Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Diego Velázquez
Spanish; 17th-century
Madrid, Spain: Museo del Prado
95%
Las Hilanderas. 1655-60. Oil on canvas
It hardly needs pointing out that this, like much by Velàzquez, is a painting about painting: the tapestry on the far back wall, into which the figure group more or less melts, is a copy after Titian's Rape of Europa (which, incidentally, Rubens copied too). The question of quality, however, turns not on whether or to what degree this painting is "meta," but rather on how its self-reflexivity manifests as a unique pictorial language. The answer to this lies not so much in the Titian allusion itself — which mostly serves as a cryptic foil to the foreground scene — but in the way the working women and the space around them react to the intertext, formally. And the key to this, I think, lies in the split duty of the gauzy white linework that runs all through the front of the scene. In the case of the spun yarn strewn across the floor and in the looms and held in the women's hands, Velázquez's line is perfectly depictive, evoking the real material qualities of fine thread; but where similar forms, say, limn a figure or accent a garment, they take on the quality not of representationally significant visual information but of pure painterly effect — look at the outline describing the shoulder of the red-skirted spinner, or at the brushstrokes in the blue dress behind her. Proceeding out from the sinewy clouds in the "Titian" at the very back of the scene, the whole image comes to seem like a thin veil stretched over the doubled function of Velázquez's rendering: it's neither the abyss of abstractness nor some solid core of depictive meaning which (for instance) the thrillingly planar figure at center seems to have been pasted on top of, but rather an impossible concretion of pictorial substance comprising these two poles. It's the acuteness of Velázquez's sense for the impossibility of painting's task that not only caused him to hypostatize this impossibility through his line and to ponder it through his allusions, but, moreover, to establish a whole visual order keyed to its problematics. It's why the two women at right are aimed inwards at the central figure, who's shrouded and casts her glance even further into the bowels of the picture. It's why the scene comprises an almost infinity of potential moments for the opening-up of space, which always eventually lead to some frustrated foreclosure (the ladder to the edge of the frame; the tapestry that pushes the painting's deepest space out towards its surface; the loom's wheel in motion, which is neither quite transparent nor quite opaque; the passage of dark wall in the top right corner, with its abstract mass). It's why, finally, Velázquez was capable of channeling Venice through Caravaggio without falling into the Rubensian trap of indulging shape and surface at the expense of deep atomic structure: because there is something behind this image that orders it but which Velázquez knew he couldn't show, even if it seeps through at the seams. Painting seems to have been, for Velázquez, less an instrument of thought than a mode of thinking. (TFS, 2026)
Madrid, Spain: Museo del Prado
80%
Las Meninas. 1656. Oil on canvas
Perhaps the reason this painting is so popular is because, more so than some of Velázquez's other "metapictures," it readily reveals its mechanics to the viewer. That's not to say that those mechanics aren't delightfully convolved. But there's a conceptual opacity to artworks like Las Hilanderas and Mary and Martha which Las Meninas, despite its complexity, lacks. Since we as viewers are implied to be fixed in the position of the royal couple getting painted (they're reflected in the mirror at back), our connection to both Las Meninas and the fictive painting of "us" within Las Meninas is somewhat deterministic, whereas there is other work by this artist which exhibits much more freedom in the relations between its internal and external parts. Of course, Velázquez knew how to put on the paint, even if there's something in his handling's quiet vigor that makes his surfaces seem just slightly more equivocal than those of the best baroque painters. (He's closer to Rubens than, say, Zurbarán is, and this is to his detriment.) The best thing which this painting has on offer is its rapid shifts in value, for instance from the sunlit wall at right to the dark interior just beside it. (TFS, 2026)
Berlin, Germany: Gemäldegalerie
62%
The Three Musicians. c1616-18. Oil on canvas
This is a very early Velázquez (he was, like, 17) so there's an indelicacy to it, especially in the way all of the many (too many) surfaces appear so closed off from each other. The clunkiness is not uninteresting, but it's extremely limiting, and anyway it's beside the point of Velázquez's art. Given the picture's flatfooted linearity (look at that helmet of black hair on the little kid!) its best features are its moments of still life, especially the cutting board with its knife like a gnomon and the ever-so-slightly-too-massive-and-too-opaque cup which the boy holds aloft. But these objects are distinguished by the way they almost seem to force themselves out of the picture's diegesis, and in this sense they're harmful to the artwork's overall sense of order. And yet, the image posseses an unaccountable forcefulness of space, despite how crowded it is; this is Velázquez's Caravaggism. The development of his art would be a development, specifically, of this nascent tendency towards spatiality. (TFS, 2026)