Desperately seeking Diego: my search for Velázquez on the streets of Seville
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Version 0 of 1. It’s a Saturday evening in Seville and locals are flocking out of tapas bars into churches. I follow them. In front of a magnificent golden altar in one baroque church, a huge crowd is gathering for mass. I admire a float laden with candles and a statue of the Virgin Mary, ready to be pulled through the streets, past crowds of hooded penitents in the city’s famous Holy Week processions. When I look more carefully at Mary’s painted face, I notice how lifelike it is and immediately feel closer to the artist I have come to Seville in search of: Diego Velázquez, the greatest painter of reality who ever lived. A major exhibition about the artist, who lived from 1599 to 1660, opens at the Grand Palais in Paris today. But instead of queuing up to revere his art, I want to walk in the footsteps of Velázquez himself, to stand where he stood and feel what he felt. This Andalusian city is where Velázquez was born. It is where, in about 1620, he painted The Water-Seller of Seville, a portrait of a penniless old man in a ragged brown robe serving a crystal-clear glass of water to a boy on a streetcorner. Droplets of water gleam on the creamy surface of the huge earthenware vessel he has poured from. These perfect transparent spheres proudly advertise the genius of the twentysomething artist. Yet the roughhewn colours and tender humanity of this portrayal of poverty show something else: the depth of his compassion. What in Seville gave him that? The 21st-century equivalents of the water seller beg outside the city’s churches. After giving one some euros, I enter another church and see yet another waxwork-like Virgin. Still made in Seville, these models of suffering Christs and beatific Marys have their roots in the harrowing painted terracotta statues from the 15th and 16th centuries that are now housed in the city’s cathedral and its art galleries. Velázquez grew up among these attempts to make the suffering of Christ and the saints real and immediate. Velázquez does the same thing, just more subtly and provocatively, in his early paintings. In Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (in the National Gallery, London) Christ is in the background, seen through a kitchen window – or is it a painting within the painting? Meanwhile Martha, a Seville kitchen maid, stares miserably out from her chores. The verisimilitude is stunning, with Velázquez putting typically Spanish ingedients on her work table: garlic, eggs, fish, a dried chili pepper. Did I write “typically Spanish”? Actually, when this array of homely food was painted, in around 1618, there was nothing Spanish or European about chilis. They were a new, imported treat. Chili comes from the Americas and its presence here is another clue as to how this city produced such a daring, astonishing artist. Today, the Guadalquivir looks like an ordinary stretch of water, but when Velázquez was growing up, Seville’s river was crowded with ships laden with treasure. All Spanish shipping to and from its empire in the New World docked here. From 1503, Seville had an official monopoly on transatlantic trade. Galleon fleets had to carefully navigate their cargoes of silver upriver to moor here. So there were chili peppers to be had, as well as all the other spicy, seamy pleasures – and dangers – of a great port. When we look at the discontented servants, drinkers and street-sellers in Velázquez’s early paintings, we see the raw life of a city that had more than 30 brothels. In Don Quixote, published in 1605, the protagonist is told to visit Seville if he craves adventure, since there are more to be had there than anywhere else. Yet it was not just theits wealth and exoticism that made Seville special. There was also the Casa de Pilatos palace. It has a room with a ceiling painted by Velázquez’s teacher Francisco Pacheco, whose clumsily daubed gods suggest he had little to teach Velázquez technically. Yet Pacheco did have an ambitious vision of art, writing the first Spanish book of art criticism and – crucially – leading a discussion group for artists that met in this room. Velázquez would come to talk art – and what a place to open his eyes and enrich his imagination. The palace is an incredible cultural hybrid. Gorgeous Islamic tiles and stuccos decorate its courtyard: a Muslim Berber dynasty from north Africa ruled Seville in the early middle ages and – long after the city was “reconquered” for Christianity in the 13th century – the Spanish elite had Muslim craftsmen build their palaces. But a layer of Renaissance decor was also added in the 16th century. So statues of Greek gods and busts of Roman emperors mingle with the blue tiles and Qur’an inscriptions. Two worlds, Islamic and Renaissance, meet joyously. In a garden grotto, there is even a statue of a sleeping nude modelled on a sensual Venetian Renaissance painting. So much for Spanish Catholic severity. I like to think this was the first image of Venus that Velázquez, who was to paint the sensual Rokeby Venus with her sad face seen in a mirror, saw. This house – with its stunning cultural fusion of Europe and Africa, Christian, pagan and Muslim – is the key to understanding the painter’s genius and his extraordinary ability to show different sides of the same truth. He is not just a “realist”: he can reveal more than one “reality” at the same time, something he surely learned in a city simultaneously Islamic and Christian. His water seller may even be of Moorish heritage: water sellers are an African tradition, still seen in the main market of Marrakech. Velázquez brought both his compassion and his sense of truth’s complexity to the job he got in 1623: painter to Philip IV, king of Spain. The Madrid he knew is harder to find than his Seville. Palaces have burned down or been demolished. In the Buen Retiro park, I see people walking at sunset. Now open to the public, this park was created for Philip IV, the man whose long face with its upturned moustache can be seen, ageing and growing sadder, in Velázquez’s disturbingly frank portraits. Philip also commissioned Spain’s leading artists to glorify his reign. Velázquez’s contribution hangs in the nearby Prado, but it subverts the king’s desire for propaganda. The Surrender of Breda shows Spain crushing a rebellion in the Netherlands. As the immaculately dressed Dutch commander hands over the keys of Breda, the even finer Spanish general bows with magnificent condescension and a chivalry worthy of Don Quixote himself. Velázquez exposes the delusion of this civilised exchange with sombre irony: the wartorn Dutch landscape spreads out behind the massed troops, smoke rising from distant farms. Velázquez can say more about the devastation of war with a column of smoke than other artists can do with legions of fighting warriors. Two truths: the chivalrous surrender and the cost of war, victory and the futility of victory. Velázquez can put all that into an official painting commissioned by the King. The Habsburg monarchy needed his compassion as much as Seville’s poor had. But Velázquez’s royal portraits were unflinching. Did Philip IV never notice how his image was being subverted? Actually, Velázquez is simply holding a mirror up to a melancholic time. Spain in the 17th century was in decline and Philip knew it. The empire, which ruled dominions from the Netherlands to Peru, was getting poorer and weaker. The Habsburgs, too, were in decline, perhaps because they had a policy of only marrying one another. All this fed into that saddening face. Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) is a portrait of Philip IV’s daughter. Her mother, the queen, was Philip’s niece. She had been due to marry the royal heir Prince Balthasar Carlos, her cousin, but he died young. So Philip, whose first wife had passed away, married her instead. The king and queen are seen reflected in a mirror at the back of the tall dark room. They are posing for Velázquez, though it feels like I am, since the painter is gazing directly out of the picture at me, standing behind his easel, brush and palette in hand. To stand before this paradoxical painting is to occupy the position of the monarch in the mirror. It is deeply uncomfortable. So many pairs of eyes on you. Velázquez looks at me, the princess too, as well as a shy maid in mid-bow and a sombre dwarf. There is also an official looking in from the doorway. This is too much reality. It hurts. Instead of portraying Philip IV, Velázquez turns you into him – with his cares, his isolation. All these people are behaving formally, distanced. Only a second dwarf kicks the dog as if he doesn’t know the king is there. What news does that man at the door have? Has a bullion fleet been sunk by the English? I came in search of Velázquez and found the agonising reality of a world where everything has two sides, where every truth is also a lie, where every mirror is the harsh messenger of time. But Velázquez is looking at me and his compassion is infinite. |