As such, he was a member of the Royal Household—in effect a staff artist. He was put on a salary of twenty ducats or escudos a month. Extra sums would be paid for the paintings he did. Of course, his life had rarely been his own: First he had belonged to his father; then to his master; now to the king. Yet in return for what we might regard as freedom he had the security of the household, one perquisite being what today would be called a health plan, including the services of a physician, chemist, and surgeon. A further sum of three hundred ducats—more than his annual salary—was provided for living expenses. Another three hundred was promised for a pension that would be funded by an ecclesiastical living; the church officialdom worked on this and a papal dispensation for it was granted in 1626. Velázquez’s father was also remembered. In the ensuing seven years, the cathedral legal scribe was awarded three secretaryships, each worth a thousand ducats. Velázquez himself was given working quarters in the royal apartments on the ground floor of the Alcázar, the huge palace with some five hundred rooms laid out on two floors around two arcaded courtyards. The formerly Arab medieval fortress had been built overlooking the escarpment of the Manzanares Valley, on the west side of Madrid, and had been enlarged, given a new facade, and somewhat modernized after 1610. Velázquez was presumably glad that he enjoyed a private residence outside the palace. To begin with, this was a house in the Calle de Concepción Gerónima, off the Calle Toledo, but by 1625, when he and Juana were joined by her father, they were all living in a rented house in the Calle de los Convalecientes (now called Calle San Bernardo). In 1626 the king directed that Velázquez be given the right to housing worth two hundred ducats per annum. In Madrid he might have missed the thicker, more pungent odor of Seville—as Mateo Aleman had observed, taking note of the greater refinement of the capital, Seville had “the smell of a city.”
However, Velázquez’s route every day to the court lay through the Plaza Mayor and along fairly unclean streets. Much food was cooked in the streets and many food sellers prepared their wares outside, too; salt cod was left to soak in tubs and the smelly brine was then poured into the gutters. Many people went out each morning for their breakfast torreznos, bacon grilled on smoky fires and chased down by a cup of wine. The court centered in the palace was the biggest single employer in the city. Roughly 10 percent of the national income went to maintain it. Some 1,700 individuals, many glad of their sinecures, others striving for further favors, jockeyed for position within it. Their promised wages were by no means guaranteed. Velázquez was one of 350 officials at the heart of the court, whose workings depended on protocol and etiquette going back to Burgundian days. The monarch seemed buried inside a mountain of antique ceremony. Routine was sacrosanct and the king was obliged never to act in an unaccustomed manner. The palace was—according to foreign visitors not used to the darkness of Spanish interiors—exceptionally gloomy. However, commercial shops and workshops surrounded some of the ground-floor courtyards, and the women’s quarters upstairs were lighter. The king had his own set of keys to every room in the palace and was able to pass without notice through a maze of galleries and corridors. He also followed a habitual route in mannerisms, one French observer saying that he acted like an animated statue, “not moving except for the lips and the tongue.” His own rooms were in the Torre Dorada in the southwestern corner of the palace from which he could look out on the woods around the Casa del Campo, where rooks nested, descendants of the colony of birds Charles V had brought from the Netherlands. Philip’s apartment included a study, an oratory, the “gilded gallery,” and two rooms set aside as the places where he ate his meals. The king took a private passageway from his quarters to the court painter’s studio when he wanted to have a personal view of the work going on.
Hidden much of the time from the people, walled in by ceremony, Philip IV felt compelled to act with Hapsburg gravity, stiff, never smiling. He was reputed to have laughed out loud only three times in his life. This impression he gave of never being amused was one of the Hapsburg characteristics, like the protruding jaw, fleshy lips, somewhat bulging eyes, and a trapped expression that hovered between melancholy and obstinacy. It was claimed that his father Philip III looked out of a palace window on one occasion and saw a passerby laughing. He said, “That man is mad or has been reading Don Quixote.” Professional fools and jesters, often dwarfs, were employed to create amusement at court, though when Philip IV’s young second wife, Mariana, arrived in Madrid from Austria and laughed at a dwarf who was playing the fool, she was told off. Laughter was not becoming to a queen of Spain. “In that case get rid of the dwarf,” she said smartly. Philip IV did not make many appearances to the people of Madrid except when receiving a foreign ambassador in public. He went to a few formal occasions such as opening performances of plays or the marriages of ladies-in-waiting, but his privacy was often theatrically enhanced. On the notable occasions when the king left the Alcázar on the west of the city for San Jerónimo church on the east, every member of the court made their way across the city in a long procession to watch him attend the service. Another rare royal appearance was on Maundy Thursday, when he went to a city church to wash the feet of a beggar. He eavesdropped on his Councils of State, listening to what was said at their meetings through small windows that kept him out of sight. He dined alone. A small army of guardsmen, ushers, stewards, and sommeliers attended him, washing his hands, pouring two glasses of wine so that it could be tasted before the king drank it, parading back and forth to the kitchens for each course, and brushing away crumbs. A martial procession of servants with soldiers as guards accompanied the arrival of and tasted each dish at his table—although from 1630 a policy of austerity dictated that lunch contain only ten dishes and supper only eight.
Olivares having insinuated his way into power brought in many reforms. The number of servants permitted was restricted as was the use of carriages and the importation of luxuries from abroad. The display of silver plate and access to brothels was meant to be controlled. Elaborate fashions were banned: Intricate lace and linen ruffs and cuffs were prohibited and the plain golilla—a saucer-shaped stiff collar made of cardboard sandwiched between silk and cloth—was introduced; the king took the lead in using one and in wearing plain black clothes. Yet other fancy accoutrements, such as heavy gold chains, remained fashionable. The visits of foreign dignitaries and celebrities also made for exceptions. When Charles Stuart, the Prince of Wales, turned up in Madrid to seek the princess María’s hand, the reform decrees were suspended for the period he was in town. Lavish balls and theater performances took place, along with fireworks displays and bullfights. Moreover, women were less affected by the reforms in their clothing. They went on wearing the then fashionable guardainfante, a wide skirt on a framework of iron, willow, and whalebone; it eventually got so wide that those wearing it had trouble getting through church doors.
If impromptu laughter was in short supply at court except for those reading the bestselling adventures of Don Quixote, one reason was money. Everyone might well look dour because they all lived on credit, including the king. Philip was betrothed to Isabella of Bourbon, the sister of the French king Louis XIII, in 1615, when she was twelve and he was ten, though the marriage wasn’t consummated for another five years. As a youth he struck many as spoiled and petulant. Most Spanish children are coddled and adored, but the future king went on having his own way and unlike most Spanish men never had to take further steps to prove he could act independently, self-confidently, unless it was as a huntsman or lover. He eventually had thirty-two bastard children, of whom he acknowledged eight. One of his natural sons was another Don Juan (1629–79), the first prince of that name in this generation, who became popular. Juan’s mother, the actress María Calderón, also had a turn as lover of Olivares’s son-in-law, though to spare the king further embarrassing publicity she eventually withdrew to a convent in March 1642, when Philip recognized Juan as his son. Not that Philip’s affairs were very secret. Olivares was believed to be the chief provi
der of mistresses to the king. In 1621 the count was criticized by the archbishop of Granada for accompanying Philip on his nocturnal adventures. The count-duke replied that the king shouldn’t be kept in ignorance of what went on in the world. He, Olivares, would keep a close eye on him since he trusted the king with no one else.
Don Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke Olivares, 1624, Museo de Arte, São Paulo, Brazil.
Olivares, the king’s favorite, sponsored Velázquez’s assimilation into the court, and the young painter returned the favor with several portraits that conveyed the count’s political clout. That Olivares found nothing to complain about in being depicted as a powerful operator seems evident by the number of portraits that showed his hulking figure. He perhaps understood that in Velázquez he had a potent weapon in public relations. The portrait, for instance, of 1624 (now in São Paulo, Brazil) was commissioned by the wealthy wife of an influential lawyer; she wanted a portrait of her husband, one of the king, and one of the count. Olivares’s shape fills the canvas, his head high up in the frame and relatively small compared with the bull-like body, shoulders exaggerated by padding, a heavy gold chain draped across a chest whose black satin smock is emblazoned with the insignia of the knightly Order of Calatrava, a huge key—the key to the kingdom, one feels—tucked into his belt in one painting, showing that he was sumiller de corps, chief man of the household, and in another work a pair of golden spurs that symbolized his position as caballerizo mayor, the king’s master of the horse. Holding more than one royal office was not intended to be the rule and that Olivares managed this showed how high he was above the law. As groom of the chamber he was the last to leave the king’s bedroom at night and the first to come into it in the morning, pulling back the curtains. He got up at five to start the day’s business. In the 1624 portrait Olivares stands with one hand on a red-velvet draped tabletop, the other hand grasping the hilt of his sword, beneath him a dark pool of his own shadow. “I am the enforcer,” he seems to say.
Velázquez was gradually absorbed into the life of the court. It was a mysterious organization, another gilded cage to enclose him or a giant sponge that sucked him in. If he hadn’t had his painting to worry about it might have driven him crazy. He met with some resentment at first from other court artists who were his stablemates. The Sevillian newcomer’s talent immediately won him envy-provoking favors. One of his first paintings after his appointment was a life-size portrait of the king on horseback. It was hung up outside the church of San Felipe in the Calle Mayor, where fashionable crowds came to admire it, and was later displayed in the Hall of Mirrors of the Alcázar opposite an equestrian portrait of Charles V by Titian, a spot of great honor. The king soon let it be known that from now on only Velázquez should portray him, in the same way that, as it says in Don Quixote, “Alexander forbad all Painters to draw his Picture, except Apelles.”
This of course fanned the flames of dissent. Critical voices complained that Velázquez wasn’t as good as all that, or that he had limitations: He was only good at painting heads. The established court painter Vincente Carducho, a Tuscan, was thought to have made that jibe, since he was known to believe that heads were easiest to paint because you had a human likeness in front of you to work from. Velázquez may have acknowledged some truth in this, but responded that his critics were in advance of him, since he knew no one (himself included) who could paint a good head. He apparently went on working on the picture of Philip on horseback, erasing much of it, dissatisfied with the horse. To alleviate the bitter atmosphere, Philip decided to hold a painting competition. Whatever his weaknesses, the king loved art: He himself painted now and then, composed music, and wrote poetry. He attempted to build a scholarly library and often spent two hours after lunch every day in serious reading. He learned Catalán, Portuguese, French, and Italian. The subject for the competition was—rather daringly—the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609, the punitive act that some Spaniards had thought counterproductive but which signaled for most the leading role the Spanish Hapsburgs had taken in defense of the True Faith, and the final stage in Spain’s ridding itself of its Muslim invaders. Three other court painters entered the lists with Velázquez, all Italians by birth: Carducho, Eugenio Caxesi, and Angelo Nardi. All were “history painters” in their old-fashioned mannerist ways.
We don’t actually know how much of a contest it was, but we do know that Velázquez’s painting won. As we’ve noted, when ten years old he may well have seen masses of enforced emigrants being funneled toward the wharves in Seville for transport to North Africa. His prize-winning painting was apparently hung for a while in the palace’s Salon Nuevo and later, according to Palomino, in the Salon Grande, where it was described as showing Philip III in armor in the center, pointing his baton at the weeping Moors. They were being led on to ships along the shore, while an allegorical figure of Hispania in Roman costume—“a majestic matron”—held up a shield and arrows, and more pacifically ears of corn. At the bottom of this picture the artist painted the representation of a parchment on which was written: “Diego Velázquez of Seville, Painter to Philip IV, King of Spain, by whose command he made this in the year 1627.” The atrocity at that time was considered to be Philip III’s victory for Catholic Spain and was used as propaganda to bolster the Hapsburg dynasty. Velázquez’s Expulsion disappeared after the fire that did great damage to the Alcázar in 1734; we also have no way of knowing whether, although Palomino’s description made it sound stagey, it was any more or less so than its competitors. At the time, to crown his artistic success, Velázquez was given a boost to his court career, being appointed a gentleman usher to the king. This post not only gave him an additional salary but meant that he was now a fully fledged member of the household and not just a minor official in the royal department of Works.
We don’t hear very much of some fellow citizens of Seville who came with him to court: his brothers Juan and Silvestre, for example, although we know that Silvestre, who had been living with Diego and Juana and was not quite eighteen, died in Madrid in mid-May 1624. There is little further mention of Velázquez’s assistant Diego de Melgar and any other studio helpers Velázquez must have had; Melgar continued his apprenticeship with Francisco López Caro. Later on we become aware of the fact that one of Velázquez’s assistants was a slave, a young man possibly a bit younger than himself named Juan de Pareja. Pareja came from Antequera on the road from Seville to Málaga and was apparently of mixed Morisco or Arab descent. He seems to have been one of Velázquez’s studio assistants from sometime in the 1630s. A large nonfree underclass dwelled in many Spanish cities; Seville’s slaves worked as domestic servants, like the kitchen girl in Velázquez’s bodegones, as assistants in artisan workshops, and as laborers, fetching and carrying in small factories and markets. They often learned the trades of their masters, in the way that Juan de Pareja picked up the practice of painting from Velázquez. Some slaves were inherited, like furniture. Velázquez’s maternal grandfather, Juan Velázquez Moreno (ca. 1545–99), a breeches maker and moneylender, owned a slave who was thirty years old in 1588 and who ran away. Kevin Ingram tells us that he was recaptured on the road to Granada. Identification was made easier because he had been branded on his cheeks with the letters Ju and Ve. Nevertheless, being a domestic servant was better than being a slave captured by the Berbers, as Cervantes was, or an oarsman chained to a bench like those prisoners who could be seen in many of the galleys docked in the Guadalquivir in Seville.
In Madrid Velázquez soaked up the pleasure of being in a privileged spot, and perhaps enjoyed, too, the sense that no one ever seemed absolutely sure of what was going on. The world spun around, but who knew which way? It was a world of questions but was anyone directing them at those who could answer them? In the court good news of course spread quickly. In 1623 Don Fernando Giron, one of Philip’s counsellors, had declared that war in the Netherlands was causing the total ruin of the monarchy. The Council of State in Madrid believed it was the moment for defensive rather than offe
nsive operations against the Dutch, possibly taking heed of the military maxim of the time that “One good towne well defended sufficeth to ruyn a mightie army.” But now in 1625 the clouds momentarily lifted. There were smiles all around and applause as word wafted through the Alcázar that things for a change were going well in the Low Countries; the Army of Flanders was heading for Brabant; this could be the start of the recapture of all the rebel provinces and the collapse of the heretic cause. A victory would herald a new golden age for Spain. The Dutch would be under dire pressure once again. Think of all the money that would be saved! Let’s not think about possible defeat. In any event, Spinola shook off the quagmire mud and first directed his forces toward the town of Grave. This was a feint. The archduchess Isabella, sole governor of the Netherlands since Albert’s death in 1621, had approved an action against a town in Brabant. However, when Breda—“the right eye of Holland” as the prolific court newsletter writer Andres de Mendoza put it—was proposed for the purpose, she and her council thought it might be too hard a nut to crack; it was well fortified; it had been held by the Dutch since the peat-boat assault in 1590 and in recent years had been judged the best-manned garrison in the Dutch defensive ring. But it was at Breda that, taking the offensive, Spinola took aim.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 7
