The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming

Author:Laura Cumming
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448182367
Publisher: Random House

12

The Escape

WE LOOK AT the world, wondering if we see what our forebears saw in the unreachable past, whether the colours remain the same, whether anything looks exactly as it once did beyond the trees, the clouds and the seas, whether anything of our world is just as they saw it.

In Madrid, nothing remains of the Alcázar where Velázquez lived and worked through his whole adult life, and very little is left of the Buen Retiro. There is a ballroom and one staircase, and the walls of the Hall of Realms where his huge equestrian portraits of the Hapsburgs, young and old, once hung. Everything else was destroyed by French troops occupying the building as a barracks during the Peninsular War. What survives of this palace life, this self-contained society, is in Velázquez’s paintings.

But the Retiro Park is still there at the heart of the city, with its maze of sandy-gold avenues radiating out beneath the cedars and limes. This was the view from the palace windows. This is where the summer masques took place in the scented air, where mock sea battles were performed on the lake. A tree planted in Velázquez’s day still thrives, a Mexican cypress brought back from the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Rowing boats still pull across the waters below the same colonnaded terraces. This is where Velázquez walked, as men in black still stride out summer and winter, suddenly visible at the end of long vistas, citizens of Madrid granted the freedom of the Park when the monarchy collapsed. This is where Velázquez walked in the sun and air, but it does not appear in his art.

It is almost always indoors in Velázquez. His is a world of interiors, of shuttered rooms at the end of long corridors away from the bustle. He goes out with the royal hunt and on diplomatic missions; he paints Baltasar Carlos posing below an oak in leaf-green clothes. But these are exceptions. His is an inner world, pictured behind closed doors. Until one day the world opens up to him and he finally escapes the palace.

Velázquez got away from court only twice in his life, both times to Rome. Italy alters his art forever.

It is said that when Rubens visited the Spanish court in 1628, industriously copying the royal pictures as if he was still learning how to paint at the age of fifty-one, and then producing thirty pictures of his own for Philip IV, it was not his prodigious work but his wise words that affected Velázquez. Rubens urged the younger painter to go to Rome as soon as he could, to see the home of art. Two months after Rubens’s departure, in the summer of 1629, Philip IV gave in and allowed Velázquez to travel.

On the voyage out from Barcelona he spends the days at sea in close conversation with the Genoese general Ambrogio Spinola, whose portrait appears in the middle of the military throng in The Surrender of Breda, accepting the keys to that city from his beaten Dutch enemy with empathetic compassion.

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