THROUGHOUT the past Viennese winter, visitors to the
Kunsthistorisches Museum were able to enjoy the first exhibition
dedicated to Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) in the German-speaking
world, thanks to the generous initiative of the outgoing curator
Sylvia Pagden, for whom it was a farewell gift to the city after 25
years.
Richly supported by the collections of the Prado, that compact
exhibition has now been expanded to offer a French audience a wider
show with some 50 paintings by the master. Each exhibition has very
different catalogue essays and individual entries for the works on
display, and together the volumes combine to show the current state
of scholarship on art from the golden age of Seville, last fully
examined by Dawson Carr in his 2006 show for the National Gallery
(Arts, 24 November
2006).
It also includes pictures by Velázquez's teacher and later
father in law, Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644), and several of his
own pupils, among whom his later collaborator Juan Bautista
Martínez del Mazo (c.1612-1667) succeeded him at his death
in the important role as painter to the king (pintor de
cámara).
The exhibition occasioned the first state visit of King Felipe
VI of Spain and his wife to France, an event sadly cut short by the
Airbus A320 disaster, news of which broke as the royal party made
their way past the Grand Palais to the presidential palace.
The bare-tree-lined Avenue Champs-Elysées fluttered with the
tricolour of France and the Spanish bandera, visible signs
of nations now united in grief, whereas the exhibition was intended
to be a joint venture celebrating the best in European
co-operation.
More to the point, as the Louvre has no paintings by Velázquez,
perhaps the most signal gap in a Western art collection of any
great European gallery, the broad sweep of the exhibition is a
veritable treasury.
It isn't that the French have not tried. In 1905, Thomas Agnew
bought the so-called "Rokeby Venus" from the heirs of the North
Yorkshire estate for £30,500 and hawked it around several national
galleries for £45,000. The British government could not find the
money, and it was offered elsewhere for £60,000 (there is a moral
in this somewhere), a bid price that Agnew's favourably offered to
reduce to £55,000 if the Louvre bought it.
The winter of 1905-06 was spent in further haggling until the
recently established National Art Collection Fund in the UK was
able to buy it for the nation before the French could. The Trustees
have generously made the celebrated painting of a naked woman
available to both the Austrian and cross-Channel audiences.
Velázquez grew up in a densely populated city, the fourth
largest in Europe, after London, Naples, and Paris. The last of the
Moriscos were expelled from Spain by Philip III shortly before
Velázquez reached the age of ten, ending once and for all the
religious toleration that had characterised the city for five
centuries when it had been part of the Muslim world, from 712 to
1248. American money, in terms of the silver from New Spain
arriving at the Spanish entrepôt, and a flourishing port that
controlled monopolies had sponsored Seville's expansion in the 16th
century.
A cityscape published in Amsterdam in 1617 by Simon Wynhoustsz
Frisius and Johannes Jansionius, of which the British Library copy
on display is one of only two known to survive, shows a city that
was bristling with churches along the banks of the river
Guadalquivir, three of which defied being named and simply appear
marked as "St . . ."'.
Coming from a noble family, Velázquez unusually took up the
modest trade of painting, for which we can be truly thankful. Had
he remained in Seville, he would most probably have produced more
religious works, the stock in trade of most Spanish artists, such
as Zurbarán and Murillo.
In his working life, he produced possibly only a dozen
devotional paintings, of which half a dozen derive from his early
years in Seville, and the rest were executed in the capital between
the 1620s and mid-1630s. It is as if, once he was a successful
court painter, no one dared ask him for altarpieces
He was still a teenager, working in Pacheco's workshop, when he
painted his first two religious works, a St John on the Island
of Patmos and a pendant of the Immaculate Conception.
The latter is in the show, while the other remains in Trafalgar
Square. Both are thought to have been commissioned for the
long-destroyed Seville convent of the Shod Carmelites.
The doctrine of the immaculate conception, which was finally
accepted as an article of revealed truth in 1854, had been a
commonplace devotion in Anglo-Saxon England in the early 11th
century long before it was encountered at the papal court. The
Carmelites adopted it as part of their Marian devotion in the
founding constitution in 1294, and it was the Fratres Beatae Mariae
de Monte Carmeli who enlivened the devotion in the realms of the
Catholic Kings after the Reconquista.
Painting this Marian image in his future father-in-law's studio
around 1618-19, it is likely that Velázquez well knew the
devotional statuary of Juan Martínez Montañés, since Pacheco often
provided the polychrome for such statues. The statue on display
here, which is still in the parish church in Seville for which it
was commissioned in 1608/09, shows striking similarities in the
posture of the Virgin. As in the 2009/10 London exhibition "The
Sacred Made Real", they are placed side by side, and here make a
striking opening to the first of 12 galleries.
Thereafter, we get to see a recently recovered painting, The
Education of the Virgin, from the same period, which has been
found languishing in an attic store in Yale University. Although
not all critics accept that it is an autograph work, it shows the
young artist struggling to make sense of another's work, in this
case copying elements of a less well-regarded artist whose version
Pacheco had in fact criticised in his writing about art as out of
line with the tenets of the Council of Trent, which had stated the
need to portray "the Gospel truth" and nothing but the truth.
From a painting in the Mercedarian monastery in Seville by the
older Juan de Rolas (c.1570-1625), Velázquez borrowed a
side table with an open drawer covered with St Anne's trinkets,
spools of silk and a bracelet, and a rush basket containing freshly
laundered napery. At a later stage, the artist added the
unconvincing figure of St Joachim, returning with a basket of eggs.
No doubt the nuns of St Anne's convent in Seville were pleased with
the result.
That Velázquez became quite the master of still life is shown in
several vivid details that litter other early pictures; half an
orange with salt cod on a dish set between two diners in a tavern
(Budapest); a circular cheese box set in front of three musicians
from Berlin; and the crucifix lying on the chest of the queen's
dead chaplain, Fr Simón de Rojas. The Paris curators have
questioned this attribution and reassigned the work from Valencia
to his great court rival Vicente Caducho.
Juan Battista Maino (1581-1649) and Luis Tristán (1585-1624)
knew Caravaggio's first attempt at an altarpiece of St Matthew
writing the Gospel with the help of an angel, a work famously
refused at the time by the French Church in Rome, and copied the
stance of an apostle with legs crossed for their rendering of the
penitent St Peter. The influence of their paintings (The Louvre and
Poznań respectively) on the young Velázquez is evident in his
version (1623), a work that was widely copied at the time.
That Velázquez had learned about Caravaggism before his first
trip to Italy (1629) is evident in his St John in the
Wilderness (Arts Institute of Chicago), a work newly
re-attributed to him. Here, the handmaiden appears to be a painter
from Viterbo, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, who came to work in Toledo for
a couple of years in 1617.
At the age of 23, Velázquez moved permanently to the capital
where, largely as the result of Pacheco's introductions at Court,
he was appointed painter to the king in October 1623, two months
after sketching the future Charles I on his ill-fated trip to win a
Spanish bride for himself in Madrid.
The rest of the exhibition charts his increasing success as a
portrait-painter, both in Madrid and in Rome at the papal court
during his return visit there in 1650. The fortunes of Philip IV
and his family would scarcely be known now but for the powerful way
in which Velázquez produced iconic images, whether of the king
himself or of his children Baltasar Carlos, María Theresa, and
Margarita.
Alongside the full-length portrait of the scowling 76-year-old
Pamphilj pope Innocent X which Prince Jonathan Doria Pamphilj has
graciously loaned is that of his 30-year chamberlain Mgr Camillo
Massimo (National Trust) and another of the 34-year-old Camillo
Astalli-Pamphilj, the pope's adopted nephew, painted in the year
that he was raised to the cardinalate.
"Velázquez" is at the Grand Palais, Galeries Nationales, Square
Jean Perrin, Champs-Elysées, avenue du Général Eisenhower, Paris
8ème, until 13 July, open daily, except Tuesdays. Phone 00 33 (0)1
44 13 17 17. www.grandpalais.fr