In Velázquez’s not overlarge oeuvre, portraits of Philip and his relatives as hunters form a distinct subsection: royals on horseback, royals with guns; the king himself; Philip’s brother the cardinal-infante Fernando; and the king’s son Baltasar Carlos, who was being brought up properly imbued with open-air sports of this kind. The king’s Master of the Hunt Juan de Mateos was granted his own separate portrait. Mateos wrote a treatise on hunting in which he lauded young Baltasar Carlos’s ability to lance wild boars. Learning that skill went along with instruction in reading the lay of the land and in dog-handling and gun-handling; one portrait made when the young prince was six showed him holding an arquebus and trying not to look overwhelmed by it. Mateos declared that “the sight of the spilled blood of wild beasts … creates generous spirits which constantly scorn the shadows of fear.” Velázquez seems to have enjoyed painting the dogs that generally accompanied their masters in these hunting portraits. He gives us mastiffs dozing, greyhounds looking alert, and retrievers patiently waiting for the command to fetch. We also of course see a number of horses in action. A mounted Baltasar Carlos figures in several pictures that Velázquez painted for the Buen Retiro in the 1630s, showing off various equestrian maneuvers. In one, possibly the earliest, the self-conscious, pale-faced little prince holds the reins lightly in one hand while the other grasps his general’s baton, which is slightly smaller than full size. His pink sash billows behind him. In the background—probably painted first—the familiar foothills of the Guadarrama rise to snow-topped peaks. This stage-set scenery—like an early-twentieth-century portrait photographer’s ready-made prop for all seasons—looks like the park of the Torre de la Parada once again.
The prince was a year or so older in a more complicated picture that shows him at the Retiro riding school, putting a larger and darker horse through its paces. Rather daringly unintegrated in the painting are the figures behind, sketchily rendered and in softer focus. Juan de Mateos is again in attendance. The prince’s valet, Alonso Martínez de Espinar, who was also the Keeper of Arms, is handing a jousting lance (which Velázquez has painted as if it were an ornament made of transparent glass) to the count-duke, the Master of the Horse, massive as ever; Olivares was one of the prince’s chief instructors in horsemanship. On a balcony watching these goings-on stand a number of spectators, apart from the event yet integral to it. They are pushed forward on the balcony rather than seen through a serving hatch, though a dark doorway behind them—as it were cutting off their escape—gives a sense of them being in their own separate world. Two of this group can be identified as the king and queen, proud parents of the boy on the prancing horse. Theirs is a cameo appearance that we will remember when we see, some twenty years later, a larger and even more intricate picture Velázquez painted with its own split-screen features.
And something else here makes one look, and look again. We get the feeling that some of the participants are on a different plane. We feel that Velázquez is disassembling the structure of things. He is playing with Art, with its conventions and its usual dimensions. One thinks of the way Cervantes amuses himself in Don Quixote, where Sansón Carrasco, the “Bachelor of Arts,” tells Don Quixote that his activities are already known about from a book—the book one is reading! And Cervantes gets further laughs by relating our hero’s history through Carrasco, who says it was written up by the Arabian sage Cid Hamet Benengeli. In this he, Cervantes—Benengeli—mentions among Don Quixote’s notable adventures those of the windmills, the two armies that proved to be flocks of sheep, the episode with the galley slaves, and the various drubbings and unhorsings the noble knight has received. Don Quixote is astounded that his biographical details are so up to date. He is amazed that the Bachelor seems to know more about what he and his squire have been up to than they themselves know. It is an inside job. And so with Velázquez: One gets the impression that he has begun to be dissatisfied with clear-cut depictions of things and people. Having put Prince Baltasar Carlos on his horse in the riding school yard, he has to alter our perception of what is real by bringing on, less concretely, the count-duke and the other retainers, and, almost on a separate stage, or royal box overlooking the stage, the royal couple, formed from a few fast brushstrokes. A fourth dimension has been created.
Another intrusion in this painting is this: Sandwiched between the thick tail of the prince’s steed and a low wall below the Retiro palace is the small figure of a dwarf. He is the second such individual the painter has presented us with. We will get used somewhat to Velázquez’s little people, but never entirely. They retain to the end a power to disconcert. Dwarfs were fairly common at royal courts, and had been so since Egyptian times. The Roman emperor Diocletian had a troop of tiny gladiators. Augustus’s niece Julia owned several. In Saxon England a dwarf named Stratton lived at the court of King Edgar. Botticelli painted dwarfs in his Adoration of the Magi and they were a long-standing Burgundian appurtenance. In the fifteenth century a blond female dwarf named Madame d’Or, who belonged to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, used to wrestle at court festivities with an acrobat named Hans, while during Charles the Bold’s reign a woman dwarf, Madame de Beaugrant, was a feature of a wedding feast, dressed as a shepherdess; she was first seated, we are told, “on a golden lion,” and then placed on the table among the plates of food and jugs of wine. Dwarfs appear frequently in paintings by the Hapsburg and Stuart court painters, Antonio Moro and Daniel Mytens. The kings and queens of Europe still competed to hire them as retainers and entertainers. In a court such as that of the Hapsburgs in Madrid, where those involved were hardly able to smile voluntarily, dwarfs were a straightforward way of provoking lawful amusement, “domesticated goblins,” as Bernard Rudofsky called them. Some were deformed in more than size, some hydrocephalic; a few, like the English Jeffery Hudson (1619–82), whom Mytens portrayed, were small but handsome. Velázquez painted seven of them, partly perhaps because he felt they were central to court life, partly—it may be—because he received a royal suggestion that he do so, and partly one suspects because he saw them with fellow feeling. They were small people who were also artistes. They seem to follow naturally after his bodegones as grotesque if not rustic subjects. Velázquez painted dwarfs without inhibition and without mawkish sympathy; what was perhaps radical was his choice in the first place to make these stunted creatures worthy of his undivided attention. The intense fury in the stare of the Dwarf Sebastián de Morra, ca. 1644, in the Prado, is brought to our notice by the symmetry Velázquez has thrust at us, the dwarf’s two eyes above two almost fingerless clenched fists above two stunted legs ending in two shoes, almost by Brueghel, their soles pitifully facing us.
Infante Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School, 1636–39, Private Collection, Duke of Westminster.
The Dwarf Sebastián de Morra, c. 1644, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Dwarfs, fools, and jesters had the privilege of being able to speak painful truths. Philip IV’s small attendants were on hand on many state occasions, such as the visit of Francesco, Duke of Modena. Two dwarfs dressed up to look like Castilian royalty perched beneath Philip’s throne as he and the duke watched a bullfight. The twenty-eight-year-old duke was lodged at the Buen Retiro and Velázquez painted a portrait of him, wearing a golilla and a general’s sash over his armor, and giving the painter a cool sidelong appraisal. Was the duke surprised at Velázquez’s intensity and industry? Velázquez had by now the reputation of being a laid-back artist, not to be rushed. The duke’s ambassador in Madrid, the poet Fulvio Testi, wrote to his master after the duke had set off for home that Velázquez’s portrait of the duke would be marvelous—if he ever got it done. “However like other men of talent he has the defect of never finishing and of not telling the truth about how long things will take.” A price of one hundred gold doubloons had been agreed upon, and Testi had given Velázquez 150 pieces of eight on account. Testi admitted, “It is expensive, but he does good work.” The picture did eventually get to the duke, and according to Palomino the duke fu
rther rewarded Velázquez with a costly gold chain. As with the portraits of the huntsman Juan de Mateos and the sculptor Montañés, Velázquez’s portrait of the Duke of Modena seems to have stuck at a point just before it was finished. Maybe Velázquez meant it to be so. Or was it interrupted by his famous phlegm again?
A court document of September 15, 1637 (a few weeks before Breda was taken back by the Dutch), lists the names of dwarfs, buffoons, musicians, and barbers who were authorized to receive free clothing. The document adds, “The clothes of the barbers and of Diego Velázquez should be reduced to 80 ducats.” Another indicator of the court painter’s matter-of-fact but necessary standing in the system is that when in 1648 places were assigned to guests at a bullfight in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, Velázquez’s seat was back in the fourth row among the barbers and servants of court influentials. Climbing the hierarchy obviously took time. And so when Velázquez painted the buffoons and dwarfs, he was painting his fellow workers at the court. Six portraits of court jesters were attributed to Velázquez in the 1701 Retiro inventory, and others of the same category at that date hung in the Torre de la Parada. Some were unlike any other representations of human beings yet painted. In Velázquez’s Retiro portrait of Pablo de Valladolid, the jester wore a golilla collar and struck a theatrical pose. Unlike the crucified Christ, pinned starkly against a black background, Pablo was adrift on a white cloud. He seemed to be floating in thin air; only the shadows of his feet and legs slightly grounded him in reality. As for his fellows, they were saddled with nicknames. Cristobal de Pernia, at court for thirty years from 1624 to 1654 and painted sword in hand by Velázquez, was called Barbaroja, Red Beard, after a sixteenth-century Mediterranean pirate. Another went by the title of Don Juan of Austria, after the hero of Lepanto. (A painting of the sea battle was shown on the wall behind him.) A third buffoon was given the name Juan de Calabazas, a calabaza being an empty gourd, with two lying next to him; the inference being that Juan was empty-headed. What Velázquez also lets us know through paint is that Juan was cross-eyed, grinned in a way that exposed uneven teeth, and enjoyed a drink or two—a wineglass was near at hand.
The buffoons were treated as stage players. The dwarfs were treated as living people, albeit lives that were unfair and undignified. Some artists might have felt uncomfortable confronting deformity so closely, but not Velázquez. His youthful interest in grotesqueries, and in the contorted expressions his young rural model had produced to order, was continued at Philip’s court by a fascination with what his English contemporary the writer and physician Thomas Browne called “the abnormalities of creation.” One female dwarf is given prominence in the late 1650s in his crowded Las Meninas, but more than a decade before that picture three male dwarfs received particularly powerful attention. Their names were Francisco Lezcano, Diego de Acedo, and Sebastián de Morra. All three were shown seated, an attitude that emphasized their stunted forms, comparatively large heads, and abbreviated limbs. Lezcano came from the Biscay region and had served Prince Baltasar Carlos since 1634. In Velázquez’s portrait he seems childlike, without adult thinking power; he holds a pack of cards as if uncertain what to do with them. His lopsided head is twisted back, tilted as though by the greater weight of his right cheek. His mouth is open in what could be a smile or an attempt to say something. On the other hand Acedo, called El Primo, The Cousin, was a full-time civil servant, secretary of the Council of the Signet, who later went with Philip IV on his 1644 campaign into Catalonia. There he sat for Velázquez, surrounded by writing materials and against the background of a ready-made Guadarrama mountainscape, burdened down, indeed dwarfed, by an immense volume open in his lap. His face looks like that of an ordinary if rather perplexed bureaucrat, interrupted at his work. His broad-brimmed hat is set at a pronounced angle. An auburn mustache flourishes above his upper lip. But the melancholy look in his eyes reveals one whose size sets him at odds with his capabilities. The picture is interesting also for its unfinished passages, such as the streaky areas of sky where the painter seems to have nonchalantly cleaned his brushes on the canvas.
About the third dwarf, de Morra, usually called Don Sebastián, Velázquez leaves us in little doubt. His feet stick out on puny legs, boot soles upright, facing the viewer. His short arms are seemingly without elbows or upper parts and end in two clenched fists jammed into a jerkin that covers his thighs. He looks at the viewer as he did at the artist, a look just this side of a glower—he has tired of glowering. But his resentment is deep-banked. He still wants to know how he got here. Why indeed is he like this? Don Sebastián had worked for the cardinal-infante in Flanders before coming to Madrid to attend Prince Baltasar Carlos in 1643. There is, I think, no similar look in painting where a deformed sitter gazes like this directly at the artist, with an expression as profound as any painted by Rembrandt. The brushstrokes are powerful, the broad layering of paint almost smudgy. We are told that when Prince Baltasar Carlos died in 1646, at the age of seventeen, in Zaragoza, he left de Morra some swords and daggers, souvenirs of the fighting life he would have liked but never had. The dwarf enjoyed these weapons for only three years until his own death in 1649. The dwarfs were individuals Velázquez encountered daily, accompanying the prince and the infantas about the palaces, often sane and intelligent people exposed to lifelong ridicule, and they drew from the royal painter a melancholy camaraderie, just as Justin and Spinola had done in their own way on a grander stage. In both cases Velázquez’s fast-thinking originality seemed matched by that part of him that was grounded in fellow feeling.
In a study of Velázquez written forty years ago, Jon Manchip White compared the dwarfs of Velázquez to the clownlike graciosos in Spanish literature; he compared Velázquez’s paintings of little men to the comic characters in Calderón’s plays. Gerald Brenan tells us: “Calderón took to relegating all the humour of his plays into a single person, usually a servant and always of lower-class origin, who fulfills much the same function as the fool in Shakespeare. This was necessary because the increasing decorum of the age was making it difficult to allow men of the upper classes to show any sense of humour, much less appear ridiculous.” When Philip’s niece the Austrian princess Mariana, age fourteen, was on her way to Madrid to become Philip’s second queen, she stopped for a rest and had the dwarfs in her entourage amuse her. She went into shrieks of laughter. Her ladies-in-waiting reminded her that laughing out loud was no longer a proper form of behavior for her. Despite these constraints, members of the Madrid court went on keeping dwarfs as retainers even if it meant having to smother their own giggles.
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WITH NO PERSONAL record, we have to imagine how Velázquez felt when news reached the court, a few weeks after the event on October 10, 1637, that Breda had fallen again to the forces of the Stadholder, the Dutch prince Frederick Henry. Perhaps he congratulated himself on his foresight in having shown in the Surrender Spinola and Justin on a nearly equal footing and not as victor and victim. Certainly he had been smart in not painting a total celebration of Spanish military triumph at a time when Spanish military prowess was once again being questioned. There are other signs that Velázquez thought of war with skepticism, without tunes of glory heard in the background. In or around 1638 he painted a less than militant warrior. His ironic picture of the god Mars was hung in the Torre de la Parada rather than among the scenes of Spanish success in the Retiro’s Hall of Realms. At the Torre Philip IV was meant to take time out of the court routine to enjoy himself, to hunt animals not fight men. Velázquez’s portrait of the god of war showed him seated on the edge of a rumpled bed, naked except for the folds of a blue sheet wrapped around his loins. The bedspread is pink, as pink as the drapes in a painting of a naked Venus we will encounter later on. Mars although improperly dressed has his helmet on and holds one end of his field-commander’s baton under a fold of the bedspread. But his shield and his sword have been dumped on the floor below his bare feet, and his chin rests on his left hand, left arm propped on a knee. The pose is, once
again, melancholy, and despite what would later be called the handlebar mustache, not at all gung ho. His nude torso shows bones beneath the skin and surplus flesh above the waist. He looks like an out-of-shape ex-pinup, exhausted after an overlong, penitential gym session. For a god, he seems all too human.
Mars at Rest, c. 1638, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Scholars have argued about our artist’s intentions here. Classical statues provide precedents for an inactive Mars. Michelangelo had sculpted in marble a seated Lorenzo de’ Medici in the same pose, chin on hand. Did Velázquez mean to remind us of Spain’s military troubles—its defeats rather than its victories? Some experts say no, no criticism or ridicule would be allowed here, at a site for royal recreation. But this Mars has evidently had enough of fighting, which was surely meant to be his divine metier. One recalls Cervantes paraphrasing Terence when he has Don Quixote say, “A Soldier makes a better figure dead in the Field of Battle, than Alive and Safe in Flight”—and we can add, better even than alive and safe in bed. There will be plenty of men from the Army of Flanders soon retired, with scars, lame, and maimed. There will be soldiers enough who have had it with war, and wonder if they will ever again have a cushy billet, dry and warm, let alone one like this with silk and satin sheets to lounge upon. From here, they ask themselves in the same way this soldier seems to be doing, will it be downhill all the way?
IX. MADRID AND ARAGÓN. 1640–48
Life squeezes in, relaxes the pressure, and then tightens its grip again. In the first two years of the 1640s Velázquez would not have been alone in feeling a growing nervousness as the fortunes of Spain fell apart. It became increasingly clear that the Hapsburg empire was an attempt to hold together too many disparate political organisms, with little in common save for their ancestral, genealogical, or religious ties with Spain. The weight of Olivares and his ambitions continued to overbalance the court. Philip IV showed fitful signs of taking the reins and being a king. When the monarch acted up in that manner, Olivares shuddered, tried to distract him with theatrical occasions and women, and hoped for the best. The “victory” at Fuenterrabia in September 1638, when the Spanish recaptured the border town from the French, was a flourish for which the count-duke took the credit, but it was not one to be widely repeated.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 15
