How the Lords of Death must chuckle in defiant glee when they send
malaria and night into the palaces of the great through cracks and
crevices! Philip's bloated, unkingly body became full of disease and
pain; lingering unrest racked him; the unseen demons he could not
exorcise, danced on his bed, wrenched his members and played mad
havoc with each quivering nerve. And so he died. Then comes Philip
the Fourth, immortal through his forty portraits painted by
Velasquez. Philip was only fourteen when his father died. He was a
rareripe, and showed strength and decision far beyond his years. His
grandfather, Philip the Second, was his ideal, and he let it be
known right speedily that his reign was to be one of moderation and
simplicity, modeled along the lines of Philip the Great.
The Duke of Lerma, Minister of State, who had so long been the
actual ruler of Spain, was deposed, and into his place slipped the
suave and handsome Olivarez, Gentleman-in-Waiting to the young King.
Olivarez was from Seville, and had known the family of Velasquez. It
was through his influence that Diego so soon got the nod of Royalty.
The King was eighteen, Velasquez was twenty-four, and Olivarez not
much older--all boys together. And the fact that Velasquez secured
the appointment of Court Painter with such ease was probably owing
to his dashing horsemanship, as much as to his being a skilful
painter.
At Harvard once I saw a determined effort made to place a famous
"right tackle" in the chair of Assistant Professor of Rhetoric. The
plan was only given over with great reluctance, when it was
discovered that the "right tackle" was beautifully ignorant of the
subject he would have to tackle. Even then it was argued he could
"cram"--keeping one lesson in advance of his class.
But Olivarez knew Velasquez could paint, and the artist's handsome
face, stalwart frame and fearless riding did the rest. The young
King was considered the best horseman in Madrid: Velasquez and
Olivarez took pains never to outdo him in the joust.
The biography of Olivarez as a study of life is a better subject far
than either the life of Velasquez or the King. Their lives were too
successful to be interesting. Olivarez is a fine example of a man
growing great through exercise. Read history and behold how
commonplace men have often had greatness thrust upon them and met
the issue. I have seen an absurd Class B lawyer elevated into a
judgeship, and rise to the level of events, keeping silence, looking
wise, hugging his dignity hard, until there came a time when the
dignity really was a fair fit. Trotters often need toe-weights to
give them ballast and balance--so do men need responsibility. We
have had at least three commonplace men for President of the United
States, who live in history as adequately great--and they were.
Various and sundry good folk will here arise and say the germ of
greatness was in these men all the time, awaiting the opportunity to
unfold. And the answer is correct, right and proper; but a codicil
should then be added to the effect that the germ of greatness is in
every man, but we fall victims of arrested development, and success
or society, like a worm i' the bud, feeds on our damask cheek.
Philip was nipped in the bud by falling into the protecting shadow
of Olivarez. The Prime Minister provided boar-hunts and tourneys and
masquerades and fetes. Philip's life of simplicity faded off into
dressing in black--all else went on as before. Philip glided into
the line of least resistance and signed every paper that he was told
to sign by his gracious, winning, inflexible Minister--the true type
of the iron hand in the velvet glove. From his twentieth year, after
that first little flurry of pretended power, the novelty of ruling
wore away; and for more than forty years he never either vetoed an
act or initiated one. His ministers arranged his recreations, his
gallantries, his hours of sleep. He was ruled and never knew it, and
here the Richelieu-like Olivarez showed his power. It was anything
to keep the King from thinking, and Spain, the Mother of
Magnificence, went drifting to her death.
There were already three Court Painters when Velasquez received his
appointment. They were Italians appointed by Philip the Third. Their
heads were full of tradition and precedent, and they painted like
their masters, who had been pupils of men who had worked with
Titian--beautiful attenuations three times reduced. We only know
their names now because they raised a pretty chorus of protest when
Velasquez appeared at the palace. They worked all the wires they
knew to bring about his downfall, and then dwindled away into
chronic Artistic Jealousy, which finally struck in; and they were
buried. That the plots, challenges and constant knockings of these
underling court painters ever affected Velasquez, we can not see. He
swung right along at prodigious strides, living his own life--a life
outside and beyond all the pretense and vanity of place and power.
The King came by a secret passage daily to the studio to watch
Velasquez work. There was always a chair for him, and the King even
had an easel and sets of brushes and palette with which he played at
painting. Pacheco, who had come up to Madrid and buzzed around
encroaching on the Samuel Pepys copyright, has said that the King
was a skilled painter. But this statement was for publication during
the King's lifetime.
When Velasquez could not keep the King quiet in any other way, it
seems he made him sit for his picture. The studio was never without
an unfinished portrait of the King. From eighteen to fifty-four he
sat to Velasquez--and it is always that same tall, spindle-legged,
impassive form and the dull, unspeaking face. There is no thought
there, no aspiration, no hope too great for earth, no unrequited
love, no dream unrealized. The King was incapable of love as he was
of hate. And Velasquez did not use his art to flatter: he had the
artistic conscience. Truth was his guiding star. And the greatness
of Velasquez is shown in that all subjects were equally alike to
him. He did not select the classic or peculiar. Little painters are
always choosing their subjects and explaining that this or that may
be pretty or interesting, but they will tell you it is "unpaintable"
--which means that they can not paint it.
"I can write well on any topic--all are alike to me!" said Dean
Swift to Stella.
"Then write me an essay on a broomstick," answered Stella.
And Swift wrote the essay--full of abstruse reasons, playful wit and
charming insight.
The long, oval, dull face of Philip lured Velasquez. He analyzed
every possible shade of emotion of which this man was capable, and
stripped his soul bare. The sallow skin, thin curling locks,
nerveless hands, and unmeaning eyes are upon the walls of every
gallery of Christendom--matchless specimens of the power to sink
self, and reveal the subject.
That is why Whistler is right when he says that Velasquez is the
painters' painter. "The Blacksmith" by Whistler shows you the
blacksmith, not Whistler; Rembrandt's pictures of his mother show
the woman; Franz Hals gives you the Burgomaster, not himself.
Shakespeare of all writers is the most impersonal--he does not give
himself away.
When Rubens painted a portrait of Philip the Fourth he put a dash of
daring, exuberant health in the face that was never there. The
health and joy of life was in Rubens, and he could not keep it off
his palette. There is a sameness in every Rubens, because the
imagination of the man ran over, and falsified his colors; he always
gives you a deal of Rubens.
But stay! that expression, "sinking self," is only a figure of
speech. At the last, the true artist never sinks self: he is always
supreme, and towers above every subject, every object, that he
portrays. The riotous health and good-cheer of Rubens marked the
man's limitations. He was not great enough to comprehend the small,
the delicate, the insignificant and the absurd. Only a very great
man can paint dwarfs, idiots, topers and kings. And so the many-
sidedness of the great man continually deceives the world into
thinking that he is the thing with which he associates; or, on the
other hand, we say he "sinks self" for the time, whereas the truth
is that in his own nature he comprehends the Whole. Shakespeare
being the Universal Man, we lose him in the labyrinth of his winding
and wondrous imagination. The greater comprehends the less.
The beginner paints what he sees; or, more properly, he paints what
he thinks he sees. If he grows he will next paint what he imagines,
as Rubens did. Then there is another stage which completes the
spiral and comes back to the place of beginning, and the painter
will again paint what he sees.
This Velasquez did, and this is what sets him apart. The difference
between the last stage and the first is that the artist has learned
to see.
To write is nothing--to know what to write is much. To paint is
nothing--to see and know the object you are attempting to portray is
everything.
"Shall I paint the thing just as I see it?" asked the ingenue of the
great artist. "Why, yes," was the answer, "provided you do not see
the thing as you paint it."
The King and the Painter grew old together. They met on a common
ground of horses, dogs and art; and while the King used these things
to kill time and cause him to forget self, the Painter found horses
and dogs good for rest and recreation. But art was for Velasquez a
religion, a sacred passion.
Nominally the Court Painter ranked with the Court Barber, and his
allowance was the same. But Velasquez ruled the King, and the King
knew it not. Like all wasteful, dissolute men, Philip the Fourth had
spasms of repentance when he sought by absurd economy to atone for
folly.
We are all familiar with individuals who will blow to the four winds
good money, and much of it, on needless meat and drink for those who
are neither hungry nor athirst, and take folks for a carriage-ride
who should be abed, and then the next day buy a sandwich for dinner
and walk a mile to save a five-cent carfare. Some of us have done
these things; and so occasionally Philip would dole out money to buy
canvas and complain of the size of it, and ask in injured tone how
many pictures Velasquez had painted from that last bolt of cloth!
But Velasquez was a diplomat and humored his liege; yet when the
artist died, the administrator of his estate had to sue the State
for a settlement, and it was ten years before the final amount due
the artist was paid. After twenty years of devotion, Olivarez--
outmatched by Richelieu in the game of statecraft--fell into
disrepute and was dismissed from office. Monarchies, like republics,
are ungrateful.
Velasquez sided with his old friend Olivarez in the quarrel, and
thus risked incurring the sore displeasure of the King. The King
could replace his Minister of State, but there was no one to take
the place of the artist; so Philip bottled his wrath, gave Velasquez
the right of his private opinion, and refused to accept his
resignation.
There seems little doubt that it was a calamity for Velasquez that
Philip did not send him flying into disgrace with Olivarez. Had
Velasquez been lifted out on the toe of the King's displeasure,
Italy would have claimed him, and the Vatican would have opened wide
its doors. There, relieved of financial badgering, in the company of
his equals, encouraged and uplifted, he might have performed such
miracles in form and color that even the wonderful ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel would have faded into the mediocre.
And again he might not--what more idle and fascinating than such
speculation?
That the King endured the calm rebuke of Velasquez, when Olivarez
was deposed, and still retained the Painter in favor, was probably
because Rubens had assured the King that Velasquez as an artist was
the master of any man in all Europe.
Velasquez made two trips to Italy, being sent on royal embassies to
purchase statuary for the Prado Gallery, and incidentally to copy
pictures. So there is many a Veronese, Tintoretto and Titian now in
the Prado that was copied by Velasquez.
Think of the value of a Titian copied by Velasquez! And so
faithfully was the copying done, even to inserting the signature,
initials and date, that much doubt exists as to what pictures are
genuine and what copies.
When Rubens appeared at the Court of Madrid, sent by the Duke of
Mantua, with presents of Old Masters (done by himself), I can not
but imagine the quiet confession, with smiles and popping of corks,
that occurred when the wise and princely Rubens and the equally wise
and princely Velasquez got together in some private corner.
The advent of Rubens at Madrid sent a thrill through the entire
Court, and a lesser man than Velasquez would have quaked with
apprehension when he found the King sitting to Rubens for a portrait
in his own studio.
Not so Velasquez--he had done the King on canvas a score of times;
no one else had ever been allowed to paint the King's portrait--and
he was curious to see how the picture would come out.
Rubens, twenty-two years the senior of Velasquez, shrank a bit, it
seems, from the contest, and connoisseurs have said that there is a
little lack of the exuberant, joyous Rubensesque quality in the
various pictures done by the gracious Fleming in Spain.
The taunt that many of the pictures attributed to Rubens were done
by his pupils loses its point when we behold the prodigious amount
of work that the master accomplished at Madrid in nine months--a
dozen portraits, several groups, a score of pictures copied. And
besides this, there was time for horseback rides when the King,
Rubens and Velasquez galloped away together, when they climbed
mountains, and when there were fetes and receptions to attend.
Rubens was then over fifty, but the fire of his youth and that
joyous animation of the morning, the years had not subdued.
Velasquez had many pupils, but in Murillo his skill as a teacher is
best revealed. Several of his pupils painted exactly like him, save
that they neglected to breathe into the nostrils of their work the
breath of life. But Velasquez seems to have encouraged Murillo to
follow the bent of his moody and melancholy genius--so Murillo was
himself, not a diluted Velasquez.
The strong, administrative ability of Velasquez was prized by the
King as much as his ability as a painter, and he was, therefore,
advanced to the position of Master of Ceremonies. In this work, with
its constant demand of close attention to petty details, his latter
days were consumed. He died, aged sixty-one, a victim to tasks that
were not worth the doing, but which the foolish King considered as
important as painting deathless pictures.
So closely was the life of his wife blended with his own that in
eight days after his passing she followed him across the Border,
although the physicians declared that she had no disease. Husband
and wife were buried in one grave in a church that a hundred years
later was burned and never rebuilt. No stone marks their resting-
place; and none is needed, for Velasquez lives in his work. The
truth, splendor and beauty that he produced are on a hundred walls--
the inspiration of men who do and dare--the priceless heritage of us
who live today and of those who shall come after.