Word: velazquez
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...Velazquez, master of cool objectivity...
...painters had batting records, that of Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, court painter to Philip IV of Spain, would be perfect. Not only did he paint the best official portrait of the 17th century -- the head of the wary, coarse, cunning old Pope Innocent X, in the Galleria Doria-Pamphili collection in Rome -- but he also made what is perhaps the greatest nonmythical, secular painting in all art history: Las Meninas, in the Prado. Neither is in the wonderful show of 38 paintings by Velazquez, about half lent by the Prado, which opens at the Metropolitan Museum...
...want to know what painting is or can be, look at Velazquez. This has been the judgment of artists for the past 300 years. It is as though Velazquez has never been seen as anything but the 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...
...course, only an eye. The intellectual discourse of Velazquez's art took in allegory as well, and the details are never insignificant. When he painted the flamboyant and overweening Olivares on his rearing horse, in front of a city (perhaps the Basque town of Fuenterrabia) that is being burned for its disobedience to the crown, he went to some pains with the kind of detail one overlooks at first -- the pruned stump of a tree branch above the commander's head has fresh green shoots, suggesting that the state is replenished by merciless excision. The Weavers would satisfy anyone...
...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 of his fascination to eyes conditioned by the spontaneity of painting since Manet, for now that Velazquez's paint has aged, one sees the radical shifts and erasures of form below the unperturbed surface. There is no texture he cannot paint, from the massive chains...