Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda

by Anthony Bailey

  Most openly attractive and perhaps most traditional of Velázquez’s religious works in Seville was his Adoration of the Magi, apparently painted for a Jesuit chapel in the city. The novices of the order performed their devotions in this building. In this painting the Virgin of Velázquez’s Immaculate Conception has grown up. She is no longer a thirteen-year-old adolescent but a young mother, holding on her lap with big workaday hands an infant child. A wise-looking self-possessed little boy, swaddled in white cloth, is being admired—indeed adored—by a kneeling man, one of the three kings; though he and his colleagues are perhaps wise men rather than kings, for they wear no crowns as they proffer covered chalice-like containers for their gold, frankincense, and myrrh. One, his black features accentuated by a white ruff, is African. One looks rather like Pacheco. We are evidently in the countryside, at the opening to a cave. No animals can be seen and no star, but a creamy dawn light is spreading into the black sky over a nearby hilltop, and an almost theatrical brilliance passes over the magi to spotlight the mother and child before bouncing on more lightly to the upturned countenance of the woman’s husband, Joseph—he seems smitten by his responsibilities. A fifth participant is a young man who bears a strong resemblance, a few years on, to the youth we’ve seen holding a glass before the Corsican water seller and the flask to the old woman cooking eggs. He is familiar, as if he were one of us; he is part of the family. (Some experts believe two of Velázquez’s brothers served as models in this picture and for the saints, John and Thomas.) On the ground beneath the Virgin, in front of the Magi, are thorn branches, hinting at troubles to come for this serene babe. If the picture was meant to prompt the Jesuit novices to ponder their faith, one feels it did its job. The word was made flesh. It dwelled among us. The Adoration of the Magi also had northern European affinities, with a debt to a painting by Alejo Fernández, an artist of German origin who had worked in Seville in the first half of the previous century. Fernández’s Adoration—which in turn was based on a print by Martin Schongauer of Colmar—was to be viewed hanging over the high altar in Seville Cathedral.

  Adoration of the Magi, 1619, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

  There is no doubt about the convincing nature of the last paintings of a religious person Velázquez made in Seville. They are both portraits of the same woman and one picture is more or less a replica of the other. Their subject is a sixty-six-year-old nun. Mother Jerónima de la Fuente was en route from her convent in Toledo, via Cadiz, to a posting in Manila, in the Philippines, when she stopped for twenty days in Seville in June 1620. There she posed, standing rather than sitting, for Velázquez to paint her. Manila, founded by a conquistador in 1571 (the same year as the great naval victory of the Catholic fleets over the Turks at Lepanto), was then as far away as the moon would be for us; it was a fortified city where Chinese and Japanese traders met the Spanish and money was made. A Spanish galleon brought silver from Mexico once a year to finance businesses; storms, calms, and shipwrecks were met with on the ways to and fro, and there were frequent deaths from scurvy, “the Dutch disease” as the Spanish called it. The order of Poor Clares that Mother Jerónima belonged to enjoined its members to seclusion. The Latin inscription at the head of the paintings means “It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God”—though one wonders how this admonition was put into practice alongside her role as a missionary converting the heathen. It took Mother Jerónima over a year to reach the Philippines, a trip broken for six months in Mexico. In Manila she founded the first cloistered convent in that part of the world (surrounded by a thirty-foot-high windowless wall) and perhaps had to lead entirely by quiet example. She was known to reenact the Crucifixion by hanging unsupported from a cross for three hours. For Velázquez she holds her long-stemmed crucifix like a weapon. He makes her look like a tough old bat, though the art scholars David Davies and Enriqueta Harris more charitably describe her looks as “indomitable.”

  The Venerable Mother Jerónima de la Fuente, 1620, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

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  AT THE AGE of twenty anything can seem possible. But in Velázquez’s case, the good fortune of being born prodigiously talented in what was still the most well-endowed city in Spain was enhanced by influential acquaintance. The word spread. Ripples from the Pacheco circle reached higher levels. Pacheco and thus his protégé had access to libraries and collections of antiquities such as that of the Duke of Alcala in his mudejar palace, the Casa de Pilatos, not far from Seville Cathedral, a palace with cool patios and handsomely tiled chambers full of books, paintings, sculpture, and collections of coins and jewels; the duke owned among other things two bodegones. Rodrigo Caro (1573–1647) was another of Pacheco’s circle who was passionate about classical learning and art as was Pacheco’s uncle and guardian, the cathedral canon Pacheco, who had the same Christian name as the artist Pacheco. However, the most important connection turned out to be with Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count of Olivares, whose father was at one time the honorary governor of the Seville Alcázar palace and who had lived in Seville during his twenties. The Dukes of Medina-Sidonia, one of whom commanded the ill-fated armada, were Guzmán’s relatives, as was, it later transpired, a grandmother who came from a family of converted Jews. Their blood was therefore by the standards of the time “impure” and “tainted.” Guzmán was born in Rome, in (so his later critics suggested) Nero’s palace and was taken to Naples by his father, the viceroy there. In 1600 at age thirteen he returned to Spain to study law at Salamanca. Although the third son, his older brothers died, and he went to court (at the time in Valladolid) where his father was a counsellor. On his father’s death, he inherited the title of Count of Olivares in 1607. He was a resident in Seville from 1607 to 1615. In October 1609, the twelve years’ truce was signed with the troublesome Dutch (the truce, being a pacific move, didn’t come naturally to him), and on the same date Olivares was presumably among those who approved the news that Philip III had signed a decree expelling the Moriscos from the country, the by now almost indigenous people of Moorish descent.

  For his eight years in Seville, Olivares kept up his suit to become a member of the royal household. He competed with the Duke of Alcalá as a patron and saw a lot of people Pacheco knew well, such as the poet Francisco de Rioja and another cathedral canon, a colleague of Pacheco’s uncle, Juan de Fonseca y Figueroa. Olivares’s desire to get fully taken on at court was fulfilled in 1615; he was appointed a gentleman of the chamber to Prince Philip, the heir apparent, in that year. The prince’s new court servant was by no means a courtierlike figure but a big broad-shouldered man with physical and mental problems, limbs that twitched, and a propensity to throw tantrums. But he soon found that finesse and politesse were dispensable. To begin with he acted the part of a courtier prepared to be humbled—on one occasion he put up with the adolescent prince Philip telling him he was tired of his presence as he stood holding the prince’s chamber pot. At that point Guzmán—biting his tongue?—dramatically kissed the pot. However, in April 1621 he was rewarded for his deference by being told to keep his hat on in Philip’s company; this meant that Guzmán now had grandee status. Indeed, after the death of Philip III at the age of forty-two, Olivares quickly became the visible power behind the throne. The late king’s favorite, or valido, the incompetent Duke of Lerma, was muscled out of the way. Nominally the chief minister was now Guzmán’s uncle Baltasar de Zuniga, a former ambassador in Brussels, a tutor to the prince, and a man whose good Low Countries connections included a Flemish wife. Olivares, on the other hand, seemed to lack a natural rapport with that northern part of the Spanish empire, as would become perilously evident in time. He added the title of Duke of San Lúcar to his name in 1625, which as we will see was the year of an astonishing Spanish victory in the Netherlands. He was thenceforth called the count-duke.

  In 1621, four years before that achievement, Spain was coming to an end of its twelve years’ truce with the Dutch rebels. Little more than a week into Philip IV’s new monarchy, the hourglass o
f relative peace ran out. Olivares had never backed the truce; he thought it injured Spanish trading interests and imperial expansion plans; and—one policy somewhat at cross-purposes with another—he believed a renewed war would give the insurgents pause and allow Spain time to work out an honorable way of bringing the interminable conflict to an end. A surge! And then a permanent peace! Meanwhile the southern provinces of the Low Countries had to be defended. Somehow Spain’s integrity depended on it. Defending the Catholic religion and opposing Protestantism were involved. Yet many in both Madrid and Flanders thought that immediate peace should be given a chance instead. The southern provinces had prospered during the truce. The leadership on the spot was not gung ho about a renewed war—neither of the “archdukes” was keen, with Isabella doubtful about its long-term value and Albert, on the point of death, with his thoughts on eternity. Their senior military commander Ambrogio Spinola was a member of a distinguished Genoese banking family. Lack of financial support from the Spanish crown forced him to invest his own funds in providing for the Army of Flanders; he wanted the Dutch to be given a chance to cool off. Unfortunately, the Dutch were once again feeling belligerent and ill-feeling mounted on both sides. The Spanish Council of State took the majority position that refinancing the struggle against the Dutch would be worth it if the conflict preserved Spain’s glory. “A good war in Flanders” would promote peace elsewhere. It would also keep the restless Spanish army busy in the southern Netherlands. The troops needed something to do that would take their minds off their long overdue pay. And of course money would be found to pay for the renewed war, wouldn’t it?

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  BOTH SPAIN AND Seville were at tipping points. Seville had begun to lose its luster as the golden city. Ships from the Americas were bringing home less bullion. The river was silting up and trade was moving down to Cádiz. The hardworking Andalusian Moriscos had been expelled or enslaved. Madrid was at last making itself felt as the real center of power, the city of the royal court. In April 1622, Diego Velázquez made his first visit to the capital, perhaps prodded by his father-in-law, who saw that it meant a way ahead.

  Velázquez was nearly twenty-three. It was a time of possibilities, of all sorts of doors being suddenly open for him. He owned several houses in the Alameda de Hércules, part of Juana’s dowry. He had taken on an apprentice, Diego de Melgar. He had two small children, Francisca born in 1619, and Ignacia, born in 1621. One imagines him from later self-portraits as having eyes well set apart, and with the expressive mustache of a young hidalgo or would-be hidalgo. A young man from Seville. Already a stunning painter, astonishingly mature, although in Madrid only a few, in Olivares’s circle, knew his name. Before he set off on the road to that city in April 1622, he asked his father-in-law to take over the collection of rents from his properties, and his younger brother Juan, also a painter, witnessed Pacheco’s acceptance of the power of attorney. (When Pacheco in turn went to Madrid for a time, Juan Rodríguez, Velázquez’s father, took over the oversight of the properties, which were damaged in the floods of 1626 and sold by auction two years later.) Diego Velázquez made what is considered to be a portrait of his former master before he left Seville: it’s a picture that might have been painted by only one other living artist, Frans Hals, who lived in Haarlem in Holland. Having said that, one can’t be sure Hals would have left in shadow so much of the mustached and goateed face that springs out above the freely painted white ruff and the otherwise all-black background. The shadow is all Velázquez. It makes the portrait that much more brilliant. Pacheco was aware that the pupil had surpassed the master and said so, proud of the fact, in print, in his Arte de la Pintura in 1649. But this wonderful picture of Velázquez’s teacher, identified by its resemblance to a self-portrait Pacheco had done in 1610–11, made the pupil’s preeminence evident nearly thirty years earlier.

  If Velázquez left this as a token of his ability, he took with him another piece of evidence when he set off for Madrid. His painting of El Corzo went with him. The pictures he had painted so far provide our best testimony of what sort of person he was: concerned with detail; alive to domestic circumstances; sensitive about such vital elements as water, food, the common stuff of daily existence; aware of religion, the Bible, the sacraments, all providing a structure that could shelter and insulate an individual; highly conscious of art elsewhere in Flanders and Italy and particularly influenced by the heightened realism of Caravaggio. His interest in what Palomino later called “rustic subjects” was interwoven with an interest in higher things. We are given hints that along with superrealism, Velázquez, mature at twenty-three, could already tap into a transcendent dimension.

  III. MADRID: FOR THE FIRST TIME. 1622–

  The road north in April would not yet have been baking. Alongside it, wildflowers relieved the dry red landscape. In bodegas and inns beside the route the bread was hard, the wine coarse if not sour. The then recently published adventures of Guzmán de Alfarache may have come to mind, Guzmán a runaway youth of uncertain parentage from Seville, seeking fame and fortune but finding en route to Madrid hard knocks and con tricks, “veal” stew made of mule meat, his clothing pilfered, beds full of fleas and lice, the innkeepers rapacious. Bumping and shaking, the coach traversed northern Andalusia before heading for Castile through wild and depopulated Extremadura. As a half dozen mules pulled his conveyance across the celebrated “plains” of Alcudia, a well-read traveler might also have recalled their recent description by Cervantes in one of his exemplary tales. To fend off bandits, thc coachmen and muleteers often formed caravan convoys, protecting scores of passengers and up to a hundred horses and mules, with bells being dragged on the ground behind the last members to alert the guards to attacks by thieves—no sound of bells meant something was amiss. The caravans camped in the country at night with guards posted.

  Velázquez, taking with him The Waterseller and a few other tangible examples of his talent to demonstrate to future clients what he was capable of, was going to Madrid as Seville began to seem burned out. His father-in-law later claimed that Velázquez went in order to see the Escorial, King Philip II’s massive monastery-palace west of Madrid, though that may have been shorthand for Velázquez’s hopes of getting a post near the seat of power, fame, and fortune. His ambition was not expressed too loudly. He may have had doubts. He had known no other home but Seville and despite the economic downturn he could have stayed there and carried on doing what he did so well, followed in Pacheco’s steps or, like Zurbarán, gone on working for churches and convents and monastic orders. But he wanted more and felt he had the ability to achieve it.

  In Madrid he was greeted by some of those who formed a Seville contingent there. Luis and Melchor del Alcázar, a Jesuit priest and a poet, were of Jewish converso origin, brothers who had helped put on the Immaculate Conception festivities in Seville in 1617. Juan de Fonseca, the former canon of Seville Cathedral, was now sumiller de cortina, a court chamberlain, and a royal chaplain who assisted the monarch at services in the chapel. Fonseca shortly became the owner of The Waterseller. Another Sevillian was Francisco de Rioja, the poet who had been a witness at Velázquez’s marriage to Juana and brought to court by Count Olivares as his librarian. So Velázquez had plenty of connections. They worked to bring the young artist to the attention of the new king, Philip IV. However, the fourth monarch to be named Philip—and called “the planet king” because people then thought the Earth was the fourth planet in the solar system—seemed to be too busy to allow an introduction or a hoped-for sitting to take place.

  Unable to paint the king or the queen, Velázquez got started on another picture. Pacheco had asked for a portrait of Luis de Góngora, poet, satirist, and a former chaplain to Philip III. Velázquez was always good at expressing determination and this painting of Góngora—useful as a calling card—was an early example of this ability. Perhaps he was helped by the fact that Góngora didn’t appear to have particularly enjoyed sitting for the young Sevillian. “How much longer is this
going to take?” his look seems to say. The self-consciousness imposed on the sitter by the painter may have interfered annoyingly with Góngora’s hopes of using the time for thinking about other things. But Velázquez used his time brilliantly—he caught the high brow, keen eyes fixed on the artist, beak of a nose, and clenched downturned lips, the head of a raptor. An unforgettable skull that rose out of the white shirt and enveloping black coat. A highbrow indeed. When Velázquez captured his look and personality, Góngora was in his early sixties, an isolated man originally from Córdoba who felt out of his time but who nevertheless managed to fit together an inherited church post with a love of gambling, philandering, and writing. He knew what it felt like to be condemned. One heartfelt poem expressed a Spanish slave’s long anguish, chained to a rowing bench on a Turkish galley. Góngora endured the endless waiting-around at court with little grace and suffered in his later years from acute writer’s block. He lost most of his fortune gambling at cards. A stroke caused him to lose his memory. His death in 1627 at least relieved him from knowing that his collected poems, published posthumously, were suppressed by the Inquisition.

  Luis de Góngora, 1622, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  El Corte. The court was the capital and the capital the court for those attracted to it. Under Philip III Madrid had drawn the nobility high and low, their servants and followers. The city had become crowded not least with criminals, who saw easy pickings there. But for Velázquez Madrid had at the moment no opening, and in early 1623 he was back in Seville; there he bided his time. And he didn’t have to wait long. By way of Fonseca, the summons to return to the court came in the summer. Count Olivares had taken the matter in hand. A portrait Velázquez had done of Fonseca had been acclaimed at the palace. Fifty ducats was sent to Velázquez as an advance for travel money. This time the journey was a hot one but worthwhile. Pacheco went, too, sure his pupil would succeed. And by the end of August, Velázquez had his entrée and had painted a portrait of the king, the eighteen-year-old Philip; this received all-around acclaim. Count Olivares declared that the king had never been painted successfully until now. (The portrait is possibly that now in the Meadows Museum of Southern Methodist University, Dallas.) The young Sevillian was also asked to sketch Charles, the Prince of Wales, in Spain on a mission of possible matrimony, traveling incognito with his friend and mentor the Duke of Buckingham as Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith. Velázquez received a hundred escudos as a reward for his work from Prince Charles but on religious grounds the Spanish court wasn’t keen on the marriage, despite Charles’s claims that he would allow religious tolerance to Catholics in England. A year or so later the Stuart marital bed was occupied instead by a French princess, Henrietta Maria. Olivares confirmed Velázquez’s first step up the ladder by ensuring him accommodation for Juana and the children in Madrid. He was clearly needed there; no one else was as talented. On October 6, 1623, Diego Velázquez was favored by the king and appointed a court painter.