The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  We know, for instance, that he had two daughters in his early twenties, Ignacia and Francisca. Death certificates show that both girls died before their father—one as a child, the other as an adult—so that it is possible to imagine the agonizing grief, or the guilt, or the constant sorrow; but there is no evidence of how their deaths affected him (unless, perhaps, you look into his paintings). We know that a third child was born in Rome, when he was fifty-one, a son named Antonio. But Velázquez had already returned to Spain, and of this infant and his mother not another thing is heard. We know where he lived in the Alcázar at various times (East Wing, then West Wing, then in a two-floor apartment) because the palace records are meticulous, if sporadic; how much he was paid—or not paid—for specific offices and duties; which books were in the studio at his death—Herodotus, Pliny, Aristotle and Descartes, works of history, geometry, poetry and astronomy—perhaps revealing at least something of his intellectual interests, unless one considers that they were amassed during his early days with Pacheco. We know in fine-grained detail all about Velázquez’s administrative roles, the taxes he owed, the pictures he purchased for Philip’s collection, the Turkey carpets he possessed (or was given by the king, or bought as gifts for his wife: who knows?); and one of these exemplary scholars has even managed to unearth a literary fragment from Velázquez’s wedding that promised to release some spirit of the occasion. Written by another of Pacheco’s friends, this dry skit plays on the name of one of Seville’s patron saints (Diego). It is typical that it should offer a tiny background detail—a punning speech at a wedding—while giving us nothing whatsoever of the bridegroom.

  Velázquez was born in the high summer of European painting. He was alive at the same time as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens and Poussin, all of whom were famous abroad in their own lifetime, as Velázquez was not, and about all of whom we know something comparatively intimate: Caravaggio’s violent crimes; Rembrandt’s bankruptcy, sorrow and destitution. Poussin’s thoughts about art and life are conveyed in many personal letters. Rubens’s full life is so abundantly documented that we even know what he thought of Philip IV (hesitant, underconfident, too easily led by his politicians) and of the young Velázquez (modest).

  But Velázquez seems sunk in mystery still. It is unusually difficult to work out when his pictures were painted because they appear in job-lot payments in the court archives; they have no titles or inscriptions, and he rarely dated them. We don’t truly know how many he made. He left no letters concerning his works and seems to have said nothing, or at least nothing that was ever recorded, about them. There are no personal writings and we scarcely even have a signature to scrutinize, in the hope of finding something expressive in its movement or shape.

  It is clear that Velázquez had friendships with writers, sculptors and palace colleagues. At least three assistants were working with him at different stages: the Moorish slave Juan de Pareja, who stayed with him for years after he was given his freedom; the painters Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, who in turn became his son-in-law, and Juan de Alfaro, who made a most poignant drawing of the master on his deathbed and offered his recollections to Palomino. Velázquez made connections everywhere he went with fellow painters, and he never forgot a friend: the visual proof appears in the course of a lifetime’s portraits. Yet among these friends, and at court, there is no sense of the living man. Nobody leaves a record of their conversations with Velázquez; scarcely anyone mentions meeting him socially, or indeed his presence at royal occasions. It has become a cliché to compare his art with that of Shakespeare, but he is like the Bard in just this respect: a fine mystery, in the words of Charles Dickens. The sense of him is of a man in the corner of the gathering, watching and observing, saying nothing although he understands all.

  But of course we do have deep knowledge of Velázquez as a man, of which we can be certain, what is more, and this is what his paintings give. We know where he went, who he met, how he felt, what he saw with his own eyes—we even have the revelation of how he wished to be seen and known, within and without, in Las Meninas—because the pictures show it. We have what Snare never had, the chance to know Velázquez through his work.

  • • •

  In one sense, our understanding has advanced very little since Snare’s day in terms of hard facts. Those early biographies, particularly that of Palomino, have never been exceeded and they contain all the scant anecdotes that give us a sense of high Spanish pride. Velázquez must have hoped for a wider audience than the shuttered Alcázar or the gloomy Escorial outside Madrid, which was his only other home, for Palomino tells us that he went so far as to display some of his paintings in public. The equestrian portrait of Philip was set up outdoors in the open air by the Calle Mayor, buzzing epicenter of Madrid, where the citizens came to stare in reported amazement. Juan de Pareja carried his own magnificent portrait by Velázquez through the streets of the Eternal City so that the Romans could compare the reality with the painted illusion. The devastating portrait of Pope Innocent X, also painted around 1650, was exhibited under the porch of the Pantheon.

  Artists were his best judges, never courtiers. When the equestrian portrait of Philip was presented at court in 1623 and actually censured “for being done against the rules of art but with such contradictory judgments that it was impossible to reconcile them, Velázquez, annoyed, wiped out the greater part of his painting.” Not in compliant acquiescence, but quite the reverse: to show that the same power that created this world could also destroy it.

  On the canvas his superb reply was painted: “Didacus Velázquius, Pictor Regis, Expinxit”—Diego Velázquez, Painter to the King, Unpainted This.

  The picture, with its deleted horse, has itself now vanished—along with that first likeness of the king and the legendary portrait of the king’s chaplain, Fonseca.

  If his way of painting remains extraordinarily elusive—it was frequently described as a miracle in his day—the paintings give us so much of the man. We are able to see from them that Velázquez never copied anyone else, never struggled against aesthetic influence, always went his own way. Everything he did was original, and in every genre. His landscapes are unprecedented; his still lifes almost sacramental; his fables are real and human. He invented a new kind of pictorial space and a new kind of picture in which consciousness flows in both directions. His portraits are not just the living, breathing likeness, but the seeing, feeling being in the very moment of life and thought. Nobody has ever surpassed his way of making pictures that seem to represent the experience—the immediacy—of seeing in themselves. He is the taciturn revolutionary among them all.

  • • •

  Perhaps Velázquez had some deep sense of his own dramatic journey from provincial still-life painter to Pictor Regis. One small but crucial fact reveals a profound attachment to the painting that brought him from Seville to Madrid, which was effectively the origin of everything that followed: the old man selling water in Seville.

  The picture shows a working man with a lifetime’s experience, wizened and poor in his gaping garments, but with his sorrowful dignity intact. The boy (that same boy) lowers his gaze alongside, taking the water with respect; without this man, he might have been thirsty; without water who can survive? Their hands meet, holding this cheap but infinitely precious substance. Velázquez takes the most banal of transactions and gives it the significance of a parable.

  The glass is an inordinately refined object containing a floating fig, perhaps there to flavor the water, but still a tremendously difficult illusion to paint. The immense terracotta jug, irregular in shape and discolored by misfiring, changes color and texture as a trickle of water leaves its trace down the surface. Velázquez was not twenty when he painted this scene, and for all the many interpretations that have been put upon it—an allegory of age, prudence or Christian charity, a scene from a picaresque novel with the old man as a comedy beggar, a portrait of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who was thought to have slept in a huge ceramic jug—it mu
st at least be said to show a young artist selecting objects in order to display his ability to overcome the exceptional challenge of painting them. The glass is like the frying eggs. This mastery goes with the mysterious and somber atmosphere of the picture: it dazzles in the same degree that it puzzles.

  As for the idea that the waterseller—so stoic, so dignified, deeply respected by the painter as well as by the boy—was some low comic beggar, one wonders whether that commentator was looking at the same work of art.

  When Fonseca died in 1627, Velázquez wrote an inventory of his art collection in which he gave the highest price to The Waterseller, and then he promptly bought it back. The chaplain’s widow benefited, no doubt, but so did Velázquez. This early painting mattered so much to him that he never let it go again; this is what we know. He kept it with him until the end of his life.

  4

  Minster Street

  READING IN 1845 was a close-knit town and John Snare was right at its heart. His business was at the very point where the main roads converged—King Street, Gun Street, Yield Hall Lane and Cheapside, redolent of Shakespeare’s London—in a little nexus of cobbles and diamond-pane shop fronts. The streets were narrow and the lives tightly interwoven; nobody moved far from home. Snare’s parents lived in the next street, where his sister married a grocer, and his brother ran the hardware business five doors up at number 21. His bookshop was opposite Simonds Bank and hard by the George Hotel, the market and the stables where the stagecoaches changed horses and many travelers came to buy the papers, which Snare sold, with their dense columns of local news, moral urging and gossip. There can hardly have been a citizen of the town who did not pass through his shop at some stage to buy stationery or books, to have their funeral cards and wedding invitations rolled through the presses, or just to get paper and string. People often dropped in, it was said, for the conversation. At Snare’s you could see the latest prints, hear the latest news.

  Yet the portrait of Prince Charles entered this tight little world silently, to begin with. Snare somehow managed to keep it secret and out of sight in the back room, as he struggled to grasp precisely what he had bought. Although the bookseller spent his hard-won leisure looking at art wherever he could, all the knowledge in the world couldn’t begin to help unless he could actually see what he was looking at.

  All old pictures, and even quite young ones, are affected by the universal dirt of ages: log fires, tobacco smoke, the human sneeze, the slightest breath, oxidization, pollution, copious use of bitumen in the priming that eventually drags them into blackness, excessive use of varnish that turns the surface bleary and yellow. Paintings fade, colors change, blue dwindles to grey, green blanches to white, leaving curious blanks on the canvas. Red underdrawing starts to show through, taking over the scene; blue skies become overcast. For a painting to show no signs of age or any other form of degradation over time would be quite abnormal. Snare had bought his portrait in “country-house condition,” as it is picturesquely known—that is to say, neither cleaned nor restored; even today auctioneers may not tamper very much with a picture in this state in case it removes some of the mystery and allure. In fact he had hit upon the most expedient of cleaning agents when he dragged his wet finger across the canvas, creating a short-lived window of transparent brilliance before the spittle dried. But in hindsight he was appalled to have done so, considering the fragility of the surface. Canvas reacts to pressure, quivering and bouncing ever so slightly like the skin of a drum, and if the paint is as thin and fine as a Velázquez, the warp and weft may be palpable beneath one’s fingertips, an irresistible reminder that the image is transmitted on and through a piece of fabric and is as vulnerable as the material itself.

  Of course we are not supposed to touch paintings anymore. They have one barrier in the glass that protects them, and another in the alarm system that separates them from us in the gallery. Even quite young children know that they are not allowed to step over the enticing toy fences that run at shin height around the world’s museums. The impulse to touch a picture is never mentioned, as if it did not exist, even though a painting may carry the movements of the brush as part of its content, and viewers may imagine tracing that motion with their own fingers in turn, fellow-traveling through the image.

  There are passages of such mystery in Velázquez’s paintings that one wonders how he could know exactly where to place those dots, dashes, flicks and spatters of paint so that they represent the sadness in an eye or the dazzle of sunlight on a silk dress; how he could catch the exact moment when heat turns to condensation on a glass of cool water. His brushstrokes are at times so sparse they can be counted, and presumably felt, one by one, giving an intimate sense of his hand at work.

  One longs to run a finger over these marks, to read them like Braille in an effort to understand how he could invent such a miraculously persuasive language of painting. If even the smallest of specks were dislodged, it might alter precisely what was written there, as with few other painters. Take away a dot and the gold brocade no longer glints; remove even a scintilla of eyelash and a sitter’s whole expression changes. Every pinprick of pigment counts.

  Snare had not only touched the picture surface, he had dabbed it with turpentine, which is good for cleaning varnish, but can take the paint away with it. This was a mistake never to be repeated. Instead he tried muslin dampened with water and more of the portrait became visible.

  There was the familiar face of Charles as a young prince, not yet a king, with his long pale face and silky brown hair; there was the fledgling Spanish beard he first acquired in Madrid. That came as a relief, for at least it confirmed that the picture could not have been painted before Charles went to Spain, when he did not have a beard (though it did not of course prove that Velázquez was the painter). The prince was wearing armor and holding a baton; in the background was some kind of misty battle scene viewed in miniature as if through an aperture, window or frame. Snare proceeded with the utmost caution, inching over the dirt-blackened canvas on the brink between hope and despair in case he found anything anomalous. But so far nothing ran against him. There were the greys, blacks and silvers that belonged to Velázquez’s portraits, the tones blended wet-on-wet that seem to glow; the airy transitions, the characteristic lucidity and restraint praised by Palomino. The prince materialized before him, and Snare—like so many viewers before and since—was mystified by the illusion. “The spectator,” he wrote, “does not see how it has been done.”

  And yet he did not confide his hopes to anyone but Isabella. The Velázquez was still a Van Dyck.

  • • •

  When we look at a picture we see its surface: that may seem a truth too obvious to mention; yet it is not quite the only truth today. Snare could see nothing more than the uppermost paint, whereas we can also see the ghosts below, witness the artist’s changes, corrections and earlier versions, even the fundamental structures that exist within paintings like the skeletons inside our bodies, those pale surrogates that live within us all. And we can see them with the aid of exactly the same technology, the microscopes and X-rays that can give an image of the inner life of the corpus. In the case of Velázquez, modern X-rays have turned out to be vital—extraordinarily so—to the identification and understanding of his pictures. We know from X-rays that the artist was originally leaning towards the canvas in Las Meninas, but then repainted his own image so that he now faces the world, and his king, altering the meaning of the picture. We know from X-rays that he returned to portraits that had been hanging on the palace walls for years to improve them, shifting a foot, removing a hat, adjusting an expression or pose as if he had been scrutinizing his own works with a critical eye every time he passed in the corridor. We know that he painted over portraits, and even that other artists may have done so, too. In 2013 X-rays revealed the spectral likeness of one dark-eyed Spanish gentleman painted by Velázquez that had been hidden for almost four centuries beneath another by Rubens, from his eight-month visit to Spain in 1628.


  We also know that there would come a time when Velázquez’s technique was so perfect that there was no need of a first draft, there were no false starts or adjustments. The paint is so fine it arrives on the canvas like a veil. In such cases the X-rays give nothing away, reveal nothing whatsoever beneath the surface. The magic is all before your eyes.

  By the early weeks of 1846 Snare had learned enough to realize that the mystery of Velázquez’s art could be disturbed by too much cleaning, so he took the picture to a London restorer, who was just as wary of troubling the surface any further and would only agree to line the back with a second canvas for support. But this man did rather more for Snare than he could have imagined. When the bill arrived in Reading, it came with a letter of unqualified praise. “Sir, Your Charles is a Superb Portrait, the finest I have ever seen. In my opinion, out of the Great Collections, it is the Most Important Picture of the Man.”

  Snare was euphoric to receive this endorsement from an expert—his very first expert—though slightly dashed to notice that the portrait was itemized as a Van Dyck on the bill. Still, he comforted himself with the thought that the Flemish painter was so well known as Charles’s royal image maker that the king’s face probably existed in the popular imagination entirely as a Van Dyck rather than a Velázquez, of whom so little was known. This was the first proof positive for Snare’s case.

  The restorer closed with an emphatic warning: “I must by all means advise you not to let it slip through your fingers.” John Snare took heed.