Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda

by Anthony Bailey

  In 1634, he was on the way north from Milan on one of the more easterly branches of the Spanish Road at the head of a twelve-thousand-strong army of Spaniards and Italians, keeping open the vital south-north supply route to Flanders, where he was about to assume the governorship. Receiving Ferdinand II’s plea for assistance, Fernando hastened with his troops and combined with the emperor’s Austrian force to rout the redoubtable Swedish and German Protestants at Nördlingen. The cardinal-infante and the emperor were shown in a painting by Rubens, meeting before the battle. It was a typically florid picture in which the two leaders stood beneath the wings of a huge storklike bird carrying laurel wreaths. Fernando and Ferdinand shook hands and bowed rather in the way Justin and Spinola had done in Velázquez’s slightly earlier Breda, though the former pair were of course allies, not enemies, as the Breda combatants had been. In 1635 the Rubens painting was used to decorate an arch at the celebration of the cardinal-infante’s entry into Antwerp. However, some aspects of this Hapsburg triumph rapidly proved counterproductive. Olivares had hoped Nördlingen would help force France out of Lorraine, where its troops blocked the Spanish supply route northward. When it didn’t make the French budge, but rather helped push them in May 1635 to declare war on Spain in earnest, the regime in Madrid found itself fighting on several fronts. It was in 1637 that Breda was, as noted, recaptured by the Dutch and Velázquez’s Surrender became a souvenir of former, better times. Olivares turned to trying to resupply the Army of Flanders and the Brussels government by sea. But the armada of sixty ships Spain sent with the double mission of destroying Dutch shipping and reinforcing Spanish forces in the Netherlands ran up against Admiral Marten Tromp and a thirty-strong United Provinces fleet. From the English shingle beach of Deal in Kent that looks out eastward across the sometimes sheltered roadstead called the Downs, the Dutch naval victory and Spanish defeat could be seen and heard on October 21, 1639.

  Nevertheless at the Retiro palace the party continued. Many thought Olivares intended it to be a place where Philip would be kept so amused and relaxed that he would give up his wild ambition to show himself as a real king, leading armies into real battles. Artists, poets, playwrights, and performers were therefore kept busy. The king, with Olivares at his elbow, was the fount of patronage, even though payment for services rendered sometimes diminished to a trickle. The display of royal magnificence was unabated. The court gave up the stuffier Alcázar for the less formal Retiro on many holidays, at the carnival of Mardi Gras, for example, at the start of Lent, and for the Feast of Saint John, and had its collective mind taken off the disasters of war and deficits in the treasury. As if to cancel out the defeat in the Battle of the Downs, there were mock naval battles on the Retiro lake. Combatants in the staged tournaments in the Retiro grounds threw eggs at one another and defended themselves with wooden swords and cork shields. The Florentine stage designer Cosimo Lotti was in his element. Among the stage performances held at the Retiro early on were several plays by the playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who was also Philip’s personal chaplain, and who took over from the great improviser Lope de Vega (who died in 1635) as the court’s theatrical director. A theater, the Coliseo, occupied prime indoors space. Doors at the back of the stage could be opened to allow performers acting, say, as soldiery, to enter from the street. On the feast of Saint John in October 1636, the king made a point of lending the cross of the Order of Santiago for use in a Calderón comedy about the three continents in which Spain held sway. In July the year before, Calderón’s proto-musical Love, the Great Enchanter, was held out-of-doors. Cosimo Lotti designed a floating stage for it, with three thousand lanterns, an orchestra, a shipwreck, and fireworks provided by artillery. In this the characters of Ulysses and Circe traveled by boat across the Retiro lake, while Philip and his courtiers watched from gondolas. When Ulysses finally pulled himself together and left for home and marital duty, Circe in a snit destroyed her own island home. Her palace sank below the surface of the Retiro lake while a Lotti-constructed volcano spouted flames. Viewers wondered about the theme. Was Circe the count-duke? Was Philip IV at last going to cast off the spell he was under and set about his enemies in a convincing way? Wasn’t it time the king came out of his retirement—el retiro—and into action?

  But the king and his courtiers were afloat again in 1637, the year Breda was retaken by the Dutch, in a performance to celebrate Calderón being named a knight of Santiago. While in Brabant a nail was being driven into the Spanish coffin, in Madrid, at the Retiro, heads were buried in theatrical froth if not sand. Transformation scenes, with magical effects, were a big feature of these works; in Calderón’s Perseus, smoke and fire issued from Vulcan’s smithy. From time to time the corps of professional actors could be augmented by the king and his courtiers, and even el pintor real. On February 16, 1638, Shrove Tuesday that year, Velázquez appeared in a romp entitled Mojiganga de la Boda. He played the role of the Countess of San Esteban. He was among a number of men who acted as women on this occasion though we don’t know how much he threw himself into the part. There were many who thought such burlesque displays, if not the Retiro itself, showed up all that was wrong with the Olivares government. Others saw merits in the extravagance. After one lavish feast to honor the election of Philip IV’s cousin Ferdinand III as Holy Roman Emperor, a banquet that allegedly cost half a million ducats and at which the emperor was not in fact present, one Madrileno declared proudly: “This great event … was to show our friend Cardinal Richelieu that there is plenty more money left in the world to punish his king.” On the other hand, one or two may have closed their eyes in dismay and thought of the title of Calderón’s play of 1635, La Vida es Sueno. This was a muddled play—the epithet is Gerald Brenan’s—with a creaking allegorical plot; everything moved very slowly, arbitrarily, in it; but the notion that life was unreal was obviously one that people could take to. “Life Is a Dream.”

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  THE KING’S PAINTER had his daily dose of reality in his work for the royal household, in which he kept up his gradual ascent. For a long time the would-be hidalgo was stuck in the working echelons, taking his seat at tournaments and festivals among the court hairdressers—who as barber surgeons did much real doctoring and were comparatively well paid. Payment for Velázquez’s services came in fits and starts. In December 1632 he was paid 797 ducats for paintings. In 1634, the year he was permitted to pass on the office of Usher of the Chamber to his new son-in-law Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, as a dowry for his daughter Francisca, he received 74,114 reales that were owed him (a ducado or ducat was worth roughly eleven reales). In 1625 he had been granted the use of a house in the Calle de la Concepción Jerónima, a perk worth 200 ducats annually. However in 1636 he did without being paid any money. Instead, in that year he received a promotion, being given the rank of Gentleman of the Wardrobe; this was, according to Palomino, who sounded a bit smarmy about it, “one of the offices or employments of the royal household that is held in great esteem,” though Velázquez actually didn’t have to serve in the office, helping carry the king’s clothes as he dressed and undressed, until 1645. Palomino thought the king recognized “the merits of so punctilious a vassal and so excellent an artificer.” The gossip in Madrid, according to a city newsletter, was that Velázquez aspired “to become one day Gentleman of the Bedchamber and be knighted, following the example of Titian.” In 1643 Olivares himself administered the oath of office to Velázquez as he was made Assistant to the Privy Chamber. Whatever the constraints of being a courtier, a punctilious vassal, an organization man, a civil servant with pay that fluctuated between high and nothing, Velázquez showed no signs of preferring the freelance life or making do as a portraitist or mostly church painter, like his fellow artist from Seville, Zurbarán. He seemed content with a system that kept him and his family comfortably fed, housed, clothed, and respected.

  Things were kept in the family, as they had been at Pacheco’s. In August 1633 Francisca had married one of his chief assist
ants, del Mazo. His younger daughter Ignacia disappeared from the records early on. But Francisca and her husband del Mazo established a firm foothold in the system. Their son Baltasar, Velázquez’s grandson, later became Head of Chandlery at the Alcázar palace. Mazo himself continued to work for Velázquez, helping with and copying paintings; he may have made one of the versions of the portrait of the count-duke in armor, baton in hand, astride a rearing white horse, that Velázquez painted the original of in the 1630s: a tribute to the first minister without whose influence Velázquez might have been still in Seville. Thus one can add to the list of reasons for Velázquez to have surrendered himself to court life. He liked the proximity to the center of things and those in charge, notably such grandees as Don Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke Olivares. The big man had his opponents behind every arras, but in 1638 the critics were silenced when Richelieu sent a French army to attack northern Spain. Irun was captured. Many nobles from Madrid volunteered to carry a pike into battle against the French. Olivares—forbidden by the king to go to the front line—dispatched a force to relieve Fuenterrabía, which was besieged by the French, and when the siege was lifted and the celebratory bonfires in Madrid had died down, was rewarded by a grateful Philip with the office of hereditary governor of Fuenterrabía. Other honors included the right to dine once a year at the royal table on the date the French fled to their ships, with a victory toast being made with wine in a gold cup and the count-duke hailed as “librador de la patria.” Velázquez’s equestrian portrait of Olivares is of this time and probably celebrates the victor of Fuenterrabía.

  In these years, when Velázquez was in his mid- to late thirties, he was—by his own apparently unprolific standards—a fairly productive painter. He painted portraits, including one particularly fine one in 1635 of The Sculptor Martínez Montañés at Work, Montañés being as we’ve seen another Sevillian, who had come to Madrid to make a bust of Philip IV. At this time Velázquez also painted religious pictures and classical subjects. He created not only the Breda for the Retiro’s Hall of Realms but other pictures for a landscape gallery and for chapels in the Retiro grounds. For these a prime subject was that of saints in their retreats or hermitages. Velázquez accepted this challenge with a somewhat tentative scene showing not one but two saints in a mountainous setting. Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit (ca. 1633) were both depicted bearded, both praying beside a scrawny tree at the entrance to a grotto. What they are praying for is probably spiritual nourishment, but sustenance of another kind is shown coming. A crow dives toward them with a crust of bread in its beak. In an almost medieval way, other scenes from the lives of these saints are shown in smaller scale elsewhere in the picture: a lion, a winding river, and craggy mountains similar to the Guadarrama, not far from Madrid. The painting was later hung in one of the hermitages in the Retiro grounds. It has a thin translucence, with azurite—by no means a material for frugal painters—once again being used to achieve the effect Velázquez wished for.

  Many of the Spanish painters gave us aspects of asceticism, the bones visible beneath the skin, though Velázquez usually did not. His people are for the most part flesh and blood, even if among the royals it is a rarified Hapsburg blood; they are visibly human beings. These two hungry saints are perhaps his major demonstration of Spanish austerity, of abnegation, and they don’t make a very convincing picture, at least for the modern, post-Christian viewer. The dive-bombing bird and sweetly painted river valley are greater attractions than the saints, the purported subjects. A much more intense religious work is his Christ on the Cross, painted a year or so earlier. This was indeed a crucifixion, the figure radiant and marble pale. Pacheco had specified that the true cross was fifteen feet high with a crossbeam of eight feet. He said the wood should be cypress for the beam and pine for the shaft, with the block on which Christ’s feet rested of cedar and the plaque giving his name of boxwood. And there should be, Pacheco decreed, four nails, not three, driven through Christ’s hands and feet. This pedantry was a poor substitute for the expression of real emotion and devotion, conveyed through paint. Velázquez hung his Christ on an almost totally black background, a pitch darkness which seems lit up by the dying figure stretched over it. The details, such as the nails, are driven home. We notice the knots and the grain in the timbers. There are bloodstains below the spikes, which pierce the palms and feet. We take in the careful carpentry, the almost carved quality of a work by Montañés, the morticing of crossbeam and post, and the words—ironic or maybe heroic—inscribed on the plaque at the top, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Christ’s head is tilted down on his chest, hair falling over his face so that we glimpse an agony that Velázquez left half-hidden, leaving much to be drawn powerfully from our imaginations. But the chaplet of thorns, a red scar where the Roman soldier’s lance had pierced him, a strip of white linen knotted across his loins, and all the muscles visible beneath taut stretched skin and bones, all accumulate powerfully. Hang it next to most of the crucifixions that were turned out then, by Domenico Guidi and Pacheco, and Velázquez’s is the clear winner. Even Zurbarán’s crucifixions of this same period seem in comparison a touch mawkish and melodramatic. Velázquez keeps in reserve so much message and meaning, and for that reason delivers a greater blow. His Crucifixion is also a transformation, a metamorphosis; it shows a man through the agony of execution becoming a part of God.

  Christ on the Cross, 1631–32, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

  The darkness could be that of a Spanish church. People then seemed to live in caves and hollowed-out places, or dwellings like them, with the light entering from only one side. They prayed and worshipped their near-eastern deity in similarly occluded spaces. Velázquez may have had in mind as he painted this crucified Christ compulsory hours spent as a child and as a youth on his knees in a dimly lit church in Seville, wondering about the cross over the altar and the man nailed upon it, in some ways frightening, in other ways sublime.

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  THE DUTIES OF el pintor real, the court artist, extended beyond the Alcázar and the Retiro. Velázquez was also busy at the Torre de la Parada, a hunting lodge of Charles V’s, which was being done up for the crown. A square-shaped retreat much smaller than the Retiro, it was planted amid woods on the west bank of the Manzanares River near the village of El Pardo, with a deer park, about six miles from the city. Royal hunts took place here. Philip IV was serious about hunting. He had speared a wild boar as a youth of thirteen, mounted on his favorite horse, at the time one named Guijarillo. By 1644 he was reputed to have taken out more than four hundred wolves, six hundred stags, one hundred and fifty wild boar, and a great quantity of fallow deer, breaking all records and winning many trophies. He was known, too, for his prowess at pig-sticking. One boar hunted at El Pardo was praised for defending itself like a lion, ripping up numerous horses. Philip splintered a lance while attacking it and after seeing it dispatched declared to his courtiers, “This is one of the most memorable days in the annals of the chase.”

  Formalized like so much else in the Hapsburg orbit, royal hunts took place three or four times a year. Velázquez painted La Tela Real, The Boar Hunt, to hang in the Torre de la Parada and celebrate Philip’s chief hobby. The painting (now in the National Gallery, London) showed one of these elaborate spectacles, at which distinguished visitors and members of the court were privileged to observe the monarch take bloody risks and demonstrate his heroic horsemanship. By no means a sophisticated composition, La Tela Real depicts the event on a much broader scale than is the case in many of his pictures, save for the Breda. Here, however, all the figures, even those in the foreground, are relatively minute. The middle ground shows a large oval arena, fenced in by telas, the canvas cloths imported from Flanders that were used to pen or corral the hunted animals. (Carl Justi notes that the amount of canvas would have served to make sails for a fair-sized armada; but for the king, why not make a big thing of it?) The arena in Velázquez’s painting is in fact the contrat
ela, the enclosure within the main tela that could be several miles in circumference. As in the Breda, Velázquez makes the ground drop away from the viewer, in this case to the contratela below, so that we look from a height onto the foreground spectators of the royal hunt, onto the carriage from which the queen watches in safety, and onto the hunters—mostly on horseback—at work in the enclosure. Only here the background rises in a wooded hillside with green copses and patches of sandy, yellow ground, reaching up to a thin margin of sky across the top of the picture. Among the figures one can identify are several horsemen, including the king, the count-duke (who was among other things Master of the Horse), and—on a rearing white steed—Juan de Mateos, the king’s Master of the Hunt. In the immediate foreground, under the shade of a tree, a group of elegantly dressed courtiers carry on conversing, as courtiers will, and pay little attention to what’s going on in the enclosure. There Philip IV is demonstrating his bravery and equestrian skills in an encounter with an enraged animal, a boar that could impale his horse, while his assistants with their fork-tipped spears called horquillas try to distract the boar. Once they have worn it out, the royal dogs will be able to finish it off if the king himself doesn’t kill it—as he did in January 1637 at a royal hunt put on for the entertainment of his niece the princess of Carignan. The painting is not more than the sum of its parts. It seems to have the virtues of an illustration (of a hunt and Philip’s hunting skills) rather than those of a more intense, self-sufficient work of art, though the self-absorbed foreground figures almost help it achieve such a status.