Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda

by Anthony Bailey

  On board, in Spinola’s company, Velázquez got to see the renowned general at close hand. Spinola’s great success in 1625 at Breda may have been talked about. But probably little was said about the great reverse to Spanish interests that occurred in 1628, when the Dutch supremacy of the seas was reestablished in Matanzas Bay, Cuba. Dutch schoolchildren still sing of their hero Piet Heijn (1578–1629):

  Piet Heijn, Piet Heijn, zijn naam is klein,

  Zijn daden benne groot,

  Zijn daden benne groot,

  Hij heeft gewonnen de zilver vloot.

  Piet’s father was a North Sea herring fisherman and Piet went to sea young, was captured by the Spaniards, and as a prisoner rowed in their galleys for four years. Freed in an exchange of captives, Heijn by 1628 was in command of a Dutch West Indies squadron that came across some ships from a scattered Spanish bullion convoy off the coast of Cuba. Four naval galleons and eleven trading ships were carrying the king’s share of the biannual haul of silver. They headed for the shelter of Matanzas Bay, but their commander Juan de Benavides acted indecisively and his ships fell prey to the Dutch before the Spaniards could land and hide the treasure. The Spanish loss was estimated at four million ducats, or eleven million guilders. The West Indies Company declared a bumper dividend of 75 percent. Piet Heijn sailed home and bought a big house in Delft to retire in. But as Spinola was to find out, successful commanders are rarely allowed to rest on their laurels. Piet Heijn led the Dutch fleet again against the piratical Dunkirkers; he beat them but died in the battle.

  The effect of Matanzas Bay was to throttle for the time being Spain’s military efforts in the Low Countries. Madrid sent no funding between October 1628 and May 1629 for a new military campaign there. Philip and Olivares moved their troops to northern Italy to cope with the French, and any spare cash went that way, too. The very size of the Spanish empire caused problems. Cardinal Richelieu was one who thought the chief obstacles to Spain achieving universal dominance were the distance between its many dominions and lack of men on the right spot. The manpower shortage was enhanced by failures to meet the need for rations and pay. Sickness was also a factor. In 1629–31 a plague in Lombardy nicknamed the peste di Milano, thought to be one of the last outbreaks of bubonic plague in Europe, carried off a quarter of a million people and hundreds of possible recruits for the Army of Flanders. Many enlisted only to desert when provisions were short and their pay failed to turn up. Military commentators frequently quoted Thucydides: “War is waged not so much with arms as with money, which provides the sinews of war.” The Marquis of Aytona, Spain’s ambassador in Brussels, reported that the war against the Dutch rebels had been reduced to a form of commerce. “Whoever has the last escudo will win.”

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  VELÁZQUEZ MAY HAVE been attracted to Spinola—driven to sketch him, even, or at least after this voyage to keep the look of him in his memory—because they were of similar temperament. They were both serious and undemonstrative. Both were known for their modestia. On the last day of their eastbound voyage the ships of their fleet steered for the 1,300-foot high peak known as the Bric del Gazo and then for the harbor of Genoa, which sheltered under it. From the sea, the town had the look of a dazzling amphitheater. How long they stayed in Spinola’s hometown—Columbus’s birthplace—isn’t known, but Genoese hospitality would have ensured the artist an intimate view of the local palaces. Spinola’s family was one of the oldest in the city, his father the Marquis de Sesto y Benafro, his mother the princess of Salerno. Genoa’s ruling class, the nobili vecchi, had close ties with Spain, lent large sums to the monarchy, and in return got Spanish help against local opponents and rebels supported by the French. At this time Genoa’s independence was being threatened by the Duke of Savoy. There were family rivalries, which, like those between the Montagues and Capulets in Verona, made for vendettas. The English diarist John Evelyn was here fifteen years later and noted how, as with “our neighbours the Hollanders,” lack of ground had forced the rich merchants of Genoa to employ their money not on large estates but on pictures, hangings, ornate houses, and rich furniture. In the Strada Nova, built of polished marble, Evelyn saw the magnificent mansion of Don Carlos Doria and the gardens of the Spinola house, with huge lemons hanging on the trees. In much of the city, however, the ways were narrow, tight lanes and twisting alleyways, bringing to mind Seville; carriages couldn’t negotiate them, only sedan chairs and litters. Evelyn said the place made one think of horrid acts of revenge and murder; he was told it was a “galley-matter” to carry a knife that hadn’t had its point broken off.

  The martial life had come easily to Spinola. His younger brother Federico (born 1571) had gone to sea as a youth, chasing corsairs, but led the way into soldiering, enlisting in Italy, serving in Flanders, and, at the age of thirty-three, meeting a hero’s death on the island of Walcheren, blown to bits by Dutch cannon fire. By then his older brother Ambrogio was also serving in the king’s army. Ambrogio recruited six thousand Lombards for the king of Spain and soon rose to high rank in Flanders. Banker, magistrate, and eventually captain-general, he was a modern condottiere. (The contemporaneous development of banking and artillery has been noted. David Jones, poet and artist, wrote after World War I that “Explosions are grand things, but they cost money, and the bigger they are, the more they cost.”) Parting with Velázquez now, and carrying one and a half million ducats to help in the campaign to secure the Mantuan succession from the French, Spinola went on to Milan to relieve Don Gonzalo de Córdoba, whose siege of Casale had been faltering. (Casale was on the river Po, which passed through the Mantuan lands of Montferrat, and was a place held by the Duke of Nevers with French and German troops.) Although Spinola’s daughter Polissena had married into the highest circles in Madrid, marrying Olivares’s cousin and closest aide, the Marquis of Leganés, in the queen’s apartments in the royal palace, the captain-general didn’t see eye to eye with Olivares about how to sort out Hapsburg problems in the Low Countries and Italy. Spinola thought he was still needed in Flanders, where his replacement, Count Henry van den Bergh, had gone off the rails and Frederick Henry and the Dutch were gaining ground. Yet here Spinola found himself on the way to Lombardy to sort out Mantua, and was—Olivares soon thought—not putting his back into it. Spinola probably didn’t know that Mantua had been infected with plague by French and German troops until he noticed corpses lying unburied along the roadsides; and he was heading into one of the hot spots of what became known as the peste di Milano. He would be fully stretched between his duties as the new governor of Milan, asked for help by the anxious citizenry, and as a field-marshal attempting to win a local war.

  In northern Italy at least a million people died from this plague. Its lethal effects are well conveyed in chapter 31 of Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed of 1827.

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  VELÁZQUEZ, HAVING RECOVERED his land legs, journeyed across northern Italy to Venice. Comparisons were forced upon him by nearly everything: people, landscape, townscape. With fortunate timing, he seems to have arrived in Venice before the plague swept east from Lombardy. Undoubtedly there was in normal times something lighter in the Italian atmosphere and perhaps something more serene than in the Spanish air; things were less serious here, though life could be just as desperate on occasion. He was abroad for the first time and, adding to the elation, was often given entry to places where no ordinary man had access. The king of Spain’s painter! Philip IV wanted him to learn about the latest trends in Italian art and bring back ideas for expanding the royal collection. Pacheco, briefed later on, tells us who received the artist and where he stayed. His first important stop was in Venice, rival to Genoa, where the Spanish ambassador put him up and gave him a guard to protect him when sightseeing. John Evelyn—there not long after—suggested that the evenings in Venice were particularly dangerous, “when the students go to their strumpets.” He also noted that the city was “miraculously placed” and that the ladies, dressed as if always in masquerade, were
much to be fancied. Venetians were pro-French and Spaniards weren’t popular, but despite this, Palomino says, Velázquez unsurprisingly came to love the city. He drew a great deal while visiting its marvels: the palace and church of Saint Mark, the Sala de Gran Consiglio, and the Academy. He spent hours with the Titians, the Veroneses, the Tintorettos. He particularly took to the latter’s Crucifixion and made a copy of another Tintoretto that showed Christ’s last supper with his disciples.

  From Venice he traveled southward. Not everyone was welcoming despite his letters of introduction. The Duchess of Parma had been warned by her ambassador in an encrypted letter that Velázquez was coming and that he was probably a spy. However, he spent two nights in Ferrara where Cardinal Guilio Sacchetti asked him to stay at his palace and dine with him. Velázquez thanked him but demurred about dinner invitations. The cardinal had been papal nuncio in Madrid, was used to Spanish ways (presumably to very late dinners), and got one of his staff, a Spaniard, to look after Velázquez and his servant and serve them when they wanted “with the same dishes as were prepared for his own table.” The cardinal knew a good deal about painting and with his brother Marcello had helped persuade Pietro da Cortona to copy Raphael and Titian, learning how to fuse Raphael’s design talent with Titian’s color sense. Sacchetti took Velázquez seriously, sending one of his staff to guide him around Ferrara’s sights and spending three hours in conversation with him before he left. Horses were provided for the travelers to journey onward next to Cento (Guercino’s town), Loreto, and Bologna—and then to Rome.

  Velázquez stayed a year in the eternal city. We have little documentation to go on, no letters to the king or his father-in-law; we have no idea how husband-and-wife relations were affected by his absence. But el pintor real’s influential connections were ever helpful. He was admitted to the papal presence and kissed Urban VIII’s toe. We know that a “don Diego pintor” rented a room in Casa Mannara in Rome, agreed for sixteen months, but thanks to the pope’s nephew cardinal Francesco Barberini was given an apartment in the Vatican. He had his own keys to rooms where pictures and sculptures were displayed, and he spent a good deal of time making sketches of Raphael’s frescoes and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment—though no sketchbook has survived. Then, feeling lonely and isolated in his palatial quarters, and not looking forward to the heat of Rome in summer, he asked one of his best contacts, the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See, the Count of Monterrey, to find him a new place to live. Monterrey—Manuel de Fonseca y Zúñiga—was Olivares’s brother-in-law twice over, that is, they had married each other’s sisters. Monterrey seems to have been involved in a roundabout request to Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Tuscany that Velázquez be allowed to move into the duke’s property at the Villa Medici, though the permission came in May from Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici. Another guest in the villa at the same time was the scientist Galileo Galilei, said to be an excellent conversationalist, though no record of any conversasione with Velázquez is preserved.

  The advantages of the Villa Medici lay in its position and the antique statuary planted in its grounds. Palomino says the villa was in the “highest and most airy part of Rome” and Velázquez clearly found that the place raised his spirits. At about this time in Rome the artists Claude Lorrain and Joachim Sandrart were among those establishing a new mode, painting out of doors, and Velázquez—from something in the air, perhaps—did the same in the enchanting gardens of the Villa Medici. Here he painted two small pictures, more sketches than elaborated paintings, thinly painted observations a little over a foot square, the surfaces of the canvases visible as canvas, on which he caught the dim gray-green light that suffused the place. The colors were muted. The seemingly spontaneous, impromptu handling (which was in his preserved works something new) is marvelous. Both pictures were painted in the open air, both out-of-doors scenes showing the tumble-down buildings in the gardens of the villa. “The sketchiness is the style”—so the art historian Enriqueta Harris neatly puts it. In one of the paintings two male figures are seen meeting in front of a pillared pavilion, within which we can make out another man looking at a recumbent statue, a figure of Cleopatra with one arm thrown back over her head. In the other picture, two men in broad-brimmed hats are talking below the balustraded facade of the villa’s grotto-loggia, whose entrance archway has been boarded up in a patchwork way; proper repairs and restorations are apparently going to happen one of these days. To the right a pale statue stands in front of its own shadow in a niche. Above the balustrade, a woman is hanging some white sheets out to dry. A line of cypresses fills the sky. The gardens, Henry James suggested two centuries later, are fabled, even haunted. A brief moment has been caught by Velázquez—the moment in which a crease in the sheet is pulled flat by the woman handling the laundry, and one man says something while the other listens. Neither painting is at all old-masterish. We sense a modern moment, or maybe an eternal moment brilliantly seized.

  When the English diarist John Evelyn was there fourteen years after Velázquez he admired the villa’s position “upon the brow of Mons Pincius” with “an incomparable prospect towards the Campo Marzo,” its gardens with two huge marble lions, rare bas-reliefs, a goodly fountain that threw water fifty feet high, an obelisk with hieroglyphics, and statues of infinite price. Evelyn and Velázquez were four hundred years closer than we to classical times, and perhaps felt the proximity to that age more than we. Here what Walter Pater called the pagan world was tangible and vibrant in the bright Italian light. The statuary included the Sabines, and Niobe and her large family as big as life, in the way Pliny had described them, and (says Evelyn) “esteemed amongst the best pieces of work in the world, for the passions they expresse, & all other perfections of that stupendous art.” Velázquez, at home among these antiques, responded in a low-key way, with his own two modest masterpieces. As far as we know, he never again painted outdoor scenes quite like these.

  On the Mons Pincius Velázquez hoped to avoid not only Rome’s summer heat but its malarial problems. The hope was in vain. After two months in the Villa Medici he came down with a “tertian fever.” Once again the Count and Countess of Monterrey came to his aid. The victim was nursed by the countess, while the count ensured that Velázquez had everything he needed. Food was carried up daily from the count’s house. Doctors and medicines were sent at the count’s expense. “Sweetmeats and frequent messages” accompanied them until the artist recovered.

  Perhaps this episode increased a sense of urgency. What if the fever had proved fatal; what if he hadn’t been spared? What paintings would he have failed to paint? He got on with a portrait of the countess, Olivares’s sister (a picture that has since disappeared). But his time in the Vatican with the Sistine ceiling gave him new ideas about conveying the human body and how to express emotions via anatomy. More than just the face was involved in this; physical animation and gesture were needed. Jusepe Martínez, a painter friend who later featured in Palomino’s book El Museo Pictorico, declared that Velázquez’s skills in perspective and composition were “much improved by his study in Rome of ancient and modern paintings, statues, and reliefs.” He was thirty, a bit old for first impressions fired by careless rapture, but Rome made its own unforgettable impact on him. Dramatic action, caught at a moment that could be pictured, was involved in the two major paintings he made on this Italian stay. Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan and Joseph’s Blood-stained Coat Brought to Jacob were both painted in 1630, apparently uncommisioned; in both the underlying theme was betrayal.

  In the Apollo a young god appears, his laurel-crowned head surrounded by radiance, announcing to the amazed and rather scrawny blacksmith Vulcan, who is backed by four muscular helpers, the shocking news that the smith’s wife, Venus, has been carrying on with Mars. (It is Ovid’s story.) In the second painting, Joseph’s bloody coat is being shown to a horror-stricken, bearded old man, who is making aghast gestures, while a small liver-and-white spaniel barks at the five new arrivals. Two of these men are evidently Joseph’s brothers
, and several look like those who modeled for Vulcan’s helpers at the forge. The two brothers are lightly sketched in, their unfinishedness contrasting with the clearly over-the-top behavior of the pair who clutch the coat that has been stained by the blood of a lamb, while their colleague, torso bared, stands with his back to the viewer, stretching his arms and shoulders in a rather too manifest demonstration of agonizing grief. The elderly, mullah-bearded Jacob is—we realize—trying to take on board the story he has been told that Joseph has been torn to pieces by wild animals. In The Forge of Vulcan, the later of the two paintings, Velázquez also did something new with his canvas that involved a more fundamental lightness: He began to use a lighter ground, of gray rather than brown, and kept up this method of preparation thereafter. In both these pictures Velázquez was apparently working in a narrative manner common to artists in Rome at this period, and it’s possible that he may have been throwing down a gauntlet—or a paint-loaded palette—to his purported rivals in Madrid; those who claimed that he could only paint heads. With Michelangelo’s example close at hand, and remembering Montañés, he was showing that he could also paint muscles, ligaments, and skin under tension. The figures in both the Forge and Joseph’s Coat with their outstretched arms, bent elbows, turned heads, and feet whose toes are just touching the ground are figures almost in motion. A likeness to Juana Pacheco has also been seen in the spotlit head of the young Apollo. Was Velázquez missing her, or was there here a hint that provokes the question: Why now this theme of betrayal? There might also be a link with what a Spanish painter would consider the disloyal attitude of some Italian states to the Spanish crown.