Velázquez, involved in these spectacular productions, in turn theatricalized the royal portraits. His painting Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School shows a real place at a real time—it even offers a glimpse of the brand-new Buen Retiro and the parkland beyond—but its figures are positioned in different phases, as it seems, almost in different planes of reality. They recede at intervals, the dramatis personae of a crowded performance in which everyone breathes the same air, is lit by the same fresh morning light; and yet none of it looks real, so much as a theatrical dream.
The young king on the balcony is barely more than a pale oval marked with two dots and a dash, but even a child can read this simple sign as a face. Velázquez makes Philip instantly recognizable simply by adding a hint of mustache and a wavelet of strawberry-blond fringe. The whole effect is pulled together with body language, the king’s stance and the impression of his long legs in their white stockings a miniature version of his pose in the bigger portraits. His first wife is summarized in no more than a hairline and cheek. And behind the royal couple—a vignette as small as the mirror in Las Meninas—are gathered some watchful servants, arranged like those in Velázquez’s greatest masterpiece. We know these people through his painting, large and small, near and far, in a thousand brushstrokes or conjured in two or three: the members of the court, the people of that world—the characters of Velázquez’s art.
Velázquez, as no other painter, moves people back and forth in space, showing them tiny or vast, gathered in crowds or in an isolation so profound that their surroundings have dissolved away. The blocking of figures is crucial to his vision: he shows his people as they appeared in the grand theater of the Alcázar. Monarchs, courtiers, actors and dwarves passing through the maze of long corridors and wide chambers, framed in doorways, visible close up or silhouetted at extreme distance. Velázquez himself arranged the Hall of Mirrors so that to enter that vast room was to step into a concatenation of images: mirrors, portraits and their looking-glass reflections, people moving among them like figures freed from the pictures. What was real, and what was illusion?
Which artist of the baroque era, or since, depicts the same people on every scale, and in every part of the scene, downstage, center stage, in and out of the wings, in light and shadow, from the soliloquizing foreground to the chorus line and background exit? People who look at each other and us, who have such an acute sense of our presence, who seem conscious at all times of the edge of the stage, the proscenium arch, the borderline between watching and being watched—between the performance and the world?
• • •
If the palace is a theater, it is also a gallery—a gallery of Velázquez’s own pictures. He only has to walk along a corridor, up a staircase, through a grand apartment, into a Hall of Mirrors or a prince’s quarters to see his own paintings hanging in state. He only has to stand in his studio to see works from the past preserved alongside those in progress. He can see his own evolution flowing without interruption all the way around the building. He sees the results of his own experiments: how pictures look at a distance, how effects work in shadows, how he used to paint, how he might paint people in the future. All of that thinking lies deep in his work.
And the people Velázquez painted saw themselves, too, of course, pictured on the walls of the palace: Pablo the performer and Francisco Lezcano the dreamy young dwarf; the jester Redbeard, who played a Turkish pirate of that name in court comedies (his portrait also described as a bosquexo in the palace inventory of 1701), and his opposite number Don John of Austria, who took the part of the Spanish hero who beat Redbeard in a famous victory at the Battle of Lepanto.
Don John in his plumed hat, cocked over a shrewd and handsome face, heavily worn by worry and weather, is as thinly painted as a fine watercolor. Even in its incomplete state, the portrait was displayed during Velázquez’s lifetime and valued just as highly after his death as the portrait of Pablo. And there in the background is a little battle scene, too; if only John Snare had been able to see this painting.
The portrait of Don John has amused Velázquez scholars to the point of hilarity down the years. Armor lies ready on the floor while the naval battle rages outside, two ships about to clash. But of course the poor man can do nothing about it, for he is only a jester in worn clothes and an oversized hat who works at the court, eats with the farriers and probably doesn’t often get his wages. The discrepancy is supposed to be comic, in theory at least. But is the painting actually funny? Again one sees something far deeper in this strange and tender portrait of the man with his broken nose and bony beauty, a performer working bravely to be mocked. Do we really see paintings so differently nowadays—hasn’t there always been far more than mock heroics to this scene? Perhaps we have been too cautious in our responses to art, too little confident of the witness of our own eyes against the arguments of scholars. Art historians point out that Don John was a low-class jester playing a high-class hero, so the dissonance must have been comic. But that only relates to what we know about the entertainer’s job and the role he was hired to perform. It does not relate to what we see: to the portrait and the way it is painted. What strikes here is not just the complex character of the man, but the matching character of the paint: gentle, grave, dissolving in veils, as if the man was hovering on the edge of a dream.
Don John and Pablo de Valladolid were not in a position to commission their own portraits, despite being the living inspiration for these pictures. They are performing for their royal masters once again, in a sense, when they pose for Velázquez. But on the royal walls, masters and servants became equal. Imagine what it must have been like for Pablo to happen upon his own portrait down a palace corridor, this lightning strike of an image, this coup de théâtre. Himself! Velázquez surely chose to paint him thus as a form of salutation: the master painter recognizing the master performer. The portrait rises in every respect to the level of the performance.
Pablo returns in a later painting that has been known variously as “The Astronomer,” “The Geographer” and “Democritus.” Here he acts the part of a merry man with one hand suspended above a globe, about to tickle the world into motion with his light finger. He’s the very soul of mirth, with a smile that deserves a smile in return.
He didn’t always have this globe. An X-ray shows that he was impersonating someone else, before Velázquez converted him into the figure we see today. A copy of that original exists, entitled The Sense of Taste, showing the same glowingly cheerful man holding up a large glass of wine. Perhaps Taste was on a palace wall for years, Velázquez contemplating its potential every time he passed, or perhaps he kept it in his studio—patient, critical, pensive. As Pablo works on his part, so Velázquez recasts the picture; the two artists collaborating on their performance.
Was Velázquez ever alone for long? We know that he had studio assistants, some of whom became properly renowned in their own right. Juan de Pareja, the black slave he made a public point of freeing, probably came all the way from Seville with Velázquez and never left his employment. Juan Bautisto del Mazo, whose paintings are such respectful imitations of the master, became Velázquez’s son-in-law and a court painter himself. Juan de Alfaro, the apostle who grew up in his studio, drew Velázquez on his deathbed, eyes sunk, features as delicate as pencil lines in themselves; it was Alfaro who gave such deeply detailed knowledge to Palomino for his influential biography of Velázquez.
There are eight other people with the painter in Las Meninas, not counting the implied presence of the king and queen. The picture shows a chamber of the Alcázar on another floor and in another wing from the apartment where Velázquez lived with his wife, Juana, and their daughter, Francisca; if one followed Nieto through that door, up that staircase and on through the vast labyrinth of corridors, one would eventually come to the artist’s home in the eastern flank. It was a long way; a courtier could walk miles criss-crossing the Alcázar in a working day.
That this was a tightly knit family is apparent from the pa
intings. Velázquez’s wife, Juana, may be the woman in profile in the beautifully wistful vision of a sibyl. Francisca is thought to be the girl with her head intently lowered over her needlework, an image of absolute absorption. She may also have appeared as an infant with her mother in an earlier painting, The Adoration, Juana as the Virgin and Francisca as the baby Jesus. Juana’s father is there, too, reverently witnessing the scene on his knees as one of the wise men. Francisco Pacheco, whose pompous tone, so apparent from his writings, might have jarred with his former pupil, nonetheless gets Velázquez’s respect and a solo portrait, too, now in the Prado, in which the intensely corrugated brows of this irritable intellectual are surrounded by a ruff so complex in its cranial folds that it seems to be the sartorial equivalent.
Yet Velázquez’s art speaks of solitude, silence, prolonged contemplation, of watching and listening with matchless concentration, of unhurried thinking, exemplary clarity and fullness of response. No matter that the court goes on all around him like a gigantic machine-play, no matter that social and political negotiations are going on outside his windows at all times, that the shops on the ground floor are frantic with custom, that lawyers are receiving and rejecting pleas as they speed across the courtyard below, Velázquez is able to shut out the pressure of noise, friction, disturbance. Even when surrounded by dogs, dwarves and children, he is beyond distraction wherever he chooses to work.
For his paintings rarely show a specific place, so much as a space; there is never anything so concrete, or modern, as a studio (Las Meninas is perhaps the exception). That Velázquez could, and did, work in shifting conditions and different places is apparent from the portraits of dwarves made on trips to the Spanish countryside, the pictures painted outdoors in Rome or on the spot during royal missions. A late portrait of Philip IV in scarlet and silver, now in the Frick Collection, was created in extremely difficult circumstances in the town of Fraga in Catalonia while the Spanish army was defending the nearby garrison of Lérida against the French army. Contemporary bills show that the king had two windows cut into the wall of his makeshift lodging to let in the light, and hired a local carpenter to knock up an easel for his painter. The floor was unpaved, the walls were collapsing and the battlefront was only a few miles away, but still Velázquez managed to create this dazzling image—the king’s face hovering between courage and sadness, the silver brocade twinkling with a virtually unreadable constellation of marks—in three rapid sittings.
He added the hat and baton later in his own hovel of a lodging, doorless, dark and in utter decay.
None of the paintings on the wall in Las Meninas are by Velázquez himself, modest man. Two are copies of pictures by Rubens, who came to the court from Flanders on a diplomatic mission in 1628, made several paintings while he was there and left with the very knighthood (so glibly given to him by the king) for which Velázquez would angle year after year. Velázquez was able to watch the older artist at work—Rubens was in his fifties—and vice versa; a connection grew out of deep mutual respect. Rubens visited him in his rooms and remembered how much he prized the modesty of the Spaniard’s work. Philip, too, was in the habit of dropping in on Velázquez to watch and talk, a distraction from the melancholy weariness of kingship. This intimacy is always evident: there is no social distance between them.
Velázquez’s son-in-law, Mazo, made the Rubens copies that hang on that wall, and it is to Mazo that we owe that glimpse of the quarters where Velázquez spent the last years of his life. In The Family of the Artist, painted some four years after Velázquez’s death, the rooms are high-ceilinged, chasmic and bare. (The rooms of the Alcázar so often were: a visiting French envoy remarked with horror on the absence of anything in these dark canyons except the occasional lonely chair.) A rose in a glass sheds its petals in front of a portrait of Philip, painted of course by Velázquez, whose posthumous presence is thus invoked. Down the corridor in an adjoining space is a tiny dark-haired painter, seen from behind, at work on yet another likeness of an infanta. It is an ungainly painting, its perspective skewed, its family lineup a very uneven series of portraits (though from Stirling Maxwell’s point of view, of course, the dwarves have been satisfactorily cleansed). But what strikes is the sincerity of Mazo’s emotion, his love of family and the touching loyalty of his composition, which is surely conceived, at least in part, as a homely reprise of Las Meninas.
Mazo’s painting gives us some hard facts about the interior of the Alcázar, the stony mass of the walls and floors, the oppressive gloom of the rooms—all of which become light as air in the art of Velázquez. This is one of his pictorial inventions, this ethereal atmosphere, not a place so much as a glowing void in which a person may appear free of the prison-house of palace life.
Palaces, wrote Quevedo, “are the sepulchres of a living death.” Velázquez himself managed to break free only twice in forty years.
• • •
For Manet, and for so many artists before and since who have made the pilgrimage to see Velázquez in Madrid, his way of painting is unique. He rejects the conventional rules of painting, judging that the eye cannot focus on every part of a picture simultaneously, that the background may become a blur without any loss of veracity whatsoever. So it is with the portrait of Pablo, where the juncture between floor and wall has disappeared and the shadow drifting from his heel, up close, is barely visible. Yet Pablo does not float, or turn as flat as a playing card, so much as spark into life with startling directness.
The performer fills the void with his own personality; it becomes an expression of himself. And Velázquez extends this grace to so many of the men and women who lived in the palace and worked for the monarch, just like himself—in his art, these servants are free as air.
Manet said of Pablo that he was filled with life, and so he is. A sprung figure perpetually in his dramatic moment, not quite floating, but nor quite tethered to this humdrum world. His act is a performance, a virtuoso illusion, like the art of the painter who can make people appear on stage, vivid as life, while also showing that these apparitions are conjured out of paint. This is the crucial paradox. The figures in Velázquez’s art are superbly real and yet simultaneously revealed to be illusions. The actor stands firm, but he stands on nothing but painted air.
10
Seizure and Theft
TAIT’S NEW ROYAL Hotel in Edinburgh was an elegant establishment on the main thoroughfare of Princes Street, not long open when John Snare arrived in 1849, but already popular with advocates, journalists and well-heeled travelers. It had quite a reputation among English writers by the 1850s. Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, took a room with spectacular views of the castle rising high above the city on its sharp volcanic crag, and the novelist Wilkie Collins, writing home to London, praised the extraordinary lightness of Edinburgh’s summer nights and the “darkly deeply beautiful blue” of the Firth of Forth, visible at the bottom of the steep streets behind the hotel.
John Snare signed the register in the first week of January, when the Scottish wind bites and darkness descends by mid-afternoon. He took rooms for himself and his friend James West, and hired a large salon for “The Lost Velázquez,” as it was promoted in the newspapers and on the handbills the two men posted through the Georgian New Town doors. Edinburgh was the first stop on what was conceived as a theatrical tour of Britain with the portrait as solo performer—Glasgow, Liverpool and Birmingham would have been next, if not for a shocking turn of events—and Snare had chosen the time and place with care. January was a dispiriting month in Edinburgh, low on entertainment and ideal for setting a novel portrait before a winter-weary public, especially one whose royal subject was born in Scotland, not England; and Tait’s Hotel was perfectly positioned on the main street, midway between the railway stations and opposite the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Scottish Academy.
The show opened on January 15. Snare, skillful publicist, had offered Scotland’s oldest newspaper an exclusive preview and the Caledonian Mercury published its awe
d response that morning: “Few pictures leave a more powerful impression of grandeur on the spectator’s mind than Velázquez’s Charles. The design is chaste to severity. There is life and youth; strength and majesty are stamped on the brow and beam from the eyes. Its beauties are at once manifest and striking.” “Chaste to severity” is unusually apt for early Velázquez.
As soon as the doors opened, curious visitors began to arrive. The numbers built: four hundred in the first few days, several hundred more by the second week as the Scottish press warmed to its new Velázquez. Spanish painting was little known and virtually unseen in Scotland, which had yet to build a national gallery for the display of Old Masters. The Earl of Elgin had a portrait (considered a Velázquez) of Count-Duke Olivares in Broomhall House on the other side of the Firth of Forth, enjoyed by nobody except his guests; and although one of Scotland’s finest painters, Sir David Wilkie, had returned from a journey to Spain with an extraordinary purchase, the portrait of Archbishop Valdés that now hangs in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, he kept it in his London home. The Scottish public had not yet had the epiphany, as Wilkie put it, of setting eyes on a Velázquez.
The Vanishing Velázquez Page 12