Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

f. Velázquez

Antithesis even within the personal will of Isabel and her king. Isabel looks to Africa and the west. Mysterious horizons claim her. Africa is the home of Origen and Augustine—Berber Christians and true Spanish minds. America casts a parabola of search alluring to her mystic appetite. But Isabel is wedded to a man who looks toward Europe. The Aragonese king comes from the most assimilated part of Spain. In him, as in his realm, lives the spirit of Catalan, of European Trader. His hungers strain toward Italy and France. And this dichotomy within the will of the monarchs—Europe and the south, politics in Europe and high adventures across the western sea—is stamped upon the classic will of Spain. The concept of the State which Isabel and Ferdinand adapt is Europe. Louis XI and Machiavelli would have hailed it. The purpose of that State would have been better pleasing to Mohammed or Saint Paul. The spirit is Isabel’s and is accepted by her husband. But the form is Ferdinand’s and here his wife is disciple.

Now, of this division within the will of Spain, that term which is Europe finds a canon. Velázquez, better than the policy of the kings, better than the victories of their captains in Sicily and France, incarnates Spain’s desire to be Europe.

But here, too, irony is at work. Velázquez is the favorite painter at the Court of Philip IV. He lives at the Palace; he is sent on diplomatic missions. His career corresponds almost literally with the reign of his king. And this reign marks the rapid ebb of Spain’s affairs in Europe. Her will toward Europe has flung her power high into the north and clear across the Latin Sea. Now, while Velázquez molds that will into organic form, his king loses Portugal, loses the Netherlands, loses the Roussillon, half the Pyrenees, and faces insurrection in Barcelona, Spain’s European port.

The will of Velázquez’ art is objective form. Bodily substance becomes real. Man’s moods and passions in themselves suffice. They have their value not in some rapt design beyond man’s body or in employing it to mystic ends: the world of appearance is the world. Velázquez’ traits are traits of modern Europe. Mysticism disappears, both in immanent and transcendental form. The beauty of spiritual strain, so eloquent in Ribera, is replaced by the beauty of physical poise. The hot fluidity of El Greco which recalls the Prophets, the creative incompleteness of the Byzantines, becomes a static peace. In El Greco, as in all mystic art, the moving materials reach the immobility of form only through the focus of a world beyond them. But in Velázquez, there are no colors save those of face and fabric; there are no forms save those of the body. Velázquez is a realist in the restricted modern European sense. He is impressionistic and he is mechanistic. The vast autonomy of the subjective vision is renounced in him. He makes his eye a literal receiver of impressions: whereas the mystic eye (and the Spanish eye) has ever been a creator of expression.

This type of æsthetic will which, from the Renaissance to Courbet, is to reign in Europe wins perhaps its highest triumph in the alien Velázquez. What tribute to the energy of Spain! For this is not Spain, this is but a fragment. The vision yearning to become complete, the mystic marriage, the parabolic search, the lyric plaint, the ceaseless cante hondo, the arabesque which transforms words to body—these, too, are Spain: these are the virtues which create El Greco, Calderón, Lope, Ribera, Cervantes. Velázquez will have none of them. Velázquez will be wholly European. Europe, accepting the world of appearance as the entire world, pours all its energy to the creating of the immense material universe which is our shambles of the machine and applied science. Spain does not follow. But Velázquez leads.[23]

Velázquez was a great lover of El Greco. Manuel Cossío tells us that in his private chambers at the Palace, the court painter had works of the great mystic. His love and study of his antithesis helped to confine him within his own domain. In his religious subjects, Velázquez shows the direct influence—chiefly in composition—of El Greco. And in these works, the graphic might of Velázquez fades: they are the least of his pictures. Where Velázquez is great, El Greco is excluded: the younger man seems willfully to avoid what he must have felt should denature his æsthetic. And in this response, Velázquez achieves once more the miracle of Spain: the infusing of a part with an intensity and essence of the Whole. El Greco is Spain of Africa and of the Semites, Spain the High Priest of Rome, the mystic Spain. And Velázquez is Spain of Europe: the land of analytic grace, of luxuriant elaborations, of immense exclusions.

Spain’s craft goes far, when Spain resolves to be “efficient.” Study Las Hilanderas, Mercurio y Argos, the portrait of Margarita de Austria. This grace is the ecstasy of cool and obvious metals. It suggests the modern æsthetic of the Machine. Modeling and texture are composed of immediate masses which are self-sufficient. Neither in part nor in whole are they transmuted into the subjective. Or take the portrait of Mariana de Austria, Philip’s second wife. Of the woman there is naught save the weak face and the flat hands. But the black and silver gown is volumnear. Its fringes and its lace hold power that appears almost to be a symbol of this Court—this Court of Spain striving to hold a world within its forces.

The will of Velázquez, at least, does not falter. Las Meninas is forever a shut and earthly room. No glimpse here of the arcana of the soul, of the soul’s subtle modeling of arm and face. Think what El Greco would have done with that group: the royal family, the painter, the dwarf, the dog. How they would have flamed; how heaven and hell would have come in and metabolized these bodies!

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