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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 met Rubens when he visited Madrid in 1628-9, and they both admired and studied the work of the Venetian artists in the royal collection at El Escorial. According to Velazquez's biographer, Palomino, Rubens "revived the desire Velazquez had always had to go to Italy", and he spent two years visiting Venice, Rome and Naples from 1629 to 31, absorbing lessons from Venetian colour and High Renaissance figure composition.
During the 1630s and 40s, Philip IV rewarded Velazquez's talents financially and with courtly honours. Velazquez's desire to achieve social superiority at court meant that he welcomed increasing responsibilities in the royal household. He was appointed to look after the royal art collection, and visited Italy again in 1648-51, entrusted with large sums of money to buy paintings and sculpture for the king's collection. In 1652 Velazquez became Aposentador Mayor de Palacio , supervising Philip IV's quarters and travel arrangements. During this time, despite his onerous court duties, Velazquez produced his best known works. Venus at her Toilet is Velazquez's only known female nude; the painting achieved an unusual significance in 1914 when the British suffragette Mary Richardson slashed it in the National Gallery as a political protest. Velazquez's most sublime and penetrating portrait, Pope Innocent X, was painted when he visited Rome in 1649; Las Meninas was completed in 1656.
Velazquez and Philip IV developed a close friendship (the king apparently had a key to Velazquez's studio, and escaped there often, as a distraction from affairs of state). The melancholy that permeates Velazquez's last portraits of Philip IV reflects the king's awareness of both waning Spanish political power and the frailty of his family line. The charming Habsburg children, whose budding personalities Velazquez immortalized so affectionately, lived pitifully short lives: only two of Philip IV's five children survived childhood.
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