Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda

by Anthony Bailey

  Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan, 1630, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

  Joseph’s Blood-stained Coat Brought to Jacob, 1629–30, El Escorial.

  In any event, Velázquez seems to have been measuring himself against past masters and the masters of the time: the antique makers of rediscovered sculptures and reliefs; Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, and Caravaggio; and Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Pietro da Cortona, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, all working in Italy. Velázquez chose to give his classical and biblical pieces an everyday look. But while striving for genre-scene realism and producing lively illustrations of animation and gesture, he doesn’t seem in either the Forge or Joseph’s Coat to have created pictures that have the essential stasis of great art—the sense of a moment caught without grandiloquence once and for all in a way it never would be again.

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  A “SERVANT OF Velázquez” was mentioned when Cardinal Sacchetti asked the painter to stay with him in Ferrara. Only later do we have a name to put to such a helper, but it makes sense to introduce here, nearly twenty years before he stepped into the limelight, again in Rome, the one “servant” of Diego Velázquez who gets into the records. If Juan de Pareja was along on this first journey to Italy, as he may well have been, he would have been about twenty at the time. Pareja, as already described, was a brown-skinned Moor, probably of mixed Arab and Berber blood, who was born about 1610 in the town of Antequera, between Seville and Málaga. In Spanish society, slaves were, as noted, members of the lowest caste and did much of the dirty work, practical and domestic, in trade establishments, workshops, farms, and private houses. As we’ve seen, Velázquez’s grandfather Juan Velázquez Moreno had owned several. The term slave was used specifically by Palomino in the next century to describe Pareja’s status—though one should perhaps blend with the harsh connotations of captivity a particularly Iberian form of household indenture. Slaves were generally treated no better or worse than their supposedly free workmates. In Pareja’s case, the slave became a valued assistant to el pintor real. How Velázquez came to own Pareja isn’t known, maybe as a gift from his father or as an acquisition that attended his marriage to Juana. Juan de Pareja seems to have performed for Velázquez many of the humble jobs an artist needed done, grinding pigments over and over until they made a fine powder that could be mixed with oils, and stretching canvases on their frameworks before laying on the grounds. Pareja took in much from this experience. In Velázquez’s company he saw picture after picture, duds and masterpieces, and learned from Velázquez’s reaction to them. Pareja had the benefit of being in close contact with a master; he was an apprentice by proximity and learned how to paint. (He may also have taken heed from Rubens, whose style seems to have influenced his own paintings, when he came to make them.)

  From Rome Velázquez traveled south to Naples. The Count of Monterrey was about to do the same, taking up the post of Spanish viceroy there. In Naples that autumn Velázquez was paid 154 gold scudi by Monterrey for paintings; one on which he worked was a portrait of the Infanta María, Philip IV’s sister, the woman whom Charles Stuart, when Prince of Wales, had failed to persuade to marry him in 1623. She had since been betrothed to her cousin Ferdinand, the king of Bohemia and Hungary and son of the Holy Roman emperor. The pair were married “by proxy” in Madrid in April 1629 and were now about to make the relationship real. The Tuscan ambassador diplomatically described the Infanta as having “the face of an angel,” even though—like her brother’s—her tastes ran to hunting as well as the theater. Velázquez intended to take the portrait back to Madrid for Philip. The queen-to-be had russet hair, tightly curled, with a latent smile on her lips above the unescapable Hapsburg chin, which rested in a high gray ruffed collar. At some point in his Italian travels Velázquez also painted, according to Pacheco, a self-portrait. His father-in-law said that he, Pacheco, had it in his possession, a painting in “Titian’s manner … worthy of the admiration of connoisseurs and a tribute to art.” The whereabouts of this picture are no longer known and we are forced to speculate whether it showed a man with an intense gaze, long black hair, a long straight nose, and a pronounced W-shaped mustache, all features of portraits associated with Velázquez in the following years.

  Now, in Naples, Velázquez seems to have felt his time in Italy was up. He had been away from Madrid for nearly a year and a half. He took his chances on a Mediterranean voyage in winter and sailed for home. Before embarking he would have learned of the final days of the man who had been his companion on the way to Italy. The marquis Spinola had managed to surround Casale but then had failed to work his military or his diplomatic magic there. His control over the siege was threatened by plague in his army, a request for reinforcements was refused, and then a peace settlement with the French and their Savoy allies was undermined by Olivares during the summer of 1630. The regime in Madrid negotiated with the enemy behind their captain-general’s back. Demoralized, feeling acutely the lack of support, and lack of men and supplies, Spinola became ill in his camp outside Casale. He had spent a fortune and a career helping the Spanish king. His morale collapsed; he felt his reputation and his honor had been taken from him. On September 25, 1630, the victor of Breda died, brokenhearted. Olivares wrote to the Marquis of Aytona in Brussels complaining that Spinola’s death was inopportune, but it was too late for any crocodile tears; while the Duke of Feria was made governor of Milan in Spinola’s place, in fact there were no substitutes for Spinola. Quevedo, the satirist and secretary to the king whose portrait Velázquez had painted around 1632 showing the poet wearing owlish horn-rimmed spectacles, wrote a poem expressing distress about Spinola’s death—which he called a bequest of overwhelming sadness.

  VI. THE GOOD RETREAT. MADRID. 1631–

  It was once again a bad time for Spain but in the capital few seemed aware of it. Brazil fell to the Dutch in 1630; Spain and Austria, the allied Hapsburg powers, were defeated at Breitenfeld in 1631 and at Lutzon in 1632. Yet in Madrid theatrical festivities and masquerade parties went on regardless. Despite the constant drain of cash into the various theaters of war, the Low Countries particularly, Olivares continued to present Philip IV as a hero of the age. A great deal of Castile’s taxes was spent not only on maintaining Spain’s armies abroad but on putting on a good show at home, making it seem as if everything va bien—still a potent political slogan today. The impression had to be given that the Spanish empire was conquering its enemies on all fronts and the forces of Catholicism were triumphing over Protestant heretics. In this, the arts had their parts to play: Playwrights created performances on stage; artists made paintings. In the gilded cage of the court, as the reality of imperial might and royal influence slipped away, some ceremonies became more conspicuous. Pageantry increased as power waned.

  Velázquez was welcomed home from Italy by his unofficial patron, the count-duke Olivares. He was taken down the long corridors of the Alcázar to kiss the king’s hands. Palomino adds unctuously that Velázquez thanked His Majesty for “not having allowed himself to be portrayed by any other painter during his absence”—as if this were the highest favor Philip could bestow on Velázquez. (Rubens was no longer around to muscle in on the territory.) The king commanded that Velázquez be given a studio-workshop in the palace’s Del Ciezo gallery, and that a chair be placed there for the monarch’s private use so that Philip could sit and watch his painter painting. This was, as noted, what Alexander was said to have done with Apelles, and what Philip’s great-grandfather Charles V had done with Titian. Titian had been with difficulty lured from Venice but only twice came as far as Germany; on one occasion Charles V bent over to pick up a brush that Titian had dropped. For many courtiers Philip appeared like a royal automaton, going through the same daily motions of custom, never visibly changing his posture or expression, but Velázquez had the opportunity to stare as hard as he wanted, to note physical details and quirks as intimately as he liked. And along with this constant, personal contact came occasional rewards: extra payments for pictures; honors
such as the office of Gentleman of the Wardrobe that was bestowed on Velázquez in 1636. Whether he got the full benefit in salary isn’t known—most household officials had to worry about their wages actually being paid—but since Philip evidently wanted real work from his royal painter, Velázquez probably got real emoluments.

  Soon after his return from Italy he was asked to paint several royal portraits. In them can be seen some of the effects of his time away. For several modern scholars, it was Italy that helped turn Velázquez from “a gifted but somewhat provincial painter into a brilliant master of the prevailing international style”—as Jonathan Brown puts it—though in fact at the time Velázquez’s friend the painter Jusepe Martínez merely (and rather obliquely) observed that Velázquez came back “very much improved in perspective and architecture.” But his palette was also lighter, his tones brighter than before. The significance of Titian and the Venetians had been grasped. Brown also sees the influence of Pietro da Cortona in color and composition, though admitting that Velázquez’s paintings were less “animated.” Cortona’s were in fact a veritable sea of waving arms and conspicuously contorted bodies; by contrast Velázquez’s were examples of eloquent restraint. His freer and more sumptuous way of dealing with clothes also seemed to have been influenced by Italy.

  He was now thrown back into the court organization, a staff artist from whom—“by royal appointment”—portrait work was demanded. It was a busy period. Among pictures he did at this time were portraits of the king’s younger brother, the cardinal-infante Don Ferdinand in hunting kit (he had been appointed a cardinal at the age of ten and in 1632 went off to Brussels where two years later he took over as governor of Flanders), and of the count-duke, showing off on horseback, almost as though he were king. A much more restrained likeness was of Don Juan Mateos, the king’s master of the hunt. A Sybil shows a woman in profile, intently staring over the top of a wooden panel or tablet, and could be Juana Pacheco, Velázquez’s wife. A Young Woman Sewing is a different person—though possibly the same lady who is elsewhere portrayed with a fan, a rosary, and a mantilla, looking out at the viewer. Sewing, she has her face in half shadow, eyes lowered to her handiwork, and with dark hair and black dress, which gives a feeling of still being painted, almost meant to seem unfinished. When one seeks other artists for comparison the only names that suit are those of Dutch painters, painters of masterpieces, Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer.

  While Velázquez was in Italy, the royal family had had joyful increase. On October 17, 1629, Prince Baltasar Carlos came into the world—a son and heir! The celebrations were ecstatic. The healthy-looking infant would be the only legitimate child of the king to survive childhood. In 1629 Philip fathered two sons, one being Baltasar Carlos, the other being María Calderón’s child, Don Juan, brought up in the castle at Ocana. Nights on the town, creating the likelihood of venereal disease, and years of inbreeding did great damage to the Hapsburg line, but at least Baltasar Carlos’s mother, Isabella of Bourbon, had Navarre, de Valois, and de Medici blood, and there were hopes that the male heir would be healthy, as well as longer-lived than the five siblings who preceded him, all girls, and all dead within roughly eighteen months. (Baltasar Carlos reached seventeen. The surviving child was María Teresa, born in 1638—sadly, another girl.)

  Soon after his return, Velázquez painted the prince, just over two years old. The painting is believed to commemorate an oath of allegiance sworn to the new heir by the Cortes of Castile on March 7, 1632. (The regime took the opportunity to prompt the cortes to approve extra funds for Spain’s wars.) The little infante stands erect, richly robed, a red sash across his chest, left hand on the hilt of his sword, a small gorget rather than a bib under the beginnings of his Hapsburg chin, cheeks already looking swollen with the genes of Hapsburg majesty (though maybe he was just teething), and the baton of command clasped in his pudgy right hand. A splendid hat with a brilliant white plume rests on a nearby dark scarlet cushion. One suspects that the painter has asked his Royal Highness to put the hat there, leaving the child’s face—pursed lips, apple-red cheeks—fully visible. The painter couldn’t resist the chance to show off his skills in the folds of the velvet curtains, dented like bruised flesh, and in the big gold-braided tassel that hangs from the cushion—hangs, one might say in hindsight, with a suggestion that it might fall off. A step below the infante, an attendant stands, only slightly bigger than Prince Baltasar Carlos, sex indeterminate, but remarkable for his or her much-older face: The attendant is a dwarf. If we take a bead necklace as evidence of a female wearer, the dwarf holds in her right hand a silver rattle made to resemble a miniature royal scepter, in the other an orb, a tiny world, in the form of an apple. This is the first such small person to be painted by Velázquez: court companions, professional jesters, chamber helpers, and possibly psychological props—to be examined more closely later on. This little one looks askance at her royal playmate, as if guarding her possessions from a princely toddler who might snatch them. The look may also ask: Am I doing this correctly? Am I showing sufficient respect and making clear that I know who is really in charge here? It is a portrait in inequality. Both figures are small. But deo volente Baltasar Carlos will grow bigger; the dwarf will not.

  Philip IV came through this period looking—in the eye of history—as Velázquez painted him. Whatever his manifest failings, Philip has to be given credit as an art lover and patron for recognizing in Velázquez a painter who might immortalize the king and his family. In these years Velázquez made a series of portraits of Philip, some of which were copied by assistants, some of which were sent abroad to royal relatives. The first that Velázquez painted after his return from Italy is probably the one now in the London National Gallery, showing Philip around 1632 standing stiff armed and stiff legged, unsmiling, indeed looking somewhat imprisoned in his rich brown and silver costume, which Velázquez painted with seemingly impromptu brushstrokes. The flourishes of the king’s extravagant mustache echo the fluent curls of his auburn hair. He is a stuffed shirt but also a human being. Philip had as a boy acted in the plays and masques put on at court; he retained for most of his life the malleability of an actor. In his brown and silver costume he was all dressed up, albeit with hints of self-knowledge in his wary gaze. The king had been seriously ill in 1627 and had tried to turn over a new leaf, with less hunting and less wenching for a time. But María Calderón and other women came along. He needed to escape into pleasure, back to the theater and actresses, to horse riding and hunting. He is not, in Velázquez’s picture, a man at ease with himself. He is a man without willpower and—curious for a king—with little self-esteem. The soubriquet “Planet King” didn’t help. In this portrait he wears in badge form the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece and rests his left hand on the hilt of his sword. He felt bullied by Olivares, who rose at five a.m. and often told off Philip for not keeping up with the royal paperwork. Here, as if to demonstrate to the minister his concern for the duties of monarchy, he holds in his right hand a document, a petition, which began “Señor”—a simple salutation whose use had been decreed in 1623, along with the less fancy wearing of golillas—and was signed by Velázquez as painter to His Majesty. Philip generally signed his own correspondence “Yo El Rey”—I, the king. Here Velázquez’s name, painted by the artist, is also his signature on the picture, though signing his works wasn’t a common practice with him.

  Infante Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf, 1631–32, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  Velázquez’s portraits of Philip done at this time tend to have a rather violent perspective—the floor tilted up, the king seemingly on the point of sliding down the canvas; the lighter tone Velázquez was now using also made for a more edgy atmosphere. Both father and son, Philip and Baltasar Carlos, were portrayed by Velázquez in the first half of the 1630s with batons in hand, on horseback, the horses rearing—rather stage-set paintings with Titian and Rubens among their progenitors, both father and son looking nervously human and not especially regal, but prov
iding for all that effective images of the monarch and (with luck) the monarch-to-be as commanders whose powers were derived from God. Velázquez’s royal portraits also had precursors in the works of the sixteenth-century Hapsburg court painters, Antonio Mor and Mor’s pupil Alonso Sánchez Coello, in which the grave, dignified atmosphere around Philip II was well-expressed. But Velázquez’s images were more human, easier to connect with, and would it was hoped stick in the minds of Spain’s subjects around the world. A pamphlet published in Madrid in 1638 made Philip absolutely preeminent in a kingdom in which the Catholic religion was central: “Divine Faith provides the stability and strength of empires, so that as Faith grows, empires grow, and as Faith recedes, empires collapse.” Velázquez had—as we have seen—already taken part in a contest celebrating the expulsion by Philip III of the supposedly converted Moriscos from the Iberian peninsula: A triumph for the Faith.

  The equestrian portrait of Baltasar Carlos was painted to be seen by the viewer from below, hung high over a doorway in a new palace that Olivares promoted at this time in a bid to present the Spanish monarchy as still the answer to world problems. Velázquez’s equestrian portrait of Philip IV was lower, to the left of the same doorway and at shoulder height. The king may have come to sit for the painter still flushed from his mistress’s bed and, obeying his painter’s direction, perched on a bench as on horseback (the horse would be painted in later as would the blown-back plumes of his hat). Philip, shown wearing armor and a general’s sash, sat looking straight ahead with the gaze of someone thinking about what he might need to tell his father confessor when they next met. Some art historians have observed a proud confidence in this Philip IV on Horseback (1634–35, Prado), but Philip could be seen as someone trying hard to put out of his mind the saying “Pride cometh before a fall.” His world was turning fast from certainty to question.