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Diego Velázquez, in full Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, (baptized June 6, 1599, Sevilla, Spain—died August 6, 1660, Madrid), the most important Spanish painter of the 17th century, a giant of Western art.

Velázquez is universally acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest artists. The naturalistic style in which he was trained provided a language for the expression of his remarkable power of observation in portraying both the living model and still life. Stimulated by the study of 16th-century Venetian painting, he developed from a master of faithful likeness and characterization into the creator of masterpieces of visual impression unique in his time. With brilliant diversity of brushstrokes and subtle harmonies of colour, he achieved effects of form and texture, space, light, and atmosphere that make him the chief forerunner of 19th-century French Impressionism.

The principal source of information about Velázquez’s early career is the treatise Arte de la pintura (“The Art of Painting”), published in 1649 by his master and father-in-law Francisco Pacheco, who is more important as a biographer and theoretician than as a painter. The first complete biography of Velázquez appeared in the third volume (El Parnaso español; “The Spanish Parnassus”) of El museo pictórico y escala óptica (“The Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale”), published in 1724 by the court painter and art scholar Antonio Palomino. This was based on biographical notes made by Velázquez’s pupil Juan de Alfaro, who was Palomino’s patron. The number of personal documents is very small, and official documentation relating to his paintings is relatively rare. Since he seldom signed or dated his works, their identification and chronology has often to be based on stylistic evidence alone. Though many copies of his portraits were evidently made in his studio by assistants, his own production was not large, and his surviving autograph works number fewer than 150. He is known to have worked slowly, and during his later years much of his time was occupied by his duties as a court official in Madrid.

Sevilla (Seville)

According to Palomino, Velázquez’s first master was the Sevillian painter Francisco Herrera the Elder. In 1611 Velázquez was formally apprenticed to Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married in 1618. “After five years of education and training,” Pacheco writes, “I married him to my daughter, moved by his virtue, integrity, and good parts and by the expectations of his disposition and great talent.” Although Pacheco was himself a mediocre Mannerist painter, it was through his teaching that Velázquez developed his early naturalistic style. “He worked from life,” writes Pacheco, “making numerous studies of his model in various poses and thereby he gained certainty in his portraiture.” He was not more than 20 when he painted the Waterseller of Seville (c. 1620), in which the control of the composition, colour, and light, the naturalness of the figures and their poses, and realistic still life already reveal his keen eye and prodigious facility with the brush. The strong modeling and sharp contrasts of light and shade of Velázquez’s early illusionistic style closely resemble the technique of dramatic lighting called tenebrism, which was one of the innovations of the Italian painter Caravaggio. Velázquez’s early subjects were mostly religious or genre (scenes of daily life). He popularized a new type of composition in Spanish painting, the bodegón, a kitchen scene with prominent still life, such as An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618). Sometimes the bodegones have religious scenes in the background, as in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (c. 1618). The Adoration of the Magi (1619) is one of the few Sevillian paintings of Velázquez that have remained in Spain.

In 1622, a year after Philip IV came to the throne, Velázquez visited Madrid for the first time, in the hope of obtaining royal patronage. He painted a portrait of the poet Luis de Góngora (1622), but there was no opportunity of portraying the king or queen. In the following year he was recalled to Madrid by the prime minister, Count Olivares, a fellow Sevillian and a future patron. Soon after his arrival he painted a portrait of Philip IV that won him immediate success. He was appointed court painter with a promise that no one else should portray the king. Pacheco describes an equestrian portrait of Philip (lost) painted soon afterward, “all taken from life, even the landscape”; the portrait was exhibited publicly “to the admiration of all the Court and the envy of members of the profession.” The envy of fellow artists, who accused Velázquez of only being able to paint heads, is said to have been the occasion of the king’s ordering him to paint a historical subject, the Expulsion of the Moriscos (lost), in competition with other court painters. Velázquez was awarded the prize and the appointment in 1627 of gentleman usher to the king. Though he continued to paint other subjects, as court painter he was chiefly occupied in portraying members of the royal family and their entourage, and he painted numerous portraits of Philip IV during the course of his life. “The liberality and affability with which he is treated by such a great monarch is unbelievable,” writes Pacheco. “He has a workshop in his gallery and His Majesty has a key to it and a chair in order to watch him painting at leisure, nearly every day.”

Velázquez’s position at the court gave him access to the royal collections, rich in paintings by the Venetian Renaissance master Titian, who was to have more influence than any other artist on the development of his style. The full-length portraits of Philip IV (1626–28) and his brother the Infante Don Carlos (1626–27) are in the tradition of Spanish royal portraits established by Titian and are to some extent influenced by his style. In these portraits the detailed description and tenebrism of Velázquez’s Sevillian paintings have been modified; only the faces and hands are accentuated, and the dark figures stand out against a light background. In his later court portraits, Velázquez was to adopt something of the more elaborate decor and richer colouring of the Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens, whom he met during the latter’s second visit to the Spanish court, in 1628. Pacheco tells how Rubens praised Velázquez’s works very highly because of their simplicity. Velázquez’s painting of Bacchus, The Feast of Bacchus (1628–29; also known as Los borrachos ), seems to have been inspired by Titian and Rubens, but his realistic approach to the subject is characteristically Spanish and one that Velázquez was to preserve throughout his life.

First Italian journey

Velázquez’s visit, with Rubens, to see the famous paintings in the royal monastery of the Escorial, near Madrid, is said by Palomino to have aroused Velázquez’s desire to go to Italy. Having obtained leave and two years’ salary from the king and money and letters of recommendation from Olivares, he sailed from Barcelona to Genoa in August 1629. In letters from Italian ambassadors in Madrid he is referred to as a young portrait painter, favourite of the king and Olivares, who was going to Italy to study and to improve his painting. The visit did in fact have an important effect on his artistic evolution. He stopped in Venice, where Palomino says he made drawings after Tintoretto, the master of late 16th-century Venetian painting, and then hurried on to Rome. Pacheco relates that he was given rooms in the Vatican palace, which he found very isolated. Having obtained permission to return to the Vatican to make drawings after Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and the paintings of Raphael, he moved to the Villa Medici, which was “high and airy” and had “antique sculptures to copy.” An attack of fever obliged him later to move nearer to the Spanish ambassador. After a year in Rome he returned to Spain, stopping on the way in Naples; he arrived back in Madrid early in 1631.

None of Velázquez’s Italian drawings appear to have survived. Of the few paintings that he made in Italy, a “famous portrait of himself” painted in Rome, mentioned by Pacheco, is possibly the “self-portrait” known only in replicas. The chief works of his Italian visit are the two “celebrated pictures” painted in Rome, which Palomino records that he took back to Spain and offered to the king: Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob (1630) and Vulcan’s Forge (1630). These two monumental figure compositions are far removed from the limited realism in which he had been trained. As a result of his Italian studies, particularly of Venetian painting, his development in the treatment of space, perspective, light, and colour and his broader technique mark the beginning of a new phase in his lifelong pursuit of the truthful rendering of visual appearance.

After his return from Italy, Velázquez entered upon the most productive period of his career. He took up again his chief office of portrait painter and was occasionally called on to represent mythological subjects for the decoration of the royal apartments. From now on his religious works are rare and individual. The devotional quality of his early Sevillian paintings finds moving expression in The Crucified Christ (c. 1632), a composition of monumental simplicity and naturalness. In The Coronation of the Virgin (1635–36) the solemnity and dignity of the holy persons are set off by their voluminous colourful robes in a composition of exceptional splendour specially fitting for a painting of the Queen of Heaven made to adorn the oratory of the queen of Spain.

For the decoration of the throne room of the new Buen Retiro palace, completed in 1635, Velázquez painted a series of royal equestrian portraits, following a tradition that goes back in Spain to Titian’s The Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg (1548) and was continued by Rubens. Velázquez’s equestrian groups have a balance and poise closer to Titian’s than to Rubens’s Baroque compositions, and, after his return from Italy, he achieved a three-dimensional effect without detailed drawing or strong contrasts of light and shade but with a broad technique of brushwork and natural outdoor lighting. The Surrender of Breda (c. 1635), Velázquez’s famous contribution to the series of military triumphs painted for the same throne room, is his only surviving historical subject. Though the elaborate composition was based on a pictorial formula of Rubens, he creates a vivid impression of actuality and of human drama by means of accurate topographical details and the lifelike portraiture of the principal figures.

Though Velázquez frequently followed traditional compositions, particularly for his royal portraits, it was from no lack of ability to compose or invent. With his portraits of Philip IV (1632–34), the infante Fernando (1632–34), and Prince Baltasar Carlos as huntsman (1635–36)—painted for the king’s new hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada—he created a new type of informal royal portrait. For the same place, he painted hunting scenes, of which Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar (La Tela Real) (c. 1632–37) is possibly an example, and some Classical subjects, including probably the portraitlike figures of Aesop and Menippus (c. 1638). The portraits of court dwarfs, painted during the next few years, display the same impartial and discerning eye as those of royal and noble sitters, while the character of the dwarfs’ disproportions is revealed through their unconventional poses, their individual expressions, and the exceptionally free and bold brushwork. The Lady with a Fan (c. 1640), one of the few informal portraits of women, is, on the other hand, remarkable for the subtle and delicate painting and for the sensitive portrayal of personal charm.

At the beginning of 1649 Velázquez left Spain on a second visit to Italy. This time he was on official business as gentleman of the bedchamber. He was given a carriage for pictures, possibly gifts from Philip IV to Pope Innocent X. The chief purpose of the journey was to buy paintings and antiques for the king for the decoration of new apartments in the royal palace and also to engage fresco painters to decorate the ceilings of the apartments and to reintroduce fresco painting into Spain. Again Velázquez found fresh inspiration in Italy, particularly from Titian. First he went to Venice, where he bought paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese. He then went on to Modena, where he saw the famous ducal collection, which included his own portrait of the duke of Modena, painted in Madrid in 1638. According to Palomino, he stopped in many other cities, including Bologna, where he contracted fresco painters to work in Madrid. Palomino recounts that Velázquez was befriended in Rome by eminent prelates and artists, including the French painter Nicolas Poussin and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the leading Italian sculptor of the Baroque style. He gives a list of the antiques selected by Velázquez, from which it seems that he followed the tradition of great collectors since the 16th century: rather than inferior originals, he chose casts of the most famous statues in Rome. “Without neglecting his other business he also did many paintings,” writes Palomino, in addition to the portrait of Innocent X. Palomino relates that before portraying the pope, as an exercise in painting a head from life, Velázquez made the portrait of his slave, Juan de Pareja (freed by Velázquez in the 1650s). This is an exceptional unofficial portrait, unusually boldly painted, which creates a powerful effect of familiar and living likeness. In 1970 the sum of $5,544,000 was paid for this picture—at the time the highest price paid for a work of art at auction.

For the portrait of Innocent X, one of his most important official works, Velázquez followed a tradition for papal portraits created by Raphael in the likeness of Julius II (c. 1511) and later used by Titian in Pope Paul III and His Grandsons Alessandro and Ottavio Farnese (1546). The powerful head, the brilliant combinations of crimson of the curtain, the chair, and the cope are painted with fluent technique and almost imperceptible brushstrokes that go far beyond the late manner of Titian and announce the last stage in Velázquez’s development in the direction of Impressionism. This portrait, which has long been Velázquez’s most famous painting outside Spain, was copied innumerable times and won him immediate and lasting renown in Italy. In 1650 he was made a member of the Accademia di San Luca and of the Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon, Rome’s two most prestigious organizations of artists. The portrait earned for him the pope’s support for his application for membership of the most exclusive Spanish military order, though the difficulties arising from the fact that he was not of noble birth were so great that he did not receive the habit of the Order of Santiago until 1659.

The two small views of the Villa Medici, where Velázquez stayed during his first visit to Rome, must, for stylistic reasons, have been painted during his second visit. They are unique examples of pure landscape in his surviving work and among those of his achievements that foreshadow 19th-century Impressionism. The Toilet of Venus (1647–51; or The Rokeby Venus) was also probably painted in Italy and is one of the few representations of the female nude in Spanish painting before the 19th century. The theme of the toilet of Venus, the rich colouring and warm flesh tones, are inspired mainly by Titian and other Venetian painters. But Velázquez has characteristically made no attempt to disguise or idealize his model, and his superbly painted Venus is exceptional for his time as a lifelike portrayal of a living nude woman.

Last years of Diego Velázquez

Velázquez returned to Madrid in the summer of 1651 with some of his purchases and was warmly welcomed by the king, who, in the following year, appointed him chamberlain of the palace, an office that entailed the arrangement of the royal apartments and of the king’s journeys. During his absence Philip had remarried, and the young queen, Mariana of Austria, with her children provided new subjects for him to portray. For his portraits of the queen and of the king’s eldest daughter, the infanta María Teresa, he used similar compositional formulas, and numerous studio replicas of them were made. The royal ladies appear as doll-like figures, with their enormous coiffures and farthingale hoops. The effect of form, texture, and ornament is achieved in Velázquez’s late manner without any definition of detail, in a free, “sketchy” technique. The portraits of the young infanta Margarita and prince Felipe Próspero, similar in composition and manner, are among the most colourful of his works, and he most sensitively reveals the childlike character of his sitters behind the facade of royal dignity. Velázquez’s late bust portraits of Philip IV (c. 1654 and c. 1656), of which many studio versions exist, are very different in character and are exceptional as royal portraits for their informal appearance. These last close-up views of the sad and aging monarch are among the most intimate of all Velázquez’s royal characterizations.

In addition to his many official portraits, Velázquez painted during his last years two of his most original figure compositions and greatest masterpieces. The Spinners; or, The Fable of Arachne (1655–60), a genre scene in a tapestry factory, is at the same time an illustration of the ancient Greek fable of the spinning contest between Pallas Athena and Arachne. Here the mythological subject—like the religious scene in some of the early bodegones—is in the background. But in this late work there is no barrier between the world of myth and reality; they are united in an ingenious composition by formal and aerial perspective. In Las meninas (1656; “The Maids of Honour”), also known as The Royal Family, Velázquez has created the effect of a momentary glance at a casual scene in the artist’s studio while he is painting the king and queen—whose reflection only is seen in the mirror in the background—in the presence of the infanta Margarita with her meninas and other attendants. In this complex composition, the nearly life-size figures are painted in more or less detail according to their relation to the central figure of the infanta and to the source of light, creating a remarkable illusion of reality never surpassed by Velázquez or any other artist of his age.

Velázquez’s last activity was to accompany the king and court to the French border, in the spring of 1660, to arrange the decoration of the Spanish pavilion for the marriage of the infanta María Teresa and Louis XIV. Shortly after his return to Madrid, he fell ill, and he died on August 6. Velázquez left few pupils or immediate followers. His European fame dates from the beginning of the 19th century. Many of his early Sevillian paintings were acquired then by foreign (chiefly English) collectors. Most of his later official works were incorporated into the Prado Museum, in Madrid.

Courtesy-- Enriqueta Harris-Frankfort

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Diego Velázquez

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