| PHILIP IV, OLD | VELASQUEZ |
| THE NATIONAL GALLERY | |
that to have once comprehended it should be to adopt it.
In the light of this distinction is Velasquez a naturalist or a realist? In his portraits, which represent his supreme achievement, is one conscious of anything but the absorbing realisation of an individual personality? Do we think of them as typical of their time and country, as are the subjects of El Greco’s portraits? Most certainly there is a great exception in the marvelous Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Behind his grim face extends a wide horizon of correlated ideas. The psychological revelation and universal suggestion of this portrait seem to declare that Velasquez was in mind a realist, but compelled by the circumstances of his life to be a naturalist. Tethered to the Court, he was chiefly occupied with painting the royal personages and their immediate entourage. His was a scene, closed in, like a stage-scene by the artificial routine of ceremony and punctiliousness, in which the puppets, from Philip down to his dwarf play-things, posed. How could a realist portray them in relation to the horizon of ideas involved except by making them contemptible or ridiculous? But his duty as a Court painter compelled Velasquez to close out the horizon, and to represent these individuals with as much of dignity as possible. It is a noteworthy fact that the Innocent X was painted during the artist’s second visit to Italy; while he was for a brief space quit of the cramped conditions of his life, able to look out on men and things and study them in relation to large issues. Also, the fact of it being his second visit and that he was in the full maturity of his powers, implies much. He was less preoccupied with individual impressions, more capable and disposed to view even the Pope himself in relation to the political and spiritual conditions of Rome and of the World.
But though Velasquez was compelled to be habitually a naturalist, he not only avoided the commonplace which so frequently attaches to naturalism, but proved himself the greatest naturalist in the whole story of painting. He lifted naturalism to its highest pitch of expression. His representations of life are characterised not only by living actuality, but by consummate justness, high distinction and extraordinary beauty. There is in all a union of mental supremacy and of supreme technical artistry. Perhaps only Rembrandt, Hals and Raeburn give one so realising a sense of being in the presence of a living personality, as we experience before nearly all the portraits of Velasquez. With Rembrandt we are usually conscious of an inseeing eye which penetrates the soul of his subject and views it in relation to a wide horizon; for Rembrandt is the great realist. Velasquez, on the other hand, shares with Hals and the Scottish artist their restricted vision; but his is the finer, suggesting his own finer quality of mind. Their minds were incapable of the high seriousness, the noble aloofness of his. Hals, seen at his best in the Haarlem groups, is one of the jolly fellows he is depicting; Raeburn, an honest, sturdy gentleman among the gentry who sit to him. Velasquez is always the aristocrat, looking out upon his subject from the elevation of a superior mental dignity. It was because of this that his portraits have the supreme cachet of all great art: aloofness. The separateness of his own mental personality from the ordinary thing around him is communicated to the personages which he creates. They are alone with themselves; whether monarch, dwarf or beggar, separated from the common touch by virtue of their author’s art. In their remoteness they are akin to Jan Van Eyck’s portrait of Jean Arnolfini and his Wife and Holbein’s George Gyze and Erasmus; but these have not the insistent suggestion of being actually alive. We recognise in them an extraordinary illusion of life; but in front of Philip IV in the National Gallery, of Moenippus and Las Meniñas in the Prado, not to mention other examples, the consciousness of illusion does not enter our thoughts. We are face to face with truth; “verdad, no pintura,” as Velasquez himself used to say was his ideal—“truth, not painting.” On the other hand, the truth is saved from being merely lifelike, obvious, by the rarifying quality of Velasquez’s own aloofness. His portraits quiver on the razor-edge of truth and abstraction.
We have spoken of their consummate justness. This represents another result of the high-bred nature of Velasquez’s mind; revealed in a tact of selection, exposition and arrangement. He had an unerring feeling for essentials, his most characteristic works being singularly sparing of detail; a cultivated instinct for the salient gesture and expression, and a rarely economical method of achieving them. His ability to plant a figure on the floor, so that it bears down with its own weight and grows up in its own strength; to give it characteristic action, at once unified and rhythmic; to invest its contour lines with firmness and precision as well as subtlety; to give to the smallest details, such as the modeling of a glove, an individual character and, finally, to adjust all these several qualities into an organized unity and place the ensemble in perfect relation to the open space it occupies—his ability to do all this is the measure of his justness.
To the high distinction of the result we have already alluded in speaking of its dignity and aloofness. It is the product, alike, of elevated mentality and of supreme technical accomplishment. The latter brings us in touch with the cause of its extraordinary beauty.
What does beauty mean to us? If it is beauty of face and form—the easy way to artistic beauty and to lay appreciation thereof—we shall seldom find it in Velasquez’s pictures. The people whom it was his lot to paint were mostly plain-featured, to use no harsher terms; their costumes outrageously extravagant and not in the direction of elegance; the coloring was sombre, only sparingly relieved with gaiety of color. Nor, for the most part, were they people of force of character or with suggestion of experience imprinted on their faces, so that in the interest aroused thereby, one could forget their homeliness. To be frank, they are mostly stupid persons, or at least apathetic. Whence, then, the beauty? Its source is twofold: in the artist’s vision of his subject and in his technical rendering of what he found.