Who is the greatest Spanish artist who ever lived? Though it’s light on writers and composers, and has only the one architect—Gaudi—Spain has a rich history of great painters; Goya, Dali, Miro, Juan Gris, El Greco. Really, though, there are only three contenders for the Spain’s-greatest-artist plinth: Cervantes—who not only wrote Don Quixote but invented the novel—Picasso, and Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez.
Since this isn’t really a column about who Spain’s greatest artist is, I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that Velazquez is the clear winner. (Though Cervantes isn’t too far behind). What this column is really about is a new Velazquez show in New York, at the Met. It has only got seven paintings, four of which are in the Met’s permanent collection, but it’s a fantastic show, well worth a trip to New York just to see it. That’s how great an artist Velazquez was, though not everyone realizes it.
It’s not that Velazquez is obscure; the problem is that people tend not to think of him as a painter greater even than Rembrandt and Vermeer, which he is. And, in fact, the greatest painting outside Europe is a Velazquez; it lives in the Met, and it’s the centerpiece of the new Velazquez show. It’s the Portrait of Juan de Pareja.
After Rafael’s Portrait of Baldasarre Catelliglione, Juan de Pareja is the greatest portrait ever painted. Juan de Pareja was a slave who Velazquez inherited and made his assistant; in 1650, de Pareja accompanied Velazquez on a trip to Rome to purchase art for Madrid—where Velazquez was a court painter to Philip IV—and to paint a portrait of Pope Innocent X. Because of Innocent’s dense schedule, the papal portrait would require quick, decisive painting. To get his eye in, Velazquez painted a rehearsal portrait of de Pareja.
De Pareja is shown with a three-quarters turn, making a casual attempt to look formal. He’s dressed formally in green-grey with a white frilled collar and a hat tucked under his arm. His head and back are held regally straight, but his expression is half-hidden patient indulgence. Only de Pareja’s shoulders and face—which is swarthy and part-Moorish—are well illuminated; the rest of the painting is shadowy. The brushwork is muscular and the strokes easy to see. When it was first displayed, around 1650, painters all over Europe are said to have agreed that while many paintings were “art,” Velazquez’s painting of Juan de Pareja was “truth.”
(Interestingly, not long after the portrait was painted, Velazquez freed de Pareja, who became a surprisingly fine painter in his own right. You might call him George Harrison to Velazquez’s John Lennon.)
The other three Velazquezes in the Met’s permanent collection are fine paintings: a portrait of Philip IV’s daughter Maria Teresa, and two anonymous portraits “of a man,” one of which might be a self-portrait, and the other of which might not actually be a Velazquez.
Of the three Velazquezes on loan to the Met, two are portraits of girls. Both are brilliant, and one was painted so hastily and with such strong, aggressive strokes that it looks impressionistic. It might almost be a Degas. The third is a portrait of Cardinal Camillo Astalli-Pamphili. The Cardinal looks like he’s trying not to look too mournful for his formal portrait, though he can’t hide a thousand-yard stare. He’s in formal vestments, and his expression is made slightly absurd by his square biretta hat leaning jauntily to one side. This is Cardinal with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
The Met’s show is superb—and I repeat, worth traveling to see. When the show closes on March 12, the only place to see so large a Velazquez collection will be Madrid. The show does, however, have one major problem.
There’s a piece of lint on Juan de Pareja’s left cheek. It could drive you crazy, just sitting there, mocking everyone who looks at the painting. But what can you do? You can’t just flick something off the surface of a Velazquez, even if it is covered in museum glass. I tried blowing on it, to no avail. No big deal, perhaps, but it rankles.
And one other thing: if this had been a column debating the question of Spain’s greatest artist, I would have been forced to point out that Picasso did his great work in France, and that if El Greco—the Greek—was Spanish, Picasso was a Frenchman. Furthermore, I would have to point out that both Cervantes and Velazquez lived during the Spanish inquisition, and are both believed by modern scholars to have had Jewish ancestry, which—obviously—they concealed. Cervantes, in fact, is believed to have been a crypto-Jew. So you have to ask yourself, how many other great artists did Spain drive away or murder? Is that why, proportionally, it has so many fewer great artists than France, England, Italy and Germany?
But those are questions for another time.
