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Velázquez: Anticipating the Impressionists
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16747 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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9 / 1989 |
2,783 Words |
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Jason Edward Kaufman
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In 1819, Ferdinand VII of Spain established the Prado Museum, opening to the public one of the world's greatest picture collections. Not long thereafter, the name Velazquez joined those of Rubens, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Bernini, and Poussin in the pantheon of Baroque art. Beginning October 3, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is honoring Velazquez with an exhibition of nearly forty of his paintings, many of which have been lent by the Prado Museum for the first time in its history.
Inventive Iconography
Since his day, appreciations of Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez (1599-1660) have largely centered on four aspects of his achievement: his realism, his innovative technique, his inventive iconography, and his unique conception of the vocation of the painter. Though it is beyond the scope of this brief study to explore these qualities in detail, an examination of a few key works may prove sufficient at least to outline the artistic development of Velazquez, the greatest painter of seventeenth-century Spain.
His career began at the age of ten, when he commenced a six-year apprenticeship with the leading theorist and aesthetician in Seville, Francisco Pacheco. According to the early Velazquez biographer Antonio Palomino (1724), "Pacheco's house was a gilded cage of art, the academy and school for the greatest minds in Seville." The kitchen scenes, or bodegons, in which Velazquez specialized at this time, show a mastery of Caravaggio's "modern" style, in which still life elements and figures emerge from darkness with riveting, almost photographic verism. In works such as Old Woman Cooking (1618) and the Water Seller of Seville (1619-20), the surface textures, local colors, and modeled forms of each object have been painstakingly represented.
The Water Seller of Seville, which depicts an itinerant vendor passing a glass of water to a boy while in the background a man drinks, is a virtual catalog of Velazquez skill. A demonstration piece for an influential collector in Madrid, the paining makes a point of presenting an old, a middle-aged, and young figure--each seen from a different point of view--and an array of objects chosen to show the painter's adroitness in suggesting opacity, transparency, hardness, softness, dryness, wetness, reflectivity, and shade. The clear droplets of water clinging to the jug in the foreground and the dimpled volume of the vessel on the plank to the left are the products of a brilliant prodigy. Pacheco was naturally anxious for his student (and son-in-law) to rise in the world.
In 1622, Velazquez went to Madrid in order to see the pictures in El Escorial and to paint the young king, Philip IV. Pacheco had arranged that he do a portrait of the renowned poet Don Luis de Gongora, but failed to arrange a session with the king. When one of the court painters died, however, Philip's chief minister, the Sevillean Count-Duke of Olivares, summoned the young painter to Madrid. In a session with the king, Velazquez made a study from life--reportedly "in about a half hour or a little more"--that earned him the coveted royal appointment.
Royal Portraiture
Throughout his life, Velazquez made numerous portraits of the king, which was his exclusive privilege, and of the royal family, many of
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