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Martínez Montañés (1568-1649) was the greatest Spanish sculptor of the Baroque era. His medium was wood; in fact, he was known as "el dios de madera" (the god of wood) because of his skill. Here and here are examples of his work.
Velázquez has among his paintings several portraits in which the subject stands before a background so neutral that it very nearly takes on the quality of a void--see, for example, his portrait of Don Pedro de Barberana y Aparregui. What is striking about this painting is that Velázquez, in his depiction of Martínez Montañés at work, makes it appear as though the sculptor has reached into that void, shaping out of it the rough form of the bust in the lower right.
Like a painter with brushes and paints before a blank canvas, the sculptor and his knives and chisels stands before the blank canvas that is a piece of wood; each coaxes an image from a blankness. I admit to not having thought this through too much, but it would seem that this take on the artistic process isn't that far removed from Milton's notion, in Paradise Lost, of God's having shaped the universe out of unformed matter (Chaos).
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Velázquez, Juan Martínez Montañés
Monday, July 2, 2007
Another visit with Velázquez' Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
Visitors here may remember this post from a while back. This morning, while perusing how people found their way to this blog, I learned about an article on it from two years ago, in which two researchers recreate Velázquez's famous and puzzling painting and come to a surprising conclusion:[T]he image of Christ in the background scene is a mental image in the mind of the servant girl. Previous scholars believe this scene is either a mirror or a window, but Esler and Boyd disagree.
Professor Esler explained: "We suggest that the girl is from the painter's time and that she is a distressed servant with the unhappy memory and mental image of Jesus devaluing another serving- woman, Martha. To further this, the old woman in the painting appears to be telling her to 'get on with it' as Martha might have felt when Jesus rebuked her. Here we have an interpretation of the Bible text in which a 17th century servant-girl feels devalued because of what Jesus said in a biblical narrative. The artist is subtly criticising the Bible in this work."
Without wanting to pull a muscle from patting myself on the back--because, after all, I don't quite say it in my post--I had considered the image of Christ with Mary and Martha as functioning as a sort of thought balloon for the distraught woman in the foregrounded scene. More significant, though, is the researchers' conclusion that the painting is a quiet critique of the Biblical text. Without arguing that this isn't the case, another possibility not addressed in the article is that Velázquez is offering a critique of a certain reading of that text.
As I learned while doing a bit of reading for this post, during these decades of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the Lucan story was a favorite of Protestants as they made the case for Luther's argument that Christians are saved not by works but by grace through faith. Here, I note that Arthur Wheelock notes that Vermeer's close grouping of Mary and Martha is his attempt to be more affirming of Martha--that is, his is a more "Catholic" reading of that story. In my humble opinion, one could read the Velázquez in a similar way.
Seen in this way, then, for me the question shifts to the old woman in the foreground. Is she offering comfort to the young woman (the Catholic take), or, as Esler and Boyd suggest, is she a surrogate for the young woman's social superiors? And, for that matter, just who is "thinking" the painting-within-a-painting? How should we understand that, in that painting, Martha has set down the pitcher and bowl on the distant table? (In the Vermeer, Martha, positioned closer to Christ than Mary is, offers him a loaf of bread on a platter.) It would seem that how we answer that question would depend on who is "thinking" it.
For me, at least, Esler and Boyd's conclusions actually open up the painting to still further questions that I hadn't had before. That's not a criticism; rather, it's an implicit warning to my reader(s) that we here might be revisiting this painting yet again on down the road.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Pacheco, his famous pupil, and some comments on "influence"
(cross-posted at Blog Meridian)
Yesterday I was surprised to learn that Peter Harrup, the administrator for the Facebook group "The Genius of Diego Velázquez," named me as an officer for that group: Francisco Pacheco. Wonderful, I thought . . . but, who is he? Way leads on to way in the Internets, and what follows are the results of that wandering, along with some speculation and musing.
I quickly learned via consulting my copy of the catalogue of the 1989 Velázquez exhibition at the Met (which, by the way, is well worth seeking out, especially if you a) love Velázquez and/but b) don't have a lot of money) that Pacheco was Velázquez' principle teacher and, eventually, his father-in-law. Pacheco was an agent of the Inquisition and thus very much a loyal adherent to the values propagated by the Counter-Reformation. Though well regarded as a teacher, his talent as a painter was never more than pedestrian1; however, unlike many other tutors whose pupils outshine them, it appears Pacheco wasn't jealous of Velázquez's abilities but taught him what he knew, especially with regard of the then-emerging tendencies toward realism, and then got out of the way. His book El arte de la pintura is still considered an authoritative source of information from the time.
I probably would not have begun to write this post, though, had it not been for going on to read the Wikipedia article on Pacheco--specifically, this sentence:Although Velázquez was a student in Pacheco's school for six years, and married Pacheco's daughter Juana in 1618, there is no trace of Pacheco's influence in the work of Velázquez.
"No trace"? That seemed to me a bold claim to make; consider Jackson Pollack, who, when asked what he learned when he studied under Thomas Hart Benton (an odd pairing, to say the least), replied, "How not to paint."2 So, I decided to do some looking around for more takes on Pacheco's influence on Velázquez, and I wound up in a surprising place--a post I wrote earlier this month.
In the course of Googling, I discovered a review of a book by Jane Boyd and Philip F Esler, Visuality and Biblical Text: Interpreting Velázquez' "Christ with Martha and Mary" as a Test Case. This was startling because, as readers of this blog know, I had just posted on this very painting. Anyway, in the course of listing some paintings that Velázquez might have seen that may have influenced his painting, the reviewer mentions
"St. Sebastian healed by St. Irene, 1616] by Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644, Velázquez's teacher and father-in-law) combining two episodes from the legend of St Sebastian, one seen through a window of the room in which the other occurs[.]"
(Here, by the way, is where I found this image.)
There is no denying the compositional similarities between the Pacheco and the Velázquez, especially if it's the case that, as with the Pacheco, the Velázquez depicts two chronologically-distinct moments. Having said that, though, the Velázquez is no mere copy. The Pacheco has an almost-medieval quality to it in its handling of perspective; as has often been noted, his pupil's painting is a fusion of the religious subject and the genre of the bodegón, itself influenced by Dutch paintings of domestic scenes. Also, the Pacheco lacks any tension between the painting and the painting-within-a-painting: the latter serves to explain the circumstances depicted in the former. The Velázquez, though, is another matter entirely, as I pointed out in my post on it.
So, then: "influence." As a teacher myself, I find my students wanting to give me credit for things they have learned when, in fact, all I had done was give them the opportunity to learn the things they were thanking me for. As it were, I supply the canvas and encouragement, and I have some things to say about the virtues of exploring, of being intellectually curious, but they still have to do the painting, and that they do on their own. What is striking to me about Velázquez's art, quite apart from the brush-wielding, is the intellectual curiosity that fuels it, the willingness to experiment with the tried-and-true. I cannot help but think that it's those qualities that Pacheco encouraged in his pupil; the rest of the time, though, I suspect he alternated between sizing up young Dieguito as a potential match for his daughter and marvelling at his talent, wondering--in a good way--as I myself have had to with some of my students, what he might possibly be able to teach him.
1The Spanish-language Wikipedia article, however, is more generous in its assessment, and indeed includes brief commentary on some of Pacheco's paintings.
2I just now realize that that statement will read differently, depending on one's opinion of Pollack or of Benton.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
National Gallery online exhibitions of Baroque art
Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1634
The homepage of the National Gallery in Washington, DC, currently features an online exhibition of paintings from 17th-century Spanish painters. In addition to the Ribera you see above, the exhibition features works by Juan van der Haben y León, Zurbarán, Velázquez, and Murillo. All these paintings are presented beautifully and are well worth a half-hour or so of your time to see.
Other NGA online exhibitions of Baroque art and artists appear below the fold.
Rembrandt's work is featured in three of these exhibitions: an in-depth study of the etching, Abraham Entertaining the Angels, and two larger exhibitions, Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits and Strokes of Genius: Rembrandt's Prints and Drawings.
A collection of genre paintings and portraits by Gerard ter Borch
And two in-depth studies of individual works: Johannes Verspronck, Andries Stilte as a Standard-Bearer, and Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Las Meninas: Some places to visit
It's easy to become obsessed with Velázquez's magnificent painting. Speaking for myself, it first fascinated me on an intellectual level when I was introduced to it via Foucault's intricate discussion of it (here is an abstract) in the opening chapter of The Order of Things). The emotional connection came later: One day I realized that my younger daughter, when she was younger, is (or was) the spitting image of the Infanta Margarita, right down to the rather coy, even impish turn of the head.
For some time now, I've also been using this painting in classes to raise questions of just what happens when a viewer stands in front of a painting: Las Meninas, we come to realize, makes explicit what we tend to forget when we're looking at most paintings, that the painting creates a space into which the viewer enters vicariously. I've even used the painting as a way of trying to articulate the complicated reading and authorial perspectives in Mark Z. Danielewski's Baroque-styled postmodern novel, House of Leaves. That novel has a good bit of textual figure-ground confusions, just as Las Meninas, explicitly extending its space outward to include the viewer, creates more than a little disorientation in the viewer who contemplates it.
See what I mean?
All this is to say that it'd be very easy to keep a blog devoted just to this one painting. Indeed, I contemplated doing just that, once upon a time, but in the end I decided that that would be a wee bit excessive: I already use it enough in my teaching life that it doesn't need to have more room than it does here in my blogospheric life. This entry, which I'll also post a permanent link to over in the Sites of Interest, will eventually serve as both a happy medium and as, I hope, a service to others with an interest in this painting. As I and others run across sites that, to my mind, contribute to our thinking about Las Meninas, I'll add links to them here.
INTRODUCTIONS:
The Museo del Prado's in-depth look isn't as elaborate as one could hope for from the home for this painting, but what is here is just enough to intrigue the person who wants to know more. Its chief virtue is that it identifies all but one of the figures who appear and provides names of those who have offered various interpretations of it.
A more thorough introduction is the Wikipedia entry, with brief discussions of famous interpretations.
STUDIES AND INTERPRETATIONS:
"The Making of . . a Camera Obscura Prank: Ordinary Life as Visual Arts in Velázquez's Las Meninas" (pdf file). Argues that the painting documents simultaneously the staging and revelation of a camera obscura prank (a proto-Candid Camera scene, in other words).
"Velázquez: La Kabala y Las Meninas." An(other) extraordinarily-detailed study of Las Meninas' geometry and its possible significance for the painting's meaning. In Spanish.
"Velázquez's Las Meninas". Pays patient, close attention to the painting's geometry (with a nice compare/contrast to Leonardo's The Last Supper) that's blessedly free of the geometric excesses of some articles here (as below).
"Vermeer's Riddle Revealed". Despite the title, an application of grail geometry to Las Meninas.
ACCIDENTS, HOMAGES, PARODIES AND RECREATIONS:
Domingo Barreras
Camille of 327 Market
Francisco Goya
Las Meninas Information. A virtual-reality exploration of the space of the painting, along with intriguing suggestions as to astrological interpretations of the piece.
Edouard Manet (explanation here)
Pablo Picasso
Fairfield Porter
John Singer Sargent
Joel-Peter Witkin
Saturday, April 14, 2007
A quick visit with Las Meninas
Context, context. Sorry. But way DOES lead on to way.
This morning I came across her most recent post, in which she describes the circumstances surrounding the accompanying picture. I'll not rehash all that; go read the whole thing, as we say here on the Internets. But what follows is most of my comment that I left there.I'll believe that you didn't plan it. The thing about Art, though, is that when the artist sees something in his/her work that wasn't planned but it improves the composition, s/he has the good sense to leave it in. It's harder to say this about Las Meninas (or painting in general) because of the medium, but it occurs to me now that the same rule applies--and that Velázquez is even commenting on it in his painting. On the left, the painter himself, palette and brush in hand, gazing at us with his critical, calculating painter's eye at the no-doubt-stiffly-sitting King and Queen . . . balanced on the far right by the little girl doing something I'm pretty sure she's NOT been asked to do.
There's more to say, of course, about the geometric connotations of that word "calculating," and some have done so to such an extent that I don't feel the need to. Besides: I'm more the "oh, look at the pretty picture!!" sort of viewer, anyway. So I'll just conclude this not-terribly-profound post by saying something else equally-lacking in profundity: Sure: Velázquez probably used grail geometry as a way of arranging the figures in this painting; so also, probably, did Vermeer. But, you know, so also, probably, did any number of Baroque-era painters, along with any number of poets of the time, along with Shakespeare and Donne and others you could find in your friendly neighborhood Norton Anthology, who wrote sonnets. To which I can only say, those features, those calculating frames are not why we keep looking at/reading certain people's work. There is something else, another sort of calculating, that exists beyond angles and rhyme schemes, the sort of sensibility that can see, in real life, a little girl's casual act of stepping on a dog and say, "That's going into a painting"--and then make it feel in Art like the casual act it originally was.
Velazquez, The Supper at Emmaus
As an option for their research papers, students can write about some paintings of their choosing by a painter of my choosing: the idea (the hope, actually) is for them to choose paintings that have something in common and offer and support an opinion about what they think the painter wants to convey via this whatever-it-is that recurs in the paintings they've chosen. So today, I talked through how that might work by showing them three paintings by Velázquez (who, by the way, isn't on their list of painters). Two of them, Las Meninas and Venus at Her Mirror, I've posted images of before and so won't here, but the third one is 
Anyway, in the course of discussing The Supper at Emmaus this morning, a student said something interesting that I found interesting about a possible theological reading of the painting.
First of all, note that the event which gives the painting its title is depicted in the upper left-hand corner of the painting. Apparently, there's been some dispute among those who make a living at deciding such things over whether that scene is a painting hanging on the wall in the kitchen or is actually a mirror reflcting the activity in another room--the one we viewers would happen to be standing in; the consensus seems to be, now, that we're looking at a mirror.
Once I got all that out of the way, it suddenly occurred to me to ask something I'd not asked the other classes in which I've shown this painting: does it trivialize the event (Jesus' revealing Himself to his disciples after the Resurrection) to deliberately NOT make it the focal center of the painting? Compare, for example, 
Now: Velázquez didn't paint many religious subjects. in his salad days in Seville, he had to to make a living, but when he became a court painter, he didn't have to except when asked to (aside: but then again, just how many paintings of a Prince Baltasar does a family need? 5 appear in the catalogue of the Velázquez exhibit that I own, and no doubt there are more). Though he'd have to be, publicly, Catholic, there's no way to know the depth of his faith. If his library is any indication, his reading tastes definitively tended toward the secular rather than the sacred. But it IS true that he is very thoughtful about his subjects, that he's not into simple picture-making but is eager to communicate some larger idea through certain canvases. It's equally true that the Church of the Counter-Reformation sought art that would engage its viewers on a more emotional, less cerebral level.
I think this painting reflects both Velázquez' thoughtfulness and that desire of the Church for its art. Making the serving woman the focal point has the effect of creating a sort of 3-dimensionality (one could call it "realism" for lack of a better term) for the viewer: while the acount in Luke mentions no one other than the two disciples, surely a woman served them their meal. And so Velázquez depicts her. But there's more than "mere" realism here: our attention is on this woman. We watch her actions and, surely, wonder what she is thinking. She becomes our stand-in in this scene, even as the mirror on the back wall causes us to stand in the space of the painting.
(Originally posted at Blog Meridian)
Velazquez, Venus at Her Mirror
I have been surrounded by art these past few days. On Friday, I led the discussion on the topic "The 'Work' of Art" that I mentioned a couple of posts below this one. Mrs. Meridian and I have begun to frame some posters that I've had for a couple of years and were threatening to become permanent cylinders. And a couple of days ago, Mrs. Meridian and I spent an enjoyable couple of hours at Bookaholic, a local used bookstore in Wichita. Among my finds was this Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition catalogue of its 1989 Velazquez exhibition. Sorry, no pic available at Amazon, but the cover is a close-up of this painting, 
Prince Baltasar Carlos as a Hunter. This catalogue is absolutely beautiful: great pictures, very informative text. And, hey: $12.
Long-time readers of this blog know that one painting in particular that I return to again and again (and not just in this blog, either) is Velazquez's Las Meninas. But, aside from Foucault's famous chapter on that painting in The Order of Things and a less-than-half-remembered biography of Velazquez for children that I read when I was in elementary school, I know very little about Velazquez. So, rather than remain like the "admirer" of someone's work who actually just knows the song that ALWAYS gets played on the radio, I snatched up the catalogue and have been reading through the introductory essays.
More below the fold.
But before I became as systematic as all that, I did what we all would do: I looked for the song that ALWAYS gets played on the radio. Las Meninas was not part of the Met's exhibition (it's hard to imagine that the Prado would ever let that painting leave), but, of course, it's mentioned throughout the text in relation to the works that did make the trip. So, as I looked for/at references to good ol' Las Meninas, one painting that caught my eye was this one,
And what do we see? The face of a beautiful woman, certainly. But it is also an IMAGE we see, and not HER. Somewhat as in Las Meninas, the mirror here works to incorporate the viewer into the space without directly showing us the source of the reflection we see in the mirror. Also, it stands to reason, just as the messages on the trailers of trucks remind the driver, if we can see the mirror, the person looking into the mirror can see us. Venus returns our (reflected) gaze even as we look at her.
So: is this painting a complex message about the nature of Love? That what we love about the beloved is an image as opposed to something "real" but that that delusion is a happy one--that, indeed, we are active participants in its creation?
(Originally posted at Blog Meridian. The comments at the original post are worth visiting for.)
