The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  Royal likenesses were still required, as always, although the king was no longer inclined to sit for his portrait. Philip wrote to his confessor that he did not wish to see himself growing old through the eyes of Velázquez. The portraits, now, were all of girls in blue and silver, coral and gold, blond hair softly waved and fixed with rosettes, or weighed down with wide wigs, rosy young faces unaffected by time and care. Vast areas of these canvases, made to promote European alliances, were devoted to shimmering silk costumes heavy with lace and brocade. They were among the very few works to leave Spain during Velázquez’s own lifetime. He tried to get away again himself, in 1657, but his request was refused “on account of the dilatoriness of the previous journey.”

  Gradually he vanishes from view into his life as a courtier; and perhaps this life removes him from art. Palomino wrote, with intense regret, that when Velázquez was promoted to the position of chief chamberlain in 1652, this highest of honors was more like a punishment. “The position is so onerous it needs a whole man to fill it and although we painters take so much pride in Velázquez’s elevation, we also grieve to have missed so many more proofs of his genius.”

  What we do not know, of course, is whether Velázquez regretted it himself. Some writers have suggested that he was now more concerned with the pictures in the royal collection, of which he had charge, than with any of his own. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset even asked whether Velázquez really could be bothered to paint anymore. Others have wondered if he had no choice—the administrative duties weighed upon him so terribly—or if he simply preferred the life of a courtier, by now, to that of a painter who had achieved everything he could. But in all the debates that have raged over the years, what so often goes unmentioned is that Velázquez did paint, and the few pictures he painted were among his greatest achievements, the late fables and Las Meninas itself, pinnacle of a lifetime’s work.

  Quantity here means nothing; and just because some of these images appear to have arrived on the canvas like morning mist does not mean they were done with ease, simplicity or dispatch. The profundity of these paintings argues for the most prolonged contemplation. It is not that Velázquez disappears into the bureaucracy so much as that he disappears into extreme thought.

  In his biography, Palomino quotes one parting remark as proof of the painter’s rapid wit. “His Majesty said to him one day that there are many people who declared that his skill was limited to knowing how to paint heads. To which he replied, ‘Sire, they compliment me greatly, for I do not know that there is anyone who can paint a head.’ What a remarkable reaction to jealousy in a man who had proved his universal command of art.” Palomino is referring to the fact that although Velázquez was employed to paint portraits, he made many other kinds of image, too—tavern scenes and history paintings like Breda, pictures of Aesop and Mars, fables and even nudes. All of these pictures, however, are also a form of portraiture by other means. Velázquez never loses sight of the human beings in the close world around him. Real people stand in for mythical people without ever losing their essential selves.

  The “Rokeby Venus,” which hung for so much of the nineteenth century in a dark Yorkshire house, is Velázquez’s only surviving nude: a pearly girl basking in a silvery light before a mirror that reveals her hazy face—although technically it shouldn’t. Had Velázquez followed the laws of light and optics, the mirror would have shown her waist, rather than her features, but instead he presents the whole of her back, inching with infinite softness over her curves, while also giving us her unidealized face. And what is she looking at in her mirror, this goddess made mortal? Venus seems to be looking at herself, and yet also at us—it is an astonishingly subtle painting. You cannot find the exact focus of her eyes in the spectral mirror, and yet Venus is no mirage, but a real living woman.

  It is well said that everyone will find something different in that indistinct face; perhaps she is welcoming, perhaps she is forbidding, perhaps she is waiting to find us in her looking glass. Like Las Meninas, the painting is open to all. And what further connects these images is Velázquez’s acute and unprecedented sensitivity to us, to the presence and imagination of every single person who comes before the picture. It is that same open-ended connection with the viewer that one sees all the way back to the sad-eyed servant in the House of Mary and Martha at the very beginning of Velázquez’s painting life.

  But by now, thirty years later, his art has become nearly evanescent. The painting of Venus’s body is virtually imperceptible; Cupid’s back foot is barely there: and yet somehow we see it. With the “Rokeby Venus,” Velázquez has reached the point where his way of painting—close up or at a distance—is uniquely mysterious. And just as you cannot make out the all-seeing eyes of Venus, so in the work generally held to be his last, known as The Fable of Arachne or The Spinners, the image itself seems to be dissolving into an optical blur. How perfectly this corresponds with the subject of the fable, which is the creation of images themselves.

  Arachne, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is a young country weaver whose gifts were so great they enraged the goddess Athena, the more so because she had taught the girl herself. Athena challenges her to a weaving contest. When Arachne’s tapestry appears more beautiful in the eyes of others—and Arachne shows no sign of debt to her teacher—Athena turns her into a spider.

  Velázquez shows tapestry weavers in the real world of a dark but sun-warmed interior, carding, spinning and winding the woolen threads, as the foreground to a brilliant illusion viewed through a curtain in which the two protagonists of the fable are shown. But are Athena and Arachne in the same reality, or are they figures in a tapestry themselves? The whole image, from dark to shining light, is as close as possible to a dream.

  And yet this strange and spectacular painting in which Velázquez might be intimating something about himself—no teacher, no debt—is also powerfully real in its effects. The softly vaporous light, the fluttering threads, the impression of movement all through the scene, climaxing in the whirring blur of the spinning wheel: everything contributes to such a presentiment of flickering light and life, of partial glimpses and barely grasped images, that the picture seems above all to portray the restless ever-changing experience of seeing—a vision of seeing, itself.

  How does the illusion appear so nebulous and yet so real? The art historian Kenneth Clark tried to identify the precise moment where the chaos of brushmarks in a Velázquez somehow coalesces into an image. He had been looking hard at Las Meninas. “I would start from as far away as I could, when the illusion was complete, and come gradually nearer until suddenly what had been a hand, a ribbon and a piece of velvet, dissolved into a salad of beautiful brush-strokes. I thought I might learn something if I could catch the moment at which this transformation took place, but it proved to be as elusive as the moment between waking and sleeping.” Somewhere between waking and sleeping, between consciousness and dream: that is the effect of these final works.

  • • •

  Did Velázquez paint The Spinners for the king or himself? Nobody knows, but it is not to be supposed that he made paintings only on other people’s orders. Velázquez had a freedom no other artist enjoyed at court; he went his own way, and was both respected and envied for it. Palomino speaks of jealous courtiers, of “malevolent people trying to deprive Velázquez of his sovereign’s grace” because there was such a palpable bond between them. Even as Velázquez was working on Las Meninas in the late 1650s, bureaucrats were vindictively attempting to thwart his attempts to become a Knight of Santiago, the noble Catholic order he had long hoped to join. Philip himself had gone to some lengths to get Velázquez in, including direct appeals to the Pope, but not without anxious prompting from the painter, who spent years espaliering the family tree to prove he had enough class to join the aristocrats. Legend has it that the king personally added the red cross, emblem of the order, to Velázquez’s breast in Las Meninas when the painter was finally elected in 1659. But X-rays do not show anothe
r hand at work. How apt that Velázquez, ennobled by his paintings far above any worldly title, should speak his quiet vindication in the silence of art.

  People have argued for centuries about the meaning of this masterpiece. Some have insisted that the mirror on the back wall does not reflect the king and queen outside the painting so much as the portrait on which Velázquez is currently working, so that this magnificent painting of the blank back of a huge canvas is in fact nothing but the humdrum reverse of yet another royal commission, a double portrait of Philip and Mariana. The picture carries no secrets, no marvels, and makes nothing of the viewer. These commentators cannot have looked at Velázquez’s art, at the “Rokeby Venus” or Mary and Martha. They cannot be looking at the same painting. Pictures are their own form of evidence.

  To argue that this whole scene has been conjured to show nothing more than the objective reality of the artist at work—close to the infanta and painting the king’s portrait, once again, as if Velázquez was awfully keen to appear in royal company—is to go against pretty much all the evidence of his genius. Velázquez, who was so deeply acquainted with The Arnolfini Portrait, who knew its ingenious use of a mirror to draw the room outside the scene, including Jan Van Eyck himself, into its depiction: it is not credible that this most intelligent of painters would have conceived of anything less remarkable. And if the mirror reflects the presence of the king and queen, so it also implies that you now stand where the monarchs once stood; that you, like they, are the watchers and the watched. Time telescopes, and you, too, are contained in the artist’s vision.

  Las Meninas is nothing without him, what is more. He is the crux of the whole painting. If Velázquez had not included himself, the picture would still be exceptional, but its emphasis would be thrown. A princess, some servants, two parents in a mirror—“The Family of King Philip IV” (how overlooked was Velázquez even then)—but an end to that unique cycle of connections, and reversals, between viewers and viewed. Our participation, the sense in which we complete the picture, would no longer be required and the never-ending transmission between us would cease. Since this is central to the painting’s complexity—and Velázquez must surely have meant to make his masterpiece as complex as he could, this meditation on art in which he finally reveals himself as an artist and a courtier, a poet and a philosopher of the human condition—the self-portrait, no matter how taciturn, how remote, is nonetheless the linchpin.

  Velázquez, stepping momentarily free of the shadows with his brush, visibly declares that this world is all his, that he can make a king and queen appear and yet disappear, that he can paint both in and out of focus, so to speak, knowing that the eye shifts continually, seeing sharply only what it focuses upon for a second, and that it cannot take in the entire scene at once. So Las Meninas runs all the way from solid description—the floor, the walls, the coffered door beside Nieto—to the little dwarf’s flurried movement on the right, not much more than a brushy blur, even to the nearly imperceptible frisson of air. The execution is a marvel, conveying the actual movement of our eyes, while casting each one of us as part of this spectacle.

  Perhaps there is a hint of the conjuror in Velázquez’s self-portrait, making the world materialize and yet vanish with this wand of a brush, but to modern eyes the black-clad artist, set apart, rising watchfully above it all, somber in his knowledge, has more affinity with Prospero, the dramatist-magician who brings the action of The Tempest into being and then breaks his wand at the end, revealing the secrets of his art. The secrets of Velázquez’s art are all on show in Las Meninas, yet their mystery does not melt into thin air.

  Velázquez wore the red cross of the Order of Santiago in the summer of 1660 during his last creative act (and his ultimate achievement as a courtier). This was the theatrical staging of a French-Spanish truce sealed by the betrothal of the Infanta Maria Teresa to Louis XIV of France on the Isle of Pheasants in a river between the two countries.

  Velázquez was still working with José Nieto, his fellow chamberlain; Nieto organized the infanta’s lodgings along the route to the French border, Velázquez prepared the way for Philip—and perhaps for the whole betrothal in a deeper sense, for his portraits of the blond princess were said to have aroused Louis’s interest in the first place. The two chamberlains were present at the betrothal, which lasted four days and for which Velázquez designed an elegant mise-en-scène inside a sequence of tents. The return journey was just as elaborate, and Palomino says that the whole enterprise left him weary and low.

  A few days later, on July 31, “a burning sensation obliged him to retire to his apartments.” Velázquez became feverish, then sick with pains in the stomach and heart. The king sent his doctor. The archbishop of Tyre delivered a long valedictory sermon. On August 6, at two o’clock in the afternoon, the painter died in his bed at the age of sixty-one. Palomino wrote the best epitaph: “God created him for the wonder of the world.”

  17

  The Ghost of a Picture

  It is surprising how often curious old portraits are found in places where nobody would ever think of looking for them. They are found thrown out of many houses for lumber, the name of the Artist and the Person represented being unknown; or are sold to pay debts, or to make way for the modern fashion for papering rooms. I know many houses where very fine portraits are put up to garrets, and neglected, while their places are supplied with an eight-penny paper.

  2nd Earl Fife, 1798

  PORTRAITS DISAPPEAR ALL through time in their untold numbers. As the people they represent leave this world, so their portraits also depart to make way for the next generation. No matter how precious they are, or once were, they cannot all be preserved in air-conditioned pantheons for the rest of time. Our museums are full to bursting, their directors protest, on being offered another donation, as if they were talking of cemeteries.

  Perhaps we think it an outrage against art to abandon or cremate a portrait, and yet it is done. An English artist once installed a vast Dumpster in a London gallery for “the humane disposal of unwanted art” and people all over the capital came to be relieved of their guilt, their quandary and their paintings. For what are we to do with our portraits if there is not enough space in our homes, our museums, our public buildings; if the people in these portraits—and the portraits themselves—mean nothing to us anymore, the identities of the artists and their sitters lost in the tidal drift of amnesia? What if a portrait has been handed down from one generation to the next but nobody knows where it came from in the first place, why it mattered, who this pallid oval at the center of the filthy black square might supposedly represent?

  Paintings can disappear as dramatically as the people they show, vanishing into the elements by just such acts of man, God and fate. A Velázquez was lost at sea in the eighteenth century, nobody quite knows when, on a voyage to Italy from Spain. Another may have been destroyed in transit simply because it was next to a canister of mercury that shattered on a ship, ravaging the picture surface. A third, The Disciples at Emmaus, suffered not one but two catastrophes. First a fire broke out at the museum where it was hanging in 1907, destroying the Velázquez, to the grief of its owner, one Baron de Quinto. But when the galleries were sifted for evidence of arson and not a trace of scorched canvas was found, Quinto correctly surmised that the fire was a cover for theft. Several clues led directly to a Spanish shipping line to America, and the New York Sun reported that the baron had written to police there appealing for help. But he was too late. “The vessel docked here long before the arrival of Quinto’s letter, and even started on its return trip to Spain on February 7, but it sank in the East River, where it now lies.” The stolen Velázquez went down with the ship, if it was still on board; or was simply spirited away into America. Its whereabouts are unknown. But it did suffer one final fate, which the baron did not live to learn. The picture, it was later established, was only a copy.

  Ships go down, carriages are plundered, railway trains crash. A Vermeer was crushed on a train betw
een Germany and Paris. Somewhere in the English Channel lies Carpaccio’s Virgin and Child. Several paintings on the way to Paris with Joseph Bonaparte were never seen again after the battle at Vitoria.

  Transport companies lose track of works or accidentally dispose of them; insurers muddle them; banks mislay them. Artworks go missing when efficient records are not kept. During the Second World War records across Europe were trashed; thousands of artworks were moved, kept in salt mines, bunkers or damp cellars, burned or damaged by bombs. Some of these paintings were atomized in air strikes—a Vermeer in Dresden, a Caravaggio in Berlin—but many are still missing today.

  The English Civil War, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune: innumerable works were punished, purged or suppressed, all verbs used at the time, and all manifesting the violence intended upon real people and here enacted upon surrogates—the kings, aristocrats, bishops or politicians who had commissioned these portraits.

  Even without war or natural catastrophe, it is surprisingly difficult to discover the whereabouts of works that disappear from public view into private houses. Even at the eleventh hour, curators sometimes hear of an Old Master that hasn’t seen daylight for decades and can now be included in a show. Specialists may pursue lost artworks through Interpol or the Lost Art Register, only to turn up nothing because the painting, which still exists, is in a house (or a garret) so far off the beaten track as to be beyond the sphere of the questing dealer. “Location unknown” is the customary phrase, with the hope that this will one day be reversed.

  The history of art is largely the history of the works that have survived, that people have bothered to protect. For pictures are not only lost by chance, and error, they are also deliberately discarded. Artists—and their descendants—destroy works they don’t think sufficiently important because they have no money for storage and no other place to keep them. Canvases are reused out of perfectionism, experiment, thrift or all three, in the case of Velázquez, who once transformed a portrait of Philip IV into a portrait of his niece Mariana. X-rays show the shocking ease of this transition between the grown man and the young girl with their lugubrious Hapsburg features; so do pictures disappear beneath other pictures.