado in 1999, the painter’s family had its roots in trade. Velázquez’s grandparents most likely came into Spain from Portugal in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. His paternal grandfather was probably one Diego Rodríguez, of Portuguese origin, who was a tailor in Seville in the last part of the 1590s. Velázquez’s mother Jerónima Velázquez was the daughter of a hos
e and trouser maker, Juan Velázquez Moreno; he and his wife, Juana Mexia, both died of the bubonic plague that struck Seville in 1599, about the time of Velázquez’s birth. Velázquez’s father Juan Rodríguez de Silva seems to have been a notary who worked for a church tribunal that dealt with the provisions of wills. The garment-business connection is germane to our inquiries—and to attempts made to distort or camouflage Velázquez’s true origins—because many of the immigrants to Spain from Portugal in the late sixteenth century were converted Jews fleeing a revitalized Inquisition there for a country where the prosecution of Judaizers (Gallego’s term) was less rigorous. The Jews had been exiled by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, and at this point no one still professing to be Jewish was legally allowed to live in either Spain or Portugal. Ingram points out that “two of the most popular surnames adopted by Portuguese conversos were Silva and Rodríguez.” In Don Quixote one of Cervantes’s characters says apologetically, “I’m sorry but I’m a tailor,” a remark that would lead his audience immediately to suspect him of being wholly or partly Jewish. Another historian, Luis Mendez Rodríguez, has demonstrated that many of Velázquez’s Sevillian relatives or connections worked in trades or occupations common to conversos. The profession of notary was also often practiced by Jews and conversos. From this it is easy to declare, as Ingram does, that “Velázquez’s Portuguese roots may have been Jewish ones.”
Given the Spanish desire for “pure blood,” even suspicions on this score would have been incendiary. Problems in regard to Jewish ancestry would have been especially awkward when it came to the painter’s aspirations to knighthood, qualifications for which included clean blood, good blood. Pacheco had observed Velázquez’s ambitions in this respect. Velázquez had mentioned to his father-in-law in 1632 the story of how the king of France had heard that the Mannerist history painter Giuseppe d’Arpino was unhappy at being in a low order of knights and gave him much pleasure by appointing him to an order of greater prestige. At Philip’s court word had spread of Velázquez’s hopes. As noted, a newsletter in Madrid reported in July 1636 that he “was aspiring to become one day Gentleman of the Bedchamber and be knighted, following the example of Titian.” Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X, painted in August 1650, was possibly intended to facilitate his ascent to knighthood. The pope not only gave Velázquez a gold medal and chain but his support for his chivalric ambitions because of the artist’s “extraordinary” skill. Toward the end of that year Cardinal Panciroli sent a letter to the papal nuncio in Madrid giving the Vatican’s backing to the artist’s application for entrance to one of the Spanish military orders. But these things could take time, particularly in Philip’s court, where even favorites had vocal and envious enemies; it wasn’t until 1658 that the process of promoting Velázquez got properly under way. During Holy Week of that year, Palomino tells us, the king offered Velázquez his choice of membership in any of the three military orders: Calatrava, Santiago, or Alcantara. Velázquez preferred Santiago, Saint James of Compostela, whose name featured in the battle cry of the Spanish army and was his own patron saint—Diego being a form of Jago, for which the English is James. The order had been founded in 1165. Its knights promised to assist the poor, defend those making pilgrimages, and oppose those trying to invade Spain.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 22