The secret of an artist’s vision, when it is truly artistic, is that it is inspired by a feeling for beauty and is looking for beauty. He is not searching for something to represent, but for a means of expressing what
| EQUESTRIAN PORTRAIT OF PHILIP IV | VELASQUEZ |
| THE PRADO | |
he feels of beauty. To such a one as Velasquez it matters little what he is called upon to paint. He is not aware of those limitations which the ordinary man calls ugliness. To him the subject is a manifestation of life and life to him is beauty in every one of its aspects, and to render that beauty is sufficient. And you may say that he finds life and the beauty of life not only in the face and figure, action and gesture, of his subjects, but in the clothes they wear and the accessories that surround them. All are contributory to the sense of life with which the subject inspires him, so that he extracts from fabrics and objects of still-life a raciness of character or subtlety of expression that lifts them above the ordinary and gives them the distinction of beauty.
But, after all, it is not so much a question of extracting beauty from the subject as of putting beauty into it. The final achievement is one of technique. There are hundreds of pictures which a layman can admire without thought of technique. Interest of subject predominates, or at least is sufficient to establish interest; charm of sentiment attracts, or splendor of color or composition. But Velasquez’s compositions for the most part are studiously reserved; his color sober; scarcely the quiver of sentiment disturbs the equanimity of his subjects, and the latter, in the ordinary sense of the term, have no human interest. Such attractiveness, therefore, as they have, is almost completely what has been put into them by his technique.
Take, for example, the bust-portrait (p. 92) of Philip IV in the National Gallery, assuredly one of Velasquez’s most notable achievements. How languid the pale hair; the face, how foolishly prolonged, flabby and expressionless! Imagine it painted by a second-rate artist, and you would pass it by. But before this portrait you pause and linger long. Why? neither you nor I can tell; except simply that we are in the presence of the mystery of life, so that even this sallow, puffed face attracts and rivets our admiration. Even a painter cannot tell you how it was painted. Its technique eludes him. Yet it is the technique which holds him to the spot. He feels that here the mystery of living structure and tissue has been compassed by the mystery of the artist’s creativeness. Something of the same suggestion of spontaneously created plasticity is to be found in the beautiful child-portrait of Don Baltasar Carlos in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Usually, however, the means by which the effect is obtained may be discovered. You note the character expressed in some detail of the canvas; and then approach until you see the brush strokes that produced it, no less magical because patently apparent. In fact, you find yourself let in behind the scenes of the artist’s dramatic representation of facts and in a measure share the joy of creating the illusion.
It is a hopeful theory that out of one’s limitations may grow one’s greatest strength. And it is true of Velasquez. The very narrowness of his scope of actual vision encouraged a closer scrutiny. He discovered beauty in things which had escaped the notice of artists to whom larger liberty of choice was allowed. This is particularly revealed in his attitude toward color and light. The range of color-hues involved in the costumes of his royal sitters was restricted; blacks and greys prevailed, with occasional notes of rose or blue. Debarred from a variety of hues, Velasquez learned to see the variety of nuances which any one hue presents under the action of light. His blacks ceased to be merely the negation of color; they took on silvery hues, and sometimes brown ones. Even the bare drab wall of his studio became a field for the play of light. He grew to be an intimate student of the identity of the effects of light and color; noting how the “local hue” of an object varies in color-value according to the quantity, direction and quality of the light upon the various planes of its surface. Some artists before his time had noted this principle, but none until Velasquez and Hals—for it is a strange coincidence that the Dutch artist also was following this track—had given a practical application to it. Others had treated the local color, as if it were separate from chiaroscuro. They would model the form in monochrome and then spread their local hue over the whole in a thin transparent glaze which permitted the underpainting of shaded, half-shaded, and light parts to be seen through it. Velasquez actually modeled in the local color, by representing the differences of color-values that it assumed, according as the rise or depression of its surface caught more or less of light.
This, of course, is what other artists had done, notably Leonardo da Vinci in his Monna Lisa, Jan Van Eyck and Holbein in their portraits; but with a difference. They imitated each color-value as exactly as they could, modeling their surfaces with innumerable facets. Velasquez, like Hals, discovered for himself the principle of Impressionism; so far, at least, as this term is applicable to technical processes. For its meaning has become extended to include the artist’s mental standpoint, so that to-day, when we speak of an impressionist, we mean one who in literature, or drama, or painting or sculpture colors his impressions according to the moods of his temperament. But in Velasquez there is nothing of the temperamentalist. He is the cool, impartial observer of objective facts. But, instead of seeing them, as Holbein did, in the multiplicity of their detailed variations, he saw them in the large. Primarily, that is to say, he aimed, not at perfection of parts, but at a unity of ensemble. To secure this he sacrificed the less important to the more important; eliminated the unessential and emphasised the salient. His mental process was one of keen analysis, directed to the question of what was and what was not essential, and also to the study of the relative degrees of importance which the essentials bore one to another and the whole. The end in view was to make the ensemble, not only organically simple, but an organic unit.