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The Face of Spain
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From Kitchen to Palace
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Velazquez
A Young Man (Self-Portrait?)
1623-24
Oil on canvas, 56 x 38 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
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Beneath a bushy, untidy moustache, teeth flash between sensual
lips. The man in the picture stands there smiling, shown
half-length, turned to one side but with his face towards us. His
right hand is placed on his hip, in an attitude setting off the
heavy folds of a red cloak. The thin little man's otherwise rather
unimpressive figure and broad, quizzical face, his black doublet and
his white lace collar all suggest the portrait of some humorous
hidalgo or courtier of the seventeenth century. However, the subject
of the painting is the Greek philosopher Democritus expressing his
amusement at the world, which stands on the table in front of him in
the shape of a globe.
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Velazquez
Democritus
1628-29
Oil on canvas, 101 x 81 cm
Musee des Beaux-Arts et de la Ceramique, Rouen
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Peter Rubens
Democritus
1603
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Democritus, who lived around 470-360 BC, taught that cheerful and moderate
contentment was the way to happiness. European painting of the Renaissance and
Baroque periods repeatedly portrayed him as the "laughing philosopher",
contrasting him with other intellectual types such as the pessimist, the stoic
and the cynic. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) painted a similar Democritus for the Duke of Lerma, to accompany a Mourning Heraclitus. From 1638 these two
pictures were in the Torre de la Parada, the king of Spain's hunting lodge in
the Pardo mountains near Madrid, for which Rubens and his pupils had painted
mythological and hunting scenes ten years earlier. Velazquez, who had been a
court painter since 1623, also worked on the decoration of the Torre de la
Parada.
His own Democritus was painted in 1628/29, and his later alterations to the face
and hands, softening their painting, show that at the time he was greatly
interested in the work of the brilliant Flemish master of the Baroque. It is
only in a few later works by Velazquez, such as the picture of Mars, the
classical god of war, painted in 1639-1641 (Mars), that the inspiration of
Rubens is similarly evident.
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Velazquez
Mars, God of War
1639-1641
Museo del Prado, Madrid
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Just as Rubens represents the culmination of Baroque painting in the southern
Catholic Netherlands, Velazquez is pre-eminent among the artists of the Siglo de
Oro, the "golden age" of Spanish painting. But unlike Rubens, who quickly rose
to European fame, Velazquez remained relatively unknown outside his own country
for a long time. One reason must have been that to a greater or lesser degree he
avoided all those areas in which Rubens shone, and which particularly impressed
patrons of high rank in the rest of Europe. Rubens specialized in the depiction
of strong emotion, in large-scale altarpieces and historical pictures, and in
the dynamic of form and narrative. Velazquez, on the other hand, paints no grand
and apparently uncontrolled gestures; his compositions are generally filled with
a sense of great calm.
As a colourist, Velazquez was in no way inferior to Rubens. In
complete contrast to the latter, however, he dealt with the subjects
of his paintings in a quiet, everyday manner, so that the artistic
qualities of his direct and apparently straightforward style seem to
be governed by a deeper and sometimes more mysterious kind of
poetry.
Only in the course of the nineteenth century, when painting began to
free itself from the constraints of literary subjects and realize
its own creative potential, was the modernity of Velazquez in
anticipating such developments recognized. Edouard Manet (1832-1883)
called him the "painter of painters" ("Le peintre des peintres"),
meaning that he appealed more to the eye than to the literary mind,
and described what was once the iridescent grey of the background to
the portrait of the court buffoon Pablo de Valladolid as "perhaps the most remarkable piece of painting
ever created". The Impressionists saw Velazquez as a precursor of
the concept of pure vision, and elevated him to the artistic
pantheon in the guise of a pioneer of modernity.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Iberian peninsula was
on its way to becoming one of the richest regions of Europe, and it
was the leading European power in the Counter-Reformation. The
culmination of Counter-Reformation policies undoubtedly came during
the reign of King Philip II (1556-1598). Under his successors,
although there were symptoms of swift decline and economic crises
shook the country, the glory of the Sigh de Oro concealed the
harsh reality from outside eyes. In the reign of Philip III
(1578-1621), literature flourished in the works of Miguel Cervantes
and Lope de Vega. Philip IV (1621-1665) was more interested in
painting than in dramatic literature, and he became the great patron
of Velazquez.
In questions of artistic form Spain, like the rest of Europe, was
entirely under the influence of Italy throughout the course of the
sixteenth century. Ultimately, however, the Catholic Church came to
occupy a predominant position during the decades of the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation. It was the major source of artistic
commissions, and could thus dictate what mystic subjects painters
should depict, and in what styles. To reinforce its anti-Protestant
stance yet further, after the turn of the century the Church
demanded dramatically realistic art that no longer employed a
complicated pictorial language or made difficult allegorical
statements, but was easier to understand: art with which the general
public could identify emotionally.
Diego Velazquez was born in Seville in 1599, to parents who belonged
to the lesser nobility. When he was twelve he probably began
studying with Francisco de Herrera the Elder (c. 1590-1654), a
hot-tempered man whose studio he soon left for the workshop of
Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644), later to be his father-in-law.
Pacheco was a painter of moderate talent, but well versed in the
theory of art and a tolerant teacher, and he had excellent
connections with the artists, intellectuals and nobility of Seville.
The artistic school of Seville was the most important in Spain
during the first half of the seventeenth century. Francisco de
Zurbaran (1598-1664) conjured up an atmosphere of mystic and
visionary piety in his pictures for the cloisters and churches of
monasteries; Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) depicted the life
of simple folk: the beggars, vagabonds and street children who were
symptomatic of social decline in what still appeared to be a
flourishing metropolis. Seville's cosmopolitan patrons of art,
buyers from the merchant class which included Genoese, Flemings and,
towards the end of the century, Netherlanders, provided artists with
an unprecedented opportunity to paint works on both sacred and
secular themes.
The public of Seville greatly appreciated the bodegones
genre. The bodegon is not just a still life; it originally
depicted a tavern or cookhouse, or showed ordinary people in
settings where food and drink figured prominently. At the same time
these superficially ordinary subjects often concealed allegorical,
moral or religious meanings. Since the southern Netherlands had
remained under the rule of the Spanish Habsburgs, artistic
influences from that region, such as the kitchen scenes of Pieter
Aertsen (1508-1575) and Joachim Beuckelaer (c. 1530-1573), had a
lasting effect on Spanish artists. During his Seville period,
between 1617 and 1622, Velazquez painted nine bodegones, and
they mark the beginning of his career.
The Old Woman Frying Eggs, dated 1618,
shows an elderly cook sitting in front of a small clay vessel in
which she is cooking eggs over a charcoal fire. The worn but fine
features of her face, beneath the confident painting of the veil on
her head, bear witness to a life well lived. There is a serious,
meditative quality about the woman's figure, and the boy with the
melon under his arm and a carafe of wine in his hand looks out of
the picture at us with comparable gravity. The contrast of youth and
age conveys the transience of life, and the egg in the woman's hand
suggests associations, familiar at the time, with the mutability of
all earthly matter and with another life beyond the grave. The
background is dark and indistinct, in contrast to the often
over-crowded backgrounds of Dutch kitchen scenes.
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Velazquez
Old Woman Frying Eggs
1618
Oil on canvas, 101 x 120 cm
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
An interesting feature of this picture, the main subject of which is
the cooking of eggs in a clay pot,
is the honeydew melon with a cord
slung crosswise around it, making it resemble an imperial orb.
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The Three Men at Table is among
Velazquez' earliest bodegones, painted shortly before the end
of his apprenticeship, in 1617 or at the very beginning of 1618. It
concentrates with particular intensity on the individual
characterization of the men, who are shown half-length and
three-quarter length. Again, they are of different ages. The
frugality of their meal obviously does not impair their enjoyment of
life. The composition presents a view from above of their expressive
faces and hands, the tablecloth, and the physical materiality of the
food and drink.
Velazquez did not paint lavish quantities of victuals, but the
frugal diet of simple people: there is garlic on his tables, with
fish and eggs, black pudding, olives and aubergines, cheese,
home-made wine and a few fruits, together with kitchen utensils such
as a mortar, a bowl or a pottery jug. These Spartan still lifes and
the realistically depicted characters shown in such settings, people
with an aura of grave silence even when they are painted in action,
convey a sense of self-sufficiency that seems to emanate from the
down-to-earth philosophy of the ordinary man in the street.
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Velazquez
Breakfast (Three Men at Table)
c. 1618
Oil on canvas, 108,5 x 102 cm
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
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Naturally enough, then, in his bodegones Velazquez followed
an artistic tendency of the early seventeenth century that had made
a deep impression on many parts of Europe, but particularly Spain,
with its radically revolutionary depiction of the directly vivid and
graphic. It derived from the painting of the Italian artist
Caravaggio (1573-1610). Caravaggio was totally opposed to the
idealistic atmosphere and cult of beauty of the Italian Renaissance.
Not only did he allow the lower classes with their rough
physicality, coarse, dull-coloured clothing and bare, dusty feet to
participate in the story of Christian salvation; even more
provocatively, in his altarpieces he made the saints themselves
conform to his empirical approach, endowing their faces and bodies
with lines and wrinkles, with the signs of old age and suffering.
Velazquez too made much use of Caravaggesque chiaroscuro in his
early pictures. However, the Spaniard turned the Italian artist's
almost aggressive realism into a sharpness of perception that is
softened by such picturesque devices as strangely new colours,
always in earthy hues, and by his equating of objects and humans in
a manner suggesting the experiences of dreams.
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Velazquez
Peasants at the Table (El Almuerzo)
c. 1620
Oil on canvas, 96 x 112 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
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A particularly fine example of this approach is Velazquez' first
real masterpiece, the Waterseller painted
around 1620. An old man whose poor clothing and sharply lit profile
are ennobled by the light falling on him is handing a boy a glass of
water; the fig shown in the water was thought to make it taste
fresher. The forceful way in which the two jugs, shining in the
light, make their presence felt in the foreground, the brilliance of
the sparkling drops of water on the curve of the larger pitcher, and
the beautiful transparency of the glass
match the physical and mental qualities suggested by the three human
figures. Dignified as this setting is, however, contemporary viewers
would maybe also have seen an unmistakably burlesque side to it, for
a Sevillian water carrier is described in a scene reminiscent of
this picture by Velazquez in one of the picaresque novels so popular
at the time, books which held up a mirror to Spanish society in the
same way as some of the stories of Miguel de Cervantes.
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Velazquez
The Waterseller of Seville
1623
Oil on canvas, 106,7 x 81 cm
Wellington Museum, London
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Velazquez
The Waterseller of Seville (detail)
1623
Oil on canvas
Wellington Museum, London
The custom of adding a fig - such as the fruit visible at the
bottom of the glass - to water
to make it taste fresher is said to be still current in Seville today.
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Velazquez
Kitchen Scene with the Supper in Emmaus
c. 1618
Oil on canvas, 55 x 118 cm
Wellington Museum, London |
