Baroque and Rococo

 

Diego Velazquez




 

The Face of Spain


 

The Psychology of Power

 

When Velazquez was appointed court painter in Madrid in 1623, his principal task was to paint portraits of Philip IV, a duty that he performed to perfection. The Count of Olivares went so far as to say that by comparison with Velazquez no one had ever yet painted a "real" portrait of the king: that is to say, so striking and impressive a likeness of him. The portraits of the Spanish Habsburgs painted in profusion by Velazquez are surely among the finest and best examples of court portraiture in the history of European art.
The artist, who had no chance of developing such a wide range of activities as his colleagues in Paris and Rome, breathed life into the conventional rigidity of the portrait by adopting a new artistic viewpoint of greater profundity, not least during his first journey to Italy. His kings and princes are of course still presented as representatives of their exclusive social rank, and their ceremonial bearing is the same as before, but their individuality shows in their faces and hands.
Philip IV in Armour, a portrait of the period around 1628, over-painted and cut to its present size at a later date, presupposes the existence of a model such as the portrait of the king in parade armour painted around 1623, probably by Juan Bautista Maino (1578-1649). This picture by Philip's Italian-trained drawing master also shows the subject in a lifelike attitude, but the modelling of the face in Velazquez' portrait is much more expressive, and its extrovert clarity shows up more impressively in contrast to the sash draped decoratively over the armour and painted in many shades of red.
 

Velazquez
Philip IV in Armour
c. 1628
Oil on canvas, 58 x 44,5 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Velazquez
Philip IV
 

When the Infanta Dona Maria, daughter of Philip III and Queen Margarita, set out for Vienna in December 1629 to meet the husband who had been chosen for her long before, the king of Hungary, later Emperor Ferdinand III, her journey included a stay of several months in Naples in 1630. Velazquez made haste to Naples to portray his sovereign's sister, who was famous for her beauty. He worked with the utmost care to emphasize the enamel-like smoothness of her fine features. Every detail, for instance the typically protuberant Habsburg lower lip, shows a striking similarity to the living model. The delicate carmine of her lips, the beautiful Titian shade of her hair, depicted in relaxed brushstrokes with dark brown shadows and bright yellow highlights, all display the artistic skill now at the command of Velazquez in his harmonious combination of state splendour with the individuality of his sitter. The carefully modelled face in this head-and-shoulders portrait was to serve as the basis for several full-length portraits of the Infanta, workshop copies that may have been intended as gifts to royal residences abroad; one is in Berlin today.
 

Velazquez
Infanta Dona Maria, Queen of Hungary
1630
Oil on canvas, 60 x 46 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
 

The portrait of Philip IV in Brown and Silver was painted soon afterwards. The unattractive matt white of the stockings is the result of an unskilful restoration of the picture in 1936, but otherwise the work is a good example of the skilled manner that Velazquez had now mastered. The restriction of surrounding areas and the general pose found in earlier portraits of the king are still present, but the subject's whole attitude is more relaxed, the flesh tints, probably under the influence of Rubens, are painted with more fluidity, the accents of colour - eyes gleaming like black tortoiseshell, the golden lights on the waves of the hair - are placed with more emphasis, and shapes conveying Baroque dignity, such as the profuse folds of the red curtain, have made their way into the formerly sparse interior. Above all, Velazquez' new delight in luxuriant colour is reflected in his depiction of the silk embroidery and the silver and brown tones of the king's clothing.
 

Velazquez
Philip IV in Brown and Silver
1631-32
Oil on canvas, 200 x 113 cm
National Gallery, London

The king is holding in his right hand a paper with the inscription
"Senor/Diego Velazquez/ Pintor de V. Mg" -
the opening words of a petition to him from Velazquez.
 

The picture of Queen Isabel, Standing is similar in its composition - although the queen is facing the opposite way - and constructed with equal care. Velazquez painted the queen between 1631 and 1632. She was the daughter of King Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici, and had married Philip IV in 1615, before he came to the throne. The artist devoted the utmost ingenuity to painting the queen's robes. Besides depicting all the material splendour shown in this picture, he was interested, as so often in later paintings, in the wealth of nuances to be conveyed by the play of light on black fabrics, which he often exaggerated to produce glittering reflections.
Art-lovers of his time also appreciated that effect in the works of the Dutch painters Rembrandt (1606-1669) and Frans Hals (1581/85-1666). It seems that this technique was something Velazquez mastered only after his visit to Italy, although no direct model for it can be identified. None of his pupils ever matched him in the depiction of such phenomena.
 

Velazquez
Queen Isabel, Standing
1631-32
Oil on canvas, 207 x 119 cm
Private collection

Velazquez painted this portrait over an older picture of the queen
that he had executed towards the end of the 1620s.
 

There can be no doubt that the presence of Rubens at court and the example of his portraits greatly encouraged a more modern and magnificent style of representation. The building on the outskirts of Madrid of the castle of Buen Retiro, which the Count of Olivares was anxious to have lavishly furnished, may be seen as expressing this new demand for splendour, for ceremony of a luxurious and artistically refined nature. However, it would be wrong to see Velazquez as portraying courtly superficiality, self-satisfaction and an addiction to magnificence. He is fully aware, of course, of the social rank of his sitters; he knows the rules of etiquette, which no one, least of all a court painter, may break. He knows that it is his duty to employ his artistic genius in contributing to the European reputation of the Spanish court.
But over and above such considerations - and it is here that his enduring achievement lies - amidst all the magnificence he takes note of his sitters' personalities. He makes statements without passing moral judgements, certainly without condemning. He shows faces that have, so to speak, become transparent to him through their destinies; he shows the over-refined hands of a society of aristocrats revealing itself to the gaze as if it had wearied in the course of the centuries. The subtle beauty and nobility of these princely portraits is so extraordinary that no later artist was ever able to repeat it.

The long-awaited heir to the throne, Prince Baltasar Carlos, born on 17 October 1629, was his parents' pride and joy. While Velazquez was in Rome he attended one of the glittering parties held in many European cities to celebrate the child's birth. No sooner was he back in Madrid than he was commissioned to paint the prince, now sixteen months old, and in another portrait of the same subject he shows the fair-haired little boy with a curious playmate .
 

Velazquez
Prince Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf
1631
Oil on canvas, 128 x 102 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The prince's face is modelled with gentle regularity, whereas the paint is
applied to the head of the female dwarf with more irregular granulation.
This contrasting brushwork is often used by Velazquez in his pictures
to accentuate certain features of their content.
 

Dressed in a magnificently embroidered ceremonial robe which makes him into a miniature adult, the prince is standing on a carpeted step beneath a draped wine-red curtain, holding a baton and a dagger in his little hands. The steel gorget indicates his future role as a military commander. His face, expressing all the charm of his French mother in childish miniature, is turned towards another child in the left foreground of the picture, and the child's abnormally large head is looking back at him.
This figure is a dwarf, it is now thought probably a girl, one of the human toys so popular at many European courts of the time. The physically handicapped figure of the dwarf holds a silver rattle and an apple in imitation of an orb and sceptre, and is acting the part of a comic major-domo to the future little king. One wonders whether their Majesties and the courtiers laughed at this picture and the court painter's amusing idea.
In Spain (and other countries too) there was a long tradition of including dwarfs in royal portraits as subordinate figures. Basically, these deformed little creatures were merely attributes of the royal dignity, part of the furnishings of the court and regarded as neuter beings rather than fully human. Velazquez accepts this distinction, yet ultimately he cancels it out. The little prince is the focal point of the composition of the picture, and the pigmentation also makes him its brilliant centre, an effect emphasized by the gold braid on the dark material of his dress and the carmine red of the sash.

These strongly resonant tones contrast with the more muted colouring of the dwarf's dark green dress, just as the delicate, light and regular colouring of the prince's face contrasts with the face of the dwarf girl, which has more effects of shadow and is treated with greater artistic freedom. As a result, the prince appears as the very incarnation of the blood royal, the nobler of the two beings presented to our gaze, while the dwarf, with her tousled dark blonde hair, is a subordinate and more animal creature. Yet Velazquez seems to wish to show a more vital human nature in the dwarf's face than in the countenance of the prince, which is already dominated by the duties of his calling; the melancholy inherent in the picturesque shadows says more about the dwarf girl's destiny than the bright flesh tints of Baltasar Carlos's face can tell us about his radiant, princely figure.
The phenomenal skill and impressively subtle psychology of this painting is based on a wealth of nuances that can hardly be described verbally: it is an interplay of harmonies and contrasts, presenting effects of closeness and distance, of the sublime and the human - and indeed of the endearingly childish. Velazquez expresses all this not through complex allegorical allusions but solely in a form where every detail has its meaning, in the magnificence of colour that lends life to the whole, and in a composition of inspired calm and dignity.
In 1630, at the instigation of the powerful prime minister Olivares, building began on a new palace called Buen Retiro on the outskirts of Madrid. It was to be a place where Philip and his court could stay in surroundings more pleasant than those of the old Alcazar. The decoration of the Great Hall, the Salon de Reinos (Hall of the Kingdoms), was completed five years later. Most of the paintings that ornamented the hall at the time are now in the Prado. There are no extant pictures or drawings of what must once have been its overwhelmingly effective interior design, but a poem by Manuel de Gallegos entitled Silva topogrdphica, published in 1637, describes the way in which the pictures were originally hung. A series of equestrian portraits formed the brilliant focal point of an exhibition of the glories of the Spanish monarchy.

Philip IV on Horseback, painted around 1635, was of course the most important item in this cycle. The king is shown here in all his absolute might and power enjoying, as a contemporary account puts it, a triumph such as few heroes of the past or present could boast. Seventeenth-century Spanish horses, bred from crosses with Arab stallions, were famous for their proud bearing and temperamental beauty. Velazquez had the opportunity of observing them daily in the royal stables or when the king put them through their paces. The curvet represented the peak of equestrian skill, the moment when the rider had to gather all his strength together, and in this picture the king is making his mount curvet. Baroque art also understood this pose as signifying the sovereignty with which a monarch tamed the unruly power of the people or the animal savagery of an enemy.
 

Velazquez
Philip IV on Horseback
1634-35
Oil on canvas, 304 x 317 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
 

Velazquez
Philip IV on Horseback (detail)
1634-35
Oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid
 

Velazquez
A White Horse
1634-35
Oil on canvas, 310 x 245 cm
Palacio Real, Madrid
 

Velazquez
Philip IV
 

In line with these ideas, and in a picture now lost, Rubens had already shown Philip IV on horseback triumphing over his enemies. Velazquez does not call upon the emotionally highly charged background usual in Rubens, nor does he employ any grand allegorical accessories. He also does not exaggerate the king's size by placing him in front of a very low horizon with tiny soldiers in the middle ground, as the Flemish master did in his portrait of Philip II. While Velazquez uses a more restrained pictorial rhetoric than Rubens, his royal horseman is livelier and more elegant than the subject in another famous painting - Titian's Charles V. at Muhlberg. The pure profile emphasizes the fine outline of man and beast, and contrasts the rising movement of the horse with the falling slope of an extensive and idealized landscape. Its pigmentation, shot with beautiful shades of green and blue, is reminiscent of sixteenth-century Flemish landscapes.
Philip IV s parents were also depicted in equestrian portraits hung in the Salon de Reinos. However, the picture of Philip III on Horseback is by an unknown painter, and was merely over-painted by either Velazquez or an assistant between 1634 and 1635. It is the horse's head in particular that betrays the master's hand. Art historians also assume that later corrections were also made by the court painter and one of his workshop assistants to the portrait of Philip's mother, Queen Margarita on Horseback.
 

Velazquez
Philip III on Horseback
1634-35
Oil on canvas, 305 x 320 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
 

Velazquez
Philip III on Horseback (detail)
1634-35
Oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid