Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda

by Anthony Bailey

  Pacheco wasn’t a fire-eater like Herrera. He was a thoroughly competent artist. He was evidently an excellent teacher and at the center of an inspiring and influential group of men in Seville. His paintings showed an earnest old-fashioned dedication, his portraits almost Dutch or German in their dutiful realism, his religious paintings often more religiose than spiritual, though there was substantial bread-and-butter work for him in painting the statuary of Montañés in polychrome. Pacheco was the immediate choice of local religious orders for portraits of saints. He was appointed an official censor of religious art by the Inquisition in Seville. It was a time in which many doctrines were being vehemently disputed. Religious orders went to court on such matters as how many nails were used to pin Christ to the cross, what age the Virgin Mary should be in depictions of her, and which friars had the right to give or collect alms and were or were not allowed to preach. Theological nit-picking and hairsplitting were common. Pacheco was also an inspector for the Seville branch of the Guild of Saint Luke, the union for artists of sundry types, so when the time came he had the right to attest to the qualifications of his apprentices. He was twice the elected president of the guild. Meanwhile he and Diego Velázquez were in daily contact in Pacheco’s studio in what was then called the Calle de Puerco, running southward from the Alameda de Hércules toward the cathedral. In the last twenty years or so the area of formerly swampy ground devoted to the Alameda had been turned into a rectangular promenade, with two columns at one end, one topped by a statue of Julius Caesar, one by a statue of the city’s hypothetical founder—heroes from times past, and they stuck in one’s mind. The Alameda was long and straight, something unusual in Seville, a city in which most of the streets twisted and turned and allowed no view of the far end.

  At Pacheco’s young Velázquez had a traditional training: apart from the menial practical jobs, there was much drawing and copying. Drawing from life, drawing from nature. Pacheco recommended applying a priming layer of the local Seville clay on the canvas, “ground to a powder and tempered on the stone slab with linseed oil.” This the master thought to be the best priming, making a base layer that did not crack, and giving Velázquez’s early paintings the same dark reddish brown ground that most paintings from Seville had at that time. The hard-working boy also had to make chalk studies of casts and models and sketches of household objects. He had to copy accurately drawings Pacheco put in front of him, drawings done by Pacheco and prints Pacheco owned by the artists he most admired—Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, and of course the Italians. Drawing, according to Pacheco, was a fundamental element in what gave painters the right to claim a higher status than ordinary craftsmen, men who carried on a common trade. Painting indeed was a noble activity, as it was coming to be seen in Italy, and in his Arte de la Pintura years later Pacheco listed the painters who had been given royal recognition, from Apelles to Titian.

  Although Pacheco in 1611 had just come back from a lengthy tour of Spain, looking at Spanish artworks, the Italian manner—La buena manera—was highest of all on his approval list, and so prints of the works of Michelangelo and Raphael were put before Diego; he didn’t need to be told to draw, draw, draw—he drew insatiably. Despite the master’s art duties for the Inquisition, Pacheco particularly admired Pietro Torrigiano’s Penitent St. Jerome, a terracotta sculpture which was anatomically superaccurate. A Florentine contemporary of Michelangelo, whose nose he had broken during a student argument, Torrigiano had worked in England on the tomb of Henry VII and then in Seville, where, according to Giorgio Vasari, his choleric temperament got him into trouble again; insufficiently paid for a Madonna and Child commission by the Duke of Arcos, he furiously destroyed the sculpture. The insulted duke then accused Torrigiano of heresy. Torrigiano was taken to prison, writes Vasari, and “brought up [before the Inquisition] day after day, being sent from one inquisitor to another, and finally adjudged worthy of the gravest punishment. But meanwhile Torrigiano had fallen into a state of melancholy, and passed several days without eating, by which he brought himself to such weakness that he died, saving himself thus from shame, for it is said he had been condemned to death.” Under Pacheco’s mastership drawing the female nude wasn’t encouraged. Lust was a danger, for the Church a mortal sin! If you needed to paint a woman’s figure, Pacheco later wrote in his Art of Painting, you should “take the faces and hands of virtuous women from life. And, for the remaining parts [whatever they might be] make use of good paintings, prints and drawings, and ancient or modern statues.”

  Diego came from an ordinary house, from a district where many of the activities were artisan. In his earliest neighborhood in San Pedro the workers in one nearby workshop shaped, cast, forged, and hammered metal with accompanying noise, heat, and flames, all memorable. Whatever the talk about his family’s distant nobility, he was being trained in a craft for whose work he would be paid. He was at home with domestic things, and it was with such everyday objects and the work associated with them that most of his earliest surviving paintings were concerned. His early canvases were often stretched over thick wooden panels, on which he laid with a palette knife the local clay-based sizing followed by finely ground earth pigments tempered with linseed oil, as Pacheco recommended. This made a dull but durable brown foundation layer. (In time, Velázquez went for lighter grounds and developed a less constrained, more transparent technique.) Pacheco later described a peasant youth whom Velázquez occasionally drew who was good at adopting attitudes and expressions, “sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing.” Pacheco went on: “He made many drawings of the boy’s head and of many other local people in charcoal heightened with white on blue paper, and thereby he gained assurance in portraiture.” With experience he appeared to need fewer preparatory drawings; fewer precise contour lines were to be found; and as his brushwork became freer and broader, his compositions grew more inventive, and more pentimenti were inherent in his works. The first paintings to be ascribed to him are of kitchen or tavern scenes, what were called bodegones from the word for the wine cellars in which taverns were often situated. In these pictures one or two figures generally appeared, but the artist seemed rather to dwell in an almost covetous way on the everyday objects at hand: mortars, pestles, water jugs, plates and bowls, particularly the brown earthenware pots known as cazuelas that were used for making pisto. Once again there was a Dutch flavor to all this concern with crockery. And it makes one wonder whether Velázquez was missing his own home.

  Diego was one of several apprentices—another was Francisco López Caro, a year older, who many years later claimed he had known Velázquez since he was nine years old; but Pacheco seems to have singled out Diego. He impressed Pacheco with what the older artist called “his virtues, integrity and excellent qualities, and also by the hopes which his happy nature and his great natural talents raised in me.” The boy appeared tireless. The “happy nature” seemed to be demonstrated in the way he painted. He was the apple of his master’s eye. He was allowed to browse through Pacheco’s scholarly library and eventually permitted to choose books to add to it. (In the library that he himself later put together there were in time many scientific texts and works on perspective, artistic theory, optics, and geometry.) At Pacheco’s, the young Velázquez was introduced to visitors: poets, men of letters, lawyers, canons of the cathedral, and Sevillian scholars such as Rodrigo Caro (1573–1647), writer, antiquarian, connoisseur. Pacheco had a sort of salon or informal academy, what Palomino was to call “a gilded prison of Art.” The artist gathered together people who were devoted to the classical world and its works, and who came to one another’s houses to talk poetry, philosophy, theology, and science. Optics were a fashionable interest; telescopes, cameras obscura, spyglasses, and viewfinders were all made in Seville, just as they were in a number of towns in the United Provinces.

  Yet Seville was not all sophisticated thought and social refinement. The grittier side of life wasn’t hard to discover, in markets, common taverns, brothels, and along the Guadalquivir riverfr
ont where malefactors were led in chains to the rowing benches of the cargo galleys. The main prison near the Plaza San Francisco housed ruffians and ne’er-do-wells and also those sentenced for what are now called economic crimes. Miguel de Cervantes, a former soldier and writer of many unproducible plays, lived in Seville in the last part of the sixteenth century and was a prisoner here on several occasions. He had also worked as a civil servant and as a purveyor to the naval task force known as “the invincible Armada,” helping prepare it for the attack on England in 1588. It was in the course of this service that Cervantes had allegedly seized supplies that belonged to the dean of the cathedral chapter in Seville and was excommunicated. Thereafter, working as a tax collector, he was thrown into prison when his accounts failed to pass audit. In his cell he had leisure enough to start thinking about Don Quixote, which came out in Madrid in 1605, an original, laugh-out-loud combination of realism and surrealism. More Sevillian, perhaps, was his short picaresque tale Rinconete and Cortadillo, an “exemplary novel” about two young cardsharps and the thieves’ den they worked out of.

  Going through the narrow streets of Seville you were well advised to hang on tightly to your bag and keep it firmly fastened. Pickpockets abounded. Small boys went armed. The local argot, known as germania, contained a full vocabulary of thievery. Many people had their hands outstretched, beggars and alms collectors, peddlers and prostitutes, and the smallest change was welcomed by fruit sellers and water sellers. The streets of Seville were also the home of much theater, of religious processions and outdoor performances. However, along the waterfront, floods caused great damage in December 1603; serious epidemics occasionally wreaked havoc. And with the new century came hints of economic trouble. Things weren’t helped when in 1609, on the very day that the government sensibly agreed to a truce with the Dutch rebels, it petulantly expelled the Moriscos—the three hundred thousand or so supposedly Christianized people of Moorish origin in Spain. In Seville’s case, they amounted to seven thousand people who—as we’ve seen—did vital jobs, keeping shops, carrying goods, growing food. The city’s prosperity was already being chipped away. The Guadalquivir was silting up and making passage difficult for ships from the Indies. San Lúcar at the river mouth and Cadíz a bit farther off waited to inherit the wealth-creating cargoes. It might have been taken as a sign of the times (though not many noticed it) when Miguel de Cervantes died on April 23, 1616, in Madrid, in the Calle de León, “old, a soldier, a gentleman and poor,” according to staff of the French embassy who were surprised at how such a celebrated writer could live so unrecognized in the Spanish capital.

  For Diego Velázquez the times continued prosperous. At age seventeen, he reached the end of his apprenticeship. He applied for membership of the Saint Luke’s Guild and declared that he had been learning the art of painting with qualified masters. The plural “masters” presumably included Herrera, though on his own Pacheco would surely have sufficed, especially since he was one of his apprentice’s examiners. On March 14, 1617, young Velázquez was accepted as “a master painter of religious images, in oils and in everything related.” He signed this as “Diego Velázquez de Silva.” It was a good time for church painters, with the already considerable number of ecclesiastical institutions constantly swelling: nine new monasteries had been founded in Seville in the first twelve years of the seventeenth century. Velázquez was licensed to practice “in Seville or anywhere in the kingdom, and to set up a workshop of his own and take assistants and apprentices”—which he did a year later. He could have puffed out his chest and accepted congratulations, but it didn’t seem to be his way. He had in any event a real reward to come from his former master. Pacheco said he so admired the young man, already a sort of son, that he gave him his daughter, Juana, in marriage.

  Although this of course wasn’t an uncommon happening in families of artists at this time, we can speculate about how well it matched the inclinations of those most concerned. Judging by Diego’s paintings that seem to have used Juana as a model, she was a pretty girl. Over the previous five years he would have been used to seeing her, being with her, in the Pacheco house, almost like brother and sister, latterly the prize student and the boss’s daughter. Young Spanish women of her sort were strictly supervised and chaperoned, and for Juana, thrown into the constant company of a good-looking, ambitious, and talented youth, praised by her father, it may have been fairly easy for interest and proximity to promote the even greater interest that might be love. She may simply have seen that among the young men in her surroundings, he was the most talented, and the best catch. Pacheco perhaps saw how things were going and encouraged it.

  The marriage took place on the feast day of Saint George, April 23, 1618. It was the day on which, two years before, Miguel de Cervantes had died.1 Diego was not yet nineteen, Juana was sixteen. Even by local standards, in a time when lives were shorter, it was an early marriage, but the die was cast, two hearts were one, and why wait? Pacheco’s golden circle celebrated the wedding in fitting style, with music, contests in verse, and literary debate. One of the witnesses was the poet Francisco de Rioja, the scholarly librarian of Count Olivares, who lived in Seville from 1607 to 1615, a period during which the count tried to retrench from some years of massive overspending in an as yet unsuccessful bid to get a post in the royal household. Rioja wrote poems that celebrated his patron’s love life. He had immersed himself in Greek and Latin literature. In Seville’s scholarly circles Tacitus and his Flemish editor Justus Lipsius were matters of frequent discussion when statecraft and classical learning came up. At the wedding of Pacheco’s daughter with Diego Velázquez, there was a theatrical contest about whether Saint Teresa or Saint James made the best patron saint for Spain. A short play was performed and poems read, including an epithalamium by the poet Baltasar de Cepeda. It all sounds pretty high-flown, but there were also more down-to-earth songs and dancing, and food and drink to seal the occasion. The wedding was celebrated in the Pacheco house; the marriage papers failed to mention the parents of the groom.

  Juana’s unusually large dowry perhaps represented Pacheco’s perception of Velázquez’s potential and set up the young couple on a sound footing. Pacheco’s wife, María del Páramo, was well-to-do; from her mother, Juana’s grandmother, the married pair acquired a house near the Alameda de Hércules, where Velázquez and his bride first lived. Their first child, Francisca, was born just over a year later. Two years later, another daughter, Ignacia, came into the world but didn’t survive childhood. (A quarter of all Spanish children died at birth or within their first year.) And that seems to have been that as far as Diego and Juana were concerned in their efforts to procreate. Velázquez was however consistently busy as an artist at this time. Pacheco provided contacts with people who would give his son-in-law commissions, and the subject matter that interested Velázquez was still close at hand. Kitchen scenes, religious pictures, or a mingling of the two genres kept him occupied. Observing his interest in drunken tavern scenes and bodegones, some in the Pacheco circle “remonstrated” with him, according to Palomino, for dealing so much with “low subjects.” The Spanish Jesuit writer and teacher Baltasar Gracián, Velázquez’s contemporary, wrote not long after in The Hero (1630) of a “certain able painter”—whom he doesn’t name though we can guess whom he meant—“who, seeing with Grief, that Titian, Raphael, and several others were gone before him, and that their Reputation was increas’d since the Time of their Death, was resolv’d to raise a separate merit, and at all adventures to make himself a Compensation for the Advantage of Priority, that they had over him. He therefore set himself intirely to paint in Grotesque; and when some of his Friends blam’d him for not continuing in his soft and delicate manner, wherein he was likely to succeed, and even become Titian’s rival; he answer’d very briskly, that he thought it more glorious to be first in his Way (wherein he was no mean Performer) than to be second in Titian’s, or any others that had gone before him.” (The Hero, English translation 1726, chap. 7, p. 71.) />
  Quite often in Velázquez’s case the result was original (more original than this anecdote, whose provenance was classical) and not what we today would call grotesque. At this point, before 1620, he was dating but not signing his own work, perhaps because he didn’t yet feel fully independent of his master. But the pictures themselves showed that he already was just that. One current theological battle in Seville concerned the Immaculate Conception: the belief that the mother of Christ had been born, unlike the rest of us, free from original sin. Preachers denounced one another on the subject; Dominicans (opposed to the doctrine) fought the Franciscans and Jesuits; long and learned texts pro and con were published about it, but most of the people in Seville were passionate in their devotion to the Queen of Heaven. For many she was, in a hierarchy of the faith, a step above the notional figureheads of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. It was as if she were given preeminent power by the force not just of reverence but of paradox: She was both a virgin and a mother. In Seville hundreds of masses were annually said in her honor. Processions took place bearing her image, most prized being the painted statue of the Macarena Virgin by Montañés, generally kept in its own chapel at the north end of the town. Juan de Roelas, a Seville artist and contemporary of Pacheco, painted a picture commemorating the 1615 ceremony in honor of the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception, a festival that went on for days, with fireworks, pageants, and masses. The doctrinal argument raged for several years until in 1617, under pressure from Spanish religious opinion, the Papacy decreed that no one could any longer deny la concepción immaculada. Seville once again celebrated with fireworks.