That he was a learned man, an intellectual for that time if not a savant, was shown in his library. One hundred and fifty-four books displayed wide interests in various disciplines. Palomino said that Velázquez sought “the Proportions of the human body in Albrecht Dürer, anatomy in Andreas Daniele Barbaro, geometry in Euclid, arithmetic in Moya, architecture in Vitruvius and Vignola, as well as in other authors from all of whom he skillfully selected with the diligence of a bee all that was most useful.” Velázquez owned volumes on art and aesthetics by Vasari, Leonardo, and Gracián, and collections of poetry by Góngora and Quevedo, both poets whom he had painted. Although no mention was made of any modern fiction—no Cervantes or Lope de Vega—Petrarch and Ariosto were on his shelves, together of course with Ovid, in both Spanish and Italian. He also had a number of books dealing with perspective and optical theory.
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VELÁZQUEZ LEFT ABOUT 125 paintings; there is scholarly dispute about the attribution to him of several and about the amount of work he put into paintings that seem to be largely studio productions by his assistants. There are no contracts between the artist and those who commissioned his pictures. The numbers of the oeuvre rose relatively high in the mid-nineteenth century, peaking at 274 with the estimate of Charles Curtis in 1883, dropping to 83 with that of Aureliano de Beruete in 1898, and rising again to 130 with Juan Antonio Gaya Nuno in 1953. López Rey and Stratton Pruitt (most recently) agree on “about 125.” Signed paintings are rare. His earliest dated painting is the Old Woman Cooking Eggs of 1618, and in the following two years are the Adoration of the Magi dated 1619, and the Sister Jerónima de la Fuente, signed and dated in 1620. Once in a while he inscribed himself “Velázquez” and very occasionally “Diego Velázquez” or “Diego de Silva Velázquez”—as, for example, on the Philip IV in Brown and Silver and the Innocent X, where the signature is fitted onto a sheet of paper or letter he has painted as part of the picture. Velázquez as we’ve seen was not an artist who painted as if there were no tomorrow; nor was he what the French call a flaneur. He knew mañana eventually comes. His court duties kept him busy, collecting, hanging, redecorating, remodeling, and masterminding ceremonies such as the Isle of Pheasants wedding. He had to cope with his notorious flema. In any event the numbers of paintings completed per year started fairly high but tailed off rapidly as the years passed. There were few drawings and no prints to be found—no etchings or engravings. Compared to many European artists—your average Dutch artist, for instance, who needed to paint at least one and preferably two paintings a week to make a living—his output was puny. This was so, Beruete thought, “because Velázquez never had an independent life.” From entering the court at the age of twenty-three, he was always more of a servant of the king than a painter; the exercise of his household duties hindered him in the exercise of his art; and in the last eight years of his life “the artist disappeared almost entirely in the official.” He didn’t seem to mind.
XVI. PENULTIMATA
There are many loose ends in Velázquez’s story and not all of them can be neatly knotted. For instance, what happened to Juan de Pareja, once his slave? Was he at his former master’s funeral? He was clearly not sent off the way Rozinante was by Don Quixote, with a brisk clap on the posterior and the parting words, “He that has lost his freedom gives thee thine.” After Pareja’s emancipation in 1654, Velázquez’s assistant went on assisting and after Velázquez’s death he went on painting; we know of religious works by Pareja such as The Calling of St. Matthew, which is in the Prado, and The Baptism of Christ, but these didn’t show much influence of Velázquez, despite the long years of their attachment. After the death of Velázquez, Pareja stayed on with the family of Juan Bautista del Mazo, who as we’ve seen took over his father-in-law’s job as painter to the king. With the license allowed to writers of fiction Elizabeth Burton de Trevino in 1965 wrote an affecting young people’s novel I, Juan de Pareja, which has Velázquez’s wife, Juana, dying before her husband and Philip IV making Velázquez a knight of Santiago after the artist’s death. This gave the king himself the chance with Pareja’s help to paint a posthumous red cross on the breast of the painter who a few years earlier had been seen at work on the giant canvas in Las Meninas. The portrait Velázquez had painted of Juan de Pareja in Rome, with Pareja as his assistant, was sold out of the Earl of Radnor’s collection in 1971 and bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New York for a then record price of $5,544,000. Palomino, a later court painter, did his best to flesh out the Velázquez life in 1724 in the third volume of his El Museo Pictorico y Escala Optica, in which he listed all the offices and honors Velázquez had received. Palomino had to hand the manuscript in which Velázquez’s assistant Juan de Alfaro (who was seventeen when Velázquez died) had jotted down notes about the master. As for del Mazo, he remarried after Francisca’s death but went on painting in his late father-in-law’s style; many pictures once attributed to Velázquez are now credited to del Mazo.
Velázquez’s granddaughter Inés remarried in Madrid in 1661 and the names of four other of his and Juana Pacheco’s grandchildren are recorded: Gaspar, Baltasar, Teresa, and Melchor. One further unresolved aspect of things is what happened to Velázquez’s natural son Antonio. Not long after the painter’s death his friend and executor Gaspar de Fuensalida declared that Velázquez had made not two but three journeys to Italy. Fuensalida ought to have known the facts of this if anyone did, though the trip has never been substantiated. It might have been something wished for by Velázquez—going to see his son and his son’s mother again—rather than something he actually accomplished. He may well have wanted to drink in again Italian air, Italian painting. He may have wanted to be seduced again. Throughout his career in the years after Seville, Velázquez borrowed ideas and themes from Italian artists and in particular quoted Titian and Tintoretto. However, as Jonathan Brown has observed, his “response to Italian art is circumspect.” Unlike Rubens and Poussin, who threw themselves wholeheartedly into Italian art, “Velázquez kept his distance.”
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FOR A CENTURY or so thereafter others kept their distance from him. They were helped to do so by the fact that Spain and its empire had lost its clout; Spain was isolated from the rest of Europe and considered as at best a romantic, backward land of guitars and gypsies. Voltaire lumped it with the wilder parts of Africa and didn’t want to know it any better. Most Europeans regarded Spain as dark and half dead, buried in royal bureaucracy and stifled by a Church that had lacked the invigorating reforming impulse of Protestantism. The long shadow of the Inquisition continued to fall over the Catholic faith in the eyes of most foreigners and many Spaniards, who found the Church’s practices hatefully oppressive. As for Velázquez, he, too, seemed to have gone into hiding. No prints of his works were published until Goya made an etching after Las Meninas, circa 1778. The fact that most of Velázquez’s works had been created for the king and that few were in private collections meant that no visible market for his paintings existed. They were sequestered in royal palaces and rarely seen publicly, except by those who as visitors were given access to the Escorial. The fire in the Alcázar of 1734 that destroyed many of the rooms Velázquez had designed and arranged, and many of the treasures he had collected to put in them, caused the loss of a number of paintings. Among them were his Expulsion of the Moriscos and three of the four mythological pictures he had painted for the Salon de los Espejos. But he was never lost, in the way some master painters have been—one thinks once again of Vermeer, whose identity was hidden in a muddled pack of other Dutch masters, and required rediscovery and disentanglement in the nineteenth century. In the years after Velázquez’s death several artists who came to Madrid paid homage to the painter originally from Seville. Luca Giordano, a Neapolitan invited to paint at the court for King Carlos II, as we’ve seen expressed his fervent admiration for Las Meninas as the theology of painting, and painted a Homage to Velázquez (London: National Gallery), which was not very Velázquez-like. Apart from del Maz
o there were (as Brown has noted) no followers, no “school of Velázquez.” However, there was certainly an increasing awareness of him. Palomino’s book in 1724 brought Velázquez to the attention of many, not just in Spain; a shortened English translation came out in 1739. In this period a copy of the Innocent X was brought to London for the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole and was sent on to the family seat of Houghton Hall in Norfolk. The portrait of Juan de Pareja, which also reached Britain, was purchased in 1788 by the Earl of Radnor. As time passed, word of mouth generated more and more interest in Velázquez among the English nobility and grand tour upper classes—the Earl of Carlisle, for example, who bought a copy of Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja and (thinking it was by Correggio) Velázquez’s Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf, which is now in Boston.
It was not all admiration. Anton Mengs, a neoclassical German artist and writer on art who became court painter to Charles III, wasn’t totally enraptured by Velázquez when Mengs first came to Madrid in 1761, although he gave Velázquez’s naturalism full marks, just as Pacheco had done early on. Mengs saw how Velázquez had moved on from the realism of The Waterseller to a more loosely painted style in The Spinners, where, he wrote, “it seemed the hand played no role in the execution.” A pupil of Mengs, Francisco Bayeu, had taught and become the brother-in-law of Francisco Goya (1746–1828). In 1778, when he was thirty-two, Goya had been made a painter to the king and had the job of making engravings after works in the royal collections. He was impressed by Velázquez’s painting, not least his use of blacks and grays and his ability to create likenesses with a small number of powerful brushstrokes. Goya went on to paint a royal group portrait, Charles IV and His Family (Prado, 1800–1801), in which the painter stands in a Las Meninas–like shadow at his easel to one side of the family members, who are crammed, spotlit, at what seems to be the front of a stage. Goya’s son said later that his father above all studied and looked at nature, which he declared to be his mistress (as Constable also would), but “he looked with veneration at Velázquez and Rembrandt.” However, unlike Velázquez, Goya moved in his paintings from light to dark; his last paintings were as morbidly black as can be. There was moreover little of the deferential courtier about Goya. He kept no distance from the subjects of his pictures. The flema wasn’t one of his obvious characteristics.
The “prime version”—Xavier Bray’s term—of the Juan de Pareja arrived in England in the last decades of the eighteenth century with the help of its then owner, Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy in Naples. In 1801 Sir William was short of cash and asked John Christie to auction it; the sale price was £42. Another version had been bought by the fourth Earl of Carlisle on one of his two Italian tours and it ended up in the great house of Castle Howard in Yorkshire until sold to pay for reroofing in 1972. By the late eighteenth century Velázquez’s coolness was being warmed to by many British visitors. The connoiseur and collector William Beckford called Joseph’s Blood-stained Coat Brought to Jacob, then in the Escorial, “the loftiest proof in existence of the extraordinary powers of Velázquez.” The diarist Henry Swinburne said the Olivares on horseback was “the best portrait I ever beheld.” He didn’t know which to admire most, “the chiaroscuro, the life and spirit of the rider, or the natural position and fire of the horse.” In the late 1770s the British Ambassador to Spain, Lord Grantham, and his brother Frederick paid a German painter Wenceslaus Pohl to make small copies of the Velázquezes in the Spanish royal collection. Grantham also bought five sets of the etchings after Velázquez that Goya made in 1778 and had them sent to London, one set being for Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the newly founded Royal Academy. Sir Joshua was said to have copied only two portraits in his life, one being Velázquez’s Innocent X. Reynolds declared, “What we are all attempting to do with great labour, Velázquez does all at once.” (However, as Mengs had observed, spontaneity takes much practice.) Reynolds’s pupil James Northcote looked at a Velázquez portrait and said that “it seemed done while the colours were yet wet; everything was touched in as it were, by a wish; there was such a power that it thrilled through your whole frame, and you felt as if you could take up the brush and do anything.”
The disasters of war, documented by Goya, were terrible for Spain and Spanish paintings but not completely disastrous for the Velázquez works in the country. The Peninsula War, the Spanish War of Independence (1808–13), and French armies marauding through Spain forced openings in the somewhat sealed envelope of that nation and brought its art, including Velázquez, into a gunsmoke-clouded daylight. Although Spain had established restrictions on the export of paintings in 1779, the continuous conflict loosened its grip. Some Velázquez paintings were taken as trophies or changed hands either under duress or in trade. The French Marshal Soult was among the Napoleonic soldiers who early on gathered up Spanish art for France. The British landscape painter George Augustus Wallis spent five years in Madrid from 1808 to 1813, acting as agent for a Scots art dealer named William Buchanan and acquiring pictures—among them The Toilet of Venus. Bartholomew Frere, the Briton sent to represent his country to the Spanish government, then sheltering in Seville, purchased two Velázquezes while there, Saint John the Evangelist and The Immaculate Conception, and took them home. An army officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Packe, acquired the rather drab and disunited Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in Seville, where it had apparently graced the house of the Duke of Alcalá. An Old Woman Cooking Eggs seems to have come to England about the same time and was sold in London in May 1813. Goya like many Spaniards welcomed into his country Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, who had been made King of Naples in 1806 but was thought to be a relative liberal. Goya worked for Joseph but hated the French troops and abhorred the atrocities they committed.
Goya also painted the British army commander the Duke of Wellington, who fought Joseph’s army at the Battle of Vitoria, in the Basque country, in 1813, and achieved a valuable victory. The value lay not only in Wellington’s success in practically freeing Spain from French domination, but in the booty captured. At the end of the all-day battle, the French abandoned 143 cannons, great stores of ammunition, three thousand wagons and carriages, fine wines, battle standards, and many chests containing money and treasure—more than a million pounds in sterling and the Bourbon crown jewels. There were also hundreds of horses and mules, pet monkeys and parrots, and numerous women, some “fancy,” some less so: it was “un bordel ambulant,” as one female who was there described it. But the real treasure from our point of view was found in one carriage. The king and his immediate entourage had fled. In the king’s carriage were a large number of state papers, love letters to the king from his mistresses, and his silver chamber pot. (This last trophy, according to Wellington’s biographer Christopher Hibbert, was, in 1997, still owned by the King’s Royal Hussars, the regiment of the officer who captured Joseph’s carriage, and was used in the regimental mess for champagne toasts on officers’ guest nights.) Picking over these trophies slowed down the pursuit of the French by the Allied army of British, Spanish, and Portuguese. But fortunately recognized at once as priceless were many rolled-up canvases. Among them were a Correggio Gethsemane and five paintings by Velázquez, The Waterseller, Two Young Men at Table, Portrait of a Man (José Nieto), Mars at Rest, and an Innocent X. The duke gave these pictures his protection and ensured that crucial items of “Joseph’s Baggage” got safely to London rather than Paris. (Two Young Men at Table and The Waterseller were both attributed to Caravaggio when first in London, Italian rather than Spanish painters having more réclame at that point and Caravaggio in particular having a splashier reputation.) When he got back home in 1815, the Iron Duke generously offered to return the paintings to Ferdinand VII, who regained the Spanish throne. But though the offer of the Mars was accepted and the painting was sent back to the Alcázar, the duke was given the others as thanks for getting rid of the French. We find in the bottomless resources of Cervantes an account of the occasion in which the
Knight of the Wood tells Don Quixote, after their combat, that the Don’s spoils “must now attend the Triumphs of my Victory, which is the greater.” And furthermore, said the Knight of the Wood, “the Reputation of the Victor rises in Proportion to that of the Vanquish’d; and all the latter’s Laurels are transferr’d to me.” Despite similarities in words, this isn’t quite what Spinola said to Justin of Nassau at Breda.
Goya was a man for most seasons and went back to working for the Spanish court under the restored Ferdinand VII from 1814 to 1824. The new Prado Museum was opened by the king in 1819, with the public being let in finally to see the royal collections now housed there. The British artist Sir David Wilkie visited the Prado in 1827 and waxed enthusiastic about Velázquez as a new artistic power, a master whom “every true painter must in his heart admire” and one who clearly was a great influence on such British artists as Reynolds, Romney, Raeburn, Jackson, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. William Hazlitt, portrait painter and one of the most perceptive writers of the time, showed the impact of Velázquez in his striking 1804 portrait of the essayist Charles Lamb, dressed all in black save for an off-white golilla collar. Lamb’s pale face in the painting had an underlying olive tone, which made him look more like a native of Seville than of London. Hazlitt it was who wrote: “One is never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you know already, but what you have just discovered. In the former case, you translate feelings into words; in the latter, names into things. There is a continuous creation out of nothing going on. With every stroke of the brush, a new field of inquiry is laid open; new difficulties arise, and new triumphs are prepared over them.… The air-wave visions that hover on the edge of existence have a bodily presence given them on the canvas.” The air-wave visions! How this makes one think of Velázquez’s paintings—visions, in Northcote’s words to Hazlitt, touched in by a wish.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 25