Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda

by Anthony Bailey

  As high moments go it was splendid; but the moment of glory soon passed. In 1627, less than two years later, the Spanish government again declared bankruptcy; fortunately the bankers of Portugal picked up the baton of debt from the Genoese, and funds aplenty managed to reach the Army of Flanders. That year the king was seriously ill, and when he recovered it was whispered that he had promised to turn over a new leaf. For a while he spent less time hunting and perhaps fewer nights on the town.

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  IN 1628 THE big event in Velázquez’s artistic life was the eight-month-long visit to Madrid of the painter Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens was a star. Both artist and ambassador, he was fifty-one at this time. His father had been a Calvinist supporter of the Reformation who had fled his hometown of Antwerp on the approach of the Duke of Alba’s Spanish army and had become the lover of William of Orange’s wife. Young Rubens was brought up at any rate as a proper subject of the Spanish empire, was taught by the Jesuits, and mastered seven languages. He studied painting with Adam van Noort in the Netherlands before joining the household of the Duke of Mantua. On his first trip to Madrid twenty-five years before, in 1603, Rubens had failed to be excited by the local art scene. He had deplored “the miserable insufficiency and want of care” of Spanish artists. When he looked at contemporary Spanish paintings, he thought “there is not a single one of them worth having.” In 1609 he had been named painter to the “archdukes,” Albert and Isabella, who had jointly ruled in Brussels on behalf of the king, and on this present trip he came as emissary for the latter, Philip IV’s aunt, the surviving governor of the Spanish Netherlands. His mission was to help arrange a peace treaty between Spain and England, and so he had frequent meetings with the king and Olivares. Before Rubens got to Madrid, Olivares had written to him sympathizing with him for the loss of his companion, Isabella Brant, a grief he understood all the more because of his own losses—his nephew cardinal Guzmán, who had recently died at the age of twenty-two, followed a few days later by Olivares’s only daughter, “carried off in consequence of a bad labor.”

  Rubens arrived with a cargo of art: eight paintings of his own for Philip IV to consider and a pile of tapestries he had designed for a convent with royal connections. While in Spain he painted a series of portraits for the crown, treading on the toes of the court painters, Velázquez included, though the younger artist took no visible umbrage. Philip had charged Velázquez with looking after Rubens, entertaining him, and showing him the Hapsburg collections in the Escorial and Alcázar. Pacheco said loyally that “Rubens ignored the other court painters and kept only the company of Velázquez.” Pacheco’s son-in-law had to put up with the fact that his modified portrait of the king on horseback was taken down from its place in the Salon Nuevo and a portrait, also equestrian, which Rubens had just done of Philip was hung in its place. (So much for Philip’s promise to have only Velázquez as court painter.) But Velázquez saw much to admire in Rubens. The Fleming had now been knighted in several countries. As an artist and courtier he showed Velázquez a way ahead that could with luck be emulated. There was no disguising the role hard work played in Rubens’s success. He sat down like a student and copied all the Titians in the royal collection. In nine months in Madrid he painted at least thirty pictures, many quite large. In one letter from Madrid he wrote that he “kept to painting, as I do everywhere.” The king delighted in watching him paint, coming to visit him nearly every day in the rooms he had been given in the palace. Rubens felt sympathy for the young monarch, who seemed to him to have been “endowed by nature with all the gifts of body and spirit.… He would surely be capable of governing under any conditions, were it not that he mistrusts himself and defers too much to others. But now he has to pay for his own credulity and others’ folly, and feel the hatred that is not meant for him. Thus have the gods willed it.” The fatalism was perhaps a by-product of life in the Hapsburg court. But it was noteworthy, too, that the great Baroque painter invoked “the gods,” the pre-Christian deities, rather than any from New Testament or even Catholic times.

  Being close to Rubens might have aroused jealousy in Velázquez but seems rather to have provoked sympathy and admiration. He passed on to his father-in-law the information that Rubens had gout. That Rubens returned Velázquez’s high opinion of him was noted by Fuensalida, the keeper of the royal records, and Pacheco learned that Rubens “greatly favoured Velázquez’s paintings because of their modestia,” their simplicity; they certainly weren’t as attention-seeking as Rubens’s pictures. Rubens, albeit a Hapsburg insider and a Catholic, was not a warmonger. He had painted a series entitled The Horrors of War. He seemed to have felt that the continued truce in the Low Countries was good for everybody; it would not only mean less blood spilled and money wasted, it would create better conditions for the Counter-Reformation to flourish. Antwerp would become prosperous again. The two painters discussed the state of art and the way ahead, and Velázquez apparently asked Rubens what he should do next. Rubens had permission from the archduchess Isabella to visit Italy in company with Philip IV’s sister, the queen of Hungary, but her departure was delayed and Rubens went off at the end of April 1629 to the London peace talks and then back to Brussels. The message Rubens left with Velázquez was “Think Italy.”

  Although Velázquez was clearly affected by Rubens’s feelings about his great predecessors and Rubens’s strong sense of his own artistic personality, the impact that Rubens had on Velázquez’s style is another question. The manner of Titian and Caravaggio certainly had marked him, though as noted it isn’t certain that he had seen any of Caravaggio’s work in the flesh at this point. Although some have recognized “a new era,” “fresh glowing tones,” and a “new freedom of execution” in Velázquez’s work, dating from the Rubens visit, as the late-nineteenth-century German art historian Carl Justi asked, did Velázquez need to learn his finest qualities from anyone other than himself? “Was it necessary to bring a man from the foggy Netherlands to show him the light in the torrid land of Spain?” On the other hand, the two painters shared a studio and saw each other daily with palettes and brushes in hand. Something may well have rubbed off. With Rubens Velázquez walked through the Alcázar and the Escorial palaces and stood before the Titians and other masterpieces, discussing them. Later, paintings copied from Rubens’s pictures were hung in Velázquez’s Alcázar studio, and Velázquez made no secret of this, as his painting Las Meninas was to show. Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi, a 1609 painting that he reworked while in Madrid in 1628–29, contained a self-portrait of the artist as a gentleman with a sword, standing in the throng of figures around the mother and child; it provided a precedent for Velázquez when he came to paint Las Meninas. Moreover, with the help of his son-in-law Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, around 1645 Velázquez painted a copy of Rubens’s Equestrian Portrait of Philip IV, florid, over-the-top, with bare-breasted heavenly creatures floating in the sky above the royal head. Seeing this example of Catholic-Baroque art at its most flamboyant, the Spaniard may well have thought that there was a less strident way of making this point, a way that might be even more eloquent. The word baroque is derived from barocco, meaning an encrusted pearl. Velázquez was a Baroque artist only in point of time.

  At age twenty-nine or so, he nevertheless seems to have been pushed into fields other than court portraiture by Rubens’s obvious success with mythological and liturgical subject matter. One of two pictures of this period in which scholars detect a “Rubens-effect” is Christ after the Flagellation Contemplated by the Christian Soul and it makes uneasy viewing for the modern museumgoer. It has the feeling of being a commissioned work, whose specifications were contractually laid out. The very title suggests the overload of religious sentiment with which the picture is infused. Although the figure of the flogged Christ is treated with restraint, a man still alert and without buckets of blood oozing from his wounds, Seville’s sometimes sadomasochistic devotional observances seem to be reappearing. The guardian angel—the Christian Soul—could
be visiting from one of Velázquez’s kitchen scenes. In fact, mythology makes a more comfortable bedfellow at this point. Titian and various Venetian scenes of bacchanalia provided antecedents for Los Borrachos, or Bacchus and His Companions, but this picture, Velázquez’s first “history painting” since The Expulsion of the Moriscos, may well have been painted while Rubens was in town and may have been inspired by his presence. The light tones favored by the Fleming may also have directed Velázquez this way, albeit he was working with simpler, less lavish means than Rubens. The event takes place in a rural spot, though lit rather theatrically from one side; the revelers are for the most part common country folk. Velázquez puts the adolescent Bacchus in the center of the action, a plump young master of ceremonies perched on a wine barrel under a tree. Bacchus is crowned with a wreath of vine leaves and with a sly grin is bestowing another wreath on the head of a soldier kneeling before him, one of the crowd of drinkers in the right half of the picture. No one, not even the young god, looks anything other than human. The satisfied, inebriated air of several of the drinkers helps create an atmosphere of mockery. A vine-wreathed bagpiper makes his music in the shadowed left foreground, the gloom of the spot intensifying the soft radiance in which the god is bathed. Bacchus, now in human form, has apparently been called on by the peasants to help them drown their sorrows, but his youthful flesh is palpable, his sense of fun as he participates in the coronation proceedings is conveyed. The pleasure passes from his companions to the viewer—particularly by way of the hat-wearing drinker who bares his teeth beneath a mustache, face creased in an encouraging smile directed at the artist who had presumably just told the model to look happy, and now at us, the viewers. One feels that at any minute the whole crew will start talking mischief, maybe even talking dirty.

  The Drinkers: Bacchus and His Companions, c. 1629, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

  This is Velázquez’s only “merry company” to set alongside the carousing of Steen and Teniers. It has been conjectured that the Spaniard may have read how Leonardo da Vinci now and then got some peasants together and, while they were in their cups guffawing, sketched them—Velázquez himself at Pacheco’s had done something similar, paying the country youth to model various facial expressions. There’s an element of parody in the performance. Velázquez seems to be making fun of a mythological event; the divine is made comic. But there is nothing academic or labored here. The balance is just right: the company leaning forward toward the viewer; the bare-chested accomplice of the young god reclining to the left; and the bearded old man crouching respectfully, like a magus before the holy infant—he has something of the proud independence of the Corsican water seller. Even in this one-off one-of-a-kind painting Velázquez seems keen to connect with his own recent past.

  The picture may also be a sardonic commentary on straitened times. The court cost roughly a million escudos a year. Getting paid was often tricky for royal servants, the royal guards, and household officials. Courtiers were even asked to dip into their own pockets to help out; in 1625 Velázquez pledged a “generous” one hundred ducats toward a national call for defense funds that the Olivares regime was asking for, and he and Juana paid off this gift to the state in installments of ten ducats a month. The word arrears came up often at court and complaints were vocal. A year or so after having been sworn in as a new gentleman usher on March 7, 1627, Velázquez was given a raise by the king and allowed other perquisites, including daily attendance by the palace barber, worth twelve reales a day, and a new suit of clothes every year worth ninety ducats; but we don’t know what he had to go through to get his wages. (He was never a cheap painter. His first Madrid portrait of a lady, the marquesa of Montesclaro, cost the marques 900 reales.) As an usher, Velázquez was one of a dozen or so functionaries who took turns to attend to the royal antechamber at mealtimes, opening and closing doors only to permitted staff and royalty. Velázquez’s daily allowance for this was twelve reales. He may have been specially fortunate in terms of actually getting paid, for the Tuscan envoy Baglioni wrote of continued hard times at the Spanish court in November 1630: “The King pays nobody. The bankers of Genoa are owed everything.” However, Velázquez from the start of his court career was shown exceptional favor by the king, who evidently worked out various ways to get money to his painter, not just as painter to the King’s Chamber, with allowances payable by the royal household, but as a servant of the Board of Works and Forests. The art historian José Manuel Cruz Valdovinos has shown that Velázquez—recognized early on by the king for his dedication and craftsmanship—“got two offices and several grants of payment in a continuous and almost annual way.” On August 26, 1625, Velázquez was also awarded the use of a guesthouse—property given him with surprising speed, after the king royally struck out bureaucratic objections to the award. A church pension of three hundred ducats, requiring a papal dispensation, followed.

  Four hundred silver ducats was the sum given to Velázquez in July 1629, Pacheco tells us, for a journey Velázquez wanted to make, and for which Philip IV gave permission, along with an advance to the painter of two years’ salary. The generous king also let Velázquez keep all his perks, his rental house, his court allowances, while he was away. The 1629 sum included three hundred on account and one hundred for the Bacchus, and the journey represented the happy culmination of Velázquez’s desire, abetted by Rubens, to see Italy and look at Italian paintings in Italian light on Italian ground. The count-duke, as Olivares was now called, gave his fellow Sevillian a further going-away present of two hundred gold ducats, a medal showing the king’s head, and letters of introduction to important personages in Spain’s possessions in Italy. Here was a chance for Velázquez to show how he could make out as an artist-ambassador in the Rubens manner. In the course of preparations for the journey, Velázquez was brought together with a man who would be going along to Italy as well. This was Captain-General Ambrogio Spinola, now a marqués, a title that may have made up somewhat for the loss of family funds he had put into keeping the Army of Flanders afloat. Spinola had helped persuade Philip IV to summon Rubens to his court and send him on to England as an ambassador to promote peace. We can assume that Spinola was sympathetic to Rubens’s expressed opinion that the Spaniards who supported war—as a way of securing the triumph of the True Faith—were “the scourges of God.” But Spinola had been in Madrid on an equally difficult effort, attempting to convince the Olivares regime that it was time to try again a less aggressive policy in the Low Countries: a new long truce or a negotiated, lasting peace. For Olivares, however, a truce was only a holding measure; the peace with England seemed for him to mean mostly a better chance of success when it came to whacking the Dutch again.

  V. THE WAY TO ITALY. 1629

  The small fleet left Barcelona and sailed eastward on the feast day of Saint Lawrence, August 10, 1629. Going by sea had risks even in summer. When an aide to Infante Antonio, Lord High Admiral of Spain, later suggested they use a boat to cross the pond in the Retiro gardens of Madrid, the admiral-infante declined, saying, “Since I sailed from Naples to Spain, I have never ventured on water.” There were nine galleys in the 1629 convoy and although no log of the voyage records their exact route, they presumably steered a cautious one, close to the shore but allowing for the southwesterly set of the currents that prevailed along the rugged Spanish coast. Sheltering ports were few. Sight of the snowcapped Pyrenees on the port beam meant France was near, but by no means at this time a place for Spanish ships to seek protection. Moorish pirates had to be considered. Ahead lay the broad Gulf of Lion, across which they hastened hoping to be spared the attentions of either a mistral, funneling out of the mountains, or a levanter, on the nose from the east, which could cast you on the rocks. As far as we know Velázquez had never been to sea before—had never even seen the sea. His home waters were the Guadalquivir, well inland, and more recently the river in Madrid, and that occasionally just about dried up. On board, out on the Mediterranean, the sea of seas, Velázquez had the opportun
ity to take deep breaths of briny air. He must have felt suddenly on the way to somewhere new—with new opportunities—and could cast aside some of the cares of being a courtier (the desengaños de Palacio, as his colleague the playwright Calderón called those concerns).

  Yet he was in exalted company. With Captain-General Spinola were a number of noblemen and grandees, a high rank whose membership had been greatly multiplied since Charles V introduced it in 1520—from twenty-five at the start, there were now at least a hundred. Spinola’s suite included Admiral Don Álvaro de Bazán; the Marquis of Santa Cruz; the third Duke of Lerma; and the abbot Scaglia (agent in Madrid for the Duke of Savoy). Ambrogio Spinola had been charged by the court in Madrid with resolving the problem of Mantua, a duchy whose rule had come up for grabs when the Duke of Mantua died in the last week of 1627. Cardinal Richelieu wanted to thwart Hapsburg power on every occasion and saw Mantua as an opportunity; the duchy was now threatened by French forces in support of their candidate for the vacant dukedom. (Mantua, by the way, was where Rubens had gone in 1600, at age twenty-three, to serve the Gonzaga family and to study and travel.) After Spinola had talked Philip IV into bringing Rubens to Spain and then sending him on to England to make peace, the Genoese general had clearly wanted to go on trying to sort out the situation in the Low Countries. He had been reluctant to take on the new posts of captain-general in Italy and governor of Milan. But Olivares told him that he was the only general in whom the crown had confidence, and he had certainly been granted greater powers than any so far given any Spanish official. Yet he knew from his Netherlands experience how morale and funds fluctuated. As a general, you were only as good as your last victory.