 |
|
In 1621, Philip IV, a keen patron of the arts, moved the Spanish court and its superb royal art collection from Valladolid to Madrid, creating a new centre of royal activity and power. Velazquez was drawn to the possibility of furthering his career there, and in 1623 he entered the king's service as a court painter. Philip IV immediately admired the subtlety and perceptiveness of Velazquez's portraits (the prime minister, Count Olivares, commented that Velazquez was the first to paint a "real" likeness of the king). By 1628 Velazquez had become pintor de camara, the only artist allowed to paint the king's portrait, thus becoming Spain's most prestigious painter. From then on, Velazquez was engaged almost exclusively in documenting the lives of the royal family and court.
Philip IV's family were the last of the great but doomed Habsburg dynasty, severely weakened by inbreeding (Philip IV's second wife was his niece, Mariana of Austria). Velazquez painted them all during the following thirty years, king, queens, princes and infantas, with extraordinary sensitivity, sympathy and often poignancy. These royal portraits are neither pompous nor sycophantic; they manage to convey the tragedy and fragility of human beings trapped in "the gloomy, rigid and vacuous Spanish court where the sickly royal children stifled amid nuns, dwarfs and dogs. . . Velazquez has left a record of court life as terrifying as Saint-Simon's memoirs." (Michael Levey.) Certainly Velazquez acknowledges implicitly the cruelty of a social environment that caged women in horrifically uncomfortable, glittering finery during their waking hours, and exploited dwarfs and people with disabilities as curiosities and human playthings. Among Velazquez's most astute observations of human life are his portraits of court jesters and dwarfs, whose physical reality Velazquez neither ignores nor mocks, treating them as seriously as his royal sitters.
Velazquez was born in 1599 in Seville, a thriving commercial city with its own artistic identity. He lived and studied in Seville with the painter Francisco Pacheco, whose studio was at the centre of artistic and intellectual life in the city. Velazquez married his daughter Juana in 1618. Velazquez at first painted in the Seville tradition of bodegones, - realistic, closely observed studies of kitchen and tavern scenes, influenced by Flemish painting of everyday life. He gave the ordinariness of these an unusual significance and psychological intensity with dramatic lighting and sensitive use of colour and tone. His teacher wrote that these works were "deserving of the highest esteem. From these beginnings and in his portraits. . .he hit upon the true imitation of nature." In 1618 Velazquez painted the symbolic Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, creating out of a kitchen tableau a religious work full of meaning. Velazquez's innovative approach to the Christian theme is to let the ordinary kitchen people, rather than the biblical figures, dominate the scene.
In 1621, Philip IV, a keen patron of the arts, moved the Spanish court and its superb royal art collection from Valladolid to Madrid, creating a new centre of royal activity and power. Velazquez was drawn to the possibility of furthering his career there, and in 1623 he entered the king's service as a court painter. Philip IV immediately admired the subtlety and perceptiveness of Velazquez's portraits (the prime minister, Count Olivares, commented that Velazquez was the first to paint a "real" likeness of the king). By 1628 Velazquez had become pintor de camara, the only artist allowed to paint the king's portrait, thus becoming Spain's most prestigious painter. From then on, Velazquez was engaged almost exclusively in documenting the lives of the royal family and court.
page: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
