Velázquez last great works became an argument in favor of the nobility of painting, a topic discussed and defended in all academies at the time: The Family of Philip IV, later called Las Meninas (1656), one of the most analyzed and commented paintings in history, and the Fable of Arachne or Las Hilanderas (ca. 1657). In both, he used bold brushstrokes that seem disjointed when seen up close, but when viewed from a distance they acquire their full meaning, anticipating the painting of Manet and the Impressionists of the 19th century, whose style he greatly influenced.
Las Meninas (1656) depicts what can be seen as an apparently casual scene: the moment in which charming Infanta Margarita, with the petulance of her rank at only five years old, bursts into Velázquez’s studio in the Alcázar when he is painting a portrait of her royal parents whose faces are reflected in a mirror hanged on the back wall (although this could also be interpreted that it’s the reflection of the kings themselves entering the painting session together with the Infanta and her companions, who thus would be visiting the painter in his workshop). The princess is accompanied by members of her small court: the two ladies-in-waiting, María Agustina Sarmiento de Sotomayor (left, crouching) and Isabel de Velasco (right, standing), from whom the painting took its name as they were the “Meninas” (a name of Portuguese origin) or maidens of the Infanta; they are accompanied by two dwarfs, Mari-Bárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, and a large dog. Behind this main group, there’s two figures almost in shadows: Marcela de Ulloa in charge of caring for and monitoring all the maidens surrounded the Infanta, and to the right an unidentified man. On the left side of the composition there’s part of a large canvas, and behind it Velázquez himself in a self-portrait while working on it. The vanishing point of the composition is located near the character who appears in the background opening a door, where the placement of a light source demonstrates, once again, the mastery of the painter, who thus manages to make the viewer’s eyes travel throughout the entire surface of the canvas looking out for this spot of light. In the background, in the shadows, we can see the figures of other royal employees, the most prominent being the silhouette on a door, of the queen’s Chambermaster José Nieto Velázquez, perhaps a relative of the painter, whom we can’t be sure whether his intention is to enter or leave the room. On that same wall there are two paintings in shadows, copies by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo of a Rubens, Minerva and Arachne, and a painting by Jacob Jordaens, Apollo and Pan, two mythological fables common in exalting the superiority of art over crafts or manual trade. The nebulous atmosphere of the upper half of the painting has usually been highlighted as the most successful part of the composition. Velázquez here with great skill solved all the problems of space composition, thanks to his mastery of color and his great ease in portraiture.
If we explain Las Meninas in the same way we did with Velázquez’s works from his Sevillian period, like The Kitchen Maid or Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, whose main subject was revealed by the opening (or painting) in the background, we will realize that this large canvas, which Neapolitan painter Luca Giordano (1634-1705) called the “theology of painting”, has an apologetic intention. The Hungarian art historian Charles de Tolnay (1899-1981), emphasized that Velázquez here portrayed himself outside of the composition, as if he were imagining it in the “internal design” of his mind, thus highlighting the symbolic value of a work that until not long ago was considered an extreme case of realism. It is true that in this painting imitation has never reached a more perfect extreme; and it is said that the French critic and romantic poet Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), upon entering the room in the Prado Museum where Las Meninas was exhibited, exclaimed: “But, where is the painting?” In effect, this painting is confused with reality, thanks to a space open to the viewer, who would only expect to be reflected in the mirror on the background, instead of the royal couple Philip and Mariana. French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) discarded iconography and its significance in the purposes of this painting, and explained it as a structure of knowledge in which the viewer becomes a dynamic participant in its representation.
It has also been suggested that in the composition of Las Meninas, Velázquez applied the “Golden rule” or “divine proportion” of the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli (‘De Divina Proportione‘, 1509), which served as a basis for Albrecht Dürer’s publication in 1525 of his “Instruction on Measurement with Rule and Compass of Flat and Solid Figures”, where he described how to draw the spiral based on the golden section, which is known as the “Dürer spiral.” Velázquez, in the composition of Las Meninas, arranged the scene elements following this spiral, the center of which is located on the chest of the Infanta Margarita, thereby marking the visual center of maximum interest and the symbolic meaning of the place reserved, as was tradition in Europe, for the monarch which had to occupy the central and privileged place in the ceremonies. At the time of the execution of this painting, the Infanta Margarita was the most suitable successor to the throne, since Philip IV didn’t have any male children at that time.
Countless artists, from the 17th century onwards, have been inspired by Las Meninas, and in consequence, have offered their own versions of the painting. Pablo Picasso, amazed by it even since he was young, began working on August 17, 1957, on the development of a series with 58 interpretations of the painting, which he completed in December of the same year.
In more recent years (1970) the Spanish avant-garde pop art “Equipo Crónica” (Chronicle Group) in his La Salita or Las Meninas recontextualized the painting in a 1970’s contemporary environment referring to the then first forms of mass consumption.
In the same way, Las Hilanderas (ca. 1657) can be interpreted not as a simple representation of Santa Isabel’s workshop for the manufacture of tapestries, but also as a plea in favor of the nobility of the painter’s art. At the back of the workshop, a tapestry, which reproduces Tiziano‘s “The Rape of Europa” (ca. 1560-1562) in its copy by Rubens, has been the thread that connects the interpretation of the painting with the ancient ‘Fable of Arachne’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses: Book 6). Arachne, a talented weaver, wove a series of tapestries about the loves of Jupiter, which displeased his daughter Minerva, as much as the young Arachne’s claim to be superior to the goddesses in weaving, which Minerva, as the goddess of Art, always excelled at, and as a consequence Minerva turned her into a spider.
In the background, in a room that appears higher to the foreground, three richly dressed women seem to contemplate a tapestry that represents a mythological scene. In front of the background scene (the tapestry), two characters can be seen (or are they inside the tapestry?), they are identified as Minerva and Arachne from the aforementioned fable and whose contemporary counterparts would be the five weavers depicted in the foreground and that are preparing the wool. What seems indisputable in this painting is its symbolic and transcendent value, as much as that of Las Meninas. Its proto-impressionism reached bolder extremes than French Impressionism itself would do at the end of the 19th century: just look at how the old woman’s spinning wheel spins at such speed that the wheel’s spokes disappear and the hand that spins it is a simple circular blur, and also the woman on the right, who winds the wool so quickly that it seems she has six fingers… Never, until the Italian “futurists” of the 20th century, had movement been represented so boldly and accurately. The placement of the two foreground “weavers” corresponds to that of the two naked ephebes painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, located above of the Persian Sibyl; Velázquez’s spinners thus are a kind of female (though dressed) replicas.
In Las Hilanderas, Velázquez divided the painting into various planes, as if it were pages of a book. He managed to make our vision go from the illuminated spinner on the right to the one on the left, to jump over the one crouching in the shadows to the scene in the background. There, one of the women (at the right) turns towards the viewer as if she was surprised by our incursion into the scene. Putting a message ‘hidden in the background’ was a typical game of the Baroque. In his latest works, Velázquez’s mastery in handling brushes was superb, as he was able to define what he painted with the use of little material and few brushstrokes, making a spot of painting into a figure, depending on the distance from the viewer. He used a loose brushstroke, similar to that the Impressionists achieved two centuries later. And here, as well as in Las Meninas, one of the most notable points is the “atmospheric” effect that managed to create the sensation that there’s air between the figures that distorts and blurs the contours: Velázquez managed to capture the ’empty’ space that covers the figures.
During his last period in Madrid, in addition to these two masterpieces, Velázquez painted his most beautiful portraits, those of Queen Mariana (1652-1653, dressed in a black suit with silver embellishments), of the Infanta María Teresa (1651-1653), of the ill-fated Prince Felipe Próspero (1659) born in 1657 and died in 1661 portrayed by Velázquez at the age of two, in a solemn and gloomy atmosphere, which contrasts with his sickly and pale grace and seems like a disastrous omen. In this portrait, Prince Felipe Próspero rests his right arm on an armchair, transmitting compassion instead of reflecting majesty, his health was precarious as he carries on himself various amulets to protect him against the evil eye. On the armchair we see a lap dog, whose watery gaze accentuates the melancholy of the scene. This dog is one of the best pieces of painting executed in Velázquez’s canvases. The prince stands inside a room, with an open door in the background through which light enters. On the right there’s a stool with a cushion on which his hat is placed. Red tones dominate this painting and the black tones depicting darkness increase the contrast between the other colors.
There are also the portraits of the Infanta Margarita, protagonist of Las Meninas and who we can see grow through very delicate and graceful effigies, from the one in a silver and salmon dress, holding a fan and alongside a table with a glass vase, executed with incomparable freshness of color (1653) to her portrait in a pink and silver dress (ca. 1656), a color harmony favored by the artist.
But perhaps the most masterful of Margarita’s portraits is that painted in 1659, wearing a blue velvet suit and sable muff or handwarmer (1659). In this painting, Velázquez used the technique of loose brush strokes that cause luminous effects. The infanta, here eight years old, has her hair tied up with laurel leaves. She reaches out her arms to gracefully touch her dress, in her left hand she holds a sable muff, and the background is gloomy, with some objects barely outlined.
If the last portraits of Velázquez’s royal patron didn’t have the color brio of his previous works like Philip IV in Fraga (1644), crimson and silver, or that of Philip IV in brown and silver (1631-1632), they surpassed them in psychological penetration, resigned, with the majestic simplicity of someone who sees that the empire his ancestors bequeathed to him is crumbling in his hands. No more moving portrait of Philip IV than the bust painted in 1653-1655, almost colorless, a pale image of that motionless king, whose imperturbable calm French ambassadors were astonished of when they arrived in Madrid to ask him for the hand of his daughter María Teresa for Louis XIV of France. These last portraits of the king reflect the monarch’s physical and moral decay, which Velázquez noticed. It had been nine years since he had painted the king, and this was how Philip IV showed his reluctance to allow himself to be portrayed: “I am not inclined to go through the brush of Velázquez, as if not to see myself getting older.”
The last commission Velázquez received from King Philip IV was in 1659 of four mythological scenes destined for the Hall of Mirrors of the Real Alcázar in Madrid, where they were placed next to works by Tiziano, Tintoretto, Veronese and Rubens, the monarch’s favorite painters. Of the four paintings he executed (Apollo and Marsyas, Adonis and Venus, Psyche and Cupid, and Mercury and Argos) only the last one survived the fire of the Real Alcázar on Christmas Eve 1734, already in time of Philip V. The painting is based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1, 688-721): Jupiter, in order to love Ío, a maiden of Argos and priestess of Juno, secretly spreads mist over the earth, but a jealous Juno suspects and dissipates it. To avoid being discovered, Jupiter cannot do anything other than transform Ío into a beautiful calf. Juno, enraged, claims her and places Argos, the giant with a hundred eyes who never slept as one of his eyes was always awake, as Ío’s guardian. But Jupiter sends Mercury to rescue her and the messenger of the gods manages to close Argos’ hundred eyes with the sweet music of his flute, the precise moment Velázquez represented in this painting. Then Mercury kills Argos and rescues the calf.
The delivery and wedding of the princess Infanta María Teresa, daughter of Philip the IV and his first wife queen Elisabeth of France, to her future husband Louis XIV king of France had to be celebrated in international territory, the Pheasant Island, in Bidasoa, on the border between France and Spain. In this chosen place, for the occasion, a pavilion was erected for the convenience of the sovereigns of both countries and their entourages. Diego Velázquez, as Chief Chambermaster, took care of these arrangements for the Spanish court, as well as of the preparation of the accommodations of Philip IV and his companions on the different stages of this round trip. On April 8, 1660 he left for Fuenterrabía, accompanied by his son-in-law. He attended the royal ceremonies on Pheasant Island, in which he could finally wear his emblem as Knight of the Order of Santiago, and returned, exhausted, to Madrid on June 20. The Chambermaster had passed through 12 different towns, organizing royal accommodations on all those stops; almost a month of travel to the border with France, plus the exquisite care he placed on the Spanish room in the island’s pavilion, and in all the stages of the return. When he arrived in Madrid, the accounts of the travel expenses awaited him, with the corresponding payments to the suppliers at each stop. All these fatigues, accompanied by some infection probably acquired due to disordered eating, caused Velázquez to fell ill. Upon learning of the seriousness of his condition, the king sent Don Alfonso Pérez de Guzmán El Bueno, archbishop of Tire and patriarch of the Indies, to comfort his painter; and after receiving the Sacraments and granting powers to his friend to make his will, the Alcázar’s keeper of the royal records, Gaspar de Fuensalida, Diego Velázquez died on August 6, 1660, at 3 pm, he was 61 years old.
His loving wife, Juana Pacheco, only survived him eight days. The same year, two of the painter’s models died, Prince Felipe Próspero and the dwarf Don Diego de Acedo (who he portrayed). His painter friends Zurbarán and Fuensalida died in 1664. Philip IV in 1665, Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo (his son in law) would die in 1667. Juan de Pareja (also one of his sitters), in 1670. But Velázquez’s example was taken up by the two great painters with whom the Golden Age of Spanish painting concluded: Juan Carreño de Miranda and Claudio Coello, who in his Adoration of the Sacred Form of El Escorial stood almost at the height of his master. The person who best assimilated Velázquez’s proto-impressionist technique was his son-in-law Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, about 12 years younger than him; but he lacked the security of drawing that his master hid under color as well as his composition. For these reasons, Mazo’s paintings, at first sight similar to those of his father-in-law, tend to be less firm. And his best, The Painter’s Family (ca. 1659) is still a somewhat pale echo of Las Meninas.
This painting by Mazo has, however, great documentary value, as it allows us to see, in its background in an ample room illuminated by a large high window, Velázquez working on the last portrait of the Infanta Margarita described before. The painter works without a model. He doesn’t even have the mannequin on which the dresses used to be placed to avoid sitters to experience posing fatigue, as their high social status meant that they limited the sessions to a minimum, generally a few to paint their faces. More than in his own house, Velázquez used to work in the Alcázar itself, in the so-called Cuarto del Príncipe (one of whose rooms he portrayed in Las Meninas), where he had a good collection of curiosities (such as a ‘unicorn’ horn), paintings and art objects. Among the objects related to his work, which are detailed in later inventories, were five long-sighted glasses, a “thick, round glass” and several mirrors that indicate his interest in optics, two compasses and a bronze ruler, a life-size mannequin, bronze plates, etc. Among the paintings there was a portrait with its garments half finished and three with white horses, in a corvette position, in which only the rider needed to be placed (a white horse waits eternally for its knight in the Royal Palace): nothing was spontaneous in the way of working of this ‘pseudo-impressionist’ from three centuries ago.
In the Treasure House at the Alcázar, Velázquez lived like a prince in a house with three floors and an attic, including a library with an excellent collection of books, more than 150, where, along with the essential treatises on painting and architecture by the best authors, he had copies in Italian of the “Orlando Furioso” by Ariosto and the “Triumphs” of Petrarch, the “Poetic Art” of Pinciano and Rengifo, works in Latin by Ovid and various books on mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, geography, symbology and astrology. His books distanced him even further from the false idea of him as a ‘realist’ painter, an adjective that is not only anachronistic (since it can only be applied properly from the mid-19th century onwards) but totally inappropriate for the painting of Velázquez.
Velázquez’s career, neither very long nor too abundant in works (just over a hundred paintings are attributed to him with certainty) is transcendental in the history of art: we can say that from his Sevillian paintings of 1620 to his Madrid paintings from 1650-1660, that is, a period of 30 years, he covered a distance of several centuries: from Caravaggio to the Impressionists.
From the dramatic chiaroscuros of the former, Velázquez went to the luminous, vibrant atmosphere of the latter, to a light that floods his paintings and seems to emulate that of the real space. From those immobile still lifes he moved on to the most daring expression of movement in the spinning wheel and hands of Las Hilanderas. From the statuary, tactile heaviness, he passed to an art in which everything is visual. From a thick and smooth technique, like Pacheco’s (his teacher), he moved on to give greatest freedom to his brushstroke, to his ‘distant botches of color’, to his ‘unfinished way’ of painting, which is still very modern three centuries after his death. He based the allegorical, symbolic or exemplary values that his time demanded for art in an execution of such rare simplicity, so devoid of emphasis and rhetoric. He hid his work (which the “pentimenti” denounce) or his enormous culture (paradoxically applied to giving the spinners the posture of Michelangelo’s ephebes, to a god [Mars] the appearance of a vulgar old soldier who, likewise, also takes a Michelangelesque pose,…) under an air of chance and deep mystery. In short, he turned upside down the categories of dogmatists, he made still lifes that were sacred paintings, portraits that were compositions, landscapes that were stories… He took the portrait to a dead end of technical perfection and denial of its own essence. In fact, in the portraits of Innocent X, Felipe Próspero or Mariana of Austria, the artist’s eye and brush are dedicated with the same accuracy and grace to paint a detail of the background or costume as to the physiognomy of the sitter. But such is the accuracy of Velázquez’s drawing and color that we immediately recognize what is most important, that expression that Velázquez didn’t intend to accentuate, that mystery of the human soul that he didn’t seem to peek into, and leave us contemplating into the sitter’s inner thoughts.
A painter who is apparently easy to observe, he was in fact, as painters and scholars are aware, the most difficult to explain; and from his biography, bureaucratically established and leaving no episode to a doubt, and from his calm and easy life, a respectful, obedient, phlegmatic and “normal” man, we could not deduce the demand and novelty of an art that, appearing to respect themes and formulas, completely deviated from everything that came before.
The Artistic Adventure of Mankind 