The Vanishing Velázquez

by Laura Cumming

  Rubens came to London not long after his time in Madrid, where he spent whole days with Velázquez; yet, if he saw it at all, he says nothing about it. There is no mention in the collections of Buckingham or Charles. Could it have been buried beneath another painting? Could there be a trace of it—if not literally, then aesthetically—in the Mytens? Or was it, too, dispatched overseas on a diplomatic mission, sent off to someone in Portugal or Poland long ago; has the portrait found its haphazard way out into the vastness of the world?

  Historians often mention the lost Velázquez and, when they do, it is with decision. They say it is permanently lost, or irrevocably lost, as if some statute of limitations had expired and nobody need look for it anymore. But it could go the other way. The condition of the portrait is simply that it has not yet been found, that—like the other paintings by Velázquez that have returned from oblivion—it, too, will come back one day.

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  Saved

  PALACES ARE NO less perishable than the people who live and die within them. They only take longer to decline into the ruins that lie above and below the earth. But the fire that dispatched the Alcázar in 1734 was so mortally abrupt that most of the hulking stone fortress that had dominated the city’s edge for hundreds of years passed into rubble and ash in a matter of hours. What was upright on Christmas Eve was gone by the end of Christmas Day.

  The Alcázar was unusually deserted that night. Almost everyone was at midnight mass or staying in another royal palace, so the few servants left behind had to fight the fire on their own. Their first instinct, perhaps fearful of their masters’ wrath, was to barricade the outer doors against looting. Rushing along passageways between cavernous state rooms and remote private apartments, they somehow managed to gather up paintings by Leonardo, Titian and Rubens, chests of coins and boxes of jewelry, including the outsize Pilgrim Pearl worn by Spanish queens, which would one day belong to Elizabeth Taylor. But when fireballs began to hurtle down the corridors, the only option was to open the windows and throw whatever could be salvaged as quickly as possible out into the freezing night air.

  The fire raged uncontrollably all through Christmas Day, destroying walls and floors, consuming tapestries, melting silver and glass; the larger the treasure, the more dangerous the attempt to save it. Of the thousand and more paintings in the royal collection, many were too big, too high on the walls or too far-flung to be rescued. The Alcázar had four floors, and the windows pierced through its thick medieval walls were often so obstructively narrow that the size and shape of the canvas came to matter as much as the image itself. As many as five hundred paintings burned in the flames.

  On the palace walls that Christmas were two large works by Velázquez. One was a famous early triumph, The Expulsion of the Moors from Spain, a subject set by Philip IV for that competition between his court painters won by Velázquez at the start of his career. This masterpiece burned. The other was Las Meninas, greatest of all paintings, saved only by the speed and dexterity of exactly the humble people Velázquez depicts—the servants of the palace, who managed to free the canvas from its frame and push it out into the wintry courtyard below before the smoke overwhelmed them.

  Only the cheek of the little princess was scorched that Christmas. If the rest of the picture had gone up in flames, the whole of art would have been diminished. One masterpiece was lost to fate, but the other was saved by the servants; and with it the revelation of all these children and courtiers held in a bright spot of time, their lives rescued from oblivion, in turn, by Velázquez’s transcendent genius as a painter.

  • • •

  This is the end. There can never be anything better than this, so said Manet on seeing Velázquez in the Prado. He wondered why anyone would ever bother trying to paint anymore—himself included—because this art could not be surpassed. Velázquez had taken the comparatively new medium of oil paint and done everything with it; he had taken it as far as it could go.

  This has been the response of fellow painters from Velázquez’s day to ours. What Velázquez painted was the truth; everyone else was just making it up: that was the reaction of the artists in Rome when the portrait of Juan de Pareja was shown outside the Pantheon in 1650. Here was the theology of painting, declared the awed painter Luca Giordano on seeing Las Meninas a century later, meaning that it told the truth about life, as theology told the truth about God. Picasso, obsessed, went in and out of that painted room for years trying to understand its enigma, isolating the elements—the weight of darkness, the activity of light, the solitary figures standing like chess pieces in their different planes of reality—in more than forty prints, which are Disney cartoons by comparison with Las Meninas; and still he could not fathom its art.

  Velázquez’s way of painting was thought miraculous, magical, above all mysterious. Even now one wonders how he could know where to place that speck of white that ignites a string of flashing glints across pale silk, how to convey the stiff transparency of gauze with a single dab of blue on grey, how to paint eyes that see us, but are themselves indecipherable. How could he lay paint on canvas so that it is as impalpable as breath, or create a haze that seems to emit from a painting like scent, or place a single dab of red on the side of a head so that it perfectly reads as an ear?

  These marks are conspicious. These brushstrokes can be counted. The methods are all laid out before you, openly declared as special effects, and yet you cannot break free of the illusion of life.

  For some writers, the illusion is all there is. Velázquez can only be understood or appreciated as a virtuoso master. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset set the tone in the 1950s, damning Velázquez even as he praised him: “All that matters to him are the fleeting images his retina receives in the blink of an eyelid. And each painting of this genius is like an immense retina . . . turning the world into pure visuality.” Out of chaos, he creates these visual phantasms. It is an extension of what Palomino says in that early biography—“up close the painting was not intelligible. But from a distance it was a miracle.” And it is true that, in some way we may not understand, these paintings mimic the experience of seeing in itself.

  But Velázquez’s genius is not in this invention alone. He is not just striving for “pure visuality,” not painting for the sake of illusion alone. He puts his art to the deepest human purpose.

  The mystery of his work is not just that his paintings are both dazzling and profoundly moving all at once, but that these apparent opposites coincide to the extent that one feels neither can exist without the other. The truth of life, the mortal truth of our brief walk in the sun, has to be set down in a flash of brilliant brushstrokes that are themselves on the verge of dissolution. The picture, the person, the life: all are here now, but on the edge of disappearing. It is the very definition of the human condition.

  And if the art of Velázquez teaches us anything at all it is the depth and complexity of our fellow human beings. Respect for the servants and the dwarves, the jesters and the bodyguards, the old woman frying eggs and the young boy with his melon, for the princess and the palace weavers, for the seller of water and the seller of books: that is what his art transmits. To respect these portraits is to respect these people. And this depth is not an illusion, not something merely in the surface of the work, but there in every nuanced observation. If we acknowledge the greatness of Velázquez, then we shouldn’t scorn anyone; let alone this Englishman who cherished a supposed fragment of his art.

  Velázquez gives every person he paints such individual presence, such unparalleled dignity. His figures are always portraits, never just types. Even when the subject is legend or myth, reality just keeps breaking through. His Aesop isn’t some anonymous ancient, but a shock-haired intellectual with a broken nose and no cash to patch his clothes. His Mars is a slumped old prizefighter, his occupation gone, muscles losing tone. Perhaps the picture was made to amuse the court, as scholars say—a drooping mustache, an oversized helmet—but Velázquez gives his veteran tragic
status, a portrait of redundancy and loss.

  He understands the harsh demands upon the dwarf, and the curiosity of the little princess surprised by the arrival of whoever we are in Las Meninas; he understands the resistance of the stoic dog and the tensions of the chamberlain, waiting on the step, one leg in and one leg out, his job this kind of exacting hesitation, trying to gauge the speed of the royal passage through court; he understands the extraordinary skill required to become, and remain, a pope.

  There is nothing sentimental in his pictures, or his thinking. They do not tug at your heart strings, or make you feel smaller by comparison with their style and flamboyance, like Van Dyck. They put you eye to eye with the sitter; this is the democracy of his art.

  And it goes both ways. It is sometimes said that Velázquez reserved his compassion for the court outsiders, but the untruth of this is everywhere apparent. All men are born equal to him. A late portrait of Philip as a sunken old lion shows the full grief of his life’s experience. Ineffably sad, it is also as near to a ghost as anything Velázquez ever produced, the paint so spectrally thin one can hardly believe it could register as a human face. And a late portrait of Olivares, who is about to lose his position—ruined in an instant and banished from Madrid forever—shows that scheming politician, kiss curl now a little disheveled, jowls dangling heavy in a kind of haze of bewilderment, as if burled in all directions. His eyes show confusion, muddle, the onset of dementia. He is said to have died in utter madness.

  • • •

  What Velázquez emphasizes is the dignity of all people. It would not be hard, after all, to hold Philip IV in contempt if one looked at the record of his reign, his womanizing and his wastefulness, his ill-advised campaigns, his stupid squandering of Spain’s wealth and power, his marrying of his own son’s fiancé, his licentiousness—many bastards, no sons, as they used to say—his irresolute and craven character, susceptible to persuasion, flattery and above all to Olivares, who led him by the nose. But Velázquez is neither awed nor repelled; he is fascinated.

  There are more than twenty portraits of Philip, a time-lapse biography in paint, from the early face with its ruddy lower lip, moist, protuberant and dangling—one can hear the wet lisp with which he surely must have spoken—to the splendor of the mid-life monarch, supposedly mitigated by the golilla that says onwards with our sober thrift, that does him no favors: a head on a plate, a head dished. Twenty years into his reign he still has that strawberry-blond hair and nearly invisible eyebrows, but the eyes are sunken and the lids drag heavily downwards, revealing the white inner rims. Velázquez sees him as fallible, mortal. The king has come closer again, as close as he was in the first portrait made on that summer’s day in 1623, but now he is a man careworn and aware of his sins, and his sorrows, but keeping going, still here. Seek inside yourself for the flaws; pray that you will be understood.

  Soon Philip will withdraw from his painter’s gaze, and his truthful brush. Yet each painting gives him the fullest mercy—that human understanding that is the very soul of Velázquez’s art.

  Velázquez is able to see the whole world before him in the microcosm of the court, in the faces of servants on the stairs, in the behavior of children, in the conversation and attitudes of actors and dwarves. He finds a Venus and a Mars in the humble people around him, sees a king as compellingly ordinary and is able to make an old man selling water seem like an ancient prophet. There is an extraordinary equality to his empathetic gaze.

  The friends of his youth appear in middle age. Nieto is there at the beginning and he is there at the end. The dwarves come in and out of the entire life’s work. Velázquez’s loyalty is fixed. He does not pretend he never knew Olivares when it is all over for him. Nobody is too high or low for his art. He painted the jester who played a matador in palace comedies; he painted the palace gatekeeper. Like the long-dead people they represented, these portraits are gone, too, thought destroyed by the Alcázar fire.

  • • •

  Ars longa, vita brevis. You only have to look at all the amulets dangling from the belt of the last of the royal children portrayed by Velázquez to sense the desperate fear of death at the Spanish court; the boy was dead at the age of four. Philip IV’s first wife died young. His two sons and youngest daughter all predeceased him. His second wife would have been the bride of Baltasar Carlos, the son for whom she was intended, if the boy hadn’t died before the wedding. And soon after bidding farewell to his eldest daughter at the Isle of Pheasants in 1660, in the betrothal to Louis XIV, Philip lost his painter, too. Velázquez was buried in the church of San Juan Bautista in the clothes we see him wearing in Las Meninas. His body has since vanished. The church was destroyed by French troops during the Peninsular War, on the orders of Joseph Bonaparte.

  • • •

  The greatest achievement of Philip’s life was to have employed Velázquez.

  • • •

  The king’s face in Las Meninas is a hazy blur; this was the last time Velázquez ever painted him. These are the twilight years of his reign, the high summer of the Spanish empire is over and war with France is bankrupting the government. By 1657 Philip will not be able to get credit even for food. A few years later he will be dead, followed far too soon, before she was even twenty-one, by the little princess.

  Of course it is thanks to Velázquez that Margarita’s youth and charm survive her. But Las Meninas is more than an arrangement of beautiful portraits; more than the sum of all its interpretations and more than a meditation on painting.

  It is well said that Velázquez’s brushstrokes reveal a true freedom of spirit. In this masterpiece they also release something equivalent in the people he portrays, so alive and unique, and in every viewer who comes before the picture. Las Meninas is piercingly sad in its representation of these lost children in their obsolete clothes, dead and gone for centuries, and the painting makes its elegy for what must come in miniature at the back of the room, where Nieto waits to lead us onwards into that other light, hovering between this world and the next.

  But he does not go and they do not fade, kept here by our presence and Velázquez’s art. The golden haze remains bright against the sepulchral darkness above. The figures of the past keep looking into our moment—as long as we keep looking back at them. Everything in Las Meninas is designed to keep this connection alive forever. The dead are with us, and so are the living consoled. We live in each other’s eyes and our stories need not end.

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  Acknowledgments

  The first Velázquez I ever saw was An Old Woman Cooking Eggs at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. I was eight and my parents thought I ought to be old enough to appreciate it. For their confidence, their lifelong encouragement and the constant inspiration of their thought and work down the decades, I am intensely grateful to my beloved artists, James and Elizabeth Cumming.

  How and where we come to see paintings is in part the subject of this book. The gallery of the Prado where Las Meninas hangs is a prospect of limitless excitement to me and I would never have been there after hours without the hospitality of Gabriele Finaldi, then at the Prado, now director of the National Gallery in London. I thank him for his wisdom and generosity. I am greatly indebted to the work of many other Velázquez scholars, too, but most particularly Xavier Bray, Jonathan Brown, Dawson Carr and Javier Portus at the Prado.

  Anna Reynolds took me behind the scenes at the Royal Collection and to the queen’s private corridor at Windsor Castle to see the Mytens self-portrait. Hilary Macartney and Laurence Grove of the Stirling Maxwell Research Project at Glasgow University were extraordinarily helpful about Sir W., as they call him. Lesley Miller, Senior Curator of Textiles at the V&A, was a reassuring authority on the subject of Charles I’s clothes. Andrew McKenzie, head of Old Master Paintings at Bonhams, show
ed me the X-ray of the Shepperson Velázquez and gave me many hours of conversation. I warmly thank them all.

  I would never have come across John Snare if not for the existence of the National Art Library, where I have so often sat in drafty seat number 33 (occupied a century before me by a fellow art critic, C. Lewis Hind, whose Days with Velasquez all but bursts with love: may he find new readers today). My thanks are due to all the NAL librarians; also to Paul Cox at the National Portrait Gallery Library; Sarah Jeffcott at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery Library; Miriam Palfrey at Reading Library; and Maurita Baldock at the New-York Historical Society. For answering all sorts of peculiar questions, I am grateful to David Allen Green, the Ross Herald Charles Burnett, Jo Edwards at Duff House, Bendor Grosvenor, Carrie Hunnicutt at the Meadows Museum, Diana Mackarill, Catherine Macleod at the National Portrait Gallery, Molly Marder at the Chrysler Museum, Virginia Napoleone at the National Gallery, Clive Stafford Smith, Mark Weiss and Florence Evans of the Weiss Gallery.

  Clara Farmer is a superb editor—exacting, acute and imaginative. I am also grateful to Susannah Otter and Charlotte Humphery for all their kindness at Chatto and to Mandy Greenfield, meticulous copy editor, and Alex Milner, eagle-eyed proofreader. At Scribner, Nan Graham sent the book in new directions with her strong insights and encouragement. Thanks also to Daniel Loedel for his warm editorial support. In Patrick Walsh of Conville and Walsh, my friend and champion, I have simply the best of all agents.