The painter of painters
David Ekserdjian
VELAZQUEZ: PAINTER AND COURTIER by Jonathan Brown
Yale, f35
There are depressingly few decent books on individual artists, and, what is more, most of them date from the turn of the century. It does not help that it has become an article of faith among art historians, far more than among their literary and musical counterparts, that even the greatest artists can be 'done', much as - at least before Gaddafi American tourists believed Europe could be 'done'. The prevalence of this heresy, taken in conjunction with paranoia about treading on academic toes and the more forgivable caution of the publishing trade, makes the appearance of Jonathan Brown's original and absorbing mono- graph, hot on the heels of Enriqueta Harris' equally excellent but very different Velazquez of 1982, little short of miracu- lous. What with the spectacular recent cleaning of Las Meninas, the old boy ought to be dancing in his grave. Brown is an expert on Spanish art of the Golden Age, whose close collaboration with the historian J. H. Elliott has give him a unique understanding of the relationship between art and politics at the court of Philip IV. The subtitle of this book `Painter and Courtier' - sums up his approach to the subject perfectly. Velaz- quez was born in Seville in 1599, but spent most of his career, apart from two visits to Italy, in Philip's capital, Madrid. From his appointment as painter to the king in 1623 until the 1640s he was a full-time if never particularly prolific artist with occasional duties at court, but from then until his death in 1660 the roles were reversed, and he became a full-time courtier and only a part-time artist. It is these factors that explain both the limited extent and res- tricted nature of his artistic production. From the first Velazquez was a law unto himself, as his earliest surviving works -- sombre, earthy pictures of ordinary people doing ordinary things - amply testify. The realism of the figure style and the dramatic lighting of this first period has often been associated with Caravaggio, an influence Brown specifically denies, but in any event the move to court was swiftly followed by a change of style. The young artist had a long way to go, however: his Bacchus reveals a definite interest in the ideal and a looser technique, but remains uncertain and pro- vincial when compared with the example of Rubens, whom Velazquez would have met in 1628. Velazquez may well have started to look at Titian through Rubens, and it is probably no coincidence that a year later he made his first Italian Journey. The works executed there show a new com- mand of classical form and of perspective. From then on he only got better. The fact that Velazquez wanted to be a great gentleman as well as a great painter is crucial to any understanding of his last years. We may regret his having spent a lot of time collecting and hanging pictures instead of painting them, but there are compensations. His second Italian Journey of 1649-1653, undertaken on behalf of the king, produced his only landscapes, a pair of plein-air oil sketches, and his two most staggering portraits, one of the 76-year-old Innocent X, reputed to be the ugliest man in Rome, the other of his mulatto slave Juan de Pareja. Furthermore,the works of which we have been deprived would prob- ably not all have been of the stature of Les Hilanderas or Las Meninas. It may even be the case that their unique qualities are not unrelated to the fact that they were painted by a man who was not permanently chain- ed to his easel.
Velazquez the artist remains an enigma; knowing that he appeared in drag at a court entertainment, sired a bastard on his second trip to Rome, and fiddled his salary expenses may make him human, but in the end 300-year-old gossip cannot help us understand his work. It is to Brown's credit that he knows this. As he is well aware, the reason we go back to Velazquez time and again is that — in the words of Manet — he is 'the painter of painters'.
Previous page
