Velazquez's Binding Ethic

By ROBERT HUGHES

If painters had batting records, that of Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, court painter to Philip IV of Spain, would be perfect. Not only did he paint the best official portrait of the 17th century -- the head of the wary, coarse, cunning old Pope Innocent X, in the Galleria Doria-Pamphili collection in Rome -- but he also made what is perhaps the greatest nonmythical, secular painting in all art history: Las Meninas, in the Prado. Neither is in the wonderful show of 38 paintings by Velazquez, about half lent by the Prado, which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City this week. Nor should they be, since such things cannot be exposed to the risk of travel. We can be abundantly grateful for what we have: the first Velazquez exhibition ever held in the U.S., comprising more than a third of his total known output, including such great works of his maturity as the Prado's portraits of the Count-Duke of Olivares on horseback and Queen Mariana and early ones like The Waterseller of Seville, painted when he was around 20, from London's Wellington Museum.

If you want to know what painting is or can be, look at Velazquez. This has been the judgment of artists for the past 300 years. It is as though Velazquez has never been seen as anything but the summit of excellence in art, embodying a degree of intelligence, pictorial skill and lucidity of realization that defy not only imitation but, in some final way, analysis itself. He is to realism what Piero della Francesca is to abstraction. First Edouard Manet and then a whole succession of French painters from the 19th century into the 20th (not to mention English and American ones as well, in particular Sargent and Whistler) were transfixed by Velazquez when they found him on their pilgrimages to the Prado. Francis Bacon contorted Innocent X into his own series of screaming Popes. Picasso did a knotty and unsuccessful series of "variations" on his work, attempting to reconstruct it in terms of something other than empirical vision. Velazquez's influence appears in unexpected places: if, for instance, one wants to know where Philip Guston felt some of the authority for his last paintings lay, where those eloquently clumsy speckled gray-and-pink shapes looked back to, one need only consult passages in Velazquez like the extraordinary plumage of the headdress worn by Queen Mariana for his formal portrait of her in the Prado. Yet not one of his painter-admirers has made Velazquez seem "newer," or in any significant way changed the address of his work. Velazquez himself seems always new, fresh on his own terms, which record the act of scrutiny in the purest imaginable form and so have never dated. He is, to quote Lenin very much out of context, "as radical as reality itself."

He was not, of course, only an eye. The intellectual discourse of Velazquez's art took in allegory as well, and the details are never insignificant. When he painted the flamboyant and overweening Olivares on his rearing horse, in front of a city (perhaps the Basque town of Fuenterrabia) that is being burned for its disobedience to the crown, he went to some pains with the kind of detail one overlooks at first -- the pruned stump of a tree branch above the commander's head has fresh green shoots, suggesting that the state is replenished by merciless excision. The Weavers would satisfy anyone as a genre picture of women at work, spinning the woolen yarn for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Isabel; but its meanings unravel far beyond that, back to the fable of Arachne in Ovid's Metamorphoses, taking in complicated references to Titian and even to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Still, it is the objectivity that seizes you. Was there ever a painter less interested in thrusting his "personality" at the viewer? He is the absolute antitype of the hot, expressive artist. His cool gaze settles on everything with equal curiosity: he is as interested in the way a formidable old nun grips her crucifix -- like a weapon -- as in the way the left hand of his monarch Philip IV rests, lightly but not quite negligently, on the hilt of his sword. There is nothing he cannot draw, though no drawings by Velazquez survive. That, however, is part of his fascination to eyes conditioned by the spontaneity of painting since Manet, for now that Velazquez's paint has aged, one sees the radical shifts and erasures of form below the unperturbed surface. There is no texture he cannot paint, from the massive chains of silver embroidery that anchor a Bourbon Queen's black dress to the bottom of the canvas, their slightly tarnished sparkle amazingly conveyed in opaque blobs of gray and white, to the hair of a hunting dog's leg whose living animal nature gets its due in three long and five short strokes of the brush. He does not truckle to King, Infanta or Pope; he does not satirize the dwarfs and idiots kept for the court's amusement. Nothing human is alien to him. Everything is worthy of respect -- a respect whose sign is an unswerving attentiveness. The morality of his art is one of transparency and proud restraint. He was, as all who knew him agreed, a paragon of the phlegmatic temperament: a walking mirror whose reflections could not be argued with.

Velazquez's portraits of Philip IV are the most remarkable biography of a monarch in all art, spanning his life from the confidence of youth to the melancholy and distance of his afflicted age. The face thickens, the eyes sag, the Bourbon lip takes on a heavy repressed pathos; you can almost see it quiver. Only the mustache, whose upswept prongs will be imitated by Salvador Dali's, seems alert, like antennae. "It is now nine years since any ((portrait)) has been made," Philip IV noted in 1653, in the last decade of his and his painter's lives, "and I am little inclined to subject myself to Velazquez's phlegm, nor thus to find further reason to witness how I am growing older."

Velazquez's life was even, and little is known about its details. It looks quite seamless compared with the struggles of Spain's other archetypal painter, Goya -- a steadily mounting curve of recognition and respect, unmarred by scandal or alienation (although he did father one bastard in Rome). Born in Seville in 1599, the son of a minor Hidalgo family, half- Portuguese, possibly with a trace of Jewish ancestry, Velazquez would always be preoccupied with his social position. (He went to great lengths to qualify as a knight of the Order of Santiago, whose members would not accept him until the King, who loved his painter, made them do so by changing the rules of entry.) He studied under a rather dry, decorous artist named Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married. He made two trips to Rome, both financed by the King, who had some difficulty getting him back -- the first time because Velazquez had gone into an ecstasy of discovery (Rome, in 1630, was the world's capital of contemporary as well as ancient art, and the young artist was absorbing the lessons of Caravaggio, Poussin and Guido Reni), and the second time because Velazquez, now in his 50s, was basking in his European reputation. And in between, nothing but security and hard work.

Velazquez's maturity is a sublime, intensive lesson in pictorial coding, and this, as much as anything else, has been the source of its fascination to other painters. In rendering appearances, every artist has a code of some sort -- a way in which the licks and smears of colored mud on cloth manage, seemingly without intervention from the viewer, to recompose themselves as hard shiny metal, warm flesh, wind-ruffled grass or the sweaty sheen of a horse's flank, all in the blink of an eye. But no artist seems as explicit about this legerdemain as Velazquez. At 20, as The Waterseller attests, he was already a virtuoso of appearances. To be able to record both the half-sunken splash of water and the light dew of condensation on the pottery jar in the + foreground was to have touched a level of skill beyond that of most painters. But then the virtuosity is replaced by something deeper -- a meditation on the way the painter translates sight into mark and how the viewer turns mark back into sight. How can painting serve empirical ends and reveal truth? Only by disclosing its stage machinery -- not by fooling the eye, but by making the mind more aware of the ways in which it reads marks and constructs them as things. When you look at a Velazquez, you do not look at an illusion of reality. You are inducted into a relationship with the painter's civil candor about what he does. You are invited to think about how paintings come to mean what they say. Brought to the fore, embodied on the surface ever more boldly, this is the great conceptual theme of Velazquez's work, its binding ethic. It precludes all sentimentality and rhetoric. It is -- as one of his contemporaries exclaimed, on seeing Las Meninas -- "the theology of painting."