• • •
Sebastián de Morra is a man of defiant intelligence, strikingly handsome and self-possessed (Plate E). He sends out such a questioning look as to root any viewer to the spot. There is that sense of mutual consciousness that is such an aspect of Velázquez’s revolutionary portraits, but in this case it is intensified by the personality of the sitter, who gives you a look of such compelling force it cuts straight through the centuries.
De Morra had a long career with the Spanish royal family, working first for Philip’s younger brother in Flanders, and then in Madrid as a tutor to Baltasar Carlos, teaching the boy about horses, weapons and the principles of war in preparation for the time when he would be king. Except that this day never came. The little boy who grows up in Velázquez’s art, from the tiny child on his charger to the blond teenager out hunting in the same forest-green clothes as Lezcano, vanishes quite suddenly from the paintings, carried off by smallpox at the age of sixteen. Philip IV was so traumatized that he no longer knew, he wrote, whether life was real or a raging dream.
Baltasar left a will, and his feelings for de Morra are written there: to his dwarf he leaves nothing less than his best silver dagger. And in this portrait de Morra cuts a fighting figure, dressed like a soldier in red and gold. His legs extend straight towards us like a marionette, but the pose conceals their shortness by blocking the view with the shoe soles. He looks tightly boxed (though the picture was once bigger), but his force of personality breaks right out, feet first. He defies you to imagine him standing up, to pity or look down upon him, and the vantage point is dropped so that we must meet him eye to eye as equals. Is it possible he chose the pose himself?
For although he is on the floor, where dwarves often sat, de Morra is squaring up and tilting his head—willing you to look at him, waiting to be looked at with his unqualified stare. He is his own man first, before his job, before his physical proportions. The dark eyes hook you in: a powerful intelligence and a powerful pose, matched in this head-on confrontation.
De Morra appears more than once in Velázquez’s pictured world. His distinctive look—which outlives office, clothes and role, which meets the artist’s eyes, and ours, over time—is immediately recognizable in the direct gaze of the dwarf who stands a little way behind Baltasar Carlos at the riding school. He gets equal billing with Olivares on the other side of the child, and points at the prince with parental pride. In the distance the king and queen, high on a balcony, are now no bigger than a dwarf.
Not only was de Morra held in high respect by his royal masters, but in a decade when Velázquez is estimated to have painted very little at all, probably not more than a couple of pictures a year, this solo portrait was one of them. It was surely made in the spirit of solidarity. It is not the dwarf’s size that makes the picture so profoundly moving, but the expression of the inner man, his condition as a human being. He was exceptional: Velázquez’s portrait tells that truth.
• • •
Yet still people ask why Velázquez kept painting dwarves; why—of all the hundreds of aristocrats and courtiers who could have appeared in his art—these were the colleagues he so often chose to depict. The dwarves appear in close-up and at a distance; on their own, paired with a royal child or in larger palace gatherings. In Las Meninas they are as numerous as the maidservants after which the painting is named. The lady dwarf, María Bárbola, stands closer to the viewer than any other adult, an emphatically prominent position to match her formidable candor. Next to her the young dwarf nudging the dog with his foot is the only human being who moves (who is allowed to move), hair swaying in the rapt stillness of the painting.
Captain Widdrington, the Hispanophile naval officer who said he saw a nude dwarf, actually believed that she was María Bárbola herself. In fact the picture he came across in 1834 showed an unusually stout child and not a dwarf, and was painted by another artist altogether; The Monster is its sad title in the Prado. The idea that Velázquez could have painted a female dwarf stripped of her clothes is inconceivable; he left only one nude that we know of and she is the goddess of love, the so-called Rokeby Venus, named after the country house in Yorkshire where the picture hung—another spoil of war—seen by almost no one in the late nineteenth century.
Velázquez has reaped scorn as well as admiration for giving such attention to the dwarves, just as Philip IV has been criticized for employing them. Stirling Maxwell writes that “the Alcázar abounded with dwarfs in the days of Philip IV who collected curious specimens of the race, like other rarities. In Velázquez’s paintings they are, for the most part, very ugly, displaying, sometimes in an extreme degree, the deformities peculiar to their stunted growth.” Richard Ford claims that “the ugliest of these distorts of nature were most esteemed . . . like Scotch terriers.” They were spoken of as “palace vermin.” In the catalogue for the 1986 Prado show “Monsters, Dwarves and Buffoons,” Alfonso Pérez Sánchez, then director of the museum, echoes the phrase: “It might seem surprising, or even in bad taste, to dedicate an exhibition to the certainly disagreeable and painful world of the physically and psychologically deformed beings who swarmed around the European courts.” But the Prado had so many of these creatures, so often painted by Velázquez, that it seemed excusable to make a show of them.
If the dwarf was a freak, it followed that the portrait of a dwarf was freakish, too—unless of course the painting happened to be by some genius like Velázquez. In fact, Velázquez’s portraits of dwarves make exactly the opposite case: that these people have the right to appear in paintings by virtue of their profound individuality. Each deserves a portrait to him- or herself.
But still there must be something more, for historians, something beyond Velázquez’s even-handed fascination with humanity, to explain the existence of these portraits—or explain them away—and that is to consider them purely as palace commissions. This way the dwarves do not have to be subjects voluntarily chosen by Velázquez, even though he paints some of them more than once.
Palomino says he saw several paintings of dwarves, actors and jesters grouped together in the queen’s apartments in 1683. A palace inventory confirms this in 1701. But immense scholarly efforts have gone into proving that wherever they were then, they started out somewhere else—in a hunting lodge called the Torre de la Parada not far from Madrid.
The Torre was a miniature brick palace at the foot of the Pardo mountains. Many artists were commissioned to produce works for it, including Rubens, at that time the most famous painter in Europe. On its walls hung Velázquez’s portraits of ancient philosophers—including his great Aesop, now in the Prado—and, some scholars believe, the solo portraits of dwarves.
So perhaps this was thematic art, the paintings made to measure and hung high on the walls, which would explain the audacity of propping a dwarf like a doll on the floor, his footwear so frankly exposed (quite unacceptable at eye height). It would also explain why they were painted with such experimental freedom, these loose and gracious brushstrokes entirely acceptable because the pictures would be way up on the walls of a place where people collapse in heat and exhaustion below, after a hard day shooting wild boar. Not that anyone cares how the court painter depicts such people in any case, for there are no formalities to uphold and no likelihood of offending the sitter.
There is no thought in this scholarship that Velázquez might have been matching the art to the subject, or that he found the dwarves more interesting to paint, and therefore his conceits were more interesting; above all, that he might have been as (or more) inspired by a man who could hold his own in the palace despite being the butt of midget jokes as he was by a gloomy monarch.
The hunting-lodge narrative can only ever explain the circumstances of their making, in any case, not what occasions the depth of these portraits themselves. This comes—as always in Velázquez—from the live encounter between subject and artist more markedly, almost, than with any other painter. Now that they have been brought down from the high walls on which
they may have hung, we can witness this supposedly casual experimentalism up close—the soft and filmy paint, the amazing grace of the brushstrokes for Lezcano; the quick strokes, bravura dots and intense dabs for de Morra—and see that it is more like palpable feeling transmitted directly to paint.
Velázquez is generally thought to have been hemmed in by official commissions, perpetually unfree as a painter. But as long as there are no documents to tell us otherwise, the opposite might equally well be true. He often managed to delay or duck out of painting royal faces altogether, so why should he not sometimes have chosen who should appear in his paintings? Velázquez’s dwarves are themselves, first and foremost, and they have something like the same freedom they had at court, humanizing that strained and formal world. Nobody catches your eye on such equal terms as a dwarf, nobody has such a free smile or such an overt sorrow. The only person who reads a book anywhere in his art is a dwarf.
• • •
Don Diego de Acedo was a learned scholar and civil servant in charge of the Royal Seal. He traveled with the monarch on diplomatic missions, and is portrayed outdoors, like Lezcano, but in such a wintry world. Partly this is to do with the fading of paint, but the scene shows snow-laden hills beneath a heavy grey sky, and Diego’s huge book looks like snowfall, too, a vast heap of whiteness in the gloom.
Into this volume he presses a tiny hand, bearing the monumental weight of pages. Velázquez gives him the fullest respect in the posing alone—the way that Don Diego handles the burdens of seniority, the way his fingers are both at work and tactfully concealed by that work. He is not too small for high office; it’s an image of exquisite tact.
The hat is jaunty, but there is suffering in that highly intelligent face. Was ever an artist more able to convey minute degrees of extroversion or introversion than Velázquez? Maybe the painting was supposed to go above a door in the pleasure palace of the Torre de la Parada; if so, it could hardly have contributed to the general cheer. It is a grave and penetrating study of a pensive man, in a continuum with the portrait of Nieto.
All people are equal in the art of Velázquez, whatever their size. His paintings make small people large, and large people tiny. He does not take sides. There are full-length portraits of dwarves just as there are full-length portraits of inbred kings, and he doesn’t truckle to either. These paintings of small figures with short legs and large heads are just as respectful as the portraits of Philip and his brother with their dopey stance and enormous jaws, just as clear-eyed with fascination. Velázquez and his king became friends; and so it seems with the dwarves, in whose painted faces there is such deep connection.
Dwarves appear in other paintings of that era as a spectacle, shocking or novel. When Van Dyck was commissioned to paint Jeffrey Hudson—the English dwarf who became such a plaything to Charles I’s eventual bride, Henrietta Maria, that she had him jump out of a pie at a royal banquet—the painter gave his subject a tiny dog to boost his height, but then cast Hudson in the dog’s role to make the little queen look taller. Velázquez never uses a human being in this way. Nobody appears in his art as an ornament or device; nobody is high or low. People appear in his paintings simply to be their unique selves. Nothing human can ever be alien to him.
8
The Attack
TO THE HIGH-MINDED critics who looked down on this little man from the provinces, the bookseller and his precious painting had something telling in common—both were entirely unknown, arriving out of nothing and nowhere. John Snare had no education, no social standing, no pedigree as a gentleman or an expert on painting. That might not have mattered if he had been some rogue adventurer like the Scottish captain who “found” the Arnolfini portrait in Brussels, or one of those middlemen who dodged about the continent picking up Old Masters for aristocrats; these chancers were only trying to flog their wares. But Snare was carrying on like an earl, displaying his possession in Old Bond Street as if he, too, collected the unimaginably rare works of Velázquez. He was mocked as an amateur, in the worst sense of the word, accused of ignorance and “silliness of supposition”; and he was habitually described as a country bookseller, as if he had strayed outside his class. Stirling Maxwell darkly implied that Snare might even be trying to raise his social standing by linking his name with that of the mighty Velázquez.
Perhaps Snare felt he had to work especially hard to establish a reputation for the portrait, having none of his own; the pamphlet he put out midway through the London show is even titled The History and Pedigree of the Portrait of Prince Charles. But there is no question that he was driven by a powerful intellectual curiosity to read deeply, follow every trail and put all of his knowledge into the cause. He goes to extraordinary lengths to solve the mystery with which he has become obsessed, a mystery that irresistibly presents itself to all who saw the painting then, and anyone who chances on Snare’s story now: namely, how on earth he could possibly have laid hands on a lost Velázquez that others before him had longed to discover, yet of which there was—apparently—no recorded sighting since the day it was made in Madrid.
The first conundrum is how the portrait reached England (there is no reason to think it was left behind in Spain; Pacheco makes no further mention of the painting and nobody has ever suggested that it lingered on in that country). Snare believes it returned with Buckingham and Charles. “It was not likely they would leave such a token behind, and though mention is made of some pictures promised to be sent to England by the King of Spain, I can find no evidence that the gifts were ever received, nor am I able to discover any reason to suppose that the Prince’s portrait would have been entrusted to so hazardous a custody.” The high price of the painting also goes to that argument.
Snare’s timeline is tight, at least to begin with. The royal party docks at Portsmouth in October 1623 and travels by carriage to London, arriving at one in the morning. They do not go straight to the palace, but stop at Buckingham’s house by the Thames to rest until later that day. So far, so true; Snare has come across the diaries of the king’s chaplain, John Hacket, from which he learns that all the baggage was unloaded at York House. He believes the Velázquez stopped there, passing without further ado into Buckingham’s famous art collection.
He has at least two reasons to think so. There is no reference to a painting of Prince Charles by Velázquez anywhere in the royal collection. Snare works diligently through the inventories of Charles’s pictures on becoming king in 1625, and those made after his execution in 1649, and can find not a hint of it among the hundreds of portraits; although the main inventory was drawn up by a Belgian painter whose grasp of English—and perhaps even of the historic importance of his task—seems almost comically limited.
And why would Charles want to hang on to a memento of the Spanish Match in any case? The whole campaign had been a dismal charade, much satirized back home in England. Since anything connected with the trip might be distasteful to Charles, “he would desire to get rid of the picture, and any friend who should take and keep it from his sight would perform a kindly service. Such a friend was at hand in Buckingham.”
The second reason, of which Snare had no knowledge, backs up his belief. Charles did indeed get rid of a masterpiece that reminded him of the Spanish Match, and had done so even before leaving Madrid. This was a parting gift from Philip that he passed straight on to Buckingham: an immense statue, Samson Slaying a Philistine, by the Italian sculptor Giambologna, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Seven feet of stupendous anatomical torsion carved in white marble, commissioned by Francisco de’ Medici for his Florentine palace in 1562, the sculpture had already doubled as a diplomatic gift more than once. It proved monstrously difficult to ship back to London, but became one of the city’s vaunted spectacles almost as soon as it was installed in Buckingham’s waterside garden.
York House, the duke’s home off the Strand, was a magnificent white palace with a garden leading down to the banks of the Thames. In its many rooms were pictures by Holbein, Raphael, Tit
ian and Dürer, as well as images of the royal family. Buckingham specialized in portraits and had recently bought a hoard of Roman busts from Rubens, sometime guest at York House, who described the collection as one of the greatest he had ever seen. The Italian master Orazio Gentileschi frescoed first the ceilings, and then the walls, of this extravagant building over many long months; Rubens made a deft sketch of him while they were staying there. The drawing survives, but York House does not. All that is left of it is the pillared water gate, built just after the return from Madrid, its steps disappearing romantically into the dark waters of the Thames.
The inventories of Buckingham’s collection do not mention Velázquez (or any spelling thereof). But many paintings disappeared after Buckingham’s dramatic death in any case. Five years after the Spanish Match, an English lieutenant with a grievance about the treatment of his comrades during disastrous French campaigns led by Buckingham stabbed the duke to death in the Greyhound Pub in Plymouth. Buckingham’s widow spent several years trying to make some income from his estate and evict the lingering Gentileschi before she married again; and in the months leading up to the English Civil War in 1642, a loyal servant named Trayler managed to smuggle most of the remaining art collection out to the continent, where large parts of it were rapidly sold off. The facts of how—and which—paintings eventually returned to England are still emerging to this day.
But Buckingham’s inventories do include several portraits of Charles, and two are unattributed, so it is possible that one of them might have been the Velázquez. Snare had no knowledge of these tantalizing records, alas, as they came to light only in the twentieth century.
Indeed, his next conundrum is precisely this silence. He can find no mention of Velázquez’s painting again before the Civil War, but offers an explanation that is persuasively rooted in truth. The twenty-four-year-old Spaniard was nobody outside Madrid, let alone Spain. He had no significance, no reputation to speak of; and if the painter had no name, then his painting was effectively nameless too, slipping from memory’s grasp after Buckingham’s death. “In York House the Portrait remained a thing at which no man might look too closely. Little by little it sank gradually to be regarded as no more than the thousand and one pictures which are at this day preserved simply because of the likeness they were intended and are supposed to represent.”
The Vanishing Velázquez Page 9