In Lope de Vega’s play of 1606, Don Juan de Austria en Flandes, a Netherlander orders his daughter to be branded and sold as a slave because she has taken up with a Spanish soldier, but on the ground the collaboration went both ways—or even three ways: There was reluctance, under duress, or even actively helping out. Many Spaniards developed an affection for the Low Countries that outweighed their love of their homeland. Some officers of the Army of Flanders learned French and adopted Flemish customs and titles. Not a few Netherlanders learned Spanish. A small number of Spanish words came into common use in the southern provinces. The Dutch begin to celebrate Christmas on December 5, the feast of Saint Nicklas, when the good saint turns up to bring small presents to good children, accompanied by his young black sidekick, Zwarte Piet, a Morisco, before heading south to Spain. According to the historian Geoffrey Parker, speakers of Dutch and Flemish particularly adopted Spanish swearwords; terms that were much in use had to do with sex, violence, and deceit. Marriages often occurred across the divide. Less permanent relationships took a notorious toll: el mal galico, venereal disease, the French pox, consumed many, while others were brought low by el mal de corazón, a heart illness that was possibly a war-induced stress disorder or a fatal homesickness, like the nostalgie identified by British army surgeons as the reason many of their soldiers fighting the American rebels in the Revolutionary War pined away and died. The men of the Army of Flanders were generally much farther from home than their United Provinces opponents, and desertions from their ranks were more frequent, especially when they hadn’t received their pay for six months or more. But the distances to Lombardy or La Mancha made it a long hike back.
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HEADING SOUTH TO Seville, I paused in Madrid. The Prado, originally a natural sciences museum first opened up to the Hapsburg art collections in 1819, had gained a new wing at the rear stretching toward the Retiro park and the few remaining buildings of the Retiro palace. This wing housed an exhibition devoted to Velázquez’s “Fables,” thirty some paintings from various points of his career that had to do with mythology, classical legends, and religious subjects. The Rokeby Venus, here called The Venus with a Mirror, had been shipped from London for the occasion. I spent longer with the less familiar to me Mercury and Argus and The Fable of Arachne before climbing into the older parts of the Prado where Las Meninas and The Surrender of Breda were to be found. On the way, I looked at Brueghel’s Triumph of Death; it brought to mind several Brueghel works which provide premonitions of Velázquez: the bare trees in Hunters in the Snow rising like pikes in Las Lanzas; the Spanish pikes also to be seen, menacing, in The Massacre of the Innocents; and in the same painter’s Corn Harvest, the ground falling away from a foreground elevation to a distant plain, in very much the same way as the terrain depicted in Velázquez’s Breda.
In front of that painting I found myself losing certain peripheral areas of vision and planes of consciousness. Some of the surroundings became less perceptible; one’s focus narrowed and sharpened; the Breda was all that mattered. Footfalls, other viewers, people nearby who might or might not impede one’s view and concentration, all faded, and I was left insulated in a private gallery almost my own. One can look at some pictures many times and on each occasion notice different things. On this occasion I was aware that from the viewer’s standpoint, the foreground of the painting presented some crucial backs—the back of the Dutch soldier, for example, wearing a light brown coat and carrying a short pike with a orange pennon attached, while to that soldier’s right, beyond the genuflecting figure of Justin and the welcoming presence of Spinola, the viewer comes up against the gleaming chestnut brown rear-end of the massive warhorse from which the Spanish captain-general has dismounted. These backs cause us to focus more intently on the faces shown. Justin’s bearded profile looks scarcely that of a veteran of sixty-six but doesn’t catch the light in the way that Spinola’s even more elegantly bearded countenance does. Seeing the commanders again reminded me that here, at the heart of what was a public picture, Velázquez had put a private moment—one which made the original point that Justin’s and Spinola’s roles were reversible. The Spanish army’s senior officers formed up behind their general earned their rights of recognition and can be identified. As noted, they include Prince Wolfgang von Neuburg; Don Gonzalo de Córdoba; Count Salazar; Count Henry van den Bergh; and two Saxon princes. Carl Justi tells us that “the old man on the left” of the Spanish party “with both hands on a stick” is probably Albert Arenbergh, Baron of Balancon, commander of the Flemish cavalry. In armor, next to Arenbergh, might be Wolfgang von Neuburg. And behind him is possibly Don Carlos Coloma, “head of the infantry, who had risen from the ranks.” We have appreciated the painting’s epic force but this documentary quality gives it another dimension: as with the Iliad, in which the leading warriors have names.
Between the fawn-coated Dutch soldier and the huge horse a sort of porthole is created under Spinola’s right arm, an aperture partly occluded by the black iron key which Justin proffers. Through this window we have one of Velázquez’s split-screen images. A transient view is given of the surrendering Dutch garrison marching past. And over Spinola’s dramatically outstretched arm, in the larger gap between the standing Dutch soldiers and the commanders of the Army of Flanders in their attendent phalanx behind their general’s horse, in a space further delimited by the fence of Spanish lances on the right and smoke drifting skyward behind the shorter Dutch pikes and battle-axes on the left, we see out across the flooded Vucht polder to a high horizon and a sky with a few breaks in the clouds.
The foreground figures stand in pools of shadow. At least three of the score of more or less recognizable men meet one’s eye. The young Dutchman wearing a black hat, arquebus over his shoulder, seems curious to know what the viewer—or the artist who is sizing him up—intends. The bare-headed and bearded Spanish senior officer standing behind Spinola, a sash over his right shoulder, gives us a detached, thoughtful gaze; he obviously has a lot to think about. And on the far right, framed by the head and flank of the general’s horse and by a large checkered blue-and-white flag drooping toward him is a man, glimpsed at the last, who without much to go on we take for a civilian, wearing pale garments, head topped by a pale hat. He appears to be without weapons, a participant perhaps only in being brought on as a privileged spectator of the occasion. But he is someone seen before. The broad W-shaped mustache, the hint of beard on the chin, the mass of curly hair, and the complicit gaze of a man regarding himself in a mirror before putting brush to canvas—he is to be found in several self-portraits and working before the easel in Las Meninas. He is interested in what we think although he looks a trifle unsure of what we will make of him. Here he is staring into the eye of history, which he has aimed to focus on himself. Will the message he is now half-sending actually carry to us? How in the end will this pan out?
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IN SEVILLE I went searching for traces of Velázquez. As a person, he remains private, scarcely documented where his feelings and behavior are concerned. We are stuck with the one special fact that at any rate he was a painter—which is why we are interested in him—and there are his paintings to ponder and marvel at. Is it wrong, as some critics say it is, to take the works of an artist as autobiographical documents? Don’t they shed light on the artist who painted them? Now and then, as if just waking from a tantalizingly almost tangible dream, I’ve had the feeling that he was about to be revealed; a fully formed individual was on the point of announcing himself; he was going to let us know which was the real man, the title-seeking courtier or the painter whose works indicated such acute recognition of shammery. But then the mists thickened again around the nearly visible figure. Was he, like Don Quixote, in the thrall of an enchanter?
Seville helped. His hometown is south, inland south. Indeed, lacking the moderating influence of the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, it seems farther south than Málaga or Cádiz, despite its well-embanked river, the Guadalquivir, curving gently thro
ugh it with a way to go still before reaching the sea. This is a place that for five months of a year is blindingly bright. It is a city where you step out of doors and immediately seek shadow—which side of the street is it going to be preferable to walk on? It is a city where one feels the proximity less of Europe than of Africa, and one remembers the Moors. Much of its low-scale jumbled townscape suggests Paris before Baron Haussmann. The narrow, twisting streets form mazes; you don’t always come out where you expect to, and then you may have to look for the position of the dazzling sun to work out which way you are heading. The Moors were here from the early eighth century. Seville was recaptured by the army of King Ferdinand III of Castile in 1248 and the seven-hundred-year-long Reconquest of Spain was accomplished in 1492, the year Granada fell to the forces of Ferdinand and Isabella, “the Catholic monarchs,” and the year the navigator they were sponsoring on an optimistic westward voyage to the Orient found not what he was looking for but the West Indies. Certainly it was, for Spanish purposes, a New World. Cristoforo Colombo was, one recalls, like Ambrogio Spinola, one of the Spanish empire’s useful Genoese.
I began my Velázquez reconnaisance in the Alameda de Hércules, a long, empty avenue surfaced with sand-colored clay hoggin. A pair of columns rise at one end of the Alameda; on them used to stand statues of Hercules and Julius Caesar, the Greek god who was the mythical founder of Seville and the Roman general; now next to the columns is a modern statue of Manolo Caracol, a noted flamenco singer. Overlooking this spot Velázquez had had—courtesy of Juana Pacheco’s dowry—a couple of houses which he rented out before he headed for Madrid. It seemed in the sharp sunlight a surreal, de Chirico sort of space. From here I walked south into the labyrinth of the Santa Cruz district, once heavily Jewish, and got my bearings now and then in the twisting alleyways from the tower of the Giralda seen over the rooftops. I paused in the Plaza San Francisco outside the sixteenth-century Town Hall. Nearby were the law courts, the site of public executions, and of the prison in which Cervantes to his grief was locked up on two or three occasions (in 1592, 1597, and possibly 1602). Then I made my way to the Giralda, the magnetic pole of these parts.
Giralda means weather vane. A bronze figure of Faith turns in the light breeze at the summit of the tower, the former minaret, three hundred and twenty feet high, that is planted next to the remains of the old mosque and its courtyard full of orange trees. The adjacent fifteenth-century cathedral bulks large, overshadowing the Muslim relics; only Saint Peter’s in Rome and the later Saint Paul’s in London are larger European religious edifices. Within, immense columns rise to support great arches which spread the load of the vaulting, two hundred feet above the transept. In the south transept is Columbus’s tomb, an ornate nineteenth-century affair showing the coffin of the explorer being carried by four bronze pallbearers, the kings of León, Castile, Navarre, and Aragón. There isn’t much here to remind us of Velázquez’s father’s occupation, working on testamentary business for the cathedral chapter. One can stretch out a long hand to the past more readily in the gardens of the nearby Alcázar. Reached through a man-sized keyhole gateway, these have a sense of structured beauty laid down in the late twelfth century by Yacoub Al Mansur, the sultan who commissioned the Giralda. In the gardens, fountains plashed into stone basins. Orange blossom gave a sweet scent to the warm air. Not much is left of the Moorish Almohad Alcázar, but enough survives to give one an idea of how the following Christian monarchs were influenced by the palace’s carved stone, gilded iron, and intricate cedarwood decorations; these carried the fluid rhythms of Muslim artifice into the Iberian kingdoms of Charles V and Philip II—whose Sevillian palacio real the Alcázar became. Visiting this royal part of the city on childhood errands for his father, Velázquez may have been impressed by the calm shade and the birdsong. He may have realized early on that a working connection with a palace had advantages.
My return walk took me around the high walls of the bullring in the Plaza de Toros, close to the left bank of the Guadalquivir. Not far away in a restored friary, founded after the Reconquest, is the Seville Fine Arts Museum, with an airy cloister at its heart. There were no Velázquezes but among other things two Zurbarán Crucifixions, a splendid Ribera painting of Saint James the Apostle—Santiago!—with full beard and red cloak, and several Pacheco portraits that allowed one to see again that Velázquez’s parents had acted smartly when they moved young Diego away from Herrera’s mastership in 1611. Pacheco’s own work can seem wooden and programmatically pious, but the double portrait here of an elderly couple, himself and his wife, their heads touching the top of the canvas, was simply done and moving. From the museum it was eastward up the Calle Alfonso XII, a main shopping street that becomes the Calle Larana and then the Imagen before narrowing and taking a dogleg at a church that blocks its way. This was San Pedro. Dark inside, with the smell of incense lingering. A priest entered a confessional and awaited talkative sinners. This church is where Diego Velázquez de Silva was baptized on June 6, 1599, by the San Pedro curate Gregorio de Salazar, the infant’s godfather being Pablo de Ojeda. I went back into the daylight and crossed a rectangular square, the Plaza Cristo de Burgos, with a children’s playground in the middle but otherwise given over to parked cars.
Here I needed assistance. No one I’d yet asked in Seville could give me precise directions for finding Velázquez’s birthplace. I’d inquired in my hotel, not far from here, and the reply hadn’t been reassuring: “We used to have someone here who knew where it was.…” The city information office I’d visited had been of little use. “It’s somewhere around San Pedro, I think.…” One problem was that the street where his parents had lived in 1599 had changed its name; it was no longer Calle Gorgoja, a name no one now recognized, but Calle Padre Luis María Llop, a name that also aroused no sudden smiles of recognition. In the early seventeenth century the square, the Plaza Cristo de Burgos, had been the Plaza Buen Suceso. Velázquez’s 1906 biographer, Aureliano de Beruete, had found at the time no trace of the painter’s family’s house. I walked around the neighborhood, getting blank looks and shrugs in bars and shops in return for my question about the whereabouts of Velázquez’s birthplace; it might have helped if my enunciation had been more Spanish, with the “V” of Velázquez sounding correctly like a blurred mixture of “V” and “B.” But eventually my luck turned: in the Cristo de Burgos someone thought the Calle Padre Luis María Llop (also a Spang-lish mouthful) was “back that way”—pointing into the far right-hand corner of the plaza. In that direction I found a parked mover’s van. Several workmen were unloading wheeled trolleys and rolls of padded matting. I approached a man who was wearing a suit and carrying a clipboard, and asked my question. “Follow us,” he said. Their van was apparently too large to get any farther into the warren of small streets. We left the square and hastened down a street called Morería, whose name suggested that people of Moorish or Morisco origin had lived there. We turned off into what felt like a brief cul-de-sac, though it had no end in immediate sight. This was the Calle Padre Luis María Llop! Around a bend to the left we stopped outside number 4. Before it a member of the moving team was sitting on a trolley. A small plaque was to be seen in a recess of the wall below an upstairs window: “VELÁZQUEZ CASA NATAL.”
The front door was open. It wasn’t the perfect moment for an uninvited call but a woman at a desk inside seemed to think that with the movers arriving, things couldn’t get any worse. “Look around,” she said phlegmatically in Spanish. Today was the day her company, a firm of fashion designers, was moving out to new premises. Her phone rang and I made a quick tour of the ground floor, where the movers had begun to put stuff in plywood crates and cardboard boxes. The ceilings of the downstairs rooms had exposed beams, through which one could see the undersides of the floorboards of the rooms above; the beams rested on intricately carved wooden columns. The windows at the front were low and small, iron-barred outside. The sound of splashing water came from an open trough in an interior courtyard—a good place fo
r filling water jugs. The house extended to the rear in a series of rooms that seemed like former open patios, now roofed over—rooms which at the back had a dark, cavelike feeling, with small doorways that made me think of the serving hatches in Velázquez’s early split-screen pictures. If this arrangement had an effect on the future artist, it must have been in an almost in utero or ex utero fashion, just before or soon after birth, because his parents moved away from the Calle Gorgoja soon afterward, possibly because Velázquez’s maternal grandparents Juan Velázquez Moreno and Juana Mexia had died of plague in this house that year. A change of scene on health grounds was advisable. The family moved from the San Pedro to the San Vicente district, north of the Merced friary which is now the Fine Arts Museum, between the river and the Alameda de Hércules.
Next day I took a look at the Velázquez casa natal again. The front door was locked, the shutters shut. It felt as if Velázquez had gone away—to San Vicente; to Madrid and the court; to fame and glory; or simply returned to one’s dreams—and I would have to take any remaining questions to a higher plane, back to his paintings.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 28