Seeing in the dark: recent writing about Diego Velázquez
Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) is one of my favourite painters. His works, mostly painted at the court of Philip IV in seventeenth-century Spain, evoke both the enigmatic magic of that country, and the brooding melancholy of a challenging period in its history. There have been a number of books about Velázquez published by English-speaking writers in the last few years, all of which have adopted their own, unique approach. None are straightforward biographies, and all clearly involved a heavy investment of ‘self’ on the part of the author (in my view beyond that typical in books about long-dead artists). I’m interested in why Velázquez, whose world was so profoundly different in its temper to our own, has inspired these intense personal and emotional reactions. In this essay I seek to trace some of the different contours of Velázquez’s work to highlight possible reasons why.
There is a painter working on a canvas. He stares out at you, somehow inquisitorial at the same time as accepting. He shares the room with a king, a queen, a princess, a host of courtiers - but his air of calm authority still draws the eye. Brush poised in deft suspense, this soberly-dressed man is in the process of catching something fleeting and nailing it down, an entomologist pinning butterflies. The moment is intensely real yet spectral, intimate yet distant.
Detail from Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez, 1656. Oil on canvas
Such contradictory sensations are at the heart of a recent burst of writing about Diego Velázquez, painter to the court of King Philip IV in seventeenth-century Spain. Within the last three years, Velázquez has been the subject three different books published by British writers. Interest in the Sevillian artist is by no means new or remarkable, nor has it really ever seen a downturn from art historians - but what is new is the idiosyncratic, personal exploration of the self undertaken by each writer, inspired by Velázquez’s paintings. In each, the approach to the painter is in some way non-traditional, and all are notable for the profoundly emotional tenor of the authors’ interpretations of Velázquez’s work. What are these writers responding to in the paintings? Is there something particularly current, of the moment, about Velázquez?
In 2015, Michael Jacobs’s posthumous Everything is Happening: Journey into a Painting (finished with a lengthy introduction and coda by his friend Ed Vulliamy) focused on the writer’s personal relationship with a single painting - Las Meninas (1656), considered Velázquez’s masterpiece - and describes Jacobs returning to Spain to explore the painting’s many mysteries. Las Meninas is a well-worn theme since Foucault saw in it the start of a particularly ‘modern’ reflexivity in art, but Jacobs’s focus on his own personal journey with the painting gives an emotional focus to the investigation. Tragically nearing the end of his life, Jacobs was nevertheless swept up by ‘awakening possibilities’ as he travelled to Madrid, summoned by an enigmatic message from an old school friend.
Then, the following year, Laura Cumming published The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez, which starts by recounting a moment of ‘raging grief’ occasioned by the death of her father. But then, an encounter with Las Meninas (again) inspires a quest not only to discover the painter, but also a Victorian bookseller named John Snare, who thinks he has purchased a long-lost portrait of Charles I of England by the master himself. The lives of the two men are told in parallel, the art and the obsession it provokes. But throughout, Cumming is writing about herself, and her mourning. In Velázquez’s paintings she finds solace, understanding, and redemption. ‘The dead are with us’, she reflects near the end of her book, ‘and so are the living consoled. We live in each other’s eyes and our stories need not end.’
Most recently, 2018 saw the publication of Painter to the King, a historical novel by Amy Sackville focusing on Velázquez’s life after he arrived at the court of Philip IV - ‘this most restrained of courts’, a place of ‘black heavy capes over thick black garments’. The reader is wrapped in a lavish, overwhelming brocade of words as Sackville not only attempts to reconstruct the court, but also Velázquez’s artistic process: strokes of the brush marked with expressive hyphens. Again, however, the author herself is part of the story, wandering around Madrid, pining on Velázquez when back in London, projecting her anxieties onto him - her worries about work, ageing, and life’s many illusory moments.
Velázquez himself, to the modern scholar or lover of art, can seem an illusion. He painted comparatively few canvases, hardly drew, and some significant works have been lost or destroyed (such as the formative Expulsion of the Moriscos). Meanwhile, the archival record is heavy on bureaucratic evidence of his duties as royal courtier, light on personal or emotional missives - no diary, no letters, no autobiography. In the words of art historian Jonathan Brown, Velázquez’s story is one of ‘holes and fissures’. Cumming, Jacobs and Sackville are all in some way drawn to these fissures. Jacobs admits such lacunae interested him in his desire to break through the confines of academic art history: ‘almost nothing was known about [Velázquez’s personality], and so [it] could be interpreted in whatever way you liked.’ The Vanishing Man gives away Cumming’s purpose in its subtitle; she is ‘in pursuit of Velázquez’. The author admits herself that she was not just motivated by tracking the life of John Snare, but hoped to find the Velázquez he claims to have owned - ‘In all the time of searching for Snare I was looking for the painting too, of course’. Snare’s obsession became hers. Sackville’s autobiographical narrator is also trying to find traces in Madrid (‘He lived here, once, in a house that was here’) and in archives, and then tries to recreate his world with her pen - ‘I want to simply set down what it looked like to you, the world, what it felt and smelled like’. This grasping at shadows, this chasing of Will-o’-the-wisps, is part of what motivates all the writers.
It is not only Velázquez’s life that is enigmatic. So too are his paintings. Las Meninas in particular is one of the most discussed and written-about works of art in all history. Jacobs is undeterred by this legacy, and seeks to explain it: ‘There is something about Las Meninas that ultimately persuades the viewer there is much more to it than meets the eye.’ There is, he believes, ‘the hint of wondrous worlds lying beyond the mirror and the open door beside it,’ the paintings mysteries ultimately being that ‘of life itself’. Both Cumming and Sackville agree - the former describing the painter’s technique as ‘miraculous, magical, above all mysterious’, while Sackville’s narrator echoes Jacobs’s feeling for the totality of Las Meninas - ‘How true to a life that is, itself, illusion’. Even in his portraits, where loose brushwork is at odds with seeming veracity, a depth of meaning is hinted that goes far beyond the staid circumstances of the commissions or sittings. So Philip IV becomes a spectre of loss and decline, Innocent X a symbol of gnarled power and the toil it can take. The human experience is a riddling, inconsistent one; our lives are tangled in knots we can’t always get loose and we are beset by questions we lack answers to. Velázquez’s art reflects this.
All the recent books emphasise this humanity. The fictional Philip IV in Painter to the King remarks to the painter - ‘Yes, you saw me; you still see me, he says. I thank you, Diego.’ This gratitude stems from Velázquez not just seeing him as a king, but first and foremost as a man. Similarly, in seeing the man behind the crown (as well as the man behind the easel), Sackville’s novel is a remarkable act of empathy, appropriately reflecting the work of one of the most empathetic of artists. It was not just royalty that Velázquez’s sympathetic eye was turned to, however. He also painted those at the margins of court life - actors, dwarves, jesters. Indeed, these portraits represent some of his most extraordinary, compelling work, Ed Vulliamy praising them as ‘poignant and percipient’ in his introduction to Jacobs’s book. These were individuals who may have lacked the authority of Velázquez’s regal subjects - and in some cases their very identity is open to doubt and dispute - but they seem to say ‘I was here too, you know’, and you never forget them. Sebastián de Morra, for example, carries a look of such intense intelligence that upon seeing it you feel, as Cumming notes, rooted to the spot. Sackville again sees the role of the enigmatic, the transient - ‘the fools know that nothing’s solid and consensus can’t keep us forever from chaos‘. But in painting men such as de Morra with the same depth of dignity, intensity and individuality as he did kings and princesses, Velázquez highlights the ultimate democracy of the canvas. It is this Cumming emphasises - ‘All people are equal in the art of Velázquez, whatever their size.’ There is another side to this democracy though - there is no hiding in Velázquez’s canvases: for anyone, even for the viewer.
Detail from El Primo, Diego Velázquez, 1644. Oil on canvas
For we are invited too, into these moments. If not by a look or glance, then by a mirror placed on the canvas. In The Rokeby Venus, the woman’s face in the mirror allows us to be present at ... what? A moment of intimacy? An intrusion? Sackville’s imagination takes hold - she supposes the painter had an affair with the painter Flaminia Triunfi, and painted her. Perhaps she hopes this is so? She sees it as ‘the way not taken’ - symbolic of the uncertainties and thresholds that characterise Velázquez’s art. Or is it jealousy? ‘-- oh, I’d love to put myself there, to sit for you, Diego’, the narrator has earlier confessed, before admitting - ‘she can be the nude if she wants to be’. The mirror allows Sackville to fantasise, her thoughts to run away with her. Cumming also picks up on the recurrence of ambiguity, noting: ‘Venus seems to be looking at herself, and yet also at us’. For Cumming, The Rokeby Venus is another expression of Velázquez’s universality and democracy - ‘the painting is open to all’, as the painter establishes an open-ended connection with the viewer’. Her emotion is palpable even in this reflection on one painting, struck by ‘Velázquez’s acute and unprecedented sensitivity to us, to the presence and imagination of every single person who comes before the picture’.
Detail from, The Toilet of Venus ('The Rokeby Venus'), Diego Velázquez, 1647-51. Oil on canvas
There is a more famous mirror in Las Meninas, in which is reflected the image of King Philip and the young queen, Mariana. But is this a reflection of their image on the canvas, or of the real king and queen in the position where the viewer would be? Jacobs, Cumming and Sackville are all emotionally invested in this painting, and its questions. For Sackville’s narrator, it is simply the emotion of finally coming face to face, in the novel’s closing pages, with her enigmatic hero: ‘So, Diego; there you are.’ It is a climatic moment of recognition, like meeting a penfriend for the first time. Cumming, meanwhile, engages with long-running academic debates about the painting’s meanings, and in particular reacts with incredulity to critics suggesting that the mirror shows merely what is on the canvas: ‘These commentators cannot have looked at Velázquez’s art’. Of course, she seems to scoff, of course the painting goes further, introduces the realm beyond the painting, invites everyone in: ‘you too are contained in the artist’s vision.’ Art history, art criticism, is not some academic exercise - this stuff matters. It does for Jacobs, too. Reflecting on his first experience with Las Meninas in the Prado, he saw it ‘as encapsulating a moment in my life when, for all my complexes and self-doubts, I was fired by an absolute, unembarrassed conviction in art’s spiritual, redemptive powers.’ Returning to the Prado and Las Meninas years later, he followed up a suggestion that it is possible to gain a new perspective on the painting by viewing it via a mirror held at a forty-five-degree angle to the canvas. He found the results underwhelming, but at one point he ‘tilted the mirror in the wrong direction, so that I had an unsettling view of myself, baggy-eyed, weathered and balding.’ The painting was a barometer for Jacobs, on where his life was at, reflecting back how he had aged, showing him himself much as Velázquez showed Philip IV - warts and all, unairbrushed, every line of age and grief on show.
In a world of Instagram, Facebook and mass advertising, playing on our need for self-definition, a world of selfie-sticks and vlogs and reality TV, Velázquez’s mirrors tap into a contemporary angst. Sackville’s narrator notices this - ‘He is interested in mirrors, this painter. I live in a world of them - I want to tell him - cameras, phones, chrome, shop windows, plate glass, screens of all sizes: reflections everywhere. I can’t get away from myself. What would you make of this?’ The Philip IV of the novel can hardly act without it being reproduced as images or performance - ‘his every victory painted and performed; his every action transmuted the moment it transpires into staged allegory, into myth’. Admittedly, this seems more profound that one’s actions being transmuted into a tweet, but the point is that, just like us, Velázquez and King Philip lived side by side with a shadow world - a world of shadows, reflections and illusions. Velázquez’s portraits and mirrors provoke intense contemplation about the nature of self, the image you present to the world, and it is perhaps no surprise that this art resonantes in this age of intense and relentless self-making.
Indeed, our world has a profusion of images of selves - it bursts with them. Cumming, in describing the loss of a Velázquez portrait, talks of how we are assailed with portraits, overwhelmed by them, and how their subject may ‘mean nothing to us any more’. More generally, for an artist or writer, this barrage of images can be a daunting obstacle to originality. Sackville’s narrator (reflecting on how the Prado palace is rammed with paintings) admits she feels anxiety about the point of creativity when there is already so much, well, stuff: ‘but this world is so full of things on walls that you wonder what the point is, if this new thing will endure - - but these are my anxieties, maybe not yours.’ These are serious worries about the point of artistic endeavour, about the ephemeral nature of creation, and of life too. Jacobs almost sees Las Meninas as pure escapism from these multiple fractured realities: ‘a refuge from the disintegrating world outside’. And yet the painting reminds him or Spain’s darkening national mood - a sense of decline and crisis - again, a mirror for the world the author lives in.
Anxiety about the purpose of art is linked to anxiety about death. Art, if it endures, can be a way to cheat it. Cumming highlights how Velázquez’s art keeps a ‘connection’ alive between past and present, how in Las Meninas the figure in the doorway at the back (probably José Nieto Velázquez, the queen’s chamberlain) ‘waits to lead us onward into that other light, hovering between this world and the next.’ Jacobs was also interested in this luminous threshold and this man either coming or going, before tragically losing his short battle with renal cancer in 2014. In the coda to Everything is Happening, Ed Vulliamy recalls a phone conversation with Jacobs where the writer confides that as well as ‘life itself’, the painting is also about ‘life’s decay until we reach the other side.’ The figure at the door was a Charon-like figure for Jacobs, Vulliamy claims. Again, the painting is not just showing us something, but demanding participation, inviting us along, into immortality perhaps. Writing, for all the writers discussed, offered either a salve for grief’s wounds or a way to accept death. For all of them though, writing about Velázquez also offers a way to participate in this cheating death. A moment of typical near-ekphrasis from Sackville reflects this:
‘He has made images of the King, of his dead brothers, his dead children - an act of resurrection, their perpetual images, the veins showing through fair skin, the wet on their lips, all the warmth and life his brush has touched into being, he has kept them all in the world thus. They will outlive him, and the King, and all of us - - I’ve seen them, their living skin - how has this much life already passed, Diego?’
Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez, 1656. Oil on canvas
Writers have been drawn to Velázquez because of his painterly engagement with themes at the heart of what it means to be human. His paintings raise questions about the self, the nature of reality and the purpose of art. Looking at Velázquez issues challenges to all artists, whatever their genre: to try and simultaneously define and transcend a moment; to approach any subject, any person, with unyielding humanity and empathy; how to find meaning in a world characterised by illusion and loss. It is perhaps this last point that most motivates and unites the works of Jacobs, Cumming and Sackville about Velázquez. There is something profoundly vital about these books (as well as the paintings they describe): something defiantly against-the-moment in their shared eschewing of simplistic interpretation, of primary colours, of obvious binaries. Against the clamour for a well-defined position, a single answer, they are a celebration of ambiguity, dissonance and uncertainty.
And what about me? What am I chasing when I’m chasing Velázquez, when reading about him? What do I see in Las Meninas and all the rest? I see faces, long dead and yet brought to life. I see the enduring power of empathy. I see the power to look another in the eye and meet that gaze with respect and humanity whatever their bearing or station. I see empty space, I see fullness, I see harmony, I see dissonance, I see authority, I see rebelliousness. I see contradictions. I see nothing, I see everything, all at once.
The books I discuss in this essay are:
Laura Cumming, The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez (Vintage, 2016)
Michael Jacobs, Everything is Happening: Journey into a Painting, with foreword, introduction and coda by Ed Vulliamy (Granta, 2015)
Amy Sackville, Painter to the King (Granta, 2018)