Édouard Manet saw the paintings by Velázquez in the Prado and was awed. ‘He is the painter of painters,’ he wrote, ‘he has astonished me, he has ravished me.’
You can feel what Manet felt if you go to Rome’s Palazzo Doria Pamphilj. In a small room are two masterpieces, both created around 1650: one a sculpted bust by Bernini; the other a painting by Velázquez (while on his second visit to Rome). They are of Pope Innocent X. Their approach is wholly different. Bernini’s is a sort of ‘swagger portrait’, idealising the Pontiff; lively, expressive and executed with brisk command of the marble. Velázquez sees someone less heroic. His portrait is as technically accomplished as Bernini’s but has no braggadocio, no pyrotechnics, no melodrama. Yet the restraint of expression contrasts with the alarming red of costume, throne and background. It is descended from the state portraits of Titian but remade for a more cynical age. The inner Pope is revealed: suspicious, cantankerous, with hints of cruelty about the searching eyes. It is an amazingly brave likeness, an effigy of power and deceit. ‘Too true! Too true!’ the Pope was said to have exclaimed on seeing it. For the 19C critic Hippolyte Taine the portrait was ‘the masterpiece amongst all portraits… impossible to forget.’ ‘The finest picture in Rome,’ said Joshua Reynolds. Francis Bacon was ‘haunted and obsessed by the image, by its perfection’. It was ‘one of the greatest paintings in the world’; his 1953 series transformed the Pope into a screaming, tortured victim, as if manacled to an electric chair.
DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ (1599-1660), who was born in Seville, had a profound influence on artists who followed, from Goya and Delacroix to Manet and Picasso. At the age of eleven, he was apprenticed to Francisco Pacheco, Seville’s most significant artist (whose daughter he eventually married). He soon surpassed his master. In 1617 he set up his own studio and produced genre or tavern scenes (nice earners) – ‘I would rather be first painter of coarse things than second in higher art’ – but also religious pictures, like the very devout Immaculate Conception (c1618) with his wife as the Virgin. Then in 1623, thanks to his father-in-law’s connections, Velázquez was asked to paint the young King Philip IV. Philip was so tickled with his portrait that he appointed him a court painter. This gave Velázquez access to the impressive royal collection, with its Titians (‘Raphael does not please me, Titian bears the banner’), which prompted a prolonged visit to Italy (1629-31) where he not only absorbed technique (from the Venetians, who loosened his brushwork) but also acted as the King’s art dealer, and bought paintings by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto. [It was on his subsequent Italian tour that he spawned an illegitimate child, to the King’s mighty displeasure.]
At court, being deferential yet clubbable, he climbed the ladder, eventually becoming – not just the official portraitist – but a Knight of Santiago (1658), a lofty position normally reserved for high-born noblemen, and only granted to Velázquez (despite the horror of bigwigs) through papal dispensation. Its emblem can be seen on the artist’s costume in Las Meninas. He was also, like his friend Rubens, a busy diplomat so his workload was prodigious. But he painted quickly. The lustre and immediacy of his paintings owes much to his touch: he conveyed brocade or reflected light with the deftest of flicks (as Frans Hals did). He was obliged to create portraits of princesses, of court jesters and dwarfs. He imbued each with dignity and personality. He never made disability comical.
Las Meninas (1656 – or 1659/60?), ‘The Ladies-in-waiting’, his most famous painting, is an affirmation of his status, showing him in his finery at the easel, painting the Infanta Margarita Maria (or the King and Queen?) surrounded by an entourage in the Royal Alcázar. It is a complex and enigmatic composition (in typically limited colour range), breaking rules of perspective, which questions reality. For some it is an exchange of two gazes, one of the spectator, the other of the privileged people depicted, symbols of the wealth plundered from South America, where the natives were robbed of gold and given in return ‘the bible, syphilis and trousers’. For others this theory is nonsense: it is ‘a private picture addressed to an audience of one – the King of Spain’, in appreciation of the artist’s elevation. It celebrates the supremacy of painting and the art of illusion – the ‘theology of painting’ according to the Baroque painter Luca Giordano. Or is it just a ‘snapshot’? A frozen moment in the life of the royal court and family? The meaning of this great work may still elude, but – said Francis Bacon – ‘Velázquez unlocks the greatest and deepest things that man can feel.’
