Velázquez must have felt gratified. The portals of the aristocracy were finally opened for him. However, everything was not yet quite done and dusted. An inquiry had to be conducted into his lineage before an investiture was performed. Under the Hapsburgs, knighthoods for painters weren’t unachievable but they also weren’t common: Titian and Rubens were exceptions. Apart from the matter of proving the purity of one’s blood and the nobility of one’s ancestry, there was a further sticking point: the rather obvious fact that most painters weren’t amateurs; they worked with their hands; they painted for a living, and this down-to-earth artisan- or tradesman-like behavior was inadmissable. How do you get around that?
Velázquez acted as smartly as he could. He wrote for the Council of Military Orders a genealogy of his family “in his own hand.” He then steered the two examiners for the Order of Santiago who had been appointed by the council toward the place in Portugal where, he said, his paternal grandparents—Diego Rodríguez de Silva and María Rodríguez—had come from. That was in Porto, in the north of the country. He claimed his maternal grandparents were Juan Velázquez Diaz de Rojas and Catalina de Zayas, both natives of Seville. (In fact, his parents’ marriage certificate gave his mother’s mother’s name quite clearly as Juana Mexia—not Catalina de Zayas, the daughter of Andrés de Buenrostro.) In early October 1658 the royal recorder (and old friend of Velázquez) Don Gaspar de Fuensalida put up three hundred silver ducats for the inquiry expenses. The examiners took over a month looking into the family’s Portuguese roots. Seventy-five people were interviewed, though well north of Porto, in Galicia, with a number saying they knew nothing about Velázquez’s paternal grandparents and a few remembering only a little. The investigators couldn’t cross the border because Spain and Portugal were at war and only vague accounts of the Silvas were picked up. There was a good deal of hearsay evidence to the effect that the grandparents were of noble and Old Christian stock, with no impurities of blood, Jewish or Moorish; they hadn’t worked with their hands or in any low occupation. (The New Christians were Jews who had converted to Christianity, either willingly or under duress, and had blood that was by no means pure, clear, or good. The conversos were also called marraños, which meant swine.) Moving on to Madrid, the examiners listened to the testimonies of another twenty or so witnesses, some of whom were painters. Now was the time for old friends to stand up and be counted. Francisco Zurbarán, also from Seville, said he had known Velázquez for forty years and believed the Velázquezes were people of high standing and the Silvas came from northwest Portugal. Alonso Cano, who had been an apprentice of Pacheco’s alongside Velázquez, a court painter in Madrid from 1638 to 1644, and godfather to Velázquez’s granddaughter Inés del Mazo, stoutly maintained that Velázquez’s parents were nobles, of untainted blood, properly married, and so on. He also testified (black is white, white is black) that he had “never heard that Velázquez exercised the craft of painter, nor that he ever sold a picture; he only practised his art for his own pleasure and in order to obey the King, for whom he decorated the Palace, and at whose court he fulfilled many honourable duties.” Jerónimo Muñoz, a knight of Santiago, claimed that Velázquez hadn’t taken the examination to become a master painter; he evidently painted for a hobby. Brushed under the carpet, apparently, were his many payments for freelance work and fees received for paintings done for the king.
Next came Seville itself, the hometown. There some fifty witnesses declared that Velázquez’s maternal and paternal grandparents were hijosdealgo—from the lower nobility—and of clean blood. Velázquez’s noble rank could be validated by showing that he sprang from people who were exempt from the meat tax. This particularly regressive levy favored the high born and well connected, in other words nobles, clerics, officers of the Inquisition, and holders of university degrees, not ordinary folk. The family tree Velázquez had provided, giving his grandparents’ names and showing his maternal great-grandfather as one Andrés de Buenrostro, was checked with the city council meat-tax registers and declared to support the painter’s claim. The examiners then went on to look at the records of San Pedro church, where the future painter or royal decorator had been baptized as a baby, and they confirmed his legitimacy.
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WITH WHAT COLLUSION we are forced to guess, but wool was being pulled over many eyes. Velázquez or his lobbyists were going in for identity fraud on a considerable scale, especially on the maternal side of his ancestry. His mother’s father was, as noted, Juan Velázquez Moreno, the hose and trouser maker, not Juan Velázquez Diaz de Rojas, and his true maternal grandmother was Juana Mexia Aguilar, not Catalina de Zayas; the names of both Juan Velázquez Díaz de Rojas and Catalina de Zayas, both real people, now dead, had been plucked into use presumably because they met the meat-tax exemption rule or had names that suggested links with nobility. “Andrés de Buenrostro” was similarly sequestrated; he was not Velázquez’s great-grandfather. Kevin Ingram, the scholar who has exposed this deception in detail in the Bulletin of the Prado, adds: “Velázquez has lied about the paternal side of his family, too.… His paternal grandfather was merely a Rodríguez”—and not a “de Silva” as Velázquez had claimed, borrowing that name from his paternal grandmother in hopes, it would seem, of impressing the investigators of his noble links, going back to a misty Alba Longa, the legendary mother city of Rome. Ingram writes that the investigators for the Council of Orders failed to check the records of the marriage of Velázquez’s parents; this would have brought into the open too much of the truth. Velázquez had petitioned Philip IV to have the investigators do their research work in Madrid, not on the Spain/Portugal border. Ingram concludes, “The painter was lying through his teeth; so too were the two investigators and all those witnesses who had stated that he was an hidalgo. Velázquez was not from a noble background.” He believes that before his father got into the protective atmosphere of a cathedral office handling wills and estates, much of Velázquez’s family was in the rag trade. One reason Velázquez’s parents were less in view, once their oldest son was in Madrid, may have been to protect him from searching scrutiny about his ancestry.
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THE COUNCIL OF Orders had had in the past to put up with a lot of heavy persuasion from both the crown and its ministers when candidates for chivalric distinction were being presented. A number of great families including those of Medina Sidonia and Olivares had Jewish connections that they kept quiet about. At the request of Olivares, Philip IV handed out many a title, making many a duke, count, and marquis. The Order of Santiago had swollen from 242 caballeros in 1557 to 957 in 1625, and the rate of increase continued to grow under the count-duke’s regime. Bankers became counts. The legal and banking professions harbored a number of conversos, many of them at court. One such was Manuel Cortizos, an accountant in the royal tax office and a city magistrate, who was often seen among the courtiers at the Buen Retiro; he was one of Philip IV’s chief creditors. (In the 1680s Don Ventura Dionis—whose uncle had been an elder of the synagogue in Amsterdam—acquired the title of marquis from the Spanish king for 50,000 écus; his father had allegedly paid more for the Order of Santiago.) Many conversos had been caught out by the council’s regulations; many a bribe was paid to sweeten the procedure and ensure a happy outcome. But the Inquisition had hardened its stance toward conversos after 1640. In 1653 a number of Sevillians were condemned as Jews, many of them of Portuguese extraction. Did Velázquez recall hearing in the Pacheco circle of the poet Ibn Sahl, a converted Jew who died in Seville in 1251? He was said to have drowned himself in the Guadalquivir so that, in his own words, “the pearl might return to its native land.” Many people who had been Jews or were descended from converted Jews in Spain had become humanists, poets, and scholars, like the sixteenth-century author of La Celestina, Fernando de Rojas, a lawyer who was also mayor of Talavera, or Luis de León, a monk and poet from Salamanca, who was locked up by the Inquisition for five years. In the seventeenth century, many Jewish converts of Portuguese origin fl
ed from Spain to Amsterdam where they went back to practicing their old religion, leaving their children to run their Spanish businesses under whatever cover they could find. However, a public relations exercise took place on behalf of Velázquez; in 1659 a courtier named Lazaro Diaz del Valle published an essay on the noble art of painting that mentioned Velázquez as a prime example del nobilissimo arte.
The council received its investigators’ report on the Velázquez case in late February of that same year and at the beginning of April delivered its verdict. Velázquez’s “purity of blood,” his limpieza, met the councillors’ test—there was no evidence, they said, that his family had Jewish or Moorish connections. But the meat-tax exemptions were insufficient on that score; they didn’t satisfy the council as to the blueness of Velázquez’s blood. He had therefore failed to prove that his family had noble origins. Further strings would have to be pulled if he was to gain entry into the coveted Order of Santiago. Palomino some years later suggested that Velázquez was held back because of the jealousies rife at court. The artist himself was not an envious sort, Palomino claimed. Palomino recalled the occasion on which the king told Velázquez that there were people who said his skill was limited to an ability to paint heads, and Velázquez had replied, “Sire, they favour me greatly, for I don’t know anyone who can paint a head.”
The Council of Orders had evidently not received any kickbacks on this occasion. The king was told a papal dispensation would be needed. So the Vatican was approached, and the pope, now Alexander VII, issued the necessary approval on June 9, 1659. After that, when the Council of Orders was still unhappy about Velázquez’s purported lineage, the king ordered the Marquis of Távara to convene a special meeting of the Council of Orders, despite it being a holiday. A further dispensation or stroke of the whitewash brush was called for. The ambassador in Rome, Luis de Guzmán, was told to apply to the pope for the necessary exemptions; these attempted to ensure total compliance by naming all four Velázquez grandparents as proved noble. And Philip—who by then seems to have had enough of this protracted finagling—told the Council of Orders that Velázquez had no impediments. The king declared, stoutly, “I am certain of his nobility.” Velázquez was therefore at last, by royal command, an hidalgo. The council conferred on him the title of knighthood on November 27, 1659, and a day later Velázquez was installed in the Order of Santiago.
The ceremony took place in the convent of Corpus Christi in Madrid. It was Saint Prosper’s Day, the saint after whom the newest young heir to the throne was named, and—everyone hoped—a day of good omen. Velázquez received the costume of the order from the Count de Niebla. As a result of the artist’s long career in the service of the crown, he was exempted from various onerous regulations of the order that most knights had to fulfill, such as the payment of certain taxes, naval service in the royal galleys, and the performance of religious duties in the order’s convents. A year or so later the red cross of the Order of Santiago was painted on the black court uniform that Velázquez wore in his picture of the royal family, Las Meninas. It was traditionally said that Philip IV added this cross on Velázquez’s chest with his own hand. Whatever the truth of that, the pintor del rey had made his supreme transformation.
We can more easily go along with Ortega’s statement in The Revolt of the Masses that nobility was not simply a matter of inheriting noble blood, but of having qualities that set the concerned person apart from “the anonymous mass” because of an evident excellence and display of effort. “The noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life,” wrote Ortega. To the Spanish mind the highest ideals of the time were honor, faith, and heroic action. On a less lofty level, Cervantes speaks on the subject of chivalry. The curate in Don Quixote says to the landlord of an inn, “You may put up your books”—that is, romances about knight-errantry—“and believe them true if you please, and much good may they do you. But I wish you may never halt of the same foot as your guest Don Quixote.”
“There’s no fear of that,” says the innkeeper, “for I never design to turn Knight-Errant, because I find the customs that supported that Noble Order are quite out-of-doors.”
Don Quixote himself admits elsewhere that things aren’t easy in the knight business, in which he has been arduously, indeed quixotically, pursuing archaic glories: “I do not know yet what success I may have in chivalry in these deprav’d times.”
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ONE FURTHER NOTE in the saga of Velázquez’s knighthood, which he acquired by hook and by crook. Despite the disclaimers, he was obviously a professional painter who had made a living from a position (for which he was not always promptly or overtly paid) in the royal household—a position that had been achieved because he was a painter, the king’s painter. But on his behalf, though it was not made much of as a qualification for the honor of knighthood, I believe one should remember his famous temperament. That is, his phlegm and prudence, which Philip remarked on from time to time, in his ineffective letters of recall from Italy and in an audience with Gaspar de Fuensalida that Palomino cites. Velázquez got ahead at court without being pushy. Similarly, his paintings made their effect without conspicuous striving. There was an element of coolness in them and of the disdain referred to earlier. The fact that Velázquez didn’t go overboard or get improperly, plebeianly mixed up with his pictures was regarded as a high virtue by some and by others as a fault—those for instance who were unhappy at not getting more of an erotic frisson from the Rokeby Venus. The distance that Velázquez puts between himself and his subjects wasn’t simply a matter of using long-handled brushes. In modern parlance, Velázquez was cool. As the modern American painter Fairfield Porter has nicely put it, “He leaves things alone.” He always takes a step back from the canvas to glance again at the person or persons posing for him. His use of paint was equally unexplosive, registering on the low side of the artistic temperature scale. The late-nineteeenth-century Scottish art writer R. A. M. Stevenson talks of Velázquez’s “unaccountable taste for certain cold harmonies, of a restrained kind, turning upon black and gray.” There is nothing hotheaded about Velázquez’s art. He is “wary of engaging,” writes Svetlana Alpers, stressing “the pacific character of Velázquez’s art, its avoidance of confrontation.” Roger Fry, early in the twentieth century, in an essay on the Seicento, compared Caravaggio and Velázquez: the former combining melodrama and photographic realism; the latter also transposing mythology into the surroundings of peasant life but—unlike Caravaggio—with “distinction, detachment and scrupulous reserve.” All in all, I think we can grant Velázquez his nobility not on grounds of meat-tax exemptions or ancestry but simply because of the sort of painter he was, self-possessed, thoughtful, and (Spinola’s abbreviated embrace in mind) supremely empathetic.
XV. THE ISLE OF PHEASANTS. BISCAY AND MADRID. 1660
All this time throughout Philip’s reign a war was going on somewhere in the Spanish empire. Velázquez would have been physically close to one of the areas of fighting in Fraga, on the border between Aragón and Catalonia, where the Reapers’ War, an insurrection within the war with France, went on for more than a decade. Indirectly he was aware of the conflict in the Low Countries whenever he thought about Breda. As we’ve seen, the city had been back in Dutch hands since 1637, after another siege, this time of only four months, conducted by Prince Frederick Henry. At that time Philip’s brother the cardinal-infante had ill-advisedly shifted the king of Spain’s army away from fending off the Dutch in order to take on the French elsewhere, and the Stadholder had seized his chance to encircle Breda. Then in May 1643 the veteran but threadbare Spanish Army of Flanders was routed by Condé’s men at the Battle of Rocroi. Spain’s hopes of regaining its dominions in the northern provinces slipped away—forever, as the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia indicated. Thereafter the arts of peace were to the fore in the United Provinces as far as Spain was concerned, and this wasn’t necessarily good for business. The Dutch army was halved in size by 1650. Fewer soldiers meant fewer customers i
n shops and taverns; the States’ income from beer excises slumped. Johannes Vermeer’s uncle, a Dutch military supplier, went bankrupt within two years of the 1648 peace as less food and forage were needed. But the Spanish empire, that widespread multinational organization, was unable to take advantage of the cessation of pressure from the Dutch. Getting an army together to put down the rebellious Portuguese proved to be an impossible task; Portugal remained outside the Hapsburg fold from that time. And France, with whom a war had been going on since 1635, presented no chance for Spanish military glory.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 23
