Word: squez
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PERHAPS the most successful court painter of all time was Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velásquez. He had servants and slaves, was a palace chamberlain and a knight of the noble Order of Santiago. His sovereign, King Philip IV of Spain, thought so highly of him that he even consented to pose for him between battles at the front. But royal favorite though he was, Velásquez won greatness by his own unaffected naturalism. "I should prefer," he once said, "to be the leading painter of what are considered common subjects than the second best...
...past two months, the Museo de Reproducciones Artisticas in Madrid has been showing the greatest exhibition of works by Velásquez ever assembled, plus some by his predecessors, his contemporaries and his students. The show commemorates the sooth anniversary of the artist's death, but it is also an attempt on the part of Spain to put Velásquez in proper focus. To the modern eye, his canvases have seemed somewhat static alongside the high drama of El Greco and the agonized intensity of Goya. Yet Velásquez sang a song of life as rich...
...King's heart right from the start, and from that time until his death at 61, he was a fixture of the court. Such a position might have stifled a man without genius, or tempted him into distortion through an effort to flatter his benefactors. For Velásquez it did neither...
Though the influence of El Greco can be seen in the upward sweep of one of his rare religious paintings, The Virgin Placing the Chasuble on Saint Ildefonso (see color), Velásquez' style, stripped of the mannerism of his predecessors, was essentially his own. In his early years, when he painted scenes of ordinary life around him, his palette was somber; color was less important to him than the play of light and shadow and the arrangement of forms. His paintings rarely told a story, and whatever action there might be seemed almost always suspended. Yet his tipplers...
There was a Pope on the Pamphili side: Innocent X, whose immortal portrait by Velásquez hangs in the picture gallery. The palace also contains a Claude Lorrain landscape, a Fra Filippo Lippi Annunciation, Caravaggio's Rest on the Flight into Egypt to see and admire. One of the most interesting pictures is a portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo of Admiral Andrea,* the greatest of the Dorias, a buccaneer of a man and a hero of history...