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This savagery and this subtlety are found in the painters. The work in itself is sinister, never masked; the deformity of face, of body, and of soul is paraded without shame. They do not discriminate. Death, horror, everything is good in their eyes, and everything collaborates willingly in their task. But as soon as one looks between the forms, the nightmare vanishes, something unexpected and unknown is unveiled—a circulation of aerial atoms, a discreet envelopment, a transparent and faintly tinted shade which floats around them and transfigures them. Velasquez, after the age of fifty, never again painted sharply defined things, he wandered around the objects with the air and the twilight; in the shadow and transparence of the backgrounds he surprised the colored palpitations which he used as the invisible center of his silent symphony. He was no longer taking from the world anything more than the mysterious exchanges which cause forms and tones to interpenetrate one another in a secret and continuous progression, whose course is not manifested or interrupted by any clash or any shock. Space reigns. An aerial wave seems to glide over the surfaces, impregnating itself with their visible emanations in order to define and model them, and to carry away everywhere else a kind of perfume, a kind of echo of them which it disperses over all surrounding space as an imponderable dust.
This savagery and this subtlety are found in the painters. The work in itself is sinister, never masked; the deformity of face, of body, and of soul is paraded without shame. They do not discriminate. Death, horror, everything is good in their eyes, and everything collaborates willingly in their task. But as soon as one looks between the forms, the nightmare vanishes, something unexpected and unknown is unveiled—a circulation of aerial atoms, a discreet envelopment, a transparent and faintly tinted shade which floats around them and transfigures them. Velasquez, after the age of fifty, never again painted sharply defined things, he wandered around the objects with the air and the twilight; in the shadow and transparence of the backgrounds he surprised the colored palpitations which he used as the invisible center of his silent symphony. He was no longer taking from the world anything more than the mysterious exchanges which cause forms and tones to interpenetrate one another in a secret and continuous progression, whose course is not manifested or interrupted by any clash or any shock. Space reigns. An aerial wave seems to glide over the surfaces, impregnating itself with their visible emanations in order to define and model them, and to carry away everywhere else a kind of perfume, a kind of echo of them which it disperses over all surrounding space as an imponderable dust.
The
world where he lived was sad. A decadent king, sickly princes, idiots, dwarfs,
invalids, certain monstrous jesters dressed like lords whose function it was to
laugh at themselves and make others outside the law of life laugh at them—all
bound up in etiquette, plots, and lies, and united by the confessional and by
remorse. At the gates the auto-da-fé,
the silence, the rapid crumbling of a still terrible power, and a land where no
soul had the right to grow. No matter. In a country, in a court where no one,
the king least of all, could free himself or desired to free himself from any
of the servitudes imposed by the strength of the soil and of the faith, the
painter alone knew how to dominate the fatal character of the surroundings. For
his needs he had mastered the grandiose and lugubrious landscape which
undulates at the feet of the Guadarramas. Condemned never to paint anything but
kings, buffoons, and beasts, he had seized upon the silvery matter which
invades the azure of the plateaus of Castile, that he might mingle it with the
pallid faces and the dark costumes of the princes, weave it with the air and
the steam into flying names, and associate earth and sky with the light
harmonies which a horseman, galloping through space, revealed to him alone, in
the floating scarfs which traverse the armor, or in the waving plumes of his
hat. He possessed everything that trails and quivers in a plain which the mists
of the morning or the dust of the evening covers with translucent veils. It is
because there is a rift of blue among the storm clouds that a pink ribbon
flecks the cuirass of black steel with its unexpected note. In the drops of
silver which spatter that cuirass there trembles the diffused splendor of the
air. In the whole of a gray picture, with a gray horse—its tail and mane flying
in the wind, with gray fringe floating, with a gray sky, a sea stormy and gray,
there is just one pink knot between the ears of the animal who bears a proud
rider dressed in red and black. The mountains, the blue plains, the distant
streaks of snow, the grayish or somber undulation of the ground sown with cork
trees and olive trees, are found again in all the grays, in all the blacks shot
through with dim blues and with pinks, which the man and the rearing animal
impose upon the landscape or receive from it. When there are flames and smoke
in the plain, they barely veil the silvery tremble of the clouds, and their
reflection does not darken the harmonies of the foreground. His sickly little
princes are surrounded by a lyricism of color, contained, veiled, and secret as
a great soul, by a diffused light, and by tremors which, running through it,
surround their ennui with a retinue so charming that they seem to bear only the
shadow of the pitiless crown.
A
spirit of nostalgia floats in the air, one sees neither the ugliness nor the
sadness nor the funereal and cruel direction given to that crushed childhood.
Whether Velasquez followed his masters to the hunt or returned with them to the
dark alcazar, he remained the silent friend of the dying race which only an
intelligence of sovereign freedom could deliver for us from indifference and
death. He alone knew, when he went through the livid corridors, how to preserve
in his memory the linage of a melancholy and subtle apparition, of a wandering
harmony Iending to the light the fugitive sheen which it turns on the things
that present themselves to its kiss. For him alone the little infantas were not
burned-out beings with greenish, sullen faces, martyrs swaddled in the robes of
state which weighed heavily on their breasts and prevented them from playing,
leaping, running, and enjoying the birdlike life of little girls. He loved
them. He himself had had two daughters, one of whom had died as a child. On
their wan faces he followed all the reflections of the pitying world which
mingled with the pallid blood, with the moist lips, and with the astonished
eyes, the silvery daylight shining from red curtains, from gray and pink
bodices where at times a red or black ribbon alone gave a darker accent, like a
corolla bursting forth in a field of young wheat. The blond hair and the pinks
of the costume encircled the frail heads with a vague aureole which gave back
to the amber air a little of the torpid and charming life stifling behind their
foreheads. A transparent handkerchief, spread out like a butterfly's wing, gave
glimpses of paler blacks under it, and more attenuated pinks and distant blues.
Upon a dress of rose crossed by stripes of thin silver plates and enlivened by
spots of mauve, he surprised, with a quickening pulse, a red rose in the
childish fingers. The lassitude of those hands resting on the backs of chairs,
or the hoops of skirts, filled him with an ardor so tender that, without ever
confessing it, he lavished upon them all the deep caresses which the world of
the air reserves for that which bathes in it. Under all that trembling silver,
his hesitating red and pink appear like a bed of flowers covered with dew at
the hour when the light of dawn shines on the hoarfrost of summer.
Velasquez
is the painter of evenings, of space, and of silence, even when he paints in
broad daylight, even when he paints in a closed room, even when war or the hunt
rages around him. As they went out but little in the hours of the day when the
air is scorching, when the sun dulls everything, the Spanish painters communed
with the evenings. The education of their eye went on in the twilight, and it
is then that the signification of Spain in color attains its value. When one
has not seen how the night falls over the graded plateaus of Castile or of
Estremadura, or over the red and gray plain of la Mancha, one does not know the
dull accent, veiled and affecting, which the black capes and hats assume as
they silhouette against white walls whose brilliance seems at that moment to be
dimmed by a pearly silver. The air takes on an orange tint which reveals a
profound intensity in the colors. The rising dust, bathed in the horizontal
rays of the setting sun, envelops figures in a blur of amber which half effaces
them and paints them against space in somber and trembling spots. Especially
when garbed in black, they look like phantoms.
The
nearer Velasquez approached his end, the more he sought those harmonies of the
twilight in order to transport them into the secretive painting which expressed
the pride and discretion of his heart. He abandoned broad daylight, he tended
to seize upon the semi-obscurity of rooms where the passages of the planes are
more subtle and intimate, where the mystery is increased by a reflection in a
glass, by a ray of light coming from without, or by a girl's face covered with
a bloom like that of a pale fruit which seems to absorb into its vague and
lusterless light the whole of the diffused penumbra. The silvery shadow is
rendered animate by the red in the blond hair, by the silver in the black hair,
by the greens, the blacks, the pinks, and the infinite grays dispersed like a
rain of petals falling where the harmony bids them fall: one would say that all
was an apparition at the depth of a great invisible mirror, into which a serene
evening enters very slowly. Visions seem to glide; an imperceptible balancing
and swaying make one think of music, and when the apparition has disappeared,
we do not cease to search our hearts for those beautiful fugitive shadows. They
are vanished sisters whom we caught sight of before seeing them, and whom we
shall see again without trying.
In
fact, we are in the same space as they. These forms are the reflection which
nature assumes in an obedient mind which accepts it in its every appearance,
never modifying it to heighten its effect, but purifying it imperceptibly in
each of the details which manifest it; and when it has been rendered for us in
its ensemble, it has been made into something of slightly finer shades,
something more aerial, more discreet and more rare, which is what gives it that
exact and supernatural aspect. The mystery is almost terrifying. None of us can
watch in the world the progressive spreading forth of the shadow and the light,
the secret passage which causes one form to prolong another, without his eyes
becoming wearied by the continuous circulation of an atmosphere whose density
is all that gives gradation to objects and makes them turn and keep their
place. But Velasquez sees these insensible things, and expresses them, without
deigning to say toward which direction he is guiding us. He travels amid the
fluid forces—inappreciable to another—which define the universe. That which we
term line—a symbol permitting us to arrest in space the volumes which are never
arrested at any precise point in space—that which we term a spot—the
superficial illusion of an eye unable to grasp the flight of contours—that
which we term form—an abstraction which does not take into account either the
air or the light or the living spirit with which matter is animated—these are
conceptions which Velasquez can dispense with. He arranges the elements of
color in space following the order of surface and of depth dictated to him by
these elements when he has assimilated them with his tranquil power of
balancing sensation by taste and measure; and when he has finished his task,
there has been performed the miracle of an admirable work wherein the artist
does not seem to have intervened.
This
feeling for value, this constant and
apparently facile power of exactly proportioning the image to an objective
judgment, is perhaps the mark of the freest intelligence, the one most serene
and master of itself that ever existed in painting. Raised to this height,
virtuosity is a heroic sacrifice. One cannot say that Velasquez never reveals
himself. Castilian pride, Andalusian temperament. Oriental fatalism, and Arab
nonchalance are all affirmed or divined in those lofty and severe effigies
which were painted between the death of Cervantes and the death of Calderon.
But the psychological value never trespasses on the plastic value. It stands
almost exactly even with it. It envelops itself and remains almost hidden under
a precise play of shades and incomparable harmonies. He does not oblige us to
see, in "The Lances," the cordial courtesy of the victor, the noble
humility of the vanquished, and the spirit which transforms war and, despite
the burned plain, the erect weapons, and the cuirasses, raises it above murder
and hatred by the simple fact that, momentarily, it passes through a lofty and
proud vision. Without saying so, he confides to the trembling water of a mirror
the images of modesty or of power in its ennui. He does not compel us to notice
the melancholy contrast between feeble princes or colorless queens and the
animal that carries them, whose blood beats under the skin of its nostrils, its
hocks and its rump, and whose mane flies in the heat of the race and in the
steam of its sweat. He does not insist on the irony of the spectacle when he
sees approaching an abject dwarf dressed like a prince and leading a formidable
dog as tall as himself and threatening to growl, its feet firm, black, as
strong as life when it yields to its strength. He scarcely smiles when he
writes the name of Don John of Austria under the portrait of a weak-bodied,
sneering buffoon, or the name of Menippus or Aesop under that of a beggar. When
he paints an idiot, he does not say whether it causes him suffering; he makes
the idiot's head and shoulders sway with the stammering of his songs. When the
king, with his long, sad face, is before him, dressed in black, he does not
confess that it is his own majesty with which the king is invested. A
distinction so royal that it never takes the trouble to try to impose itself, a
grandeur detached from itself and conscious of being alone in knowing itself,
raises to the level of his heart this world, which is dying little by little.
This
reserved nobleness is the last of his victories; and his supreme affirmation is
the least openly avowed of all, and the most difficult to penetrate. Only
bright spots the prison-like existence. First the sojourn in Madrid of Rubens,
at the height of his powers, with whom Velasquez, who was then not yet thirty years
old, established a friendship, and by whom he was counseled to go to consult
the masters of Rome and Venice on how to discipline a natural generosity. Then
the two journeys in Italy which he extended as long as possible and from which
he brought back, with the friendship of Ribera and of Poussin, that which only
a superior mind can discover there, the instrument with which to free himself.
The remainder of the time he lived like a servitor, oppressed with idiotic
duties, badly paid, dressed in clothing cast off by his superiors, and painting
by accident, when he was charged with a portrait, a decorative subject, or one
from religion or history. Each progression was for him not only a victory over
himself, but also over the indifferent inertia or the hostile forces which
surrounded him. He wrested each one of his works from a solitary and almost
forced meditation, thrown back upon himself by the impossibility of finding a
kindred mind and of confessing his real soul in any other way than through the
works with which he was commissioned, into which he infused his longing and his
silence, as if behind a veil almost impenetrable. He did not suspect until
quite late, at the hour when the shadow of his days was lengthening along his
path, the extent of his secret power to bring from the depth of his passion to
the surface of life the image of his unknown illusions. And as his isolation
and constraint increased with the years, his proud understanding grew apace, as
if he had felt that he would not have the time, before death, to collect his
forces completely.
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