Velázquez's paintings of the 17th-century Spanish nobility, on show in a major London exhibition, retain immediacy due to their timeless humanity, writes Aidan Dunne
In 1623, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez received an offer he could not refuse. It was an offer that brought him, as a young provincial painter, into the heart of the Spanish court, where he was to remain in fruitful employment for the rest of his life. Routinely described as the greatest painter Spain has produced, Velázquez was little known beyond the Iberian peninsula until the 19th century.
Most of his output took the form of portraits of the Spanish court, executed with quiet, unshowy expertise and remarkable empathy and perception. Not surprisingly, the Prado in Madrid boasts by far the best collection of his work, but London's National Gallery houses nine of his paintings, more than enough to form the kernel of its current outstanding Velázquez exhibition, which also includes a huge number of impressive loans, including that of our own National Gallery's Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus.
Velázquez was born in 1599 in Seville, where his grandparents, originally from Portugal, had settled. He apprenticed as a painter from an early age, finding a position with the progressive Francisco Pacheco. Pacheco emphasised intellectual accomplishment as much as manual skill and Velázquez was introduced to a wide range of learning, including aspects of humanist thought. Working as an independent artist from 1617, he married Pacheco's daughter, Juana de Miranda, the following year. His early paintings are low-key, naturalistic works that take the prevalent style of tenebrismo, characterised by inky darkness and a certain gritty quality, and somewhat mitigate its tendency towards gloomy theatricality. He is a tonal painter, but one who eschews the use of glaring contrasts to ratchet up the melodrama. Rather he anchors his subjects to a ground of muted mid-tones, inflecting towards highs and lows sparingly, almost reluctantly. A slow worker, he slows things down within his paintings as well.
A year after Velázquez's first foray to Madrid he was appointed as a court painter and returned to the city. It is generally accepted that the ebullient Count of Olivares, a Sevillian and acquaintance of Pacheco, and the power behind the throne, won him his position. But when he came into contact with Philip IV, then only 18 years old, the two hit it off. Philip so approved of his first portrait likeness that Velázquez became his exclusive portraitist. The artist became much more than the king's painter, however. He seems to have been a friend and confidante of the monarch, and he achieved other official positions at court, positions that cost him considerable time and energy but brought him prestige and financial security. Eventually he took on the role of curator and decorator and was ennobled by Philip - not without dissent within the establishment. All the evidence suggests that Velázquez relished and actively sought his official status.
His role as king's painter means that he compiled an episodic biography in portraits of the increasingly ill-starred Philip and his family. Among the misfortunes Philip faced were a succession of wars and rebellions and the deaths of his first wife, Isabella, and their son, the Infanta Baltasar Carlos (the subject of a masterpiece of equestrian portraiture by Velázquez), and many others. The portraits are painfully informative of the king's sagging spirits. At one stage he noted in a letter that he could not bear to submit to Velázquez's "phlegmatic temperament".
IT IS SURELY an exaggeration to say, as is often said, that Velázquez was a virtuosic painter from the beginning. Chronologically, there is huge development in his work. There is real awkwardness early on. To take a case in point: he struggles to reconcile the components of his paintings within paintings, as in Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus. The composition is dominated by a view of the servant at work in the kitchen; through a window we see the notional religious subject on a diminutive scale. But the two elements are jarringly combined. A postmodernist would say that he disrupts the conventionally seamless narrative of pictorial illusionism. The device, by no means unique to Velázquez at the time, is echoed by the contemporary painter Sean Scully in his use of inset panels in his paintings, which are, in a more general sense, very much in sympathy with Velázquez's sombre sensibility.
Peter Paul Rubens was one of the main agents of Velázquez's development as a painter. A fellow court artist, the larger-than-life Rubens arrived in Madrid from Antwerp late in 1628 on a diplomatic mission. He and Velázquez shared a studio for some months and evidently gave a great deal of attention to the Venetian paintings in the royal collection. At Rubens's behest, Velázquez became convinced that he should travel to Italy and, with Philip's approval, did so, visiting Genoa, Venice, Rome and Naples between 1629 and 1631.
This time in Italy, and a subsequent sojourn there 20 years later, when he painted what some regard as the greatest portrait ever made, of Pope Innocent X, stand out in a life spent largely within the confines of the court, bar a few official excursions with the king. He was well able to take on the kind of large-scale subject paintings that some of his contemporaries criticised him for avoiding, but arguably he seems all the more immediate a talent to us today because we can so easily relate to the humanity of his portraits. Apart from the royal family, brilliantly portrayed from infancy to old age, and the attendant nobles, his subjects in a series of astonishingly good paintings include the court dwarves and fools.
The Toilet of Venus, or The Rokeby Venus, a jewel in the National Gallery's crown, and one used extensively in publicity relating to the exhibition, is unusual in Velázquez's output in that it is his only surviving female nude.
Sadly so, given its amazing quality. But then the nude was a controversial genre in Counter-Reformation Spain. It was either not permissible at all or permissible only in a highly moralised context, piously removed from sensuality and sexuality. Yet the Alcazar had on its walls many paintings depicting the nude. Some historians argue that Velázquez, as the king's painter, would have been exempt from the normal strictures. In any case, his Venus is problematically sensual and human and - shades of Jan Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring - it is even possible that the painting coincides with a love affair on which he embarked while in Italy.
To see his work first-hand is to realise that the mature Velázquez is a daringly optical painter. That is, rather than laboriously reconstructing an external reality within the idealised framework of a perspective cage, he paints appearances, anticipating the French realist and Impressionist painters who later claimed him as a precursor. In his own lifetime his striking technique was the cause of much comment. Observers noted that, while they came across as full and accurate representations from the middle distance, up close his canvases dissolved into a blur of abstract markings.
When he set out to depict the elaborate embroidery of Philip's costume in a superb portrait of the 1630s, Velázquez did not, as a Renaissance artist would have done, recreate the detailed pattern of needlework, creating an image of enhanced, heightened reality. Instead, with apparently casual flicks of his brush, he captures an impression of the costume, how it appears to the eye. The effect is startling in that, while it looks entirely convincing, on closer examination it is as if the image simply dematerialises. This is not to imply that he was indifferent to spatial accuracy. He is generally thought to have used some form of camera obscura as an aid in several works, including his most famous surviving painting, the epic Las Meninas.
THE SIGNIFICANT ABSENCE in the exhibition is the Prado's Las Meninas, in which Velázquez himself appears at work, painting a portrait of the royal couple while the Infanta Margarita looks on, although it is difficult to figure out if that is exactly what is happening in the painting. The labyrinthine complexities of this work, in terms of both pictorial construction and narrative interpretation, have spawned an entire scholarly industry, not to mention many explicit artistic homages. Critical theorists are excited by the impossible optics instituted by the various viewpoints implied in the composition, historians debate the psychological meanings of the various relationships between the dramatis personae.
The ambiguities built into the painting help to ensure that it remains a source of fascination. When he died, quite suddenly, while still extremely busy, at the beginning of August, 1660, Velázquez left many such mysteries. Is the canvas he depicts himself painting in Las Meninas, for example, a real or an apocryphal work? There is speculation that it is a missing, large-scale double royal portrait. Yet, regardless of the riddles and conundrums about and within the work, we can appreciate Velázquez for what is glaringly obvious: the sheer quality of so many individual pictures, and his exceptional enrichment of European painting.
Velázquez is at the National Gallery, London, until Jan 21, 2007. For further details, tel: 0044-207-7475930 or see www.nationalgallery.org.uk