The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  But the Retiro Park is still there at the heart of the city, with its maze of sandy-gold avenues radiating out beneath the cedars and limes. This was the view from the palace windows. This is where the summer masques took place in the scented air, where mock sea battles were performed on the lake. A tree planted in Velázquez’s day still thrives, a Mexican cypress brought back from the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Rowing boats still pull across the waters below the same colonnaded terraces. This is where Velázquez walked, as men in black still stride out summer and winter, suddenly visible at the end of long vistas, citizens of Madrid granted the freedom of the park when the monarchy collapsed. This is where Velázquez walked in the sun and air, but it does not appear in his art.

  It is almost always indoors in Velázquez. His is a world of interiors, of shuttered rooms at the end of long corridors away from the bustle. He goes out with the royal hunt and on diplomatic missions; he paints Baltasar Carlos posing below an oak in leaf-green clothes. But these are exceptions. His is an inner world, pictured behind closed doors. Until one day the world opens up to him and he finally escapes the palace.

  • • •

  Velázquez got away from court only twice in his life, both times to Rome. Italy alters his art forever.

  It is said that when Rubens visited the Spanish court in 1628, industriously copying the royal pictures as if he was still learning how to paint at the age of fifty-one, and then producing thirty pictures of his own for Philip IV, it was not his prodigious work but his wise words that affected Velázquez. Rubens urged the younger painter to go to Rome as soon as he could, to see the home of art. Two months after Rubens’s departure, in the summer of 1629, Philip IV gave in and allowed Velázquez to travel.

  On the voyage out from Barcelona he spends the days at sea in close conversation with the Genoese general Ambrogio Spinola, whose portrait appears in the middle of the military throng in The Surrender of Breda, accepting the keys to that city from his beaten Dutch enemy with empathetic compassion. Velázquez began the picture six years after meeting Spinola, yet the portrait is quick with character and life. No human encounter is lost, with Velázquez, no conversation wasted.

  They dock in Venice, where he wants to walk the city alone to look at every painting, but the Spanish ambassador insists on a bodyguard as the alleys are too rough. Still, Velázquez manages to spend long hours before Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, whose paintings he copies. In Ferrara, the papal nuncio invites him to dinner, but is delicately spurned as Velázquez, claiming that he eats at odd hours, prefers to keep to his rooms. The painter always goes his own way.

  In Rome, Velázquez is treated like a prince. Cardinal Barberini finds him an apartment in the Vatican, in what is now the Etruscan Museum. We know that he was allowed to visit the Sistine Chapel any time of day or night to look at Michelangelo—he was even trusted with a key—and that the Spanish ambassador sent his personal doctor to tend to Velázquez when he was ill. We know that he managed to remain in Rome for more than a year, despite appeals from Philip IV to come home, because in the summer heatwave of 1630 he was offered cooler rooms above the city in the grand Villa Medici, where the shady gardens spread out below his window. This is where he stopped for a while, and something extraordinary happened. Velázquez went outdoors, gazed at the view and painted a picture without precedent.

  The scene is a drowsy corner of the Medici gardens surrounded by cypresses (Plate G). A white cloth hangs over the edge of a balconied terrace above a classical archway boarded up with wooden slats. Two colleagues stand chatting, perhaps builders, perhaps gardeners, one distractedly holding the end of a rope that dangles down from those slats, criss-crossing the picture with a silvery line as imperceptible as a spider’s thread.

  The picture is so casual and yet so intensely captivating; this paradox is part of its mystery. The shadow of the statue in its alcove looks half-alive; the figure of Hermes rising above the hedge might be eavesdropping on the conversation. The immense cypresses, holding the day’s heat within their darkness, rise like a screen to the world beyond, concealing everything but a glimpse of the pink-tinged sky. And at the center of the scene, as it seems, are those open gaps between the slats, which so entice the mind and eye. If only one could slip between them and find out what lies behind that door. If only one could enter the painting.

  We could go to the real gardens now, for they still exist. But this corner could never be as Velázquez sees and depicts it. What haunts this silvery scene is not just the white cloth, somewhere between festive bunting and flag of surrender, and not just the murmuring figures or the theatrical archway, but what surrounds it: the wonderful stucco wall.

  That pictures are like walls—flat, upright, impermeable—is a point often made by modernist painters. But this is a different kind of resemblance, a gorgeous analogy between pigment on canvas and plaster on walls. The paint lies smooth and creamy in certain places, thinner in others; sometimes it is scraped back so that one sees the bare weave of the cloth, its tiny grid exposed like brickwork beneath plaster. The painting mimics the very thing it represents.

  Velázquez’s picture is small, not twice the size of the page before you. The figures standing with their backs to us are tiny, the servant draping the cloth over the balcony barely visible: the vista is real, yet distanced as a dream. A small canvas is easily carried outside, of course, but perhaps he chose the scale for another reason, too: the weave of the cloth is exactly the right size to imitate the pattern of bricks at that distance.

  This is one of Velázquez’s unimaginably subtle calculations. How could he guess in advance, or did it come to him as he painted? This is a great question with his art: what grows out of what, how it all evolves at leisure, or at speed, by chance or design. But what one sees here is something akin to precision engineering, in terms of vision and judgment: each brick finds its tiny outline in the grid of threads.

  This painting is a miniature revolution in art for more than one reason, not just the extraordinary way in which it was painted, but that it seems to have no pretext, no definitive narrative or focus. A fragmentary glimpse, strikingly modern in its random observations, it is simply itself—the momentary scene. It is as remote as possible from the classic Roman landscapes infested with nymphs and temples that buyers craved in those days. The two great exponents of the ideal landscape were also living in Rome, Velázquez’s French contemporaries Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Their prized pictures were circulating through the same villas and palaces and among exactly the same patrons. There is no doubt that Velázquez knew their work, and Palomino says he knew the artists, too; he shared a friend with Poussin, and he painted a portrait of Claude’s chief patron. But his landscape is nothing like theirs.

  What is so singular about this little canvas is that Velázquez is actually out there in the still gardens of the Villa Medici. He is recording what he sees with a loaded brush and an extreme sensitivity to the place, its atmosphere and warmth, and to the mellow light of a Roman summer. It is painted on the spot, with the eye’s observations transmitting directly through the hand to the brush—an impression, literally and, of all his works, the one that most prefigures Impressionism two centuries later.

  Did nobody paint outdoors before the nineteenth century? It is bizarre to think of artists trudging back from the fresh air, drawings in hand, to work up the big picture in a stuffy studio. But landscape was so often an excuse for allegory. To depict nature purely for itself, live and unadorned—in its natural state, as it were—was very much the innovation of Velázquez.

  Even Corot, whose silvery landscapes with their secretive air have a genetic link back to Velázquez, has the odd ruin or viaduct in his scenes of the Roman Campagna, and his late works—those elegiac willow-and-wanderer scenes of the 1860s—descend more directly from Claude. Corot was prolific and his paintings were available to the French Impressionists as Velázquez’s were not, so the Spaniard’s influence came indirectly through him. His landscapes we
re so popular that copies flooded the market; of the three thousand Corots in existence, the old joke ran, ten thousand were owned by Americans.

  View of the Gardens of the Villa Medici is one of the smallest paintings in the Prado and one of the greatest. It is a painting that insists upon nothing, that appreciates something as mean as a wall, that makes a wall as beautiful as a painting. Perhaps because it has so many of his crowning characteristics—it is so advanced, so radical and original—specialists have argued that it must have been made during the second trip to Rome in 1649, when Velázquez was fifty, otherwise he would have reached an evolutionary peak when he was barely out of his twenties. But he had already done so; and he was right there, after all, living in the Villa Medici.

  • • •

  It is during the second trip to Rome that Velázquez becomes more visible. Although the walls of the Alcázar were covered with paintings by Leonardo, Titian, Veronese and now Rubens, Philip still aimed to enrich his collection despite the absolute poverty of his treasury. He sent Velázquez on a mission to collect art, and it is typical of the early biographies that we know more about precisely which paintings Velázquez purchased and which classical sculptures he had copied in bronze, and what became of them, than about his exact movements during the two years he was away. But the journey materializes in other documents, some only recently discovered.

  Velázquez set off from Malaga in 1648, accompanied by his black assistant Juan de Pareja, just as the king was about to marry again after the death of his first wife, Elisabeth. They were part of a group sent to meet Philip’s future bride (and niece), Mariana, in the city of Milan. Velázquez was supposed to paint a likeness of the fourteen-year-old princess who looked so like her cousin (Philip’s daughter) that their portraits were confused for centuries. But Velázquez somehow managed to duck the task so that he could see Leonardo’s Last Supper and other masterpieces in Milan. He was single-minded about art on both legs of the Italian trip, breaking away to visit Giotto’s frescoes in Padua and revisit Titian and Tintoretto in Venice; traveling to Bologna to look at Raphael and Michelangelo and to meet two Bolognese fresco painters; to Parma for Correggio and to Naples to meet his old friend the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera.

  There is a purported interview, in baroque rhyming couplets, in which Velázquez gives his famously pithy opinion of Titian as a genius compared to the overrated Raphael. The Italian author describes the Spaniard in a phrase that could also stand for his art: “A Cavalier breathing dignity.”

  No matter how self-contained his art, and how aloof he has often seemed to scholars, it is clear that Velázquez kept good company with artists and that his loyalty was true and enduring. When they were out of work, Velázquez managed to find commissions for both of his Bolognese colleagues in Madrid. He was the first Spanish artist to connect with his Italian peers—Velázquez tried, and failed, to persuade Pietro di Cortona to come and work for Philip—and in Rome he evidently had friendships with women artists as well as men. He is known to have portrayed an Italian woman named Flaminia Trionfi, who was herself a painter. Nothing more is known of her, or the connection between them; the portrait, alas, is lost.

  Just at the moment when the Spanish court wanted portraits of the newlywed monarchs in Madrid, Velázquez somehow found time, among his many duties as the king’s art collector, to paint some of his most personal pictures and to become the great portraitist of another court in another country—the papal court in Rome.

  Stories about Velázquez’s portraits being mistaken for real people were legion in Spain. Philip IV is supposed to have rebuked one of his pictures—“What, are you still here?”—confusing it at dusk with a courtier who had annoyed him. But they reach their apogee at the Vatican when Velázquez is working on the portrait of Pope Innocent X and a passing aide, convinced he had seen the pontiff, and not the picture, through a doorway warns everyone in the vicinity to keep the noise down. It is a tedious old strain of art praise—why, it’s the living (speaking, breathing) likeness of the sitter!—and Innocent’s own comment about the portrait is far more revealing. Of this devastating icon of ferocity and power he simply conceded “Troppo vero!”

  Too true to character, as well as to life: the image seems intensively both, flashing back at you like a sudden face at the window. The sense of its awful animation is emphasized by the theatrical presentation at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome, where the first glimpse of Velázquez’s deathless portrait is not the canvas itself, but Innocent’s frightening face looming around the corner in a specially angled mirror. It is a sight to make anyone flinch, the Pope’s merciless intelligence glaring right back at you—and who hasn’t been momentarily deceived? Obviously one’s continuous eye movements and the mirror’s slippery volatility double the illusion of animation; it is an ingenious stage effect to make one start. But it turns out to be no more sensational, in fact, than the actual experience of entering the room and coming face-to-face with the Pope (Plate H).

  Innocent by name, runs the adage, but not by nature. The first truth the painting declares is that the pontiff enthroned before you is formidably astute, wily enough to have reached the top of an infinitely complex political structure and equally capable of maintaining that position. It is not just that the portrait is powerful—though it is, abundantly so—but that its subject possesses that power. This has its pictorial expression, above all, in the eyes.

  It is commonly said by people who have stood before the picture in Rome that Innocent seems to regard you with piercing clarity; or worse, that he sees through you. This is more than just a variation on the cliché about the eyes in portraits following you around the room. Innocent’s look is drilling, pertinacious—it is an active look, he appears to be keeping a close eye on you—and this intensity is abetted by other aspects of the image: the turning to look, the sharpening expression of those eyebrows, the hand that holds the letter in relation to the one that waits, fingers restlessly curling as if about to clench with irritable impatience. And because Velázquez gives the eyes such a light and glancing touch—almost unbelievably so, just darkness tinged with a scarcely perceptible white blur—they have an open-ended vitality. Innocent looks, and he keeps on looking, with a fixity so intense that one may imagine it contributed to his authority in real life.

  Innocent was notoriously ugly, or so people said. In fact he looks like the handsome film star Gene Hackman in all the contemporary portraits. But no matter what anyone else thought of his appearance, the Pope himself respected the portrait so much that he displayed it before his visitors in the waiting room outside his office. It shows him with a written plea in his hand, so that one senses his temporal as well as his spiritual power; and it seems as if Velázquez himself has been granted an audience with God’s representative. But in truth—and it is the same truth, once again—this is not the image of an almighty stranger so much as a person known to Velázquez.

  Innocent X, formerly known as Giovanni Pamphilj, had been the apostolic nuncio in Madrid from 1626 to the end of that decade. He moved through the city and its churches, was a frequent visitor to the royal palace and, indeed, had a sufficiently strong connection with Spain to worry the French when they were fielding their own candidate during the election campaign that eventually crowned him pope. Artist and sitter are known to each other.

  If a portrait can be said to have a human trait, this portrait has inexhaustible charisma.

  When Innocent died, the picture (by Velasco, as the Italians had it) went to his adopted nephew, Camillo Astalli Pamphilj. Camillo had a short but spectacular career at the Vatican, becoming a cardinal in 1650. He was given the family name and the family palace in the Piazza Navona in the hope that he would prove to be a brilliant administrator, and then stripped of everything on the grounds of incompetence—and leaking state secrets to Philip IV, continuing the family bias towards Spain—three years later.

  Velázquez also painted this vain and feckless man, who wears his red biretta at a slightly
rakish angle (or is made to wear it at that angle: X-rays show that it was level at first, and later tilted by the painter) with a certain spare understatement. There is the faintest trace of a smile, or a sneer, about the lips, and Camillo looks about to dissolve like a hologram, so thin and fine is the diaphanous paint. Velázquez heard word of Camillo’s dramatic downfall back home in Spain, far away from the events, far away from the political ups and downs, the disasters, assassinations and executions of kings, watching the world turn like Lear in his jail.

  There is evidence of other people’s reactions to the way Velázquez saw them. Cardinal Barberini, who got him those first Vatican lodgings, so disliked the character Velázquez gave him, believing the portrait made him less vivacious and too melancholy, that he destroyed it and commissioned another from a rival. Philip IV ceased to sit for his painter from his mid-fifties, saying that he no longer wished to see the truth of himself in Velázquez’s mirror. What is plausible about Innocent’s remark, what takes it beyond the reflex compliment paid to practically any half-decent portrait at that time, is just one word, the simple adjective “troppo.”

  Perhaps the young Charles in Madrid in 1623 had seen someone he did not care for when he looked at himself through Velázquez’s eyes, someone pale and callow, too frail inside his stiff outer shell, a small man alone in a painting.

  • • •

  Palomino says that Velázquez would not take any payment from the Pope, “and could only be prevailed upon to accept a gold chain as a personal mark of esteem from the Holy Father.” The Pope’s whole entourage now insisted on having their portraits painted in turn: his sister-in-law Olimpia; his chamberlain, his barber and his majordomo; Ferdinando Brandani, banker and chief officer of the secretariat; and in addition “a Roman gentleman called Girolamo Bibaldo, and the excellent Roman painter Flaminia Trionfi . . . All these portraits were painted with long-handled brushes in the spirited manner of the great Titian.” And all these portraits have been thought irretrievably lost.