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Velazquez: Anticipating the Impressionists
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16747 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
2,783 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
In 1819, Ferdinand VII of Spain established the Prado Museum, opening to the public one of the world's greatest picture collections. Not long thereafter, the name Velazquez joined those of Rubens, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Bernini, and Poussin in the pantheon of Baroque art. Beginning October 3, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is honoring Velazquez with an exhibition of nearly forty of his paintings, many of which have been lent by the Prado Museum for the first time in its history.
Inventive Iconography
Since his day, appreciations of Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez (1599-1660) have largely centered on four aspects of his achievement: his realism, his innovative technique, his inventive iconography, and his unique conception of the vocation of the painter. Though it is beyond the scope of this brief study to explore these qualities in detail, an examination of a few key works may prove sufficient at least to outline the artistic development of Velazquez, the greatest painter of seventeenth-century Spain.
His career began at the age of ten, when he commenced a six-year apprenticeship with the leading theorist and aesthetician in Seville, Francisco Pacheco. According to the early Velazquez biographer Antonio Palomino (1724), "Pacheco's house was a gilded cage of art, the academy and school for the greatest minds in Seville." The kitchen scenes, or bodegons, in which Velazquez specialized at this time, show a mastery of Caravaggio's "modern" style, in which still life elements and figures emerge from darkness with riveting, almost photographic verism. In works such as Old Woman Cooking (1618) and the Water Seller of
... (1993 of 16684 Characters)
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