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Biographical Information:
Velazquez was born in Seville of Portuguese descent and apprenticed with Francisco Herrera and Francisco Pacheco, a minor late Roman mannerist. He married Pacheco's daughter Juana in 1618. In 1623, after previous visits to Madrid, he settled there permanently and became the court painter to Philip IV. From that year dates the first of his many portraits of the King, who is often dressed in black in the severe style of the Spanish court. In his early portraits Velazquez achieves a great feeling for space and atmosphere without the usual expedients of furniture, curtains, or linear perspective; only subtle changes in light or vague indications of the floor or wall line are used. They still show the precise division of light and shade and the clear outlines of his Seville period, but after the late 1620s his work acquired a new fluency and richness.
During the 16th century, the artistic stimulus in Spain came from Caravaggio and Flemish painting. Velazquez painted in a Caravaggesque style during his early years, but his interests centered on genre and still life rather than religious themes. "The Water Carrier of Seville" (1619), which he painted at the age of 20, shows his genius: his powerful grasp of individual character and dignity invests this everyday scene with the solemn spirit of a ritual..
In the 1630s Velazquez also did numerous portraits of dwarfs and jesters, which are remarkable for their profound psychological insight and their pictorial richness. They illustrate the fact that Velazquez, who painted relatively few religious pictures, was not primarily a painter of the Counter Reformation, as were his contemporaries Rubens and Bernini. Instead he showed his Christian spirit by an great respect for the individual, God's creature, no matter how ugly.
He had become a friend of Rubens and traveled in Italy, where in 1650 he painted the portrait of "Pope Innocent X" (1650). The picture is meant to evoke the great tradition of the papal portraits of Raphael but its fluid brushwork and glowing color derive from Titian.
"The Maids of Honor" (1656) show Velazquez' mature style at its fullest, at once a group portrait and a genre scene. Unlike Rembrandt, he was concerned with the optical rather than the metaphysical mysteries of light. The varieties of direct and reflected light are almost limitless. Velazquez' aim is not to show figures in motion, but the movement of light itself and the infinite range of its effects on form and color. For him, light creates the visible world; and it took another 200 years for other painters to realize the implications of this discovery.
Velazquez's last great work and one of his most famous is "Las Meninas", in which the dislocation of reality, the fusing of real and pictorial space, reaches its apogee. All the art of Velazquez is concentrated in this uncommonly beautiful and enormously complex work: the use of crossing diagonals, the subtle harmonies of pinks and grays, the scintillating brushwork, and the magical rendering of atmospheric space.
In 1659 Velazquez was made knight of Santiago. He was both courtier and court painter; his numerous portraits of the Spanish royal family, restrained, dignified, and at the same time profoundly human, rank with the finest portrayals ever made. His rendering of light and atmosphere and of aerial space was revolutionary, and he is often considered the first truly modern painter.
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Artists Works:
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
Velazquez, Diego
...more works by Velazquez, Diego
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Related Information:
ReNatssance
ReNATssance Art
Spanish Arts
Velazquez, Goya
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