The exact spelling disappears in a flurry of marks, so we shall never know whether it would have been an s or a z.
And what is this letter—is it from Velázquez or to Velázquez? It continues “Painter to His Majesty.” This seems to imply that it’s on its way from king to courtier, rather than the other way round; although some have speculated that it is the reverse, and that this is a petition from the painter to his monarch.
Does it resemble Velázquez’s own signature? It certainly resembles the signature on another letter held in another hand, that of the pink-faced Archbishop Fernando de Valdés, a portrait that cannot be seen all at once, for the strange reason that it has been cut into pieces.
The part of the picture that hangs in the National Gallery in London shows a tense, wary, highly intelligent man experienced in worldly ways, but with an anxiety bordering on sadness. This is the face of a patriarch—archbishop of Granada, president of the Council of Castile, a political post equivalent to lord chancellor—but a face is pretty much all that we have, for the rest of Valdés is invisible. He sits in front of one of Velázquez’s rose-pink curtains, against which his black hat takes the arresting shape of a pair of crab’s claws; but the form of his own body is completely concealed by the voluminous robes of office.
This is one of those paintings that has the aspect of its missing parts, like the glove puppet above the stage that implies the unseen hand below, or the piece of jigsaw that invokes its missing neighbor. One sees Valdés and knows there must have been more of him; and sure enough, the upper torso is here, but the arms and hands are somewhere else: the patriarch has been dismembered.
How did Valdés lose his hands? We know they once existed because a version of the complete picture survives. Most of Valdés is in London—brought back from Madrid by the Scottish painter Sir David Wilkie—but the hands remained in Spain and perhaps there is a reason why they were separated from the body.
Valdés was holding a letter in his right hand, and on this letter Velázquez had painted his signature. A hand holding a handwritten note, painted by the hand of Velázquez to imitate his own handwriting—it matches the compressed flurry on a rare surviving document: one may easily imagine why this section might have been cut from the canvas as a special trophy.
The hand was last seen in the Royal Collection in Madrid in the 1980s. Nobody knows when it disappeared. Perhaps somebody has it even now, a fetish for a secret collector.
In the portrait of Philip IV of Spain in Brown and Silver, Velázquez’s name is incorporated as a piece of documentary evidence. The king has written to him (or vice versa); he carries the letter; the letter is part of the story. Perhaps the two men corresponded during the first Roman trip, though no letters survive; it is thought this portrait was painted not long after Velázquez’s return. During the second visit he also set his own name before the eyes of Italians unfamiliar with his art, in the letter held by Pope Innocent X.
But there are precious few signatures. Indeed, Velázquez goes all the way in the opposite direction from everyone else. Just as he can unpaint that equestrian portait of Philip—Diego Velázquez, Painter to the King, Unpainted This—so he effectively unsigns certain paintings.
There is a sheet of white paper lying casually in a corner of his huge horseback portraits of Philip and Olivares, and another in The Surrender of Breda. Known as cartellini, these are illusionistic pages or scrolls on which artists may leave their names as if written on paper. Philip IV’s court painters all signed their names; but not Velázquez. In each case his sheet of paper is blank. He omits his signature in the very place where others would have spelled it out, having no interest in embellishing his reputation. It is such a fine rhetorical device, a sort of pictorial shrug. Who else could have painted this picture? No name necessary.
• • •
If only that had turned out to be true. Velázquez seems profoundly self-contained still, a figure in another room. His paintings have no titles, no inscriptions, rarely a date or a signature; he kept no record of their sequence, as far as we know, and the questions of when they were made and why (and if, indeed, they are by him) drive scholars, as one has written, “into a world of pain.”
The pictures issue from his mind, to his brush, and out into life to represent themselves; his way of painting remains exceptionally elusive. And for Americans fascinated by reports of his art, and half a world away from seeing it in person in the nineteenth century, there was nothing to look at but prints.
Murillo, by comparison, was practically a household name, his heartfelt pictures having reached the New World long before those of Velázquez; New Yorkers could even see one of his largest paintings, The Immaculate Conception, with its seventeen-strong crew of cherubs transporting the Virgin upwards on a rosy cloud, for free any day in the Tenth Street home of the shipping tycoon William Henry Aspinwall by 1859. But Velázquez was unseen, intangible, remote. Even thirty years later Walt Whitman writes to a friend that he has been trying to visualize the Spaniard’s way of painting by studying a little black-and-white print in the November 1889 edition of the magazine Century. “Wonderfully good, I looked at it for ten minutes. By what the fellows [experts] tell me who have travl’d in Spain I guess there is no portrait painting existing any better than V’s.”
The painting was Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist made modern in the person of a shock-haired old tramp, shabby, at ease and incorruptible. He has no pockets to warm his hands, nothing but the sagging folds of his coat, beneath which he is evidently naked. One of his boots is broken down from limping, and around his poor feet is a litter of rags and a wooden bucket, perhaps to remind us that this great writer was also a slave.
Whitman calls it a portrait, and so it is—not some imaginary Greek, but a real human being dressed for the part. Velázquez finds an Aesop in the living people around him. Some scholars have insisted that the face is made up or, worse, that it is based on “the bovine type” in a contemporary iconography manual; one has even proposed that Velázquez is punishing Aesop for satirizing human beings as beasts. But in fact Aesop has the face of an actual person—he looks exactly like the English actor Albert Finney—just as the portrait has the force of a true human presence. It goes to that idea we all must have at some stage, that the legendary figures of the past must still have had ordinary bodies; and as we walk through the world, certain faces strike us as fit for particular heroes. Aesop’s is an exemplary face—level-eyed, dignified, unillusioned after a lifetime’s hardship—but it is also a real one. Perhaps there is something of Velázquez’s own character in that watchful gaze, so wise and undeceived.
When Hans Christian Andersen saw the portrait, he declared he had found his ancient counterpart and could never picture Aesop any other way.
The print in Century magazine was based on a dim photograph of the painting far away in Madrid; and yet, even at such a remove, Whitman still had a sense of the marvelous original.
• • •
That same year of 1889 the Metropolitan Museum was given the gift of its first supposed Velázquez. The painting that entered the new museum on the Upper East Side was not just any Velázquez, what is more, but a portrait of the artist by his own hand. That is to say it had that intensity about the eyes, that piercing look of recognition that comes from staring long and hard in the mirror, which seemed to single it out as a self-portrait.
It was the very painting the art writer Mrs. Jameson had admired forty years earlier in Mayfair, which had now passed from the Marquess of Lansdowne through an Old Bond Street dealer to the American railroad magnate Henry Marquand.
Marquand was so famous for never being able to say no to a dealer that the entrance hall of his Fifth Avenue mansion was chronically jammed with deliveries of antiques, carpets, paintings and sculptures; there was no room, he lamented, for a humble working clock. He was equally famous for his largesse, a generosity so deep that works of art bought on his behalf in Europe sometimes passed straight into the public museums
of America without spending a single night in his house.
This particular purchase once belonged to a Spanish prime minister, who bought it as a self-portrait; nineteenth-century writers from Mrs. Jameson onwards were equally convinced, and so it appears in the Metropolitan Museum’s own catalogue until well into the twentieth century. But August Mayer was not so sure, and the doyen of Spanish Velázquez scholars, José López-Rey, whose catalogue raisonné was published in 1963, thought it was possibly a fine work by a student. As the century passed, that student was identified as the painter’s son-in-law, Mazo. Certainly the brushwork strives to imitate, in slow and calculated strokes, what Velázquez achieves apparently without effort—the hazy air, the enigmatic eyes, the transparent glow of flesh. Look at the back view of the painter working at the easel in Mazo’s The Family of the Artist and surely this is the same man: the round head, the bushy puffs of soft dark hair: Mazo’s own self-portrait.
But each time someone said it was by Mazo, somebody else reverted to Velázquez. There were no two identical opinions. The assertion that it was by Velázquez split the specialists just as much as the claim that it was a self-portrait—absurd to anyone who has ever seen Las Meninas, for it looks nothing like the painter.
Jonathan Brown, the great American Velázquez scholar, once formulated what he called the five-second rule to deal with the perils of using one portrait to identify the sitter in another. If the resemblance is not apparent within five seconds, it is almost certainly not the same person. Apply the rule in this case and it undoubtedly works.
• • •
In the late nineteenth century other pictures by Velázquez gradually began to reach America. Arabella Huntington, wife (and aunt) of Henry Huntington, who made his fortune laying rail-tracks through Tennessee and Kentucky, bought the immense horseback portrait of Olivares that hangs in the Hispanic Society of America. At the turn of the century her husband bought the exquisite portrait of a little girl, dark-eyed, innocent, aged around seven and so tenderly close to the artist as he works that one might conjecture a family relationship, perhaps grandfather and granddaughter. He takes his time to paint her grave face, bathed in pearly light. Between them, the Huntingtons also bought Velázquez’s portrait of the cashiered Cardinal Astalli, nephew of Innocent X. His identity was unknown in those days and the documents describe him—with a vagueness that would have outraged the cardinal—as “A Young Ecclesiastical.”
In time, some of Velázquez’s least-privileged sitters arrived in the land of the free: the seering image of the lyric poet and satirist Luis de Góngora, in exile from royal favor—though not from Velázquez’s respect—which is now in Boston; the cross-eyed jester Calabazas, holding his paper windmill and beaming so cheerfully at the artist, in Cleveland. The beautiful painting of a sibyl, thought to be Velázquez’s wife, Juana, bought in the sixties by the oil millionaire Algur Meadows for his eponymous museum in Dallas, one of three paintings by Velázquez in this little Prado in the desert. If this is Juana, it is almost all we know of his loyal wife.
In New York there were no fewer than nine paintings, including the Metropolitan’s portrait of Juan de Pareja—or so it seemed until 2010. And then, in the same museum, a Scottish conservator who had been cleaning a portrait of an anonymous gentleman, a picture so murky that it was, he said, like looking into the bottom of a dank pond, began to realize that he was staring into the eyes of a lost Velázquez (Plate J).
The picture shows a thin man with a high forehead and long, narrow face. He is still and secretive as a heron. His brow is slightly moist as if affected by self-consciousness or heat, his hair as fine as the glassy halations that surround him. The eyes are dark disks, one hidden in shadow, the other edged with light and becoming more visible, though still he is reserved; there is a hint of sleeplessness in the sag beneath that eye. The mustache turns up in a single live wire.
He is fractionally turned towards the painter, but the two men are held together by what feels like only the most minimal pressure, nothing so strong as a formal sitting with a concerted pose and special clothes, nothing so routine as a commission. Perhaps this man—this friend, colleague—was a reluctant sitter, but Velázquez has been gently persuasive. The picture won’t take long to make, although it will last forever.
It is an electrifying sight: radiant, fugitive, volatile. The paint is as fluid as a watercolor and so thin as to be almost transparent. The brushlines crackle. Around the head the atmosphere of silver, grey and greenish silver resembles nothing so much as mist. The underlying canvas is everywhere visible, so that the paint seems to have materialized on the surface like condensation on a mirror.
If portraits had souls, this one would surely complain that nobody had ever understood it. The first we hear of it is in the nineteenth century, when it was bought—despite its pensive restraint—as a work by the garrulous and sociable Van Dyck. The buyer was the illegitimate son of King George II of Britain, a Hanoverian aristocrat who kept it in his eccentric castle on the Rhine. It passed to a German dealer who bizarrely included it in his collection of Dutch paintings from the circle of Rembrandt, which is where August Mayer saw it, identifying it as a Velázquez in 1917, most probably as a self-portrait. This was partly because of its powerful resemblance to a man in another painting by Velázquez, the figure in the plumed hat positioned on the edge—and thus in the traditional onlooking role of the artist—of the immense crowd of troops in The Surrender of Breda.
He does look exactly like the man in the plumed hat, and vice versa: they pass the five-second test. And each likeness seemed to corroborate Mayer’s theory that both showed Velázquez around the age of thirty-five, when The Surrender of Breda was painted.
It is a truth seldom acknowledged that historians change their mind, sometimes quite radically. This happened to Mayer. A few years after his declaration that the picture was by Velázquez he began to feel that it might be by Mazo instead. Nobody now would imagine that Mazo had the ability to carry off that collar in one astounding line, or to catch the faint moisture on the forehead and the way the light bounces off it as Velázquez does. Nobody now would imagine that Mazo could even begin to paint that scintillating air, but nobody now sees the picture as Mayer saw it—uncleaned.
And yet he changed his mind, once more. How this came about is one of the low stories of art.
The picture was sold in 1925 to a German dealer named Blumenreich, and as it changed hands attracted the attention of another dealer, the notoriously slippery Joseph Duveen. Duveen wanted to buy the painting from Blumenreich as a middling Mazo and sell it as a great Velázquez. He pursued his course like the sly predator he was, quietly negotiating with Blumenreich until he had caught his prey, but at the same time relentlessly pressurizing Mayer to come and look at the picture again in Paris. Mayer resisted at first, reluctant to appear so changeable in his views. But Duveen wheedled and coaxed and increased the enticements until eventually, at the end of 1925, Mayer relented and came to France. A cable from Duveen, now in the Metropolitan Museum, says that he has “cleaned up a little” as he thinks “it would give a much clearer effect for discussion with Dr Mayer.” Sure enough, a few days later another cable triumphantly announces: “Mayer passes Velázquez.”
Art historians ever since have been uneasy or downright critical about Mayer’s volte-face, since he was—as is customary—paid for this final verdict. But the surface of the picture had changed since he last saw it in 1917 and there were no color reproductions to prepare him for the way it now looked. It was, he wrote, “one of the most delightful surprises which I have ever had . . . The modelling is simply marvellous, the painting is like a flowing water colour, the tints of the face look like mother-of-pearl. It has come out most splendidly. The picture lost all the dimness and shows now the characteristic silver-grey tone of the works of these years.”
If only the painting had been left in this state, its future would have been different.
But Duveen wanted to sell it to an America
n collector and he believed, correctly as it turned out, that he would get bigger money if the picture looked more like an Old Master; or rather, an Old Master as imagined by an American unfamiliar with Velázquez. Having cleaned it once, he now effectively uncleaned it. Duveen sent the picture to a restorer for transformation. The picture was darkened, the beautiful silver-grey tone dimmed once more. The features were given more emphasis, the head a rigid contour, the hair a heavier do. One could not say that the essential subject changed—it was still the portrait of a man, probably Spanish—so much as that it was solidified, weighed down, coarsened. It was traduced, extra-Hispanicized, “improved” or “consolidated,” as you will, and then heavily varnished on top of all this cosmetic surgery. And this is how it came into the collection of Jules Bache, sold to him as a Velázquez self-portrait for a gigantic $1.25 million a few months later in 1926.
Bache was a German immigrant who arrived in New York as a teenager, some twenty years after Snare, to work his way up the stockbroking company founded by his uncle. By the age of thirty he had taken over; by the age of forty he had made the firm so successful its only rival was Merrill Lynch.
Bache bought paintings with a passion and opened his large house at 814 Fifth Avenue to the public free of charge, four days a week, with the idea that it might eventually become a private museum. The painting appears in a photograph, hanging on the wall of the drawing room among the Rembrandts, the Titians and the ormolu clocks. But Bache later decided that his collection needed a more reliable home and bequeathed most of it to the Metropolitan Museum.
The portrait that entered the museum in 1949 in the Bache bequest was not a Velázquez for very much longer. It was revarnished in 1953 and then again in 1965, by which stage it no longer convinced the specialists and was demoted to that dispiriting category “workshop of Velázquez.” By 1979 it was relegated to the store. What had begun as a possible Van Dyck, become a definite Velázquez, then a Mazo, then a Velázquez all over again now turned into nothing very much: any old portrait of any old Spaniard; anonymous sitter, anonymous painter.
The Vanishing Velázquez Page 19