CHAPTER IV.
VELASQUEZ, THE PAINTER OF MEN.—MURILLO, THE PAINTER OF ANGELS.—RIBERA, THE PAINTER OF INQUISITORS.—ZURBARAN, THE PAINTER OF MONKS.—GOZA, THE HOFFMAN OF SPANISH ART.—THE QUIETUDE OF THE GALLERIES.
E had come ostensibly to Madrid to see the works of Velasquez, and we carried out our intention, not glancing at, but really looking into and studying them as we study Homer, or Shakespeare, or Cervantes. The journey from London to Madrid is costly and fatiguing; but I advise any one to make it who is desirous of receiving a good lesson in art. I own that no one has taught me such a lesson on the largeness of it, the perfectibility of it, the ease of it. Velasquez’ work is simple creation, and that is the truth of it. Where will you find work like it? He was no poet like Murillo or Raphael. He sucked in no golden atmosphere that saints and seraphs breathe; he heard no music of the upper spheres, but he lived among ordinary men and women, and portrayed them, flesh and spirit, without an extravagance, without an idealism, without the hairbreadth of a deviation from the truth. Thus it happens that when you come away from his pictures, you forget the painter and the painting, and you remember only the subjects,—not elevated subjects, often quite the contrary, but æsthetically conceived by an intellect so unswerving, and touched with a hand so masterly, that they seem to “live, and move, and have their being.”
As has been truly said, “He drew the minds of men; they live, breathe, and seem ready to walk out of their frames. The dead come forth conjured up; we behold what written history cannot give—their actual semblance in life. His power of painting circumambient air, his knowledge of lineal and aërial perspective, the gradation of tones in light, and shadow, and colour, give an absolute concavity to the flat surface of his canvas; we look into space, into a room, into the reflexion of a mirror.” And elsewhere, “Aucun maître ne saisit comme lui un personnage pour le faire vivre, agir, respirer devant vous. En même temps, quelle tournure il lui donne! Comme il a le secret de cette fleur d’insolence et de ces belles rodomontades, dont à nos yeux l’hidalgo Castilien est le type!”
I suppose most people would prefer Murillo to Velasquez, because imagination is generally set on a pedestal above intellect. Murillo’s imagination is like an upsoaring fountain, ever sunny and ever luminous, whilst Velasquez did not dream, but reason. He is, indeed, the most logical of painters; and what makes his works so valuable to artists and lovers of art is the quality they have in common with the masterpieces of antiquity, and which has been well called the perfection of good sense. As a French author has said, “Velasquez écrit en prose, mais, pour le portrait, du moins, il est le premier des prosateurs.”
The Museo of Madrid contains more than sixty pictures of this great master,—the Voltaire of art, who tried his hand at everything and succeeded in everything,—portraits, landscapes, historic subjects, animals, interiors, flowers, fruit. There is nothing he left untried excepting the marine. It is quite astounding with what nobility he treated ignoble subjects, such as dwarfs, beggars, dull Infantas, and kings with “the foolish hanging of the nether lip,” painting all to the life; for though Velasquez was a courtier and a court-painter, he never flattered his royal patrons one iota. He treated ignoble subjects nobly, that is, faithfully, seeing and respecting in dwarfs, beggars, and foolish Infantas and kings, the same humanity that he saw in such lofty, stately Spaniards as he has elsewhere given.
Study one of Velasquez’ greatest pictures as a whole, as a creation in fact, and then set yourself to look into the manner of it, how much remains still to marvel at and admire. Moratin said, “Velasquez knew how to paint the air;” and nothing is more striking in his pictures than this clear, palpable, sunny atmosphere; one seems to breathe in it, and not in that of the galleries.
But when you have made this discovery, you will make others no less striking. Take, for instance, his colouring. Perhaps no painter ever employed fewer colours than he; he is as sparing of bright tints as a classic writer in the use of similes, yet his pictures glow with life and are perfect miracles of harmony and truth to nature. His painting has been well compared to a stately gentleman who maintains in his conduct, his actions and his words, a perfect and dignified equilibrium, and who avoids loud laughter or talking, or anything that might disturb the general harmony of his bearing and appearance.
His work, indeed, resembles his life, which was courtly, dignified, and complete. Though a courtier, he kept intact his pure manners and morals, his kindly nature, and his passionate love of art. All that is known of him redounds to his honour, from the period of his early youth, when he worked in the studio of Pacheco, and by his fine qualities of heart and brain won his master’s affection and the hand of his master’s daughter, to the fatal journey to Irun in 1660, where he brought on his death by overworking himself in preparing the ‘Ile de Faisans’ for the Infanta’s marriage. Of all noble Spaniards, hardly Cervantes seems to have been nobler than he.