Word: painter
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...summit of excellence in art, embodying a degree of intelligence, pictorial skill and lucidity of realization that defy not only imitation but, in some final way, analysis itself. He is to realism what Piero della Francesca is to abstraction. First Edouard Manet and then a whole succession of French painters from the 19th century into the 20th (not to mention English and American ones as well, in particular Sargent and Whistler) were transfixed by Velazquez when they found him on their pilgrimages to the Prado. Francis Bacon contorted Innocent X into his own series of screaming Popes. Picasso...
Still, it is the objectivity that seizes you. Was there ever a painter less interested in thrusting his "personality" at the viewer? He is the absolute antitype of the hot, expressive artist. His cool gaze settles on everything with equal curiosity: he is as interested in the way a formidable old nun grips her crucifix -- like a weapon -- as in the way the left hand of his monarch Philip IV rests, lightly but not quite negligently, on the hilt of his sword. There is nothing he cannot draw, though no drawings by Velazquez survive. That, however, is part...
...repressed pathos; you can almost see it quiver. Only the mustache, whose upswept prongs will be imitated by Salvador Dali's, seems alert, like antennae. "It is now nine years since any ((portrait)) has been made," Philip IV noted in 1653, in the last decade of his and his painter's lives, "and I am little inclined to subject myself to Velazquez's phlegm, nor thus to find further reason to witness how I am growing older...
Velazquez's life was even, and little is known about its details. It looks quite seamless compared with the struggles of Spain's other archetypal painter, Goya -- a steadily mounting curve of recognition and respect, unmarred by scandal or alienation (although he did father one bastard in Rome). Born in Seville in 1599, the son of a minor Hidalgo family, half- Portuguese, possibly with a trace of Jewish ancestry, Velazquez would always be preoccupied with his social position. (He went to great lengths to qualify as a knight of the Order of Santiago, whose members would not accept him until...
Velazquez's maturity is a sublime, intensive lesson in pictorial coding, and this, as much as anything else, has been the source of its fascination to other painters. In rendering appearances, every artist has a code of some sort -- a way in which the licks and smears of colored mud on cloth manage, seemingly without intervention from the viewer, to recompose themselves as hard shiny metal, warm flesh, wind-ruffled grass or the sweaty sheen of a horse's flank, all in the blink of an eye. But no artist seems as explicit about this legerdemain as Velazquez...