Velazquez

On the last day of January 1906, Punch magazine -- the conservative Briton's venerable voice of humor and satire (now alas defunct) -- ran a cartoon, captioned "Desirable Aliens," showing an odd couple strutting into the National Gallery, chests high, wreathed in smiles. One was the fashionably bearded John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the Yank, with his portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth slung under his left arm. At his side was Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), court painter to Philip IV of Spain, all velvet and ribbons, his "Venus and Cupid" clasped under his right. From each frame hung a label reading "PURCHASED FOR THE NATION." With all due respect to our compatriot, it's not easy, a century later, to imagine that the two canvases could ever have been mentioned in the same breath.
"The Toilet of Venus" or "Venus at Her Mirror," to give the Velázquez its now accepted formal titles, holds a place in the universal pantheon scarcely lower than that of Leonardo's "Mona Lisa," another enigma. The goddess of love is seen reclining, her back to the viewer, gazing into a mirror propped up by an obliging Cupid. Her face reveals no discernible character, barely even an identity. As a mug shot, her face in Cupid's mirror would never do. So soft is the focus that the features leave no imprint at all. Her expression -- a blank -- has been read as inviting or forbidding.
Once thought to be one of Diego Velázquez's later works, the painting is now at dated at 1647-51.
The figure is the artist's lone known nude. (His "Christ on the Cross" does not count.) As all the world knows, the Spain of los Reyes Católicos -- Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, that is -- suppressed carnal desire with a ferocity that made it flame all the hotter. The monarchs of the centuries that followed were scarcely more permissive toward the impressionable lower orders. But rank had its privileges, and aristocratic art collections, from the kings' on down, abounded in urbane erotica.
The second securely documented owner of that Velázquez nude was the scandalous Gaspar Méndez de Haro, a boon companion of the Spanish Infante, or crown prince. Méndez de Haro acquired the painting -- a majestic 4 feet high by 5 feet 9 inches wide -- in 1652 at the tender age of about 20. From him it passed to his daughter, Doña Catalina Mendez de Haro y Guzmán, who married the Duke of Alba, whose family held onto it until the early 19th century. Then, in short order, it went through various hands, winding up in 1814 at Rokeby Hall, a stately home in Yorkshire, where it hung for the private delectation of a few.
Nine decades later, the painting was put up for sale at Thos Agnew & Sons in London. Some 30,000 viewers lined up to see it. The price tag of £45,000 -- some 30 times the average annual salary of a solicitor, 170 times that of a surgeon, 300 times that of a high-ranking bureaucrat, or nearly 1,000 times that of a farm laborer. Yet it discouraged neither the Louvre, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, nor a pack of Henry Jamesian American plutocrats. But private subscribers to the newly founded National Art Collections Fund (now the Art Fund) saved for England the picture the Daily Express had dubbed "the Nation's Venus." Today, it is best known as "The Rokeby Venus."
Long thought to belong to the painter's last years, the "Venus" is now dated 1647-51, coinciding almost exactly with his second, very protracted, journey to Italy. Yet there is still ample margin for error. (Stylistic analysis of the brushwork has proved inconclusive; better evidence lies in sales histories and inventories.) As a gentleman of the bedchamber to Philip IV, the traveling Velázquez was charged with buying art and antiques for new apartments in the royal palace, as well as with recruiting fresco painters to embellish the apartments' new ceilings.
In Rome, between shopping sprees, he also found time to paint. In particular, he produced a pair of outstanding portraits in sharply contrasting modes. In a personal vein, he painted Juan de Pareja, a mulatto slave he had brought along from Spain. As a subject, such a person could have no standing whatsoever, yet Velázquez celebrated his admission to the Congregazione dei Virtuosi, Rome's confraternity of artists, by exhibiting Juan's likeness at the Pantheon. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired "Juan de Pareja" in 1971 at the price of £2,310,000, or $5.5 million, then the world-record price for a painting sold at auction. In a ceremonial vein, there was the riveting "Pope Innocent X," which in the 20th century haunted the oeuvre of Francis Bacon.
Was "The Rokeby Venus" likewise painted in Rome? History tells us that Velázquez met a widow named Martha there and fathered a child, Antonio, out of wedlock. Other than this, nothing is known of the fate of the son or the mother. Romantics have wondered: Was Martha Diego's Venus?
I doubt it. Where in Velázquez do we ever find a subject that seems to hold him by the heartstrings? (There may be one: little Infanta Margarita in the incomparable "Las Meninas.") Besides, there is the question of personality. Juan de Pareja and Pope Innocent X speak across the centuries as individuals, each vivid and unique. But who is Venus? Is she even modeled after a real person?
Venus's relaxed, graceful body seems more composed than observed, a harmonious symphony of idealized curves, the skin tones blended with a calm, unflurried hand. The pose conveys a certain sensuality, yes. But no show is made of the pre-eminent "charms" of breast and belly (they are invisible). And Velázquez displays no trace of the goatish concupiscence of a Rubens, who could slaver over a quivering posterior. Venus neither arouses him nor raises his guard. Yet there is nothing clinical, chilly, or austere in his appreciation of the female form. Quite simply, he paints, and she is there -- she and her boy. The artist's detachment bespeaks neither passion nor the memory of passion. (Was Antonio Diego's Cupid? Another imponderable.)
Dominated by a single figure in a shallow field, "The Rokeby Venus" may seem at first a far simpler proposition, spatially as well as formally, than other chief works of Velázquez. That impression is deceptive. Consider for a moment how intuitively most viewers read pictures like text on a page, from left to right, top to bottom. Taken by herself, Venus (her head to our right) reads from right to left, as it were, top to toe. Secondary as he is, Cupid turns the arrow the right way round. Kneeling, he also defines the vertical axis, complementing Venus, who defines the horizontal. At the same time, the pensive little heartbreaker's pose echoes that of the goddess with a difference, adding a sharp angle or two, and reducing the scale. Tilted between the two figures, the square frame of Cupid's mirror pries open the third dimension of depth. From the bit of nondescript background that shows in the upper right quadrant, the room they occupy seems as bare as a garret. Yet a red drape and the slate-gray coverlet over the white sheet on the couch conjure up a magic hollow, enfolding Venus and Cupid like the halves of a giant scallop shell.
Is the simile far-fetched? Maybe. Remember, though, that Venus was born of the sea. In a composition that strips away the furniture and paraphernalia of myth, grant room for allusion.
According to recent scholarship, Velázquez painted the drape in a red far bolder than the red we see today and the coverlet in deep purple. Time changes everything. How right such sumptuous, royal shades seem for Venus, at least in theory. Yet as it is, the yin-yang color scheme we see seems beyond improvement, right down to the pink ribbons in Cupid's hand, his blue sash, and the fleecy white of his wings, tipped in tans like the ghost of old gold.