Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda

by Anthony Bailey

We know so little of Velázquez’s personal life that anything that draws him out of the close surroundings of his court career takes on a disproportionate vividness and scale. Thus the small episode documented in the Roman archives in the autumn of 1652 becomes something startling. The documents were, I believe, first discussed in print, almost as a footnote, by Jennifer Montagu, in the Burlington Magazine, in 1983. Giovanni Garzia Valentino—the same lawyer who had witnessed the deed giving Juan de Pareja his freedom and put his name on the contracts for the casts of statues Velázquez had commissioned for the king—drew up a legal document regarding a baby boy, Antonio. The papers refer to him as “the natural son” of Don Diego de Silva Velázquez. A nurse, Marta Vedova, presumed to be the infant’s wet nurse, a widow living in the parish of Santa Maria-in-Via, had been paid by attorneys acting for Velázquez to “release” the babe-in-arms at the end of October 1652. This Marta did two weeks later—though she seems to have done so reluctantly. The amount she received was seven scudi and thirty baciocchi. The name of Antonio’s mother wasn’t given. We don’t know if it was Marta herself or whether Velázquez ever saw his son—his only son. Nor has anything further been found concerning Antonio’s baptism or fate. He remains what Jennifer Montagu calls “a marginal note.”

  It may not be coincidental that, around this time, Velázquez painted the picture that is exceptional among his extant paintings. Exactly when The Toilet of Venus was painted is—as we’ve noted—unclear; some experts (such as Jonathan Brown) believe it came into being before Velázquez’s second trip to Italy, while others feel the same woman modeled for it, for the Coronation of the Virgin, and for the woman holding the skein of wool in The Fable of Arachne, a painting made around 1656. But the Venus seems to reflect the freedom he felt in Italy, out from under both court and family life, and it is easily associated with his time in Rome. The presence in the picture of Cupid, holding a mirror, is indicative of a love interest. The picture may have been shipped home to Madrid from Rome before Velázquez—at last—made his departure. De Haro went on in time to become Spain’s ambassador in Rome, viceroy in Naples, and a prodigious art collector. The Venus would have been one of the stars of the collection. It is only a mythological painting in title. It is a divinely human painting in all else. A woman “at her toilet,” and not very busily so, Venus is recumbent. Velázquez may have been making up for the lack of similar living models in Spain, a lack that forced artists to find substitutes, the way Angelo Michele Colonna, the Bolognese painter, used a cast of an antique statue of Venus to paint a Pandora. Velázquez had of course looked at many naked women painted by Titian and Rubens. A similarly recumbent form was the Hermaphrodite Asleep, lying stomach down, head on crossed arms, in the Villa Borghese; it was one of the statues that Velázquez had had cast in bronze to take to Madrid. In the Greek myths the ambisexual Hermaphrodite was the result of a getting-together between Hermes and Aphrodite; but for his Venus Velázquez clearly had a real woman model for him, lying on her right side, with her back to him.

  No woman’s back has ever been more sweetly painted. She is completely without clothing. Her outstretched left foot is pressed into the slate-gray satin sheet and a well-shaped left calf partly covers her right foot, which is poking out enticingly from under the left knee. That the perfection of physiognomy did not come easily was shown when the painting was cleaned and alterations to one of the left toes were found. The back of the most visible thigh casts a shadow on the sheet and then vanishes into a dark declivity molded by the complex curves of her buttocks. One’s eyes make this journey from left to right, from toe to top, while at the same time following the outline of pale flesh silhouetted against the bedclothes. It is a soft ridge of upward slopes and downward valleys that suddenly over the top of her left hip sweeps vertiginously down to her waist—the most audacious hip ever. Then upward again, ascending to her shoulder. Here let us pause at the recess, barely a dimple, under her right shoulder blade; it is a spot the eyes fondly linger on before moving to her neck—such a neck!—and the back of her head, chin turned away, just a hint of eyelash visible, her auburn hair piled up in a ruffled chignon, right arm bent with the hand holding up the head. The scene has horizontal divisions with diagonal accents: pale crimson curtain; flesh colors of the Cupid and Venus; gray of sheet and off-white of the crumpled and creased undersheet. The curtain looks like that seen in the portrait Velázquez had painted of Archbishop Fernando de Valdes, and the bedcover that Velázquez’s melancholy Mars was sitting on. The painter was obviously fond of that color, nearly pink. The viewer—not to say voyeur—is then diverted by the woman’s gaze directed toward a heavily framed mirror being held just beyond her hips by the Cupid: a cherubic small boy, with a pair of seemingly stuck-on white-gray wings borrowed from a pigeon, and naked apart from a blue-gray ribbon looped over one shoulder and a pink ribbon leading from the mirror to his wrist. Cupid used such items to bind those in love. The presence of Cupid makes it clear that the unclothed woman is Venus.

  But having given us those clues to her identity, Velázquez gives us a shock. In the mirror, as in one of his scenes within a scene, we are in ambiguous territory; we observe the face, a bit foggily reflected, and it isn’t at all the face we’ve expected. From early on Velázquez had not taken the easy way with his pictures—doubt not certainty is what we expect from him—and here the mirrored face doesn’t seem at all right for the woman whose back and backside we are now almost besotted with. It is a plain, even pudgy face. It is, surely, one we have seen before. There is at least a chaste, sisterly resemblance to the Virgin being crowned by the Trinity, or a likeness to that of several of his earlier sitters, one of whom may well have been Juana Pacheco. If he was in Rome at the time, an artist-husband at some distance, might this be a semi-guilty gesture, disguising the looks of the woman who was his model by planting an echo of his wife’s features on his Venus? Velázquez has deliberately created something unexpected, possibly suggesting that beautiful women can be partly plain, or that a fairly ordinary face can coexist with a wonderful body. The situation is further complicated by those experts who have looked at the pictured arrangement scientifically and decided that the reflected image isn’t in the correct spot—a mirror held just there at that angle wouldn’t have shown her head in quite that way. Velázquez at any rate has heightened our interest by this complication and by concealing the woman’s identity. Body and face are separated, perhaps deliberately. The device may also render this woman a love interest for all men. No specific woman can be connected with this adorable (at least from the rear) creature; she is therefore a love object open for the admiration of any contender.

  Far more subtly and powerfully than Rubens, whose thick-thighed Flemish females furnished a standard for the age, Velázquez concentrated his suggestions of the sensuous on the skin and the fabrics: the crimson drapery; what looks like a white chemise lying on the bed under the mirror; a hint of the folds of a transparent chiffony green garment beyond her waist; the cover, now slate gray, which was perhaps as originally painted a mauve or ultramarine; and the white sheet curving away on the mattress below. The painting is not confrontationally erotic; it is touchingly beautiful. Softness is evoked by the brushwork, loaded here, thin there. The colors let us visualize and almost feel her flesh and the surroundings in which it is most perceptible. At first sight the painting isn’t at all “sexy.” Indeed, some viewers have looked at this picture and found it dispassionate. Cool is a word that has been used to describe it, and as a term of temperature-based criticism (i.e., not warm enough) rather than of modish compliment. But Kenneth Clark has recognized one hold this Venus has on admirers. He writes, a bit gingerly, “It might be argued that the back view of the female body is more satisfactory than the front.” (“Satisfactory”! Doesn’t he mean “arousing”?) The back view, he goes on, might also be “considered symbolic of lust,” although Velázquez was somewhat out of place in his time. “The bottom is a baroque form.”

  Art historians! We need them
but now and then we shudder at them. Here we have what is convincingly the most erogenous female rear ever depicted. Where one’s eye ultimately falls is on what’s called the “small” of this woman’s back. Between the curving cleft of the pressed-together buttocks and the longer and shallower curve of skin covering her spine is a zone painted with such skill that words fall away, useless. What we retain are sensations from a gentle gloss of light and lightly modulated shade, the slope of flesh above the spine, the dimple where the left buttock folds into the top of the thigh at the waist. As said, our response to this creature is not altogether an erotic one. Walter Pater somewhere talks of the “sexless beauty” of Greek statues; it was a quality that conveyed serenity, “a negative quality … the absence of any sense of want, of corruption, or shame.” A sort of indifference or coolness.

  I wonder what Velázquez’s master, father-in-law Pacheco, would have had to say about this Venus, remembering his strictures that an artist should have before him only the hands and faces of chaste women when he painted the female form. Velázquez in any event dared to disagree. Compare his full-length wonderfully human Venus to the nudes by Rubens in his Three Graces—flabby, cellulite-packed. Or the Rubens Toilet of Venus (1606–11) in the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, an upright painting showing only half the goddess’s face, albeit clearly, and wearing a chemise or cloak that leaves just one breast exposed. Velázquez made numerous modifications as he painted his Venus. Her right arm and shoulder were moved in the course of his work. He changed the color of the bedcover. He painted many areas of fabric alla prima, quickly, lightly. He left some passages seemingly unfinished, almost out of focus, with the grain of the canvas visible and tangible, for example in his Venus’s left sole and right hand and in the back foot of the Cupid—who was also an afterthought. Yet on that peerless back the brushstrokes are unnoticeable.

  * * *

  VELÁZQUEZ FINALLY STARTED his journey back to Spain in the early winter of 1650. That December he was again in Modena, chivvied by suggestions from Philip that he get a move on. At the duke’s court he tried unsuccessfully to liberate a few masterpieces, among them a Tintoretto and a Correggio. The duke himself was “not at home”—genuinely or because he wanted to avoid being talked into giving up some of his best pictures; a court official was delegated to tell Velázquez that they were unable to get hold of the keys to the rooms where the paintings were hung. The duke’s ambassador to Madrid, Ottonelli, passed on the word that the duke regarded his ownership of Correggio’s Night as one of trusteeship. The duke had vowed never to let it leave his family. “I had the impression,” said Ottonelli, “that this gave Diego pause.” Many had the impression that when Velázquez came calling, it was best to keep him away from your pictures. But Velázquez managed to squeeze in a stop in Venice and there succeeded in buying two Veroneses and a number of Tintorettos; these included some canvases meant for a ceiling and a Paradisio that the poet Marco Boschini thought would assure Tintoretto’s immortality. Once again Velázquez seems to have been dawdling on purpose and he took his time catching a boat from Genoa. The return voyage to Barcelona was boisterous; Palomino tells us they ran into severe storms. He was back in Madrid just after the middle of June 1651.1 But Italy remained in his thoughts—perhaps a recumbent woman modeling Venus, and perhaps an infant named Antonio, remained there, too. When Velázquez asked Philip IV if he could go to Italy again in 1657, the king said no.

  XII. TRANSFORMATIONS. MADRID. 1651–59

  Velázquez was awarded a new job not long after his return to court. It may have been a reward for finally coming home—for doing what he had been asked to do. And it may have reflected the king’s greater cheerfulness. Philip now had a second wife, his niece Mariana of Austria, young and bouncy, whom he had married in 1649 while Velázquez was away on his Italian journey. At that point she was fifteen, a good-humored teenager, to be overheard actually laughing out loud in the Alcázar palace, and she soon proved herself at least capable of motherhood, if not yet of producing an heir, by giving birth to a daughter—Margarita—in July 1651. There were for Velázquez new portrait candidates for his brush and much work to do with all the art objects from Italy that were at last arriving and being unpacked. He oversaw the casting of statues in bronze or plaster by Girolamo Ferrer, a craftsman who had been brought from Rome, and Domingo de la Rioja, a Madrid sculptor. And as for the new job, it aroused among the royal painter’s colleagues either envy (why weren’t they given the post?) or possibly—with a more perceptive few—a sympathetic or malicious feeling that Velázquez was going to have less time for his own painting.

  There had been six candidates for the post of aposentador mayor del palacio, chamberlain of the palace. The job involved looking after the royal quarters in the Alcázar and organizing royal journeys. The chamberlain had to see that staff opened the windows at certain times and that in winter rush mats covered the floors, and fires were lit. He supervised the king’s sitting down at dinner and scheduled his attendance at various diversions, at plays, balls, hunts. He had to arrange places for the king and his courtiers to stay when they traveled, and this meant seeing there were wagons to move chairs, tables, and beds, often across country, on difficult roads. A committee from the Bureo of the royal household duly considered the candidates, who included the ladies’ guardian and queen’s chamberlain, José Nieto, and cast their votes for them in order from most- to least-favored. Only one candidate had the backing of the entire committee, but did not win all the first-place votes. One of the Bureo, the Count de Montalban, said the desired candidate should be of graceful appearance and capable of making journeys; he thought Simon Rodríguez, the oldest competitor, was disqualified by not being able to count. In these circles “seniority” figured large, often judged by dates the courtiers had been sworn in. Velázquez was not the first choice of any. But it was Velázquez who got the crucial backing of the king. On February 16, 1652, Philip IV cut through the discord and wrote in his own hand a note to the effect that Velázquez was to be the new chamberlain: “Nombro a Velázquez.” “I appoint Velázquez.” He had gone extremely far in the king’s favor.

  Real work, real time, went into being aposentador mayor. Despite the implications of consequence in the title, much of the job required him to look after very ordinary tasks, seeing that sheets were washed and aired, making sure that the carpets were shaken out and floors swept. It was up to him to ensure the servants on the staff did their jobs properly. He took the oath of office on March 8, 1652; his salary according to one source was to be 3,300 reales per annum, though one wonders if he was also given for the occasion the words “Good luck getting it.” It was more than the average income of most of the nobles at the court. He also hypothetically did well with the annual sum out of which he was expected to pay his assistants. By 1660, for instance, he was notionally 3,200 ducats to the good, twice what he was owed. In a country where the crown was often bankrupt (as it was again in 1653) it was important to keep oneself in the black, ahead of the bailiffs. He was working in a time of constant financial crisis. Things were particularly bleak in September 1656, a time with a great shortage of food in the palace. In October 1659 there was no money for firewood, and next the sweepers and cleaners went on strike since they hadn’t been paid. As chamberlain, Velázquez had overall charge of renting out shops on the ground floor of the palace, around the courtyards, another source of income for him. When his granddaughter Inés married an Italian in 1654, as a special favor for her dowry the king gave Velázquez a post with the Naples city council, valued at twelve thousand silver ducats. Another perquisite for the painter was a large four-story apartment in the Casa del Tesoro, the Royal Treasury, in the eastern wing of the Alcázar, that the king told him to move into in August 1655. Given all the pesky anxieties his chamberlainship involved—the juggling with cash, the overdrafts, the staff management, the marshaling of what would now be called “human resources,” and the need for blandishments and for a frequent firm line—it’s amazing that he eve
n remembered what his first office at court had been, el pintor real. He was buried in the system, a mole—albeit one with an important title—burrowing along the corridors and passageways to rooms for which he had the official keys. Palomino recognized the good and the bad aspects of Velázquez’s rise in the household and saw that the office of chamberlain, while honorable, was “such an onerous one that it needs a whole man.”

  In many respects, as Palomino noted, the job of aposentador was a restriction of his talents, “more of a punishment than a reward.” The artist/art historian/curator shared the pride of those in the Spanish art world a generation later who were pleased Velázquez had been elevated to such a position, but regretted that they thereby lost “so many proofs of his rare ability that would have multiplied his gifts to posterity.” He painted fewer pictures in the 1650s than in any of the previous three decades. Nonetheless pictures did get painted, and were mostly of Philip’s family. Soon after getting back from Italy he made a portrait of the young queen Mariana (1634–96), the daughter of the emperor, Ferdinand III of Austria, and a replica was sent to Vienna for her father and mother (Philip’s sister Maria). Mariana wasn’t smiling. Did she suspect that these almost incestuous Hapsburg marriages of close relations weren’t for the best? She looks unhappy, standing rigidly, as Velázquez had told her to, in what seems to have been the agreed mode for these portraits, the body facing slightly right, the head turned slightly left, eyes fixed on the painter (why won’t he talk to her?), red-cheeked, right hand resting on a fabric-covered side table, left hand gripping a lace scarf or shawl that is draped over her voluminous skirt. The skirt is like a tent, round-topped, stretched over the frame of a farthingale. She was homesick for Vienna. The laughing teenager was soon borrowing her uncle-husband’s gloomy looks.