Velázquez and the Golden Age

Classical Antiquity and Christian tradition played a key role in the intellectual horizon of the Spanish Golden Age, and were consequently the object of pictorial representation. They often gave rise to images that made implicit comparisons between wisdom and poverty, resulting from the growing interest in Neo-Stoicism that spread throughout Europe during the Baroque. Besides revealing some of these intellectual referents, this section allows us to see how pictorial tradition developed through works painted for the same places or depicting similar characters. Velázquez painted Aesop for the same hunting pavilion that housed Rubens’s Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher and was therefore able to contemplate the earlier composition as he worked. The comparison between the two works shows different narrative sensitivities and Velázquez’s interest in clothing classical characters in ordinary contemporary dress. In its turn, the work by the Flemish painter can be likened to the picture of the same theme painted by Ribera at roughly the same time, that explores the dramatic and descriptive possibilities of chiaroscuro. Despite starting from a common basis – the conception of painting in chromatic terms – Rubens, Velázquez and Ribera managed to offer several unique, personal alternatives.

The Spanish Golden Age was also a time of important scientific developments in which experience and accumulative knowledge were highly valued, giving rise to works like those by Jan Brueghel the Elder that presented viewers with small visual encyclopaedias, encouraging them to probe the themes underpinning the paintings.

Mythology, the set of narratives through which Graeco-Roman antiquity articulated its religious system and expressed its vision of the world, offered the painters of the Renaissance a wonderful opportunity to explore new artistic themes. One of these was the nude, artistic form par excellence in Western tradition, the place where artists proved the scope of their possibilities. Spanish royal collections abounded in mythological paintings portraying nude figures, most of which had been made by foreign artists and were usually stored in so-called reserved rooms. These private chambers survived until the early nineteenth century, and were a way of protecting the paintings against moral censorship.

The presence in this section of works by Titian, Rubens and Velázquez attracts attention to the three main names that enable us to speak of royal collections in terms of international tradition: Rubens learnt from Titian, and Velázquez’s style is inspired by the knowledge of the works by the two of them. All three artists are connected by a similar conception of painting as matter in which colour is more important than line.

Most of the pictures in this section were genuinely courtly products, because of their origin, their fate or because they reveal step by step the emergence of a pictorial tradition in the Spanish court.

The court was the stage on which Velázquez’s career unfolded between 1623 and his death in 1660, and as a result the adjective most often used to define his art and his biography is ‘courtly’. His work in the court is fundamental in order to understand important aspects of his art that distinguish it from that of his Spanish colleagues: his customary dedication to portraiture, his incursions into the field of mythology, and the scant presence of mythological works. These thematic options are related to the kind of expectations generated by painting in the court. This section displays some of the motifs related to the genre, such as royal portraits, the representation of jesters, and historical and allegorical paintings.

The court was one of the main backdrops for the forging of a pictorial tradition in Spain during the seventeenth century. The accumulation of paintings from diverse origins, and the need that different courtly artists had to adjust their work to the expectations of that environment gradually created an international chain of Flemish, Italian and Spanish artists inspired by the works they discovered upon their arrival in Madrid. Velázquez wasn’t oblivious to this, and had to adapt his portraits to courtly uses. Indeed, his art in general cannot be understood without bearing royal collections in mind, which are especially rich in Venetian painting of the Renaissance and in seventeenth-century Flemish works.

The main theme explored by Spanish painters of the Golden Age was religion, which accounts for over 80% of works by Ribera, Zurbarán, El Greco and Murillo. The last section of the exhibition is dedicated to this subject matter, and comprises eleven works, a small figure in comparison with the number of religious paintings circulating in seventeenth-century Spain, yet balanced in comparison with those found in the courts where Velázquez pursued most of his career.

The selection seeks to emphasise the ties between Spanish and foreign painting. Caravaggist interest in chiaroscuro and realism was shared by Velázquez, Maíno, Ribera and Stanzione; the paintings by Guido Reni and Zurbarán reveal a similar compositional technique; the figures of St Francis depicted by Gentileschi and Van Dyck were characterised by a similar system of emotions and pathos; while the pictures by Murillo and Rubens similarly appeal to concerns such as tenderness and domestic intimacy. Yet despite these common features that describe similar aesthetic horizons and a comparable religious and emotional system, each of these great masters managed to create an original and unmistakable style, as evinced by all the works in this section.