"It is a sombre and a weeping sky
That lowers above thee now, unhappy Spain;
Thy 'scutcheon proud is dashed with dimming rain;
Uncertain is thy path and deep thy sigh.
All that is mortal passes; glories die;
This hour thy destiny allots thee pain;
But for the worker of thy woes remain
Those retributions slowly forged on high.
"Put thou thy hope in God; what once thou wert
Thou yet shalt be by labor of thy sons
Patient and true, with purpose to atone;
And though the laurels of the loud-voiced guns
Are not with us to-day, this balms our hurt--
Cervantes and Velazquez are our own."
--DUKE OF RIVAS: _For the Tercentenary_.
The celebration, as planned, was comparatively simple, but enthusiasm
grew with what it fed upon. The Knights of Santiago held the first
place upon the programme, for into that high and exclusive order the
artist had won entry by special grace of Philip IV. Even Spain has
been affected by the modern movement for the destruction of
traditions, and certain erudite meddlers, who have been delving in the
State archives, declare that there is no truth in the following
story, which, nevertheless, everybody has to tell.
The legend runs that Velazquez became a knight of St. James by a royal
compliment to the painter of _Las Meninas_. This picture, which seems
no picture, but life itself, eternizes a single instant of time in the
palace of Philip IV, that one instant before the fingers of the little
Infanta have curved about the cup presented by her kneeling maid,
before the great, tawny, half-awakened hound has decided to growl
remonstrance under the teasing foot of the dwarf, before the reflected
faces of king and queen have glided from the mirror, that fleeting
instant while yet the courtier, passing down the gallery into the
garden, turns on the threshold for a farewell smile, while yet the
green velvet sleeve of the second dwarf, ugliest of all pet monsters,
brushes the fair silken skirts of the daintiest of ladies-in-waiting,
while yet the artist, so much more royal than royalty, flashes his
dark-eyed glance upon the charming group.
But if Velazquez looks prouder than a king, Philip proved himself here
no uninspired painter. Asked if he found the work complete, the
monarch shook his head, and, catching up the brush, marked the red
cross of St. James on the pictured breast of the artist. So says the
old wives' tale. At all events, in this way or another, the honor was
conferred, with the result that on the three hundredth birthday of
Velazquez, June 6, 1899, dukes and counts and marquises flocked to the
Church of _Las Senoras Comendadoras_, where the antique Gregorian mass
was chanted for the repose of their comrade's soul.
By the latest theology, the "Master of all Good Workmen" would not
have waited for this illustrious requiem before admitting the painter
to "an aeon or two" of rest, but the Knights of Santiago have not yet
accepted Kipling as their Pope.
On the afternoon of the same day the _Sala de Velazquez_ was
inaugurated in the _Museo del Prado_, taking, with additions, the room
formerly known as the _Sala de la Reina Isabel_, long the _Salon
Carre_ of Madrid, where Raphaels, Titians, Del Sartos, Duerers, Van
Dycks, Correggios, and Rembrandts kept the Spanish Masters company.
Portico and halls were adorned in honor of the occasion; the bust of
Velazquez, embowered in laurels, myrtles, and roses, was placed midway
in the Long Gallery, fronting the door of his own demesne; but the
crown of the _fiesta_ consisted in the new and far superior
arrangement of his pictures. The royal family and chief nobility, the
Ministers of Government, the Diplomatic Corps, and delegations of
foreign artists made a brilliant gathering. The address, pronounced by
an eminent critic, reviewed what are known as the three styles of
Velazquez. Never was art lecture more fortunate, for this _Museo_,
holding as it does more than half the extant works of the great
realist, with nearly all his masterpieces, enabled the speaker to
illustrate every point from the original paintings. A rain of
aristocratic poems followed, for a Spaniard is a lyrist born, and
turns from prose to verse as easily as he changes his cuffs. As
Monipodio says, in one of Cervantes' "Exemplary Tales": "A man has but
to roll up his shirt-sleeves, set well to work, and he may turn off a
couple of thousand verses in the snapping of a pair of scissors."
These Dukes of Parnassus and Counts of Helicon did homage to the
painter in graceful stanzas, not without many an allusion to Spain's
troubled present. If only, as one sonneteer suggested, the soldiers
of _Las Lanzas_ had marched out from their great gilt frame and gone
against the foe! A programme of old-time music was rendered, and
therewith the _Sala de Velazquez_ was declared open.
To this, as to all galleries and monuments under State control, the
public was invited free of charge for the week to come. The response
was appreciative, gentility, soldiery, ragamuffins, bevies of
schoolgirls with notebooks, and families of foreigners with opera
glasses grouping themselves in picturesque variety, day after day,
before the art treasures of Madrid, while beggars sat in joyful squads
on the steps of the museums, collecting the fees which the doorkeepers
refused.
During these seven days, artistic and social festivals in honor of
Velazquez abounded, not only in Madrid, but throughout Spain. Palma
must needs get up, with photographs and the like, a Velazquez
exposition, and Seville, insisting on her mother rights, must arrange
a belated funeral, with mass and sermon and a tomb of laurels and
flowers, surmounted by brushes, palette, and the cloak and helmet of
the Order of Santiago. In the capital the _Circulo de Bellas Artes_
sumptuously breakfasted the artists from abroad. The dainties were
spiced with speeches, guitars, ballet, gypsy songs and dances,
congratulatory telegrams, and a letter posted from Parnassus by Don
Diego himself. Two valuable new books on Velazquez suddenly appeared
in the shop windows, and such periodicals as _La Ilustracion_, _Blanco
y Negro_, _La Vida Literaria_, and _El Nuevo Mundo_ vied with one
another in illustrated numbers, while even the one-cent dailies came
out with specials devoted to Velazquez biography and criticism. The
Academy of San Fernando rendered a musical programme of Velazquez
date, the Queen Regent issued five hundred invitations to an
orchestral concert in the Royal Palace, and there was talk, which
failed to fructify, of a grand masquerade ball, where the costumes
should be copied from the Velazquez paintings and the dances should be
those stepped by the court of Philip IV.
The closing ceremony of the week was the unveiling of the new statue
of Velazquez. Paris owes to Fremiot an equestrian statue of the
painter, who, like Shakespeare in his Paris statue, is made to look
very like a Frenchman, but the horse is of the most spirited Spanish
type. A younger Velazquez may be seen in Seville, at home among the
orange trees, and the _Palacio de la Biblioteca y Museos Nacionales_
in Madrid shows a statue from the hand of Garcia. Still another, an
arrogant, striding figure, was standing in the studio of Benlliure,
ready for its journey to the Paris exposition. The tercentenary
statue, by Marinas, is also true to that haughty look of Velazquez. It
represents him seated, brush and palette in hand, the winds lifting
from his ears those long, clustering falls of hair, as if to let him
hear the praises of posterity. Little he cares for praises! That
artist's look sees nothing but his task.
The unveiling took place late on Wednesday afternoon, in front of the
_Museo del Prado_, where the statue stands. A turquoise sky and a
light breeze put all the world in happy humor. The long facade of the
_Museo_ was hung with beautiful tapestries. Handsome medallions bore
the names of painters associated in one way or another with
Velazquez--Herrera el Viejo, his first master in Seville; Pacheco, his
second Sevillian teacher and his father-in-law; Luis Tristan of
Toledo, for whom he had an enthusiastic admiration; El Greco, that
startling mannerist, whose penetrating portraiture of faces, even
whose extraordinary effects in coloring were not without influence on
the younger man; Zurbaran, his almost exact contemporary, enamored no
less than Velazquez himself of the new realism emanating from the
great and terrible Ribera; Murillo, whose developing genius the
favored Court painter, too high-hearted for envy, protected and
encouraged, and Alonzo Cano, the impetuous artist of Granada, to whom,
too, Velazquez was friend and benefactor.
Spanish colors and escutcheons were everywhere. In decorated tribunes
sat the royal family and the choicest of Madrid society, with the
members of the _Circulo de Bellas Artes_, who were the hosts of the
day, and with distinguished guests from the provinces and abroad.
Romero Robledo, as President of the Society of Fine Arts, welcomed the
Queen, closing his brief address with the following words: "Never,
senora, will your exalted sentiments be able to blend with those of
the Spanish people in nobler hour than this, commemorating him who is
forever a living national glory and who receives enthusiastic
testimony of admiration from all the civilized world." Their Majesties
drew upon the cords, the two silken banners parted, and the statue was
revealed to the applauding multitude. While the royal group
congratulated the sculptor, the ambassadors of Austria and Germany
laid magnificent wreaths, fashioned with a due regard to the colors of
their respective nations, at the feet of Velazquez. The eminent French
artists, Carolus Duran and Jean Paul Laurens, bore a crown from France
and delighted the audience by declaring that "the painter of the
Spanish king was himself the king of painters." Nothing since the war
had gladdened Spain more than the presence and praises of these two
famous Parisians; the reverence of Madrid for Paris is profound. The
tributes of Rome and London excited far less enthusiasm. Still more
wreaths, and more and more, were deposited by a procession of
delegates from the art societies of all Spain, headed by Seville, the
bands playing merrily meanwhile, until that stately form of bronze
seemed to rise from out a hill of laurels, ribbons, and flowers.
This is the first Velazquez celebration which has had universal
recognition. The painter was hardly known to Europe at large until the
day of Fernando VII, who was induced by his art-loving wife, Isabel of
Braganza, to send the pictures from the royal palaces, all those
accumulated treasures of the Austrian monarchs, to the empty building,
designed for a natural history museum, in the _Prado_. This long, low
edifice is now one of the most glorious shrines of art in the world.
It is a collection of masterpieces, showing the splendors that are
rather than the processes by which they came to be. There is only one
Fra Angelico, but there are ten Raphaels and four times as many
Titians. In the Netherlands, no less than in Italy, the Spanish sway
gathered rich spoils. There are a score of Van Dycks, threescore of
those precious little canvases by Teniers, while as for Rubens, he
blazes in some sixty-four Christian saints, heathen goddesses, and
human sinners, all with a strong family resemblance. But although the
Italian and Flemish schools are so magnificently represented, the
wealth of Spanish painting is what overwhelms the visitor. Here are
four rooms filled with the works of Goya--whose bones, by the way,
arrived in Madrid from France for final sepulture a few days before
the celebration. Little more heed was paid to this advent than to that
of the United States ambassador, who, it may be noted, was not
presented to the Queen until the Velazquez jubilee was well over. But
as for Goya, this unnoised entry was appropriate enough, for he, whom
De Amicis has called "the last flame-colored flash of Spanish genius,"
used, during his later life, to make the long journey from Bordeaux to
Madrid every week for no other purpose than to gloat upon the Sunday
bull-fight, coming and going without speech or handshake, only a pair
of fierce, bloodthirsty eyes. This fiery Aragonese painted
bull-fights, battles, executions, and Inquisition tortures with blacks
that make one shudder and reds that make one sick. He painted the
brutal side of pleasure as well as of pain, filling broad canvases
with dancing, feasting peasants--canvases that smell of wine and
garlic, and all but send out a roar of drunken song and laughter.
[Illustration: GYPSY TENANTS OF AN ARAB PALACE]
Goya lived in the day of Charles IV, whose court painter he was, and
against whom this natural caricaturist must have borne a special
grudge, so sarcastic are his portraits of the royal family; but his
genius is allied to that of Velazquez's powerful contemporary, Ribera.
The _Museo del Prado_ has abundant material for a Ribera _sala_, since
it possesses no less than fifty-eight of his works, but the official
put in charge of it would probably go mad. The paintings are mercifully
scattered and, well for such of us as may be disposed to flight, can
be recognized from afar by their dusks and pallors--ascetic faces
gleaming out from sable backgrounds, wasted limbs of naked saints
tracing livid lines in the gloom of caverns, and, against an
atmosphere dark as the frown of God, the ghastly flesh of tortured
martyrs, and dead Christs drooping stiffly to the linen winding-sheet.
One is appalled at the entrance of the Long Gallery by the two vast,
confronting canvases of Prometheus, less a Titan than a convulsion of
Titanic agony, and of Ixion, crushed not only beneath the wheel, but
under that cold, tremendous blackness of hell made actual. Far down
one side of the hall they stretch, those paintings upon paintings of
torment, emaciation, the half-crazed visionary, and the revolting
corpse. But there is no escape from Ribera, he who
"tainted
His brush with all the blood of all the sainted."
Turning back to the Spanish cabinets that open from the vestibule we
come upon a piteous San Sebastian, the blanched young form bound fast
and already nailed by arrows to the ebon-hued trunk of a leafless
tree. Descending the staircase to the _Sala de Alfonso XII_, we must
pass an attenuated old anchoress, whose sunken face and praying hands
have the very tint of the skulls that form the only ornaments, almost
the only furniture, of her dreary cave. We may as well brave the
terrors of this first half of the Long Gallery, where El Greco's livid
greens will at least divert attention, and where, opposite the
collection of Riberas, wait the gracious Murillos to comfort and
uplift.
Yet Ribera, ruffian though he was, is not solely and exclusively a
nightmare artist. He could give sweetest and most tranquil color when
he chose, as his "Jacob's Dream" here testifies, with the dim gold of
its angel-peopled ladder; and for all the spirit of bigotry that
clouds his work, there is Catholic fervor in these pictures and
masterly truthfulness up to the point where the senses need the
interpretation of the soul. There is more than anatomy, too, in these
starved old saints; there is the dread of judgment. Ribera depicts
supernatural terror, where Goya shows the animal shock of death.
Another Spanish phase appears in Zurbaran. In his most effective work
we have not Goya's blood color, nor Ribera's blacks, nor the celestial
violets of Juan de Joanes, but the grays of the monastic renunciation,
the twilight that is as far from rapture as from anguish. His gowned,
cowled, corded figures pass before the eye in the pale tints of the
cloister. The shadow of cathedral walls is over them. The _Prado_ has
been strangely indifferent to Zurbaran, who is far more fully
represented in the galleries of Andalusia; but it has in its baker's
dozen two important and characteristic works, both visions of San
Pedro Nolasco. In one the entranced saint, whose figure might be
carved in stone,--stone on which ray from stained-glass window never
fell,--gazes upon an angel, whose vesture, crossed by a dark green
scarf, is flushed with the faintest rose. In the second the sombre
cell is illuminated for an instant by the apparition of St. Peter the
Apostle, head downward, as in his crucifixion, his naked form dazzling
against a vague redness of light like a memory of pain.
One glance at a wall aglow with Madonna blues reminds us that Spanish
sacred art does not culminate in Ribera nor in Zurbaran. The Christian
faith has had almost as pure, poetic, and spiritual an utterance in
the land of the Inquisition as in Italy itself. This is not Murillo's
hour; it is the triumph of Velazquez and the realists that Spain is
celebrating to-day; but none the less it is a joy of joys to walk by
the Murillos on the way to the laurelled bust and the crowded _sala_.
These are the pictures that are rather in heaven than earth. Where
Mary, divine in her virginal loveliness, is not upborne among the
golden clouds, the radiant-plumed angel kneels on her cottage floor
and the wings of the descending dove beat whiteness through the air.
Here is realism and more. The Mater Dolorosa has those luminous
sea-blue eyes of Andalusia, but they tell of holy tears. The Crucified
is no mere sufferer, but the suffering Son of God, and the crown of
thorns, while dripping blood, haloes his brows with the redemption of
the world.
The genius of Velazquez dwelt not above the earth, but upon it, in the
heart of its most brilliant life. He was no dreamer of dreams; he
"painted the thing as he saw it," and with what sure eyes he saw, and
with what a firm and glowing brush he painted! His _sala_ surrounds us
at once with an atmosphere of brightness, beauty, elegance, variety,
delight. His work is so superb, so supreme, that, like perfect
manners, it puts even the humblest of us at our ease. We are not
artists, but we seem to understand Velazquez.
Of course we don't. No knight of the palette would admit it for an
instant. What can the rabble know of the mysterious compoundings and
touchings from which sprang these splendors of color that outshine the
centuries? Young men with streaming hair are continually escorting
awed-looking senoras about the room, discoursing with dramatic
vehemence on the "periods" of the Master's work. As a youth at
Seville, they explain, Velazquez had of necessity taken religious
subjects, for the Church was the chief patron of art in Andalusia;
but his natural bent even then displayed itself in tavern studies and
sketches of popular types, as the "Water-seller of Seville" and the
"Old Woman Frying Eggs." Of his early religious pieces the
archbishop's palace of Seville keeps "San Ildefonso Receiving the
Chasuble from the Hands of the Virgin," and the National Gallery of
London secured "Christ in the House of Martha," but "The Adoration of
the Kings" hangs here at our right as we enter the Velazquez _sala_. A
little stiff, say these accomplished critics, with a suggestion of the
dry manner of his master, Pacheco, but bear you in mind that this is
the production of a youth of twenty. It is obvious, too, that
Andalusians, not celestial visions, served him as models.
A longing to see the Tintorets and Titians, those starry treasures of
the dark Escorial, drew him to Madrid at twenty-three. Here he was
fortunate in finding friends, who brought his portraits to the notice
of Philip IV, a dissolute boy ruled by the Count-Duke Olivares. Youth
inclines to youth. Velazquez was appointed painter to the king at the
same salary as that paid to the royal barber, and henceforth he had no
care in life but to paint. And how he painted! His first portraits of
Philip show a blond young face, with high brow, curled mustache, the
long Hapsburg chin, and eyes that hint strange secrets. Again and
again and again Velazquez traced those Austrian features, while the
years stamped them ever more deeply with lines of pride and sin--a
tragic face in the end as it was ill-omened in the beginning. But the
masterpiece of Velazquez's twenties is "The Drunkards," a scene of
peasant revelry where the young are gloriously tipsy and the old are
on the point of maudlin tears. Here it is, _Los Borrachos_, farther
to the right. In looking on it one remembers that a contemporary
realist, in the Protestant island which has often been so sharp a
thorn in Spain's side, likewise crowned the achievement of his
springtime by a group of topers, Prince Hal and Falstaff and their
immortal crew.
Not the influence of Rubens, who spent nine months in Spain in
1628-29, painting like the wind, nor a visit to the Holy Land of
Raphael and Michael Angelo could make Velazquez other than he was.
This "Vulcan's Forge," which we see here, painted in Italy, is
mythological only in the title. Back he came at the royal summons, to
paint more portraits--Philip over and over, on foot, on horseback,
half length, full length, all lengths; the winsome Infante Baltasar,
as a toddling baby with his dwarf, as a gallant little soldier,
hunter, horseman, and in the princely dignity of fourteen, when he had
but three more years to live; the sad French queen, the king's
brother, the magnificent Olivares, the sculptor Montanes, counts,
dukes, buffoons. Within these twenty years Velazquez produced his two
most famous works of religious tenor--"Christ Bound to the Column," a
"captain jewel" of the London National Gallery, and that majestic
"Crucifixion" before which Spaniards in the _Prado_ bare their heads.
But the crown of this period is _Las Lanzas_, or "The Surrender of
Breda," which holds the place of honor on the wall fronting the door.
It is vivid past all praise, and nobler than any battle scene in its
beauty of generosity. The influence of Italy had told especially on
Velazquez's backgrounds. The bright, far landscapes opening out beyond
his portrayed figures, especially those on horseback,--and his horses
are as lifelike as his dogs,--give to the _sala_ an exhilarating
effect of free space and wide horizons.
In 1650 he made his second visit to Rome, where he portrayed Pope
Innocent X. Nine years of glorious work in Spain remained to him.
Still he painted the king, even at his royal prayers, for which there
was full need, and the young Austrian queen, who had succeeded the
dead mother of the dead Baltasar. On that happy left-hand wall of the
_sala_ shines, in all its vigorous grace, the "Mercury and Argos," but
if the hundred eyes of Argos are ready to close, their place is
supplied by the terrible scrutiny of a row of portraits, embarrassing
the boldest of us out of note-taking. How those pairs of pursuing
black eyes, sage and keen and mocking, stare the starers out of
countenance! The series of pet dwarfs is here, old AEsop, and Menippus,
and the sly buffoon, "Don Juan of Austria." Of these two wonder-works,
_Las Meninas_, "The Maids of Honor," has a room to itself, and thus
_Las Hilanderas_, "The Weavers," becomes the central magnet of this
returning wall. A saint picture and even a coronation of the Virgin
cannot draw the crowds from before this ultimate triumph of the
actual--this factory interior, where a group of peasant women fashion
tapestries, while a broad shaft of sunshine works miracles in color.
And this, too, is Spanish. Cervantes is as true a facet of many-sided
Spain as Calderon, and Velazquez as Murillo. With all the national
propensity to emotion and exaggeration, Spaniards are a truth-seeing
people. The popular _coplas_ are more often satiric than sentimental.
They like to bite through to the kernel of fact, even when it is
bitter. Velazquez, with his rich and noble realism, is of legitimate
descent.