The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, 1618–19, National Gallery, London.
We have no knowledge of how Velázquez felt about the debate or how intensely he believed or disbelieved the doctrine, but we have evidence of his empathy with the devotion. Both Pacheco and his star pupil made representations of the young Virgin Mary. Velázquez was barely twenty when he painted The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. Pacheco’s painting of three years earlier in Seville Cathedral, one of three he did of the same subject, showed the Virgin standing on a moon, stars around her head, and squadrons of angels on all sides. Pacheco called the doctrine “this most lovely mystery,” and he laid it down in writing that the Virgin should be painted en fleur, “twelve or thirteen years old, with fine and serious eyes, a most perfect nose and mouth and pink cheeks, wearing her most beautiful golden hair loose.… She is clothed in the sun.” There was much less clutter in Velázquez’s seraphim-free treatment, apparently done for an Order of Carmelite nuns in Seville. The Virgin’s eyelids are demurely lowered. She seems to be levitating on a partly transparent moon, lit by the reflection from white clouds. She is, unlike Pacheco’s stilted figure, a very real almost adolescent girl; Velázquez may have been inspired by Montañés and he also may have asked his sister, Juana, nine years younger than him, to be his model. Crucially the stars making a horseshoe constellation in the night sky around her head are brighter but less flamboyant than Pacheco’s, diamonds in the sky rather than gaudy Christmas decorations.
What gave most support for Velázquez’s reputation as the brightest young spark in Seville’s art firmament was his skill in painting kitchen scenes. These would be much copied. They were done, as Palomino noted, “with most extraordinary originality and remarkable talent—animals, birds, fish-stalls and bodegones with perfect imitation of nature.” The originality lay less in the subjects than in the boldness with which they were painted. There were predecessors for Velázquez’s kitchen pictures, not from Spain but from the Low Countries, to which Velázquez early on showed an affinity. They were in particular pictures by Pieter Aertsen, the sixteenth-century artist nicknamed Lanky Peter, who worked in Antwerp and Amsterdam; his pictures figured in Seville in the collection of the Duke of Alcala and were also imported into the Andalusian city in print form by Flemish merchants. In one Aertsen tavern scene men sit at a table with food while a girl pours wine for them—just as in paintings by Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer that pictured similar scenes. But in the bodegones by Velázquez the tavern utensils often seem more prominent than the figures. In the painting in the Wellington Museum called Two Young Men at Table, for instance, the young men are turned aside, talking secretively, while the light falls on some dishes stacked upside down to dry, and our eyes focus on an orange perched on top of a jug. The turned-over dishes and jug are treated with an attention tantamount to love. In another two of Velázquez’s kitchen scenes, painted in 1618, the same old woman appears. One wonders if she worked in the Pacheco household or for the newly marrieds. In one picture she is cooking eggs, holding a long-handled wooden spoon over a brown earthenware pot in which the eggs are being fried in oil. Beneath the bottom rim of the pot the glow of red-hot charcoal in an iron basin is just visible. In fact the elderly woman bears a strong resemblance to another woman shown in a double portrait Pacheco is thought to have painted of himself and his wife, María del Páramo; we can take it that she was doing the cooking on this occasion. A plump-faced young boy stands close by, holding in one hand a glass flask and in the other a melon. The viewer is made to look down on the eggs in the pot—an earthenware cazuela—and on the objects on her table, a gray dish, a brass pestle and mortar, a carafe and a jug, a red onion. The perspective is similar to that in a wonderful Zurbarán still life, a fragment of canvas showing a two-handled mug full of water, sitting on a silver plate, with the head of a rose peeking over it. From the viewer’s point of view one expects the top of the mug to reveal less of the water-filled interior than it does. Zurbarán, from Extremadura, was a year older than Velázquez but started his apprenticeship in Seville three years later; they evidently met and in later life were in touch on several crucial occasions, though, unlike Velázquez, Zurbarán spent most of his career working for monasteries and churches, painting saints and religious scenes that combined an austerity of action with the most brilliant colors.
An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Francisco Pacheco, Portrait of an Elderly Man and Woman, Museum of Fine Arts, Seville.
The bony old woman we take to be Pacheco’s wife was seen again, wearing the same scarf, her forehead furrowed by deeper lines, standing close behind a kitchen maid who is working with the brass pestle and mortar, evidently crushing garlic, with four fish and two eggs waiting on the table. In what has been seen by some as a religious picture on the wall to the right but is more likely a kitchen hatch into the next room are revealed three smaller figures. Christ is addressing Martha and Mary. This seems to have been Velázquez’s first use of a split-screen effect—a device fairly common since the previous century and practiced in the seventeenth century in Holland by such artists as Nicolaes Maes (Maes’s The Listening Housewife pauses to lean over the banisters, jug in hand, while downstairs in the cellar we glimpse a servant girl being embraced by a young man). In Velázquez’s Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary the old woman in the left foreground seems to be admonishing the maid to behave herself, and the maid looks as if she is trying hard to preserve a grumpy silence. Velázquez manages to fit a moral message about serving—even tight-lipped—amid the pots and pans into a kitchen scene that once again seems to have Netherlandish connections and marvelously observed detail; in terms of quality it was on a par with the best the Low Countries painters of the time could produce. That Velázquez was thoroughly at home in the kitchen was shown in further paintings. Two show the same maid. In these she is not an unhappy overweight Andalusian teenager but a girl with brown skin and African features, with flat nose, full lips, and frizzy hair. The brass bowl, pestle and mortar, gray and blue jug, clove of garlic, and basket hanging on the wall are items we have seen in the Old Woman Cooking Eggs. One of these pictures (now in Chicago) is darkened and damaged and less amplified than the other (now in Dublin), which once again has a religious scene partly visible through a hatch, a sort of cartoon thought bubble, this time the Supper at Emmaus, where Christ recently risen from death has appeared in order to break bread among his astonished disciples. As Luke put it, “And their eyes were opened, and they knew him, and he vanished out of their sight.” Here as well as being entranced by the wonderfully rendered bodegón elements, we are held by the foreground figure of the preoccupied servant girl, quite likely a slave in the Pacheco household, bending forward over the kitchen table, her face partly in shadow but revealing the most evident signs of an epiphany. (Seville had roughly six thousand slaves, mostly of North African but also of Caribbean origin.) Her turbanlike cap is more tightly pinned than the head scarf of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and she has no pearl earring. It is as if she were waiting for an angel to arrive and present her with astounding news though Velázquez no doubt meant only to show us her inner awareness of what was happening in the view through the hatch. Whatever her thought, it was one accessible, Velázquez suggested, to the humble and lowly.
Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 1618, National Gallery, London.
Velázquez made a habit of reusing his small cast of characters as well as his store of domestic utensils. His brothers may have figured in Two Young Men at Table, about which Palomino described “some earthenware vessels, oranges, bread and other things,” although the bread was in fact not on that table but on the table in another picture, this time of musicians, known in four versions, that in Berlin most likely the original. Here, too, the young men possibly played a part. One of them is also at a table, smiling or gesturing, eating and drinking, in several tavern scenes the you
ng Velázquez made, for example the bodegon now in the Hermitage—a painting in which the plump-faced boy from An Old Woman Cooking Eggs appears again. Although the cast of characters Velázquez had at his disposal was limited, he reserved the right to interpose a novelty: a monkey looks around the back of the youngest musician in The Musical Trio. A young girl with a cap on the back of her head (similar to that worn by the Moorish servant girl in The Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus) pours wine, as if for the first time, with nervous concentration, in the tavern scene that now hangs in Budapest. An unseen hand in the making of these paintings was that of the Italian master Caravaggio, who died in 1610, and whose theatrical pictures, full of fierce contrasts, had an immense influence not so much on his fellow Italians as on Rubens and Rembrandt, and here in Seville. On the young painter of bodegones, this influence could have occurred in the reproduced form of prints, or possibly—indirectly—as a result of encountering paintings by Juseppe Ribera, the Valencian-born painter and follower of Caravaggio, sent from Naples (where Ribera worked) to Seville, or even perhaps after Velázquez saw several actual Caravaggios brought back to Seville from Rome by Prior Camillo Contreras. Caravaggio went in for painting from life with strong lighting and dramatic foreshortening. Pacheco saw Caravaggio’s influence on his pupil in Velázquez’s ability to evoke “force and plastic power” in order to create three-dimensional forms. And as Palomino later noted, Velázquez rivaled Caravaggio in the boldness of his painting; he was called a second Caravaggio “because he imitated nature so successfully … keeping it before his eyes in all things.” Fortunately, the work of Velázquez wasn’t generally as stagey, or as affected, as that of the Milanese painter—except nearly a decade later in a “religious” painting called Christ After the Flagellation Contemplated by the Human Soul.
One painting from the Seville years contains two male figures whose faces we seem to have seen before in Diego Velázquez’s youthful oeuvre; it is not at all Caravaggesque and it is his masterpiece from this period. The Waterseller of Seville, also known as El Corzo, The Corsican, is remarkable for several reasons. The elderly man who dominates the picture stands mostly in shadow, his weathered, bearded face in profile, only his white-sleeved left arm brightly lit under his shabby leather poncho. The by now well-known chubby-cheeked boy stands before him, clutching the glass goblet that the water seller—perhaps the same elderly man with a beard who sat in the tavern with the girl pouring wine—holds out ready for the water to be poured into it. The goblet has either a flaw in its glass or a fig at the bottom to sweeten the water. Once again Velázquez has chosen a humble actor for a leading role. At the time water sellers were found all over Spain, and in places like Seville, in summer, they did a vital job. In a hundred-degree Fahrenheit heat, water was truly the most precious element. At the entrance to every inn in southern Spain (Richard Ford assures us) a clay waterpot or alcarraza hung, ready for those arriving to take a long drink from. The Corsican with his big jars of water was not so much a tramp or peddler as a bearer of blessings. For the parched, his clear cool water tasted sweeter than any wine. “Agua muy rica,” very tasty water, was how it was described by the sellers, and so it felt when one drank it. The aguadores generally carried along with their jugs a tin box for storing their glasses and biscuits in, the latter usually being obleas, a sort of sugar wafer. The painting also has something sacramental about it. Water had an almost religious importance in this part of Spain. The boy’s contemplative look, not saying anything aloud as he presents the goblet to El Corzo in a way as acolyte to priest, conveys his participation in an act of communion, a mystery. Jar, water, glass, the server and the recipient—in all things are signs of God’s presence.
The Waterseller evidently caused its painter considerable pains. A strip of canvas several inches wide has been added across the top. The shadows in the picture are given depth by the ground whose tone Velázquez manipulated (so the art historian Zahira Veliz tells us) “with decreasing densities of paint … to achieve the notable chiaroscuro evident there. The shadow on the right side of the large water jug in the foreground is achieved by scumbling over the ground with a drab tone, allowing a delicate play of light and cool tones, from which the form of the jug is brought into relief by the finely graduated lead-white based colour of the highlight.” Corrections have been made to the collar of El Corzo’s sleeveless pancho and to his thick fingers. Some of the details are exquisitely done, the goblet that seems to have an air bubble in the glass at its bottom, the light on the boy’s face reflected up from his twisted white collar, the pearls of moisture on the clay surface of the biggest jug and the glinting highlights on the glazed gray curves of the smaller, two-handled jug. Begging all manner of questions is the dim grotesque figure who can just be made out between the boy and the old water seller, perhaps the sketched suggestion for another participant who was never fully rendered, but left presenting a spectral or gnomic potency: broad faced, bearded, observant. He gives us a foretaste of Goya. Why is he there looking on? In any event, Velázquez knew this picture represented what he was capable of; it was a pearl of great price. For a young man, painted at a time when most artists would have been floundering as they tried to find “their own voice,” it was astonishingly mature. He took it with him when he left Seville on the next stage of his career, gave or sold it to his patron Juan de Fonseca y Figueroa, chaplain to the king of Spain, and valued it at four hundred reales when Fonseca’s collection was appraised in 1627, the highest value given any item. A number of copies of the picture were made.
The Waterseller of Seville is, apart from the heat implicit in its subject matter and the demonstrated profession of its main character, by no means a Spanish picture. In this and in the two kitchen scenes with servant girls, one detects a sympathy with the intimate and day-to-day that is positively Netherlandish. In European politics the Low Countries were tied to Spain in a relationship that, as we’ve already seen, was Oedipal or fratricidal, but Velázquez shows that he felt a similar tug. A large number of Spanish merchants were in the Netherlands, particularly in ports such as Antwerp, and in Seville the same was true of representatives of Dutch and Flemish businesses. Much Spanish wool went to Flemish textile makers. Diplomats and soldiers and royal officials went back and forth between the two countries. Art traveled, too. It may of course only be happenstance that eight hundred miles away and thirty-five years later we find Johannes Vermeer of Delft working in the same territory as Velázquez: a Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, with fewer kitchen implements but the same inspiration in Luke 10:38–42. Of the two paintings, Vermeer’s now seems the more modern and more composed but Velázquez’s has its depths and complications, its thought-provoking ambiguities.
His Seville years must have felt long at the time, but when he looked back, how fast they went by. Some of the work he accomplished then was less original in subject matter, more usual for the time and place, less low-life and more conventionally aspirational. “Religious Art” is a term that doesn’t stir the emotions anymore and it may take an effort to shift oneself back to a period when the sea of faith was still at the full, and the patronage of the Catholic Church kept artists alive. Living up to his declared billing by the Guild of Saint Luke examiners in 1617 as “a master painter of religious images,” Velázquez redressed his cargo of down-to-earth kitchen and tavern scenes with some more devout and more designedly devotional imagery. St. John the Evangelist, probably painted for the same Carmelite convent that had commissioned his Immaculate Conception, depicted John on Patmos, a young man having a vision, staring soulfully at a sign in the heavens that showed “a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” Thus Revelation 12:1. The saint, a man with a thin mustache, looks like an Andalusian kitchen helper but has in his lap an immense manuscript of many pages in which he has been writing. Behind him stands a heavily pollarded tree and behind it an area of background on which, with a series of almost calligraphic diagonal strokes, Velázq
uez seems to have cleaned the paint from his brushes, a common habit with him.
He obviously hadn’t completely kicked the need for religious art that obsessed most Spanish painters. Other subjects he painted in these years included a bushy-haired and long-bearded Saint Paul and a Saint Thomas, a slightly more vigorous figure than represented by the same model in the Saint John, this time carrying an open Bible in one hand and in the other an iron-tipped lance—the weapon with which the saint would be martyred. Saint Ildefonso, the seventh-century archbishop of Toledo who defended the concept of Mary’s perpetual virginity, was shown in Velázquez’s painting of him receiving a chasuble from the Virgin as a reward for his good works. It was seemingly intended for a Franciscan convent in Seville, where it hung in the open atrium and even in its present damaged state makes a striking picture: Mary with a chorus of very real women stands over Ildefonso as he kneels to receive her gift, presenting a gaunt prayer-abstracted profile. The picture has, perhaps alone among Velázquez’s saints, something of the power of the carved wooden figures of Juan Martínez Montañés, sometimes (as we’ve seen) polychromed by Pacheco. Montañés was forty-one years older than Velázquez. His crucified Christs were tormented men, rib cages evident under taut skin, muscles and tendons tense behind shoulders and knees. His St. Hermenegild showed the son of the Visigothic king dressed in Roman armor and holding aloft a crucifix, and it was probably carried in procession to a chapel in Seville designed for honoring the saint and opened in 1616.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 5
