Diego Velázquez [antikvár]

From Kitchen to Palace Beneath a bushy, untidy moustache, teeth flash between sensual hps. The man in the picture (p. 6) stands there smiling, shown half-length, turned to one side but with his face towards us. His right hand is placed on his hip, in an attitude setting off the heavy folds of a red cloak. The thin little man's otherwise rather unimpressive figure and broad, quizzical face, his black doublet and his white lace collar all suggest the portrait of some humorous hidalgo or courtier of the seventeenth century However, the subject of the painting is the Greek philosopher Democritus expressing his amusement at the world, which stands on the table in front of him in the shape of a globe. Democritus, who lived around 470-360 BC, taught that cheerful and moderate contentment was the way to happiness. European painting of the Renaissance and Baroque periods repeatedly portrayed him as the "laughing philosopher", contrasting him with other intellectual types such as the pessimist, the stoic and the cynic. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) painted a similar Democritus (p. 8) for the Duke of Lerma, to accompany a Mourning Heraclitus. From 1638 these two pictures were in the Torre de la Parada, the king of Spain's hunting lodge in the Pardo mountains near Madrid, for which Rubens and his pupils had painted mythological and hunting scenes ten years earlier. Velázquez, who had been a court painter since 1623, also worked on the decoration of the Torre de la Parada. His own Democritus was painted in 1628/29, and his later alterations to the face and hands, softening their painting, show that at the time he was greatly interested in the work of the brilliant Flemish master of the Baroque. It is only in a few later works by Velázquez, such as the picture of Mars, the classical god of war, painted in 1639-1641 (p. 9), that the inspiration of Rubens is similarly evident. Just as Rubens represents the culmination of Baroque painting in the southern Catholic Netherlands, Velázquez is pre-eminent among the artists of the Sigh de Oro, the "golden age" of Spanish painting. But unlike Rubens, who quickly rose to European fame, Velázquez remained relatively unknown outside his own country for a long time. One reason must have been that to a greater or lesser degree he avoided all those areas in which Rubens shone, and which particularly impressed patrons of high rank in the rest of Europe. Rubens specialized in the depiction of strong emotion, in large-scale altarpieces and historical pictures, and in the dynamic of form and narrative. Velázquez, on the other hand, paints no grand and apparently m A Young Man (Self-Portrait?), 1623/24 Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 38 cm Madrid, Museo del Prado PAGE 6: Democritus, 1628/29 Oil on canvas, 101 x 81 cm Rouen. Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Céramique