But the painter still retained sufficient vitality to create a higher art, almost enigmatical, which is shown in the works of his last decade, an art so sublime that it has only recently been understood, and which finds perhaps its best disciples among the moderns.
After having painted at Rome in 1650 the portrait of the Doria Pope, preceded by the bust of Juan Pareja now at Longford Castle, and the study for the portrait of the Pope which is preserved in St. Petersburg at the Hermitage, Velázquez became one of the highest functionaries of the Spanish Court. Up to his death in the month of August 1660 he superintended the decoration of the Royal Palace. His official duties, which were quite foreign to the exercise of his art contributed greatly to limit the output of the painter. However he found means to take from his numerous and exacting occupations the time to create works such as the last portraits of the Kings and the Princes which we admire so much at Madrid; the second series of dwarfs, richer still and more marvellous than those that he had painted in his maturity and among which we must place the two characteristic figures of Aesop and Menippus which have nothing of the Greek and are in the last epoch of the painter’s life, what the painting of the Drunkards had been in the earlier; the two religious paintings of the Crowning of the Virgin and the Holy Hermits; the six mythological canvases, three of which perished in the burning of the Alcazar in 1734, but some of which happily remain in our national Museum, the Gods Mars and Mercury with Argus, and, in the National Gallery in London, the Venus with the Looking-glass, the attribution of which has been wrongly doubted; and finally the fine canvases of the Spinners and the Meninas the supreme monuments of a whole school, models of synthetic art, marvellous for the simplicity of their technique, the delicacy of their harmonies, and the study of values, paintings which, in spite of their modest appearance and lack of elaboration, are works of magic and sublime creations in which the painter betrays neither effort, weakness or fatigue.
Such was the genius who has conferred so much glory on Spain and who, with barely a hundred canvases, has exercised the most powerful influence over nearly all modern schools of painting.
The numbers at the foot of the illustrations, correspond to those in the official catalogue of the Prado Museum.
1
La Adoración de Los Reye
L’adoration Des Mages