Velazquez courted nobles on canvas
By Tova Navarra
December 3, 1989

Queen Mariana was a sullen bride with a big nose, a slight underbite and a hint of jowls destined to become jowlier with age. Her expression retells the old story that money can’t buy happiness. There she is: elaborate jewels, magnificent dress and headdress, fashionably oversized handkerchief – and empty-eyed. Perhaps she was mourning the deaths of her first husband, Prince Baltasar, and his mother, or pouting over her marriage to King Philip of Spain in 1649, when he was 45 and she 15.
Interesting how an indisputably great piece of art can be somewhat annoying for its unappealing face and attitude. It’s a painting that may impress you for its subject but moves you for its uncanny technique. From human features to silver braiding, jewels and rich fabrics, Velazquez’s brushwork conducts a vigorous visual exercise.
Many historians consider the royal portraits – and they are frighteningly good – the height of Velazquez’s genius. These make up most of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of about 40 Velazquez paintings. Seventeen works traveled from the Museo del Prado in Madrid for the first time in the Prado’s history.
Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello said, “The very notion of a Velazquez exhibition is one that most of us have always dismissed as belonging to the realm of unrealizable dreams, so great and rare a painter is he. At least half of his paintings are in the Prado, and in the few other collections where they appear, they are so highly valued that their loan is seldom seriously envisaged.”
De Montebello added the Metropolitan’s recent collaborations with the Prado for Zurbaran, Goya and Caravaggio exhibitions nurtured the idea of a Velazquez show, including a possible extension of it in Madrid, where many of the artist’s works in the Metropolitan collection have never been seen.
“Of course, the three greatest masterpieces, ‘Las Meninas,’ ‘Fable of Arachne (Las Hilanderas)’ and ‘The Surrender of Breda’ cannot travel and the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan did not request their presence,” de Montebello said.
But just as “Queen Mariana” does not encompass all that makes Diego Velazquez of Seville the most celebrated artist of the Spanish school and one of the greatest painters of all time, the paintings that stayed home do not abrade the exhibit.
Rather, “Queen Mariana,” five portraits of Philip IV, “Don Diego del Corral y Arellano” and others, stand as historic spectacle and excellent examples of the 17th century royal Spanish portraits Velazquez did so intimately well as Philip’s court painter, a tenure that began when Velazquez was 24 and lasted the rest of his 61 years.
His royal portraits also lend some artistic sense to the fascination with royalty’s physical and emotional accoutrements that has endured to this day, to Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Fergie and the rest. But before Velazquez’s eye was monopolized by the court, it had tarried in local taverns and kitchens. His observances there gave forth the early bodegones, kitchen scenes, such as “An Old Woman Cooking Eggs,” “The Waterseller of Seville” and other works depicting humble people going about their chores.
When the young Velazquez painted contemplative but decidedly unroyal faces, peasant garb, a glass of water or egg whites just beginning to solidify in a hot pan, he brought out their sculptural beauty as though they were as noble as the nobles. (Perhaps at this point he embraced the compassion that was to emerge in his portraits of the cross-eyed “Don Juan de Calabazas,” who holds a pinwheel as a symbol of folly or madness, and dwarfs including “The Dwarf Francisco Lezcano, Called ‘El Nino de Vallecas.’” In all, Velazquez saw worth and dignity.)
His style, thereafter educated by meeting Peter Paul Rubens in 1628 in Madrid and influenced by trips to Italy to see Titian’s mythological paintings, became much freer, fluid, and cooler-toned. He abandoned the deep contrasting light and dark called chiaroscuro; he’d mastered Italian perspective, demonstrated in “Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob” and “The Forge of Vulcan.” His way with paint, especially his ability to unify foreground and background, eventually surpassed Rubens’ and Titian’s.
Given all this, what art would have been made had Velazquez – whom French Impressionist Edouard Manet called “a painter’s painter” – had total freedom and gone on painting whatever he pleased?
The main forerunner of 19th century French Impressionism, Velazquez may have found in his work a parallel to his contemporary Francisco  de Zurbaran’s sense of drama. Had he also been the seed of Francisco Goya’s sociological paintings of the 18th century? Or 20th century painter Joaquin Sorolla’s simple themes and voluptuous use of light? Certainly, velazquez’s sculptural realism peeked into the paintings of Salvador Dali and contemporary artist Heriberto Cogollo.
If nothing else, however, Velazquez has gained admittance to your kitchen, where you are cooking eggs. Assess the moment – the sizzle, the steam, egg white quivering in the skillet, the ration of stove-light needed because of a reluctant sun, your fingers clutching the spatula, tiles enduring tiny splatters, your jaw set as you concentrate, your slippered-foot stance. The artist considers all elements of a composition and sees the prevailing mood that unites them/ Velazquez was a master of mood.