Velasquez, the Painter of Kings
Frank, Waldo
445 VELASQUEZ, THE PAINTER OF KINGS By WALDO FRANK A NTITHESIS even within the personal will of J"\ the Catholic kings. Isabel looks to Africa and the west. Mysterious horizons claim...
...But the black and silver gown is volumnear...
...The beauty of spiritual effort and of strain, so creative in Ribera, is replaced by the beauty of physical poise...
...But here too, irony is at work...
...In him, as in his realm, lives the spirit of Catalan, of Navarran and of commercial Jew...
...This grace is the marriage of cool and obvious metals...
...there are no forms save those of the body...
...El Greco is Spain of Africa and of the Semites, Spain the high priest of Rome, the mystic Spain...
...Now, in this division of the will of Spain, that term of it which is European finds its canon...
...And here were the twisted courtiers of the king...
...El Bobo de Coria—the simplicity of the inane issuing from the breakdown of complex power: sweetness, candor, poetry and grace surviving in the death of idiocy...
...Velasquez was a great lover of El Greco...
...This type of aesthetic will which, from the renaissance to Courbet is to reign in Europe wins perhaps its highest trimph in the alien Velasquez...
...The will of Velasquez does not falter...
...In El Greco, as in all mystic art, the moving materials reach the immobility of form only through the focus of a world beyond them...
...The vast autonomy of the subjective vision is renounced in him...
...He lives at the palace...
...In the world there lives a spirit whose name is Christ...
...And Velasquez is Europe— scientific, deductive, materialistic—the land of grace, of luxuriant elaborations, and of immense exclusions...
...But in Velasquez, there are no colors save those of face and fabric...
...Mysticism disappears, both in its imminent and its transcendental forms...
...Europe, accepting the material world as the entire world, pours all its energy to the creating of the immense material universe which is our universe of the machine and science...
...El Primo—a little man beside a gigantic book...
...It suggests the modern aesthetic of the machine...
...The forces which aspire beyond the body, beyond the domain of the senses lived on in Velasquez...
...Think what El Greco would have done with that group—the royal family, the painter, the dwarf, the dog...
...America casts a parabola of search and service alluring to her mystic appetite...
...In these works, the graphic might of Velasquez fades—they are the least of his pictures...
...And since they were pitiful victims of nature's law— the despised and dispossessed—an artist's soul could use them as a symbol...
...Modeling and texture are composed of immediate masses which are self-sufficient...
...Manuel Cossio tells us that in his private chambers at the palace, the court painter hung several works of the 446 THE COMMONWEAL September 16, 1925 great mystic...
...Las Meninas, however long one gazes at it, remains the picture of a shut and earthly room...
...Don Sebastian de Morra: a huge body squats, the head empty, the outstretched legs short as a child's—so eloquent, so helpless...
...Louis XI and Machiavelli would have hailed it...
...Study Las Hilanderas, Mercurio y Argos, the portrait of Margarita de Austria...
...The will of Velasquez's art is objective form...
...Spain's craft goes far, when Spain resolves to be "efficient...
...In his religious subjects, Velasquez shows a direct influence —chiefly of composition—of El Greco...
...His artistic career corresponds almost literally with the reign of his king...
...A good court painter could portray them...
...But this is not the final word...
...Her will toward Europe has flung her power high into the north and clear across the Latin sea...
...He makes his eye a literal receiver of impressions: whereas the mystic eye (and the Spanish eye) has ever been a creator of expression...
...he goes on a diplomatic mission to Italy...
...The concept of the state which Isabel and Ferdinand adapt is modern Europe...
...In the palace of the king of Spain, there were simpletons and dwarfs...
...Bodily substance is real, here, and absolute...
...Velasquez, employing the climax of his power to bespeak the idiot and dwarf, meets Cervantes—Velasquez the courtier and Cervantes the outcast, set down the tragedy of aspiration —the doom of man, whether he strives or whether he denies, whether he follows Anti-christ or Christ—his equal doom to fail, and to beget unconquerable beauty...
...The moods and passions of the human mind suffice in themselves...
...Velasquez will be wholly European...
...The world of appearance is the world—and the means for the aesthetic triumph are such immediate means as impeccable modeling, bright pigment, gracious lines...
...Velasquez, better than the policy of the kings, better than the victories of their captains in Sicily and France, incarnates Spain's desire to be Europe...
...they have their value not in some rapt design beyond man's body or employing it to mystic ends...
...Of the woman there is nothing save the weak face and the retreating hands...
...Velasquez is the favorite painter at the court of Philip IV...
...It must be added that this realistic art, and this realistic Europe, are doomed today...
...The purpose of that state would have been better pleasing to Mohammed or to Saint Paul...
...But Isabel is wedded to a man who looks toward Europe...
...How they would have exploded...
...But here were these instincts and intuitions, stifled in the master's soul, unable to speak, unable to die...
...This is a prophecy of Europe, whose life of mechanical perfection has turned the Christ and saints of its soul into just such twisted dwarfs...
...This explains the cramped discomfort or the lifelessness of his religious pictures...
...Velasquez is a realist in the restricted modern European sense...
...Or take the portrait of Mariana de Austria, Philip's second wife...
...Velasquez has discovered this: he sets down his dark confession after all...
...Here is a literal record of all the grotesque and pitiful world which his devotion to the literal has formed in his own spirit...
...Africa is the home of Origen and Augustine—Berber Christians and true Spanish minds...
...No glimpse here of the arcana of the soul, of the soul's subtle modeling of arm and face...
...Spain does not follow...
...With the flesh of a harlot, with the crushing of sentiment and love, Rojas made the word of God...
...Now, while Velasquez molds that will into organic and immortal form, his king loses Portugal, loses the Netherlands, loses the Roussillon and half of the Pyrenees to France, and faces insurrection in Barcelona, Spain's European port...
...Velasquez's traits are traits of modern Europe...
...pathos, tenderness, pride—the song of frustration...
...Cezanne, a disciple of El Greco, marks the turn of the tide, in the domain of painting...
...The hot fluidity of El Greco which recalls the line of the Prophets, the creative incompleteness of the Byzantines, becomes a static peace...
...When the world denies, that spirit ceases to be Christ—it becomes a dwarf and a madman...
...And this dichotomy within the will of the monarchs—Europe and the East, conventional politics in Europe and vague adventures across the western sea—merges into the classic will of Spain...
...The Aragonese king comes from the most assimilated part of Spain...
...But the form is Ferdinand's—and here his wife is the disciple...
...What a tribute to the energy of Spain...
...He is impressionistic...
...His aesthetic will allowed them no immediate expression...
...Velasquez will have none of them...
...Neither in part nor in whole are they transmuted into the subjective...
...And this reign marks the rapid ebb of Spain's affairs in Europe...
...Mysterious horizons claim her...
...But he painted them so well because they were part of himself...
...Since they formed part of the court, Velasquez painted them...
...since they were of the palace...
...This is the confession of Velasquez, enacting Spain's will to be Europe...
...The purpose is Isabel's and is accepted by her husband...
...Its fringes and its lace hold an immensity of power that appears almost to be a symbol of this court—this court of Spain striving to hold a world that sta'rves its spirit...
...A Spaniard fathers the school of "realistic" art which is expressive of the Europe that left Spain doomed...
...And in this response, Velasquez achieves once more the miracle of Spain—the infusing of a part with an intensity and an awareness of the whole...
...But Velasquez leads...
...What a page it is...
...how heaven and hell would have come in and metabolized these bodies...
...For this is not Spain, this is but a fragment...
...The vision yearning to become complete, the mystic marriage, the parabolic search, the lyric plaint, the ceaseless canto hondo, the shrewd arabesque which transforms words into body —these too are of Spain—these are the virtues which create El Greco, Calderon, Lope, Ribera and Cervantes...
...Where Velasquez is great, El Greco is rigorously excluded: the younger man seems wilfully to avoid what he must have felt would diffuse and denature his aesthetic...
...His love and study of his antithesis helped to confine him within his own domain...
...His activities tend toward Italy and France...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 19
