The Velázquez show at the National Gallery has reminded me that art history is not only about what was, and what is, but what might have been. This Andalusian from Seville (his father was Portuguese) was a lifelong snob and social climber and later maintained his family were of gentry, if not noble, stock. We do not know and it seems unlikely. What matters about this single-minded and pushy southerner is that he was perhaps the most naturally gifted painter who has ever lived. His training is obscure and was unimportant. Who can teach a genius of the top rank? The way in which he put on the paint, with infinite exactitude and matchless daring, swiftly, surely and with total confidence, has never been equalled. This kind of skill cannot be learned. It comes by the grace of God. Velázquez also had a supreme gift of penetrating the face and bodies of those he saw, and translating their structure, in his mind, from three dimensions into an image in two, and then getting it on to the canvas luminously, as if the blood still coursed under the pigment-mask, and the brain still flickered fiercely behind the glowing eyes. I do not blame Pope Innocent X for saying his portrait was ‘too true’, for there he is in all his shifty, calculating worldliness (the version in the NG show is not the best, which is, naturally, in the palace of Innocent’s family, the Doria-Pamphili, in Rome).
What is notable is that Velázquez was producing masterpieces at the age of 18, and he was only 19 (probably) when he painted my two favourites in his entire oeuvre, ‘The Old Woman Cooking Eggs’ (Scottish NG) and the ‘Water Seller of Seville’ (Apsley House). What is remarkable about these works is not so much the magic of his painted surfaces — textiles, porcelain, stonework, metal, water, grease and dirt, hair and flesh — as the way in which he conveys the nobility and dignity of the poor, which are the most precious characteristics of the Spanish people.
Velázquez was 19 when he used his exquisite teenage wife as model for the ‘Immaculate Conception’ (London NG) and she appears again (I think) some months later in his rendering of ‘The Adoration of the Magi’, a work of such originality and power as to defy belief in its subtleties.
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