"A work devoid alike of art and decency" (Modern Painters, vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. xiv. § 24). For the circumstances of its acquisition see above under 193.
197. A WILD BOAR HUNT.
Velazquez (Spanish: 1599-1660).
Don Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez was born at Seville of well-to-do parents—his father's name being Silva, his mother's Velazquez. His talent for drawing quickly showed itself, and when only twenty he married Juana, the daughter of his second master, Pacheco (his first being another painter of Seville, Herrera). Pacheco's house, says one of the Spanish historians, was "the golden prison of painting," and it was here that Velazquez met Cervantes, and obtained his first introduction to the brilliant circle in which he was himself to shine. In Pacheco's company he went in 1622 to Madrid, where he had influential friends, and next year he was invited to return by Olivares, the king's great minister. Olivares persuaded the king to sit to Velazquez for his portrait. The portrait was a complete success, and the painter stepped at once into fame and favour. This immediate success is characteristic of his extraordinary facility. "Just think," says Ruskin, "what is implied when a man of the enormous power and facility that Reynolds had, says he was 'trying to do with great labour' what Velazquez 'did at once.'" Velazquez shows indeed "the highest reach of technical perfection yet attained in art; all effort and labour seeming to cease in the radiant peace and simplicity of consummate human power"[109] (Two Paths, § 68; Fors Clavigera, 1876, p. 188). From the time of this first portrait of Philip IV. onwards, the life of Velazquez was one long triumph. He was not only the favourite but the friend of the king. He was made in succession painter to the king, keeper of the wardrobe, usher of the royal chamber, and chamberlain, and offices were also found for his friends and relations. He lived in the king's palace on terms of close intimacy, painting the king and his family in innumerable attitudes, and accompanying him on his royal progresses. When our Charles I., then Prince of Wales, visited Madrid in 1623, Velazquez painted his portrait, and figured in all the royal fêtes held in the English prince's honour. The Duke of Buckingham, it would seem, was also his friend, and Velazquez saw much too of Rubens, when the latter came on his diplomatic mission to Madrid. Rubens advised Velazquez to visit Italy, and in 1630 the king gave his consent. He travelled with recommendations from the king, and wherever he went—Venice, Ferrara, Rome, Naples—he was received with all the honours accorded to princes. His second visit to Italy was in 1648, when the king sent him to buy pictures with the view of forming a Spanish Academy. At Rome he painted the portrait of the Pope (Innocent X.), which made so great a mark that it was carried in triumphal procession, like Cimabue's picture of old. His royal master, however, became impatient for his return, and he hurried back to Madrid, after giving commissions to all the leading artists then at Rome. On his return he was given fresh honours and offices—especially that of Marshal of the Court, whose duty it was to superintend the personal lodgment of the king during excursions. It was the duties of this office which were the immediate cause of his death. He accompanied the king to the conference at Irun—on the "Island of the Pheasants"—which led to the marriage of Louis XIV. with the Infanta Maria Teresa. There is a picture of him at Versailles by the French artist Lebrun, which was painted on this occasion. The portrait, sombre and cadaverous-looking, was no doubt true to life; and when Velazquez returned to Madrid, it was found that his exertions in arranging the royal journey had sown the seeds of a fever, from which after a week's illness he died. Seven days later his wife died of grief, and was buried at his side.
Though Velazquez spent all his life, as we have seen, amongst the great ones of the earth, no trace of vanity or meanness is discernible in his character. Ruskin (The Two Paths, §§ 62, 65) connects his sweetness of disposition with the truthfulness which was characteristic of his art. "The art which is especially dedicated to natural fact always indicates a peculiar gentleness and tenderness of mind, and all great and successful work of that kind will assuredly be the production of thoughtful, sensitive, earnest, kind men, large in their views of life, and full of various intellectual power ... (One instance is Reynolds). The other painter whom I would give you as an instance of this gentleness is a man of another nation, on the whole I suppose one of the most cruel civilised nations in the world,—the Spaniards. They produced but one great painter, only one; but he among the very greatest of painters, Velazquez. You would not suppose, from looking at Velazquez's portraits generally, that he was an especially kind or good man; you perceive a peculiar sternness about them; for they were as true as steel, and the persons whom he had to paint being not generally kind or good people, they were stern in expression, and Velazquez gave the sternness; but he had precisely the same intense perception of truth, the same marvellous instinct for the rendering of all natural soul and all natural form that our Reynolds had. Let me, then, read you his character as it is given by Mr. Stirling (afterwards Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell): 'Certain charges, of what nature we are not informed, brought against him after his death, made it necessary for his executor to refute them at a private audience granted to him by the king for that purpose. After listening to the defence of his friend, Philip immediately made answer, "I can believe all you say of the excellent disposition of Diego Velazquez." Having lived for half his life in courts, he was yet capable both of gratitude and generosity.... No mean jealousy ever influenced his conduct to his brother artists; he could afford not only to acknowledge the merits, but to forgive the malice of his rivals. His character was of that rare and happy kind, in which high intellectual power is combined with indomitable strength of will, and a winning sweetness of temper.'" Nothing shows his character better than his treatment of Murillo, who came to Madrid, an unfriended youth, in 1640. Velazquez received him to his house, gave directions for his admission to all the galleries and for permission to copy, presented him to the king, procured him commissions, and offered him facilities for making the journey to Rome.
The chief characteristics of Velazquez's art have been already incidentally alluded to. "Rejecting all influences," says Sir Frederick Burton, "alike native and foreign, and following nature alone, he succeeded in imitating the true appearances of things as seen through the atmosphere that surrounds them, with a fidelity that has never been matched. Whatever he undertook to paint, whether the human face and figure, other animals, or landscape scenery, the result in his hands was a presentment intensely individualised, and yet, at the same time, suggestive of the type." Some modern writers claim the work of Velazquez as "impressionism"—a much abused and a very ill-defined term. Certainly Velazquez, like every other great artist, painted his impressions. But his sheet-anchor was fidelity to fact; and as for his technique, it was only by constant observation and practice that he attained that lightness of hand, that felicity of touch, by which his later work is characterised. For a painting of the master's earliest period, see 1375. The truthfulness of Velazquez had its reward, says Ruskin, in making him distinguished also amongst all Spanish painters by the sparkling purity of his colour. "Colour is, more than all elements of art, the reward of veracity of purpose.... In giving an account of anything for its own sake, the most important points are those of form. Nevertheless, the form of the object is its own attribute; special, not shared with other things. An error in giving an account of it does not necessarily involve wider error. But its colour is partly its own, partly shared with other things round it. The hue and power of all broad sunlight is involved in the colour it has cast upon this single thing; to falsify that colour, is to misrepresent and break the harmony of the day: also, by what colour it bears, this single object is altering hues all round it; reflecting its own into them, displaying them by opposition, softening them by repetition; one falsehood in colour in one place, implies a thousand in the neighbourhood.... Hence the apparent anomaly that the only schools of colour are the schools of Realism.... Velazquez, the greatest colourist, is the most accurate portrait painter of Spain" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. xi. § 8 n.).[110] It is curious that the influence of Velazquez was in his own time and country comparatively circumscribed. He exercised no such overpowering attraction as that of Leonardo, or Raphael, or Michael Angelo. The real followers of Velazquez are painters of our own day, and more especially the French painters of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and their imitators in the other schools of Europe and America.
A very interesting picture, both for the sparkling brilliancy of its execution and for the truth with which it reproduces the court life of the time. Philip IV. was as fond of the chase as he was of the arts; and here we see some state hunting-party in a royal enclosure (such as was arranged, no doubt, for the pleasure of our Charles I. when he visited Madrid), with an array of huntsmen and guards, and magnificent carriages for the ladies of the court. "The king has just thrown his horquilla very slightly sketched, but we at once recognise Philip IV. from the few touches suggesting his face; he keeps to the right, owing to the proximity of the ladies, and by him stands Olivares as equerry-in-chief.... In the second carriage is Queen Isabella. Occasionally the boars made tremendous leaps; hence the ladies are also provided with pitchforks to turn them aside. Moreover, two huntsmen with spears keep watch by the Queen's coach. The groups of spectators deserve minute study. They contain studies of costume and character enough for a scrap-book of "Castilian Types of the Seventeenth Century." Thus, notice under the tree on the right a peasant resting with elbows and chest on the patient back of his beloved ass—verily, another Sancho Panza! And those two rogues on the grass, one holding the water-jug to his mouth, look like a sketch by Murillo. The mendicant, again, in the brown cloak, both hands resting on his stick, is surely a privileged speculator, who solemnly invites the rich folk to increase their stock in the next world by entrusting their investments to him. Elsewhere is a rider slashing at the hard flanks of his obstinate mule, while his escudero shoves from behind; two cavaliers paying each other formal compliments; a group of experts in "dog-flesh" near the master of the hounds, thronging round the fine boar-hound, who has been ripped up by the quarry. Notice, too, the isolated group of cavaliers in grey and scarlet cloaks, with the clergyman, perhaps the "chaplain to the hunt." They stand apart from the scene, having more weighty matters on hand." "The figures do not seem very numerous, as they are scattered about without a trace of conventional grouping. Yet, even without the heads that are merely suggested, there are over a hundred figures, some sixty outside and fifty inside the central enclosure. Sir Edwin Landseer declared that he had never seen so much large art on so small a scale" (Justi's Velazquez and his Times, pp. 212-14). Notice especially the two splendid dogs near the left-hand corner. Velazquez is very great in painting dogs; he "has made some of them nearly as grand as his surly kings" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vi. § 13).
With regard to the execution of the picture (which was bought in 1846 and was alleged to have been damaged in cleaning), Ruskin wrote: "I have seldom met with an example of the master which gave me more delight, or which I believed to be in more genuine or perfect condition.... (The critic's) complaint of loss of substance in the figures of the foreground is, I have no doubt, altogether groundless. He has seen little southern scenery if he supposes that the brilliancy and apparent nearness of the silver clouds is in the slightest degree overcharged; and shows little appreciation of Velazquez in supposing him to have sacrificed the solemnity and might of such a distance to the inferior interest of the figures in the foreground.... The position of the horizon suggests, and the lateral extent of the foreground proves, such a distance between the spectator and even its nearest figures as may well justify the slightness of their execution. Even granting that some of the upper glazings of the figures had been removed, the tone of the whole picture is so light, grey, and glittering, and the dependence on the power of its whites so absolute, that I think the process hardly to be regretted which has left these in lustre so precious, and restored to a brilliancy which a comparison with any modern work of similar aim would render apparently supernatural, the sparkling motion of its figures and the serene snow of its sky"[111] (Arrows of the Chace, i. 58-60).
198. THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY.
Annibale Carracci (Eclectic-Bologna: 1560-1609). See 9.
The legend of the temptation of St. Anthony, here realistically set forth, is the story of the temptations that beset the ascetic. In the wilderness, brooding over sin, he is tempted; it is only when he returns to the world and goes about doing good that the temptations cease to trouble him. St. Anthony lived, like Faust, the life of a recluse and a visionary, and like him was tempted of the devil. "Seeing that wicked suggestions availed not, Satan raised up in his sight (again like Mephistopheles in Faust) the sensible images of forbidden things. He clothed his demons in human forms; they hovered round him in the shape of beautiful women, who, with the softest blandishments, allured him to sin." The saint in his distress resolved to flee yet farther from the world; but it is not so that evil can be conquered, and still "spirits in hideous forms pressed round him in crowds, scourged him and tore him with their talons—all shapes of horror, 'worse than fancy ever feigned or fear conceived,' came roaring, howling, hissing, shrieking in his ears." In the midst of all this terror a vision of help from on high shone upon him; the evil phantoms vanished, and he arose unhurt and strong to endure. But it is characteristic of the love of horror in the Bolognese School that in Carracci's picture the celestial vision does not dissolve the terrors.