Imagining the Real
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The art of Joachim Patinir revels in a world that is earthly, visible, concrete. You must stand for a long time before his Rest on the Flight into Egypt to grasp each of the minute details the painter has gathered into the rather small rectangular space of the panel—if he has not rather scattered them as if by chance, as if merely recording what anyone might have seen by walking through the Flemish countryside, the woods and fields, the pastures, scattered farmsteads and village houses with roofs of plaited straw. You must stand before the painting for a long time, thinking you have noticed everything, then going back to glimpse some crucial detail that had gone completely unseen. Nearly everything about the picture would have been familiar to its viewer. Its size, the scale of the figures and the precision of its every detail indicate without a doubt that it was made to be seen up close, as part of a small altar in the chapel of a private home. Its contemplation would have been as intimate and private an act as reading a book of hours and savoring its pictures. One would have lingered over each visual detail as over the beauty and depth of a Biblical phrase or the ornate lettering of those old illuminated volumes that were written by hand and vanished with the coming of the printing press.
What beguiles us in Flemish painting is the clarity of the real, the sense of looking at the world through limpid air, as when the clouds part after the rain and the sun comes out to shine over Dutch fields and city squares. An Italian fresco is made to be seen from a greater distance. The technique itself allows far less precision than oil on wood. Italian painting, as Erwin Panofsky once said, takes place in an intellectual atmosphere steeped in Neoplatonism: the immediate and the concrete matter far less than the depiction of ideal forms. In Flanders, says Panofsky, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, what prevails is a “nominalistic philosophy which claimed that the quality of reality belongs exclusively to the particular things directly perceived by the senses and to the particular psychological states directly known through inner experience.”
In this Rest on the Flight into Egypt, our gaze and our imagination rest on the ground of the real. We should be allowed to sit down in front of a painting in order to look at it unhurriedly. Then we, too, could rest from our wanderings through the museum. The very stillness of the painting presents us with a kind of challenge. It provides what we would now call an interactive experience, except one that employs the cutting-edge technology of the early sixteenth century. The realm of fantasy has been reduced to that stagelike city in the upper left corner where sacrifices are being made to monstrous pagan deities, one of which has the head of a rat. The age of redemption has begun, but the ancient world endures. The buildings are partly Oriental or Romanesque, suggestive of what would have been distant times and places for a viewer of the 1520s. The fate of the pagan gods is starting to be fulfilled. The idols of Heliopolis tumble from their pedestals and lie in pieces on the ground as the Holy Family passes by.
Theology, though, like fantasy, fades in the stark illumination of the real. There is the careful gesture with which Joseph carries a pitcher that is maybe filled with milk or curds, trying his best not to spill it as he walks on such uneven ground. There is the air of calm with which the donkey takes advantage of this moment’s rest to graze a little on the grass, even if the stop will be so short that they have not even bothered to take off the saddlebags. There is the darkness of the ground the peasants sow and then the gold and yellow wheat stalks where the mowing has begun. One must linger as well over the plough that cuts furrows in the ground, the figure of the boy who pulls the bridle of the mule, the man who follows after, sowing seed. And then, too, as I now realize for the first time, over the birds that hasten down to peck the seed that has just fallen, and then over the darkness of the trees that rise a little farther out, a borderland between the cultivated fields and those primeval woods of Europe that are being felled already, communal forests where poor peasants can procure some firewood or hunt for birds or gather some wild berries. A plough, I said, but as I look at it more closely (it is a kind of wooden lattice spiked with nails), I recognize it as a harrow, an implement intended not to plough the earth but to break up a surface layer that will cover up the scattered seed. I saw them still in use when I was little.
Out in the woods, a man with a hurdy-gurdy moves among the trees as if skipping or dancing. Hurdy-gurdy players turn up in stories, paintings and woodcuts as characters who are at once wicked and alluring, traveling musicians capable of stirring up revelry or madness, tellers of tales, conduits for a music whose monotonous and mesmerizing drone accompanies the village dances. There is something of the pilgrim and the jester to the hurdy-gurdy player, who here dances like a parasite among the trees while nearby the peasants struggle at their grueling work—a work whose fruit is forever in question, since the birds lie in wait for the fresh-sown seed, and at any given moment, the ordered, inalterable tempo of the seasons and the labors of the field can be shattered by one of those tempests of misfortune that follow in the wake of armored men, mercenaries, harbingers of war. A few days later, I go back to Patinir in the company of Eduardo Barba, a seemingly omniscient botanist who has catalogued every species of plant depicted in the Prado’s collections. He points out to me that the character I noticed is in fact not carrying a hurdy-gurdy but a crossbow, which he is cocking in order to fire. He, too, is one of the invaders.
So many different things are happening simultaneously, in crowded corners and familiar places. There is something so delicate yet so unyielding to the actuality of ordinary things, the humble trappings of this family of refugees. I never tire of looking at that wicker basket, plaited with such skill, with its carefully tightened lid to keep the food from spilling, a lid to which a small hasp has been added for greater caution. Or of looking at that gourd with the small tin cup dangling from a string, so that the Child may drink, or at the satchel that St. Joseph will carry on one side, or at the staff that he will lean upon when they resume their journey. Each object has required of the painter a capacity for absolute perception in both eye and hand. Travelers, at the time, must have carried gourds and baskets just like those. I saw them myself when I was still a child. I drank water from that kind of gourd, and when my father was in his orchard, I brought him food in a similar basket, though it was made of esparto rather than palm leaves or wickerwork. I saw enormous sows much like the one suckling its young in front of that house in the distance, which looks like a farm, but according to those who know the iconography of the period is actually a brothel, as indicated by the dovecote on the roof.
Gazing at this kind of painting is in itself a religious experience. It teaches its viewers to attend to the world’s visible appearances in order to discover what lies hidden underneath and to perceive within the alluring spectacle of reality the ominous signs of a demonic realm. To keep one’s eyes alert before a painting of such minute detail is to train oneself to discern, beneath all flattering outward appearance, the eternal presence of evil and damnation in a world stained by original sin, a world without any other hope of personal or collective redemption than the Passion of Christ. Within the Biblical scene as depicted by Patinir, in that apparently calm and bucolic landscape that seems at first almost like a memory of Eden, unsettling things begin to happen, or things at least that are too real to be proper. Looking very closely, you can see a man squatting and defecating by the outer wall of a house. This figure is one of the strange signatures that Patinir often incorporated into his paintings. In the midst of the wheat field that grew miraculously overnight, there is a group of soldiers, rendered even more frightening because the painter has not bothered to put them in “period” dress or tried to situate them in any way within the distant century of the birth of Christianity. The soldiers carrying out this massacre are as contemporaneous for Patinir’s viewers as the harrow turning up the soil or the peasants’ implements or the architecture of the houses. The rest on the flight into Egypt must not last a moment longer: those soldiers are in pursuit of the fleeing family, and if they catch them, they will display the same ruthlessness as their armed companions are showing to the children of the villagers whose houses they are plundering right now. Poppies have grown among the yellow wheat. Eduardo Barba brings his magnifying glass close to the surface of the painting and is able to distinguish another humble species of plant, the bindweed. A picture made five hundred years ago keeps bringing back memories of childhood. My father taught me to identify the bindweed, with its long, winding stem and its white trumpetlike flowers, because it was one of the favorite foods of the rabbits we used to raise.
Our eyes crave more reality. We grow weary of all those theological and aesthetic abstractions, their splendor, the ubiquity of the powerful and the sanctified: kings, princes, warriors, martyrs, gods. We want to learn about the actual things in ordinary people’s lives, the tools they used. As an antidote to the fantastical visions of the saints, or to the deeds of generals, the arrogance of those in power, the lust of mythological divinities, one wants to look, for instance, at that group of peasants tilling, sowing, harvesting the field; or at that woman lying face down on the ground amidst the general mayhem in Brueghel’s Triumph of Death, which hangs in the same room of the Prado. Surrounded by skeletons, demons and allegorical figures, she alone is perfectly real. Face down on the ground, she continues to reach with her left arm, the one in which she held her baby, to drape it around him in an attempt to cradle him still. A skeletal dog is licking the child. Next to her right hand there is a spindle. When the armies of death arrived, this woman rushed out of her house holding her child. There was no time even to drop the spindle she was using to spin yarn. It is just one figure lost in the great final reckoning of the Apocalypse. Because she fell face down, she remains completely anonymous. She is nobody, but the gesture with which she tries to embrace her child, as well as the spindle with the tuft of wool that she was spinning, bestows on her an unyielding individual truth.
The baby Jesus in Patinir’s painting is not very convincing, but the Virgin’s gesture as she presses her breast between her index and middle fingers to ease the passage of milk is delicate and precise. These figures were painted by an assistant in his workshop, and not just anyone, either, but probably Quentin Massys. Nearly as truthful in its anatomy and gesture is the Virgin’s hand in a different The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, this one by Gerard David. Here, too, there is a forest, and one can see between the trees Joseph walking behind the donkey that carries his wife and newborn child. There is a sense of youthful motherhood to the Virgin as depicted by David, though his skill in capturing reality does not go far enough to present a genuine interaction between the mother and child.
This is the great mystery of children in painting. Artists have spent centuries manufacturing children on a kind of great assembly line—little Christs, St. Johns, big cherubs, little cupids—seemingly without having once bothered to look at a real child. They drew and painted a series of monstrous creatures: elongated babies with the faces of old men; children with blond locks and flesh that looks like sausage; puerile faces that lack a single individualizing trait. A lonely exception to this mass of anonymous, prefabricated children is the cupid lifting up his little gown to pee in Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians. Nicolas Poussin painted hundreds of childish figures that are all of an unbearable incompetence, though no one seems to have objected at the time. In four centuries of painting, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, children multiply like a strange breed of ornamental and rather menacing creatures, as unreal as those lions, for instance, that furnish another example of egregious ineptitude, even if one that can be justified more easily.
Very few people could have known, back then, what a lion truly looked like. Children, on the other hand, are everywhere. The lions that sit by St. Jerome to keep him company sometimes look like cats, or dogs, or like the lions on a coat of arms. Jacopo Bassano’s The Animals Entering Noah’s Ark shows a stunning plethora of creatures that have all been carefully observed, including a snail that one fears will not make it to the ark before the hatch is closed. Bassano paints roosters, dogs, donkeys, horses, owls, hens, the whole exuberant panoply of the animal kingdom as known to a southern European of the sixteenth century. When he paints an elephant, he masks his ignorance or his insecurity by showing just a part of it. But the pair of lions going up the gangway with a certain boastful air is really inexcusable. The first truthful lion in the world was painted by Rubens. It appears, in the act of devouring a fox, in the foreground of his Victory of Truth over Heresy. The first child to have been truly seen is the Child Jesus in the Adoration of the Magi by Velázquez. Apparently, he was in fact a girl, the artist’s daughter. He sits upright, and his gaze is maybe that of a year-old child rather than the days- or weeks-old baby the Magi would have come to adore. But it is a real child, with distinct features and a kind of incipient personality that is at least as marked as those of the adults around him.
No painter truly looked carefully at a newborn baby until Georges de La Tour did so in his Adoration of the Shepherds, which made a memorable appearance in the Prado when on loan for an exhibition in 2016. Scenes like the birth of John the Baptist or the birth of the Virgin afford us a glimpse into the intimate world of servants and midwives, women who worked with their hands. There is a flash, a fleeting view of reality in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Birth of Saint John the Baptist. The mother lies convalescing in bed after giving birth, while the women who tend to her bathe the child or vigorously hoist a basin of hot water, treading on an ordinary floor made of clay tiles. They have strong forearms. Their expert hands are chapped and red. They have rolled up their sleeves and pulled back their hair anyhow to keep it from annoyingly falling across their faces. Juan Bautista Maíno’s Adoration of the Shepherds also shows a real child, even if not a newborn. But the most powerful flash of truth in the painting is in St. Joseph’s gesture as he kisses his son’s pudgy arm, shutting his eyes in pure paternal bliss and holding it delicately in one hand while very gently squeezing the boy’s flesh.
This is the ordinary world of the everyday, a world we wish to see but are rarely allowed to. The life of the people leaves almost no traces. Folk music only began to be preserved when the first phonographic recordings were made in the early twentieth century, a continuation of the first attempts to document it by students of folklore in the age of Romanticism. The faces, the labor, the habitations of the poor have only been able to endure since the invention of photography. Only with La Celestina, the Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache or Don Quixote did the voices and the plight of ordinary people enter literature. In 1568, an old soldier named Bernal Díaz del Castillo completed his True History of the Conquest of New Spain, a vindication of the trials of the many foot soldiers who took part in the conquest of Mexico, which the official chronicle by Francisco López de Gómara attributed primarily to the heroic role of Hernán Cortés. Battle paintings depict victorious generals in the foreground, almost always on horseback, while the soldiers who fight, die, and suffer all the indignities of war can barely be distinguished in the great mass of people in the distance. Velázquez, Maíno and Peter Snayers show us a glimpse of the lives and faces of those who participate in war mainly as cannon fodder. Only Goya, nearly two centuries later, would allow the victims to occupy the foreground. But Goya is an exception to the norm. It is photography, rather, first during the Crimean War and then during the American Civil War, that truly showed what could only be glimpsed in Patinir and Brueghel, the full scale of butchery and infamy that occurs in battle.
I keep looking for minutiae. In Patinir’s Landscape with Saint Jerome, a boy leads a blind man down a path by the river while a hare lies crouching and alert, its ears stiff, its body blending with the ground. In a painting by Bernard van Orley that seems half Flemish, half Italian, the Virgin holds a pear that has been drawn and shaded as precisely as the hand that raises it as if to inspect it closely. These are flashes of reality. In Rogier van der Weyden’s Durán Madonna, the Child has clumsily reached for the pages of the Bible that his mother holds open on her lap, crushing and crumpling them. In the Annunciation panel of Dirk Bouts’s Triptych with Scenes from the Life of the Virgin, there is a water jug on top of a wooden cupboard, and next to it a pair of trays and an apple that is absolutely of this world. In the next panel, which depicts the Visitation, the Virgin and St. Elizabeth gently hold their bellies, which are quite distended by pregnancy. The gesture of their hands is one of curiosity and care: they touch their stomachs lightly, so as not to disturb the babies while nevertheless feeling for their motions within.
In Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, the face of the figure on the left is very pale and the eyelids are red, nearly blistered with crying, while at the foot of the scene there is a series of wild plants and flowers that have been as perfectly drawn as in a botanical manual. I thought I had inspected them with care, but Eduardo Barba points them out to me one by one, reciting their Latin names and then their beautiful common names as well, which I write down, inviting me now and then to look through a kind of telescopic sight that he usually carries around his neck like some artistic and botanical detective. There is yarrow, white dead-nettle, wild geranium, soft rush, spear thistle, thymeleaf, ryegrass, rough brome, and dandelion. In Dürer’s Adam and Eve, the leaves and branches of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are unquestionably those of an apple tree. The shape and color of the apple are as real as the gaping jaws and patterned scales on the snake, or as the rapt expression of stunned anticipation and desire on the faces of this man and woman who, as told in Genesis, are still untouched by shame or guilt: “and they were naked, and they were not ashamed.”
In Antonio Correggio’s Noli me tangere, the kneeling Mary Magdalen and resurrected Christ are idealized figures caught in a kind of theatrical gesturing. But at their side, bathed in a morning light that has not fully dispelled the shadows, we see a mattock, a straw hat, and a gardener’s shovel. On a wooden crossbar in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation sits a single swallow, as carefully drawn as each of the flowers, herbs and plants in the Garden of Eden, thirty-six of which, according to Barba, can be clearly identified. In comparison with this swallow, the standard-issue dove that symbolizes the Holy Spirit is entirely devoid of poetry, despite the golden rays that pierce it and seem to propel it along. A painter as adept at celestial abstractions as Fra Angelico is nevertheless still endowed with the eye of a naturalist. In the half of a pomegranate held by the Virgin with the Pomegranate, one can see the irregular cut across the edge of the stiff rind, which is so hard to peel, and each of the little seeds lying inside, some deep red, others nearly white, gathered in clumps that are divided by translucent veils within the fruit. In Andrea Mantegna’s Death of the Virgin, which hangs next to it, the entirely predictable figures of the apostles, whose robes and tunics seem borrowed from classical statuary, stand by an open window that shows a clear view of the Mantuan countryside: the calm waters of the lake, some rooftops, a bridge, a scene that is neither celestial nor abstract but probably familiar, rather, to anyone who lived in the city. It is the first real, completely identifiable landscape in Italian painting.
In Agostino Carracci’s Last Supper, which is otherwise quite formulaic, I notice a bottle, a glass jar, a basket brimming with bread. The pile of bread at the foot of the table is far more truthful than the figures of the apostles or Jesus Christ. There is a convincing depiction of a barn or a stall in Federico Barocci’s Nativity: hay is strewn all over the floor, and a rather plausible Child lies on a bundle of straw in a manger that has been crudely cobbled together out of some wooden boards. There is a sieve on the ground to sift the grain that will feed the mule and the ox, calm, solemn creatures that seem at once ordinary and somehow sacred. The light emanating from the newborn child could just as well be the light from a candle. The grand display of angelic tidings and adoring shepherds is reduced to what can be glimpsed through the barely opened door where they stand and hesitate, not quite daring to enter despite Joseph’s encouragement. The faint glow in the distance could just be a flash of lightning across the dark sky on a stormy night. It could be lightning, or it could be the equally blinding though supernatural light of the angels, who have come to tell the shepherds of the birth of Christ.
As in Patinir, the real does not exclude the sacred but rather allows it to be manifested through the mystery of its simplicity. To us, the abstract and the concrete seem incompatible. The laws of nature seem to stand against the possibility of miracles. That is why it bothers us so much that Galileo, Newton and other pioneers of science were also deeply religious. Newton carried out endless calculations to determine the exact dimensions of Solomon’s temple. Galileo made a pious pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Virgin of Loreto, a shrine devoted to the worship of the house where the Virgin supposedly once lived, miraculously carried from the Holy Land by angels when the infidels tried to tear it down. Galileo and Newton believed that the mathematical perfection of the laws of nature were a confirmation of their faith, being proof of the wisdom and omnipotence of the deity who created them. One proof of the nobility of painting is that it provides a visual testimony of this perfection. “Whoever wishes to consider it attentively,” writes Francisco Pacheco, “will judge the origin of this art to be found in nature itself, its model or exemplar being the gorgeous framework of the world, and its teacher, the first light imparted by singular grace on our understanding.” To a painter, a believer, an illuminator working on a book of hours, each visible thing reveals in its perfection the sum of divine wisdom, and nothing is so purely earthly, tangible or concrete as not to possess, as well, a symbolic meaning. A gourd, a satchel, a donkey with its saddlebags, a stalk of ripe wheat in a painting by Patinir allude to the fact that we are pilgrims in this earthly life, in transit to another. The fecundity of nature after lying dormant through the winter stands for the world’s renewal through the birth of Christ, while the sheaves of wheat ready for harvest foreshadow the bread of the Eucharist. The apple tree to one side of the figure of the Virgin is also the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Images in Christian art are always in unstable equilibrium, as on a balance so extremely sensitive that the lightest touch in one direction produces a contrary motion.
Images depict, and also signify. The sacred is under constant threat from the profane. As in the parable of the sower, part of the seed that symbolizes the word of salvation will be lost when the birds devour it. In Patinir’s Flight into Egypt, the plowed field is steps away from the peril of the woods, including that soldier with the crossbow who looks a bit like a demon. The brothel, and the great sow with its famished young, and the man who crassly defecates, all give warning of the unvanquished force of carnal appetite, just as it is in the present that Herod’s soldiers carry out their massacres, a here and now that is atemporal too. The statues of the pagan gods fall and shatter as the Holy Family goes by, but pagan sacrifices continue to take place in the distance. The sow devours acorns from an oak tree while her babies suckle on her milk. On the chimney of a house, next to where the innocents are having their throats slit, there is a stork feeding its young in their nest. More soldiers can be seen coming up a distant path on horseback. The magnifying glass that I borrowed from Eduardo Barba keeps uncovering signs of an immense crime, the “slaughter of the innocents,” a religious metaphor for all the cruelties inflicted by those in power on those who are defenseless.
The seeming stillness of the landscape as it spreads into a blue distance is a promise and a consolation, but also a warning about a deceitful mirage. Idolatry, cruelty and corruption are a present and continual threat. The only possible defense against them is the miracle of a helpless innocence: a woman nursing her child in the fields before resuming her journey. The carefully drawn pear that the Virgin holds in one hand in a painting by Van Orley is in counterpoint to the apple of perdition, because Mary, within the set of symmetries and echoes that structures the Christian imagination, is the obverse of the sinful woman who caused our expulsion from Eden. One of them brought sin and damnation into the world, the other is the key to our salvation.
A similar allusion, though less overt, is provided by the apple on top of the cupboard in Dirk Bouts’s Annunciation. Art here performs two actions at once. It presents an image of the natural simplicity of everyday life, and it declares and serves as proof of a miracle that will overturn the world. The scales of the balance will never be even, or still. Words are clear-cut, abstractions can be categorical, but the ambiguity of images will never be exhausted. The plants and flowers at the foot of Patinir’s Virgin, like the ones that flourish in the Garden from which Adam and Eve are being expelled in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, are as readily identifiable as the illustrations on a Renaissance herbarium. Their morphology is as distinct as the medicinal virtues attributed to them. Yet each of these species carries as well a symbolic meaning, and neither of those qualities hampers or annuls the other. Nature, as Baudelaire says in one of his poems, is a temple of living pillars, and human beings wander through it—much like visitors to a museum—as in a forest of symbols. The more you peer at the open pomegranate in the Virgin with the Pomegranate, and the closer you bring your eyes to the painting, the more you will be struck by Fra Angelico’s wondrous mastery, which seems more Flemish than Italian. But you will not see it completely unless you take into account that this pomegranate, with its bloodred juice, is also an allusion to Christ’s Passion, to the future torment and misfortune that await the Child. All of creation is a great symbolic edifice, in its overall structure as well as in each of its visible parts. The brambles at the feet of the Virgin in Patinir’s painting, like those that can so easily go unnoticed in Velázquez’s Adoration of the Magi, are a literal announcement of the crown of thorns.
The painter Antonio López once said that there are very few periods in human history when artists truly paid attention to reality. The things that López says about painting sound at once like oracular pronouncements and like observations drawn from common sense. He speaks with nearly religious reverence of the cave painters of the Paleolithic; of the sculptors who carved those brutal scenes of war and hunting in Assyrian bas-reliefs; of a Roman portrait in bronze; or of the chilling funerary Fayum mummy portraits. When you look at these portraits, they look back. They look you in the eye, as if they were here now, and two thousand intervening years had never passed. No one may have ever looked so closely at an animal as the artist of Wounded Lioness. Nothing in it is idealized, or treated crudely, or turned into caricature. The long, lithe, muscular body pierced by arrows tightens in a painful spasm that expands the jaws and makes us almost hear the roar of the dying beast. The forelegs are still pressing firmly on the ground, but the hind legs are unstrung by a perfectly aimed arrow.
Among the ancient, formal portraits of the pharaohs, a set of individual features now and then shows through, perhaps the troubled, bony face of the heretic Akhenaton. In the Naples Archeological Museum, the viewer’s eye is bewitched by the realism of the figures in a Roman mosaic: a fish, an octopus, a bird, a frog, all kinds of creatures from land and sea. Before I went to the museum, I associated mosaics with the imperial or religious rigor of late-Roman or Byzantine art. I did not know that such a medium might be capable of depicting and celebrating the varied splendors of sight. Following that brief burst of naturalism, artists stopped looking at the world for at least a thousand years.
Now I understood what Pliny the Elder said about a certain mosaic on a palace floor, one that mimicked so superbly what the floor itself would look like after a banquet that the servants tried to clean it up, as if those spilled cups, wine stains and scraps of food were really there. Artists have sometimes failed for centuries to notice the reality before their eyes, or they have thought it unworthy of depiction, or served masters with a powerful vested interest in hiding it or falsifying it for private gain. Yet as far back, at least, as the time of the Greeks, the prestige of painting has lain partly in its ability to imitate reality with such precision as to deceive the eye. Not just the human eye, in fact, but that of animals as well.
No writer of a treatise on the arts, from Giorgio Vasari to Antonio Palomino, fails to repeat the famous stories about ancient painters found in Pliny’s Natural History, usually along two lines: the first, of course, as a reminder of the nobility granted in Antiquity to the art of painting, and of the fortunes and social standing once achieved by its practitioners; the second, to remark on the consummate skill that allowed them to give a painted thing the semblance of reality. For nearly three centuries, beginning in the quattrocento, these stories are passed on from one treatise to the next. The reason Pliny is so valued by painters of later times is that he provides the only credible traces of a lost tradition. Poets, philosophers and historians could make use of undisputed models, transmitted in manuscripts that were finally made available in critical editions through the printing press. Architects, starting with Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, were able to rely not just on Vitruvius’ ancient treatise, but on the ruins of the very temples and palaces of Rome, some as undamaged as Agrippa’s Pantheon. Each day, new excavations rescued ancient works of sculpture that were still intact, or broken into fragments that were no less eloquent, like that Belvedere Torso that so influenced Michelangelo when it was found in the Campo dei Fiori during the papacy of Julius II.
Of ancient painting, though, nothing remained. A canvas, a panel or a fresco are far more fragile than the stones of a building or the bronze of a statue. Until Pompeii was unearthed, almost all that could be known about ancient painting was what Pliny told in some chapters of his vast encyclopedia, which not only comprised the arts and knowledge of the Romans, but their fantasies, too. Thus, in order to sustain their classical aspirations, painters had to appeal to a series of Greek exemplars, who were mythical even when Pliny wrote about them, and to derive their inspiration from works which had left no trace.
When Juan Fernández painted his dazzling Still Life with Four Bunches of Grapes in the 1630s, anyone viewing it would have understood the allusion to Zeuxis of Athens, who according to Pliny once painted some grapes so perfectly that the birds flew down and tried to peck at them. The spirit of competition among painters, which Vasari remarks on so often, was in full force already between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, one of his contemporaries. The two of them tested their strength against each other, just as Leonardo and Michelangelo would test theirs on the walls of a large hall in the Signoria in Florence. Zeuxis had put on view one of his paintings of grapes and went over to Parrhasius’ to lift the cloth that covered it. He was forced to acknowledge his defeat when he discovered that the cloth was painted, and that he had been fooled by his opponent’s mastery.
The highest achievement for a painter was mimetic perfection. Zeuxis painted a boy carrying a basket of grapes, and his admirers marveled once again at the fact that the birds flew down to peck them, but he was not satisfied: “I painted the grapes better than I did the boy,” he said. “Had I done it well, the birds would have been afraid of him.” Apelles, having painted a horse and fearing that other painters would not praise it, had it shown instead to some horses that all neighed at the painted beast. Vasari ascribes to Leonardo a similar awe-inspiring ability to imitate reality: “Pictures so vividly painted,” says Pacheco, “that they nearly assault the unsuspecting senses.” Leonardo once painted a monstrous head on a wooden shield that made his father nearly jump with fear when he entered the dim room where it was kept. On a painting of the Virgin, according to Vasari, he put in some flowers in a vase, adding a few dewdrops to their petals that were “more real than reality itself.” I cannot believe they were as real, though, as the ones that glisten on the ribbed surface of the clay jug in Velázquez’s Waterseller of Seville.
The portrait and the still life became the great tests in the pursuit of likeness. A still life is a symbol of the vanity of the world, of the ephemeral nature of all tangible things and the sensual pleasures we derive from them. At the same time, in its visual skill, it is a celebration of pure immanence, activating the eye and trapping the most acute observer in its optical illusion. In Spanish still lifes, the objects are often framed by a painted support and a dark background that suggest the cramped, hollow space of a cupboard. A picture of fruit or of some life-size animals hanging on a kitchen wall seems to carve out a real space within it. Juan van der Hamen’s Still Life with Sweetmeats and Glass Vessels included two flies. It must have been hard to tell, in the room where it first hung, if they were real or painted. Perhaps Van der Hamen’s skill had done to them what Zeuxis’ did to those birds who came to peck at his illusory grapes.
If a picture is capable of deceiving a fly, a bird, a horse, its power over the senses can be as wondrous as it is sinful. Lodovico Dolce, the Venetian writer on painting who once proposed, rather cynically, that Michelangelo’s nudes in the Last Judgment be covered up as immoral, took pleasure in lauding the sensual effects of the picture of Venus (whose backside is presented to the viewer) embracing Adonis in the “poetical work” of his friend Titian. “No man,” he says, “however sharp his eye or his judgment may be, will fail to think, in seeing her, that she is alive, and none will be so chilled by age or of such hard complexion as not to feel the blood in all his veins grow hot, and yield, and begin to flow.”
A portrait, if it is very good, can be mistaken for the person it depicts. Painters as well as their subjects take pleasure in that sleight of hand. Pablo de Céspedes mentions in one of his writings that “Titian made a portrait of the Duke of Ferrara, and he had the painting placed at a window, while he stood at another to enjoy the ruse, and all who walked by, thinking it was he, bowed and took off their hats.” Diego Saavedra Fajardo, an experienced judge of painting, was as affected by one of Velázquez’s full-length portraits of Philip IV as by the king himself: “He had . . . such a graceful carriage, and the expression on his face was so majestic and august, that I was deeply troubled in my reverence, and bowed, and lowered my eyes.” The king’s posture in those official full-length portraits was exactly the same he would have adopted when receiving an embassy, to the point where his stillness during a reception could be mistaken for that of his painted figure. He must have stood there like a waxwork, with a dull luster to his pale wax skin. “His Majesty,” reads one account, “received [the Duke of Gramont] in the great hall, standing by a writing desk, and stayed like that for the entire time.”
During the seventeenth century, the Baroque aesthetics of desengaño, in combination with the first scientific inquiries on optics, led to an endless fascination with all forms of visual illusion—the split between appearance and reality; the splendor and deceit of the great theater of the world. The man who developed the microscope lived two houses down from Vermeer in Delft. The way St. Thomas puts his fingers into the wound after the Resurrection, the way he fixedly stares at it in the works of Caravaggio or of his Dutch follower, Matthias Stom, has much in common with the sense of pure physiological curiosity one sees in Rembrandt’s doctors as they carry out their autopsies and teach their lessons on anatomy. The stories that Antonio Palomino tells about the confusion wrought by certain of Velázquez’s portraits resemble those that Vasari told about Leonardo, or Pliny about Zeuxis.
The social and professional success attained by Velázquez during his second trip to Rome had much to do with the portraits he made of highly eminent figures in the papal court, starting with the pope himself. “The chamberlain went in to see his Highness,” Palomino recounts, “and seeing his portrait, which was dimly lit, took it for the original, and went out again, telling some courtiers who were in the vestibule to speak quietly, since his Holiness was in the adjacent room.” In Rome, Velázquez made his slave, Juan de Pareja, carry the portrait he had made of him, dressed in the same costly clothes he wore in the painting. Picture and model resemble one another so closely that the line between reality and fiction begins to blur, allowing them even to trade places. Juan de Pareja holding the portrait of Juan de Pareja is a figure nearly as chimerical as Don Quixote de la Mancha finding at a printing shop in Barcelona a copy of Don Quixote de la Mancha. It is a statement about his master’s prowess in the art of portraiture, as well as its living proof.
Of course, neither Don Quixote nor the genre of the picaresque novel enjoyed real literary prestige. They were too vulgar, filled with lowly characters and disreputable locales like taverns or roadside inns, written in a language that was too close to common speech, without exemplars, heroes, heroines or any trace of the lofty style of declamation that was considered appropriate for literature. These books might be commercially successful, but they would never earn their authors the protection and patronage of a great lord, which was the only real source of stability and social rank. The cultured people who laughed heartily at Sancho Panza’s scatological scenes or Don Quixote’s harebrained schemes, the same who recognized in Rinconete and Cortadillo the familiar types and settings of the Sevillian underworld, would never bestow on such books the kind of literary value they reserved for epic poems or the chronicles of heroic knights and conquering saints. The works Velázquez painted as a young man in Seville, many of them reminiscent of Cervantes’ picaresque tales in their low register and documentary style, belong to a genre that received much scorn in treatises on painting, the bambochadas, scenes of manners set in kitchens or taverns and featuring characters who were lowly and picturesque: servants, paupers, slaves, picaros and street musicians, figures that, on top of it, were usually cut in half rather than nobly presented at full length. The same repertoire of characters appears in Cervantes’ entremeses, his short plays, and in those of his exemplary novels that most resemble them. Artistic realism, like everything else, hinges on social class: only the have-nots can be depicted as they are, and only for the delight of those above them, for whom they serve a role like that of midgets and buffoons in lordly courts. When Brueghel painted brutal, crass, drunken peasants, he did it to amuse the wealthy burghers of the Flemish towns. One is allowed to depict peasants (but not lords) asprawl on the floor after a bout of gluttony or drunkenness.
From an early age, Velázquez displayed a matchless ability to take in the most varied influences and make them his, whether they came from art or from a direct observation of life. In Seville, as a young man training in the methods and the knowledge of his craft, Velázquez was exposed to Dutch paintings and engravings brought to Spain by merchants taking part in European commerce at the very crossroads of the trade with the New World. There were powerful connections to Italy as well, both to the northern cities and to the Kingdom of Naples. Down that road came another influence that was just as fertile and attractive—the naturalism of Caravaggio, which meant not just its formal impact, but an imitation of its methods too, for instance the practice of painting directly from the model. Pacheco, who was Velázquez’s teacher and his father-in-law, refers to it in his treatise on painting: “That is how it was done by Micael Angelo Caravacho; one can tell in the crucifixion of St. Peter . . . to what great effect; and that is how Jusepe de Ribera does it, too, since his figures and his heads . . . seem as if they were alive. . . . And my son-in-law, who follows the same path, you can also tell what a difference it makes and how it sets him apart, since he always paints from life.”
Pacheco could only have known The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, which hangs in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, from an engraving. That is how Velázquez, too, discovered those religious paintings that were also luxuriant still lifes, maybe even literal still lifes protected by the claim to be religious paintings. The genre had been invented by Pieter Aertsen during the prior century. A splendid example by one of his disciples, Joachim Beuckelaer, is now in the Prado. It is clearly a still life, as lavish as a stall in a fancy market, yet it is also a passage from the Gospels. The scene, hidden beneath its pious alibi, is so real as to be nearly obscene. Yet the alibi is also, as in Patinir’s painting, a lesson in contemplation: the attentive believer knows how to discern the hidden presence of the sacred within the spectacle of worldly things.
As in the case of Pieter Aertsen, what galvanized Beuckelaer’s skills as a painter is the sheer abundance of earthly victuals, ennobled by their placement within the marble spaces of classical antiquity so as to be nearly transformed into pagan emblems of fertility. The fish, the venison, the vegetables are all depicted with as much sensuous delight as the naked flesh of the goddesses in Titian’s “poems.” A few figures in the background, however, turn this pageant of material opulence into mere decoration for what is truly taking place: a concealed story from the Gospels. Reality is once again a detour, a pretext or a symbol. The true subject of the painting is Christ’s visit to the house of Martha and Mary in the Gospels. One of the sisters is seated at his feet, drinking in his every word. The other is burdened by domestic tasks. She comes over to complain to Jesus about her sister’s indolence, but he corrects her: what Mary does by listening to the sacred word is more important than her own concern for the household and their guest. The life of religion is higher than practical matters. Beuckelaer’s painting, like his teacher’s, carries out an inversion that seems scandalous to many sensibilities, since the truly significant historical events are relegated to the background. To a painter like Vicente Carducho, whose education was so conservative, these innovations were infuriating. “One should also be aware of a different kind of devotional painting, made so profanely and with such insolence that it can be hardly recognized as such. Just recently, I saw a painting of the holy visit to Lazarus’ sisters . . . all cluttered by such a quantity of food, of turkeys, capons, lamb and fruit, of plates and other kitchen stuff, that it resembled more an inn of gluttony than a refuge of holiness.”
It is a great pity that the Prado does not have any of the works painted by Velázquez in Seville, when the direct influence of the school of Aertsen and Beuckelaer was combined with the dramatic use of light and shadow known as Caravaggio’s tenebrismo. Velázquez’s still lifes are much more frugal, in part because an ordinary kitchen in Seville would have had far fewer varieties of food on display than that of a Dutch lord or burgher. That, however, is precisely what accounts for the powerful realism of the paintings, as well as for an atmosphere of Biblical poverty that is already more indebted to the bare, penitential, proletarian religion of Caravaggio. Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, is directly derived from the examples set by Aertsen and Beuckelaer, but it produces an effect of almost pained soberness, quite close to that of the original story in the Gospels. It was very rare for the art of that period, or any period, to take a working woman as its main figure. We see a very young maid, almost a child, with a round, puerile face and a frown such as any of the small mishaps of childhood might produce. She has strong wrists and the hands of a grown woman, big and chapped, the right one vigorously holding a pestle. She is mashing the seasonings for a simple dish: there are two eggs on the table, some fish on a plate, some garlic and a dry pepper. The gilt mortar, the chipped plates, the glazed jug and the bare wall could all come from one of the Andalusian kitchens I knew as a child, before there were any electrical appliances.
In another painting by Velázquez from his time in Seville, now in Dublin, the supper at Emmaus appears in the background of a main scene that shows a Black maid or slave immersed in her kitchen duties. She is rapt in such a sense of calm and concentration that we are reminded of the saying of St. Teresa according to which Christ can also be found among the pots and pans. In this case, there is almost no food at all. Some pots, some kitchen utensils allow Velázquez to revel in the textures of tin, ceramic and fired clay, but the only edible thing on view is a bulb of garlic. Hanging on the wall there is a small basket of woven grass that for me holds personal as well as literary connotations. That kind of basket was common in the houses and the gardens of my childhood. It also appears in several picaresque novels, notably Rinconete and Cortadillo, where the two picaros work for a time as “basket carriers,” porters who carry produce for the serving maids, who buy it at the market, back to the houses where they work.
The food that Christ and his disciples shared in Emmaus surely had more in common with the scant fare we see in Velázquez’s kitchens than with the flood of abundance in Beuckelaer’s still lifes or in Adriaen van Utrecht’s even more opulent works. Francisco Pacheco comments with distanced equanimity and palpable circumspection on the trend they represent: “Some have preferred to paint a great variety of fish; some, dead fowl and game; others have painted still lifes with different types of food and drink; or absurd and ugly figures of various kinds, with which they aim to induce laughter. All of it, when done with boldness and skill, can be amusing, and shows ingenuity in their disposition and wit.” Within the social and aesthetic hierarchies of Pacheco’s professed classicism, still lifes dealt with subject matter that was too low to be truly respectable, while portraits looked too closely at the imperfections of reality to attain canonical beauty. Pacheco, however, was partial to his son-in-law, who was also his pupil, and this made him capable of broader views that he lacked in other areas. “Should still lifes not be valued?” he wonders. “Of course they should, if they are painted in the way my son-in-law paints them, which no one can surpass, and which is worthy of great esteem.”
Nevertheless, the prejudice against painting from life was deeply ingrained and can be found at the root of the many condescending judgments, to us entirely incomprehensible, that were made about Velázquez and that explain why for centuries his paintings received a rather modest valuation in the inventories of the Royal Collections. Vicente Carducho disparages any painter “who should be a mere imitator of external nature, bereft of precepts or understanding.” The position of painting with respect to reality is very similar to the one that Aristotle attributed to poetry in a view that held full currency well into the sixteenth century and that Cervantes echoed more than once. History, Cervantes says, alluding to Aristotle, recounts things as they were; poetry, as they could or should have been. The ability to depict accurately what is immediate and visible is treated with a strange disdain. “How can a painter,” says Carducho, “pretend to succeed in producing heroic works by only copying from nature what is filled with imperfections?”
In 1633, when his treatise was published, Carducho was a well-regarded and capable painter. As heir to the Florentine Mannerist tradition into which he was born, he was alarmed by the incursion into the court of youths like Velázquez, who seemed to him infected by Caravaggio’s scandalous innovations: “Some . . . without any further drawing or sketching, put a white pencil to a primed canvas and figure out what to do as they go along, and they start painting (without ever erasing anything) by looking at the model before them, which they just copy, and sometimes they will finish half a figure completely without having determined what the other half should be.”
Antonio Palomino makes vague allusions to the concerns or negative opinions expressed about Velázquez by his contemporaries. “Their envy pursues him even in death,” he writes. Anton Raphael Mengs, who introduced the Neoclassical sensibility to the Spanish court, admired Velázquez’s technical feats but did not think he could be considered a true master. In 1800, Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, the first Spanish art historian of the Enlightenment, and a friend of Francisco Goya and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, assessed Velázquez in terms that are at once admiring and condescending: “Let us agree wholeheartedly with those who say that Diego Velázquez never rose above naturalism. But who was ever his equal in this class?” He also suggests that Velázquez, in his wish to reproduce the always imperfect spectacle of reality, must have employed mechanical means: “Convinced that painting is nothing more than a precise imitation of nature, he sought to expedite every available path to its observation, and found the very reliable means of the camera obscura, which turns nature into a painting; that is to say, which presents nature as if painted by all the rules of art.”
When more than two hundred paintings from the Royal Collections were selected to be sent to the Musée Napoléon in Paris, Las Meninas was not included. Nor did Joseph I take the painting as part of the vast plunder he and his retreating army carried away from Madrid when they left for Paris. Don Quixote de la Mancha and Las Meninas are probably the two greatest inventions of Spanish literature and painting, but their destinies were at first quite disparate. Cervantes had no recognizable influence at all on his Spanish contemporaries, or on any Spanish writer of the following two and a half centuries, until the time of Benito Pérez Galdós. Don Quixote failed to initiate any kind of new narrative tradition in Spain, though in Europe—in France, for instance, and even more in England—it became the source of a wondrous novelistic tide. Defoe, Fielding, Sterne and Dickens were readers and ardent imitators of Cervantes. In the United States, he was hailed as a model by no less than Herman Melville and Mark Twain.
Las Meninas, which received its rather arbitrary title only in 1843, was for a long time a secret masterpiece. Palomino’s impassioned praise was an isolated fact without consequences. Palomino was backward-looking as a painter and a theorist, a man stuck in the late Baroque and in a stale Aristotelianism that seemed like a relic of bygone times to Enlightenment Europe. The painting continued to hang in one of the king’s private chambers in the Alcázar, and then in the Palacio Nuevo, where it also seems to have drawn little attention. Théophile Gautier saw it in 1840. He looked at the scene, with its strange wavering between the cryptic and the banal, and asked, with characteristic French wit: “But where is the painting?”
Gautier had brought with him one of the first photographic cameras ever reported in Spain. If he thought that he was not looking at a painting, it was precisely because what he saw was just like one of those instantaneous, literal fragments of reality that became possible due to the extreme precision of the daguerreotype. As Jonathan Brown, one of the great scholars of Velázquez, has observed, the first expressions of complete praise for Las Meninas date from the end of the nineteenth century and coincide with the technical progress of photography as well as with its social and artistic rise. This appraisal prolongs the old misunderstanding (even if now inverted) that Velázquez “never rose above naturalism.” That supposed naturalism is now celebrated, especially under the spell of a kind of nationalist superstition professed in elaborate forms by intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset, Miguel de Unamuno, Azorín or Eugenio d’Ors, all of whom sought to define the essential qualities of the Spanish soul and to declare what seemed necessarily characteristic of Spanish art. The essence of Spanish art and literature, apparently, had to be realism, since Spaniards are not well suited to abstract ideas.
There is no truth to any of it, except for one thing: no other work by Velázquez, perhaps no work by any other painter, is able to convey as vividly a sense of the real. No other work attains so perfectly the sense of perceptual illusion that so delighted artists and viewers in the 1600s, both in the way the space projects backwards into light and shadow, and through that other illusion or mirage that is even more entrancing because it is not spatial but temporal: the pulse of a single instant that has just occurred and is about to vanish but was caught somehow in the play of glances, interrupted gestures, a momentary trance where some have become aware of what is happening and others are only about to. The enormous size of the painting is needed to produce its effect. Its virtual inner space seems to project forward to encompass the viewer. Today, Las Meninas holds pride of place in an immense room, enthroned in the most select spot in the museum and at the summit of the history of art, flanked by a retinue of masterworks that are like courtiers paying homage to an absolute monarch. One must make an effort to imagine it in a much smaller room of noble but domestic dimensions, the same study in the king’s lower chambers where it was seen by Antonio Palomino.
A moment in time awaits us there, a just now that once stood at a precise location inside the dark labyrinth of the Alcázar in Madrid. As you approach, some of the figures have already noticed your arrival. Velázquez, the infanta, a woman in her retinue who is beginning to curtsy, the sleepy dog, the steward beginning to open the door in the back that you will presently go through, the dwarf, who must have seen you a fraction of a second later since she has barely had time to draw her hand to her breast, the man with vague features who pays little attention to the governess speaking to him and gesturing with her hands. Velázquez has employed the scale, dimensions, complex composition and varied characters of the so-called cuadros de historias, or narrative paintings, the most prestigious genre and the one his adversaries accuse him of not mastering. His painting tells a story, but nobody knows what it is. He has given it a size that is usually reserved for important paintings dealing with warfare, mythology or sacred history. Yet nothing really seems to be taking place.
In the second part of Don Quixote, Cervantes creates situations that seem like they will turn into adventures but in the end develop and conclude without really involving anything beyond the regular flow of ordinary life. A fragment of this same reality is presented in Velázquez’s painting, as it was in the paintings of his Dutch contemporaries or in those popular genre paintings he used to make as a young man. It is good to pause before the painting and observe it all, picturing in silence the very instant in its photographic immediacy. This time, I notice something I had not dwelt on before: the side edge of that immense canvas, as tall as the painting itself and nailed to the frame, the solid structure on which a painting is stretched. Velázquez is dressed in all the finery of his courtly position, which he valued so highly, and he certainly seems absorbed in the pure intellectual speculation that the art of painting entails—if not enthralled, perhaps, courtier that he was, by the presence of the king and queen. Even so, the wooden frame, the nails, and those rough uneven edges of the canvas cloth bring to the fore the material nature of his craft, as does the brush between his fingers or the fresh smudges of paint on the palette, all pointing to a work in progress that has only just been interrupted when the viewer entered the scene. Don Quixote is a portrait of real life, a life that had never been the subject of literature, and it is at the same time a meditation on literature and a celebration of its capacity for fantasy. In his precise depiction of a world that is concrete, tangible and momentary, Velázquez offers us as well, inseparably, an encomium of the abstract rigor and the supreme mirage of painting.
[Translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Bleichmar]
This is the third in a series of four lectures delivered by the author as the El Prado Chair in November 2019, on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the Museo del Prado.