The painting is the sketch.
• • •
Snare was so distressed that he wrote a rejoinder to Stirling Maxwell. Proofs of the Authenticity of the Portrait of Prince Charles, 1848, is a strange mixture of scrupulous argument and research, but also of anxiety bordering on despair. “He who has something to say surely has a right to speak,” he begins, his voice ringing with anguish. Anyone who thinks that Snare was just an amateur impresario, trying to make money from his painting—he did, after all, charge for the London exhibition and the accompanying pamphlet—might read this defense of the painting, so hard-won and sad, so exhaustively detailed, as a lament for the damage inflicted not on the author but on the reputation of Velázquez.
Snare’s pamphlet was an invitation that Stirling Maxwell could not resist. In Velázquez and His Works, 1855, he attacked not just the picture, but all of the printer’s beliefs, from the idea that it showed Charles as a prince to the notion that it had ever belonged to the 2nd Earl, still less the Duke of Buckingham himself. Stirling Maxwell did go so far as to admit that he had completely misunderstood the term “bosquexo,” conceding that Snare’s interpretation was correct, but still he dismissed the portrait.
Snare rightly feared that Stirling Maxwell’s opinions would be repeated by his successors: they can be found, fossilized, in many books on Spanish art.
It is easy to understand how Snare might have felt after years of labor—with no grand library of his own, no money for travel, no chance of comparing one Spanish painting with another, none of Stirling Maxwell’s advantages—to have his painting repeatedly swatted by this highly respected historian. But what upset him most was the fact that Stirling Maxwell never ventured anything more than his abrupt verdict. He never troubled to go into any detail about style, color, subject or indeed any aspect of the picture as art, even though so many people believed it really was by Velázquez.
For Snare, “the handling is free in the extreme. The brush appears to have swept across the canvas and never to have paused or hesitated. The touch of a master who knew his power and put forth his energy is at once recognised.” For Stirling Maxwell, it hardly matters what the brushwork is like because the prince looks older than he should, and the picture is more than what he understands by the term “sketch.” Yet the same writer, of course, was prepared to believe that Velázquez painted bagpipers and poodles and, on the strength of hearsay, nude female dwarves.
The difference between the two writers is one that still exists in art writing today. Stirling Maxwell is intent on establishing the history and pedigree, so to speak, of all the paintings by Velázquez he can find, and ordering them in time and place like the pioneer art historian he was. Whereas Snare is looking at a single work of art with the power to affect the viewer as a person or a poem might. His pamphlet is a biography of the picture, but it is also a hymn of praise. He is an evangelist for his Velázquez: he wants to travel the world with it, he wants the world to see and love it as he does.
9
The Theater of Life
ÉDOUARD MANET BOARDED the new direct train from Paris to Madrid one summer’s evening in 1865. The uncomfortable journey took a day and a half. He stayed in the Grand Hotel de Paris, supposedly noted for its French cooking, though Manet found the food so inedible that he sent every dish back. We know he saw a matador gored in the ring and took an excursion out to Toledo to look at the paintings of El Greco. But the overwhelming reason for this hazardous pilgrimage, taken during an outbreak of cholera and without a single word of Spanish, was to set eyes on the art of Velázquez.
In the long galleries of the Prado, Manet found the painter of painters, “worth all the misery and exhaustion of the trip.” But he also discovered what would become, for him, the painting to end all paintings: Velázquez’s portrait of the court performer Pablo de Valladolid (Plate F).
Pablo makes a momentous appearance—out of thin air. His dark figure flashes up in the glowing void of the picture, a burning black shape in an empty space, anchored by nothing but shadow. There is no floor, nothing to hold him there but his own commanding presence in this solo show. The sheer suddenness of the image amounts to an entrance.
The actor holds his pose, feet planted far apart, one hand across his body as if to contain all the energy inside him, just as Velázquez’s contours hold him tight to the picture. He stands fast, but his gestures speak for him. One hand hitched in the cloak signals to the other, which points down and away as if towards another time and place. It is a declamatory gesture; and this is the only portrait in which Velázquez depicts action. These communicative hands—the left leading to the right, and to the finger pointing to a thought in pure space—are performing a double act together.
There is no stage, no set, no costume or props, nothing that might limit him to a particular character or performance. Pablo is free to be simply and only himself. And just as the picture does not define him by role, so it does not confine him to any particular place. Behind him there is no wall, no architecture, not a speck of context, even the junction between the wall and the floor has gone. The space in which Pablo stands has become his element, a diaphanous void in which the performer appears monumental. The right foot drifts off into its own shadow, which trails away like smoke on water. Pablo is standing on—in—nothing but a painting.
Manet could scarcely believe what he saw. He wrote from Madrid to his fellow painter Henri Fantin-Latour: “This is the most astonishing piece of painting that has ever been made. The background disappears. It is air that surrounds the fellow.”
• • •
Who is the man in the portrait? Anyone can see that he is some sort of performer, that gesture is his métier; he is not one of Velázquez’s nameless courtiers; indeed, his identity has never been in doubt. Pablo de Valladolid worked at the Spanish court from around 1632 (nobody has a fixed date) until his death in 1648, and is probably in his late forties in this picture. He was an hombre de placer—man of pleasure—one of many servants hired, though not always regularly paid, to entertain their royal masters. He may not have come from Valladolid so much as Vallecas, a poor district on the outskirts of Madrid, and we do not know what characters he played, or what roles, either on- or offstage at the court. But we have the picture and its staging of the man, the homage it pays his performance.
When Manet saw the painting in the Prado, it was called Portrait of a Famous Actor at the Time of Philip IV. In the slippery guesswork of titles, this feels exactly the right surmise: an actor, to be sure, and evidently acclaimed at the very least by Velázquez himself. But Pablo started his career in the records as a jester. He was described as a jester for centuries, in fact, until someone listed him as a buffoon, whereupon the nineteenth-century German scholar Carl Justi defines him as a Pantaloon and finds him killingly funny. “The gesture of the mime cannot possibly be mistaken,” Justi writes in his influential study of Velázquez. “His half-open right hand is extended a little downwards, as if he were retailing to the public some good joke, perhaps at the expense of some notable person in that direction. Pose, gesture, countenance, correspond nicely with the outburst of laughter doubtless provoked by the humorous quip drily uttered by apparently the most innocent of beings. This is a laughter-compelling head.”
Nothing is more subjective than humor, a comedian might argue. But nobody laughs at Pablo now, and one wonders if anyone ever did. If he had appeared as an actor in the palace inventory, would Carl Justi still have found him so hilarious? Taxonomy distorts interpretation. Get the naming of parts wrong from the start, and it seems that you can believe anything.
Pablo has had multiple identities over the years. He has been one of the “palace vermin” and one of the licensed fools. In the twentieth century he was an improvisational actor, although he remains a “buffoon” in the Prado to this day. Whatever he was—and as with the term “bosquexo,” the simple translation of Spanish nouns has caused endless discrepancy—he was nobody’s fool to Velázquez.
The painting shows him in his professional moment, all his dramatic gifts supremely embodied. Some have seen fear and loneliness there, others the vulnerability of a man putting on the performance of a lifetime each day. Far from being a comic turn—and it is doubtful that modern eyes see anything much to laugh about now—the painting is both dazzling and poignant. Nor is this depth an illusion. It emerges from a strange ambivalence that becomes apparent to anyone standing where Manet once stood, in front of the painting in the Prado.
Pablo is all in black, except for the golilla collar, so the focus is thrown on the face and the knife-edge contours. This is where the mystery enters. The man has more power on the right-hand side—best foot forward, firmly holding his cloak about him, its feathery swags, and the knee ribbon, like uplifting wings—than he does on the left, where life is altogether less certain. The portrait is a balancing act. As you walk from one side to the other, the pose becomes ambivalent; one eye is no longer quite in accord with the other and a sense of sorrow complicates the face. The power of the portrait, and its subject, is immeasurably deepened.
• • •
Manet left Madrid as soon as he could, so miserable without his creature comforts that he lasted not much more than a fortnight. He wrote to Baudelaire, “Velázquez was the greatest painter there ever was.” Back in Paris, he painted a picture based on the Velázquez and called it The Tragic Actor; he clearly didn’t find Pablo funny, either.
Manet’s picture shows the French actor Rouvière dressed in black, a sword discarded on the ground beside him. He is in the same no-man’s-land as Pablo, but like so many of Manet’s figures is conspicuously himself, the modern man in the shell of somebody else’s clothing, playing a role—in fact, the role of Hamlet. The difference is that Velázquez’s Pablo is purely himself; he is held there by nothing but the strength of his own presence and the painter’s art. “Simply the thing I am shall make me live.” It feels like Existentialism avant la lettre.
That portraits are like performances is a truth rarely in need of mention; the person in the picture is making an appearance, the picture is staging that appearance. Some portraits take this further than others, but Velázquez goes beyond any artist before him. He positions Pablo in an expressive world of his own, surrounded by an atmosphere that might be the visual manifestation of his own charisma.
The air—the paint—around him is a combination of ocher, green and grey brushstrokes that vibrate with a glow that has something in common with sunshine, candle and limelight. It is oddly radiant, and nothing at all like the ambient light around you in the Prado, just as the nameless place in the picture lacks all definition; it is only the actor’s feet that indicate the ground beneath him, that bring the scene down to earth.
But there is a palpable sense of brighter lighting in the spot where Pablo poses, ringed by shadows that also seem to indicate an offstage world.
Even in Velázquez’s lifetime, Spanish theaters had sophisticated lighting, elaborate sets and complex machinery to conjure illusions of moonlight and rain, flight and fire. Seville had four theaters by the time he was born, and another was built in his childhood. Drama was so fundamental to Spanish life that there were theaters everywhere, even in quite small towns, and plays were performed on traveling stages in market squares, during pageants, parades and outdoor festivals, in palaces, villas and gardens. When the new Buen Retiro palace was built in Madrid in the 1630s, there were even spectacular performances on the boating lake that is still there today in El Retiro Park.
Flaming torches, and their reflection in the rippling waters by night, created a spellbinding sense of danger for the production of Calderón’s play about the sorceress Circe. Silver lamps brightened the sense of daylight and enormous candles were used to illuminate certain passages of painted scenery; they could be snuffed out, too, to powerful effect: sudden darkness, sudden death.
On a single spring night in 1632 Count-Duke Olivares laid on three productions for the king and queen on temporary stages in the bosky gardens of a villa outside Madrid. A few weeks later, on Midsummer’s Eve, they returned for Francisco de Quevedo’s crackling satire He Who Lies Most Prospers Most, and then progressed through to the gardens of the villa next door to watch Lope de Vega’s Midsummer’s Night. One imagines them moving about in the warm dusk like Titania and Oberon in Shakespeare’s Dream.
Velázquez painted Quevedo, magnificently irascible in nose-pinching specs; a copy exists that shows us something of this startling portrait—the asperity of the sitter’s eyes ringed and redoubled through his large lenses—but the original has, alas, vanished.
Quevedo lived a life of constant drama: vicious fights with rival writers, banishment, exile, skirmishes with the Spanish Inquisition, defamation and ultimately prison. But he was for a brief few years one of Velázquez’s colleagues at the court and it seems, moreover, from a poem that appears in his collection Silvas, that these two lights of Spain’s Golden Age—the piercingly intelligent writer, the piercingly intelligent painter—had some deep understanding of each other. Quevedo wrote a famous praise of Velázquez’s unique way of painting:
Through you the great Velázquez,
Skilful as he is inventive
Can bring beauty to life
And give feeling to flesh
With his distant blots.
When he paints
The result is not likeness but absolute truth . . .
“Distant blots” so perfectly captures the apparent chaos of marks made using long-handled brushes, Palomino says, in the manner of Titian. And who better to confirm the truth of a portrait by Velázquez than the one person with an intimate knowledge of the sitter, both within and without—the poet Quevedo himself.
• • •
It was sometimes said that Olivares’s motive for dreaming up the new palace of the Buen Retiro was to distract Philip from daily politics so that he could get on with ruling Spain himself—the overbearing, resoundingly ambitious minister once more puppeting the hesitant and insecure king. Work began in 1629 on a building raised so fast it was nicknamed “the chicken coop,” partly in reference to an old aviary that once stood on the spot, but also because the structure appeared so provisional and hasty. The new palace was to be an escape (retiro: retreat) from the gloomy old Alcázar, without the laborious slog to the countryside, for it is not fifteen minutes’ walk between them; and an elegant park was created for the palace in the surrounding lands donated by Olivares himself, where pleasure boats could be rowed, puppet shows performed, masques and plays staged upon and around the lake.
The inaugural production took place on a massive platform erected seven feet above the water. Calderón’s Love, the Greatest Enchantment lasted for six hours, finished at one in the morning and ran for several nights, including a free public performance watched by hundreds of Madrileños. In addition to the usual trapdoors and curtains, it featured a waterfall, a chariot drawn across the water and artificial lighting that would brighten or fade to create an illumination something like limelight.
The most important of all the rooms in the Buen Retiro was the Hall of Realms, built as central throne room and chamber of state, but initially used as a theater. Velázquez painted a sequence of huge equestrian portraits for the hall, images of monarchs he had never met—the last king, Philip III, and his wife—as well as those he saw every day in a great cycle of lineage: this queen’s eyes, that king’s chin, their pale complexions, handed down from one generation to the next in a spectacle of inbreeding so intensive that some of the figures in these paintings had aunts who were also their nieces. Like players on a stage, these paintings were meant to be viewed from a distance; and they have a double existence: up close, a baffling semaphore of dots, dashes and blots that resolve, from farther away, into monumental rearing figures.
The Hall of Realms was the size of a theater in itself and fitted with high balconies all around so that spectators could watch the proceedings below, which often took the form of new plays
and masques. Door shapes were later cut out of some canvases so that the professional actors (and the players of court life) could make their entrances and exits at exactly the right intervals around the room. Indeed, two of these portraits, now in the Prado, recently grew larger when conservators discovered flaps of canvas that had been folded back to make the pictures fit the space between windows and doors. These sections are bright and unfaded, like the turned-back cuffs of an old overcoat that have never been exposed to daylight.
When the Buen Retiro finally acquired an actual theater, one of the first performances had thirteen scene changes—palace, forest, river, glade, lake—in little more than one hour, devised and created by the royal painters.
And the courtiers themselves were sometimes required to take part in palace productions, no doubt to the mirth of their colleagues. On one occasion Count-Duke Olivares even appeared onstage himself in a representation of the world turned upside down—“el pobre mundo al revés”—featuring a mock wedding between the knight of the shining vegetable, the Marquis of Cauliflower, and the daughter of the good Count of Parsley. The Count-Duke slummed it as a porter. Velázquez, in drag, was elevated to the title of countess. He had only one line: “Come on, marry them.” Was he cast according to character—a man of few words, too taciturn and watchful to be cajoled into farce? It is easier to imagine Velázquez listening than laughing.
• • •
The court itself was of course the grandest theater of all. El teatro de la grandeza, as it was known—the theater of greatness—had more than 1,200 dignitaries, and rituals as slow and deliberate as a masque in perpetual performance. Its leading actor was Philip IV. The king’s progress down a corridor was a spectacle in its own right—the chamberlain with the key opening each door in turn, as courtiers watched—and he would dine before a public audience once a week at the Alcázar. Philip was alternately hidden (literally, behind small latticed screens to overhear his advisers’ conversations) or dramatically visible. When he went to mass at San Jeronimo’s church in the east of Madrid, every courtier followed behind in a long procession. And when plays were performed, Philip’s presence—his very person—might be ingeniously acknowledged in the staging. The king would be seated some twelve feet away from the stage, at the exact focal point for the perspective of each piece of painted scenery. Next to him sat the queen, and on either side of the room stood ranks of courtiers looking back and forth, watching both the play and the monarchs. That they were as much a spectacle as the performance itself was a point superbly made in one particular production, when the curtain rose to reveal a throne positioned at the center of the stage, exactly opposite the seated monarchs. And propped upon this throne were two portraits of these same monarchs, so that the king and queen looked at their own images, which looked back, like mirror reflections—an act of staging that irresistibly invokes Las Meninas.
The Vanishing Velázquez Page 11