REVIEWS
 

A RHETORICIAN OF THE BRUSH
VELÁZQUEZ IN ROME: HIS THIRD "VISIT"
A Show at the Palazzo Ruspoli, via del Corso, Rome

May 1, 2001

REVIEWER: David Mayernik

Field sketch by David Mayernik in the gardens of the Villa Medici
from the same vantage point as Velàquez's painting in the exhibition

I

 
n the standard trajectory of the historian's inexorable determinist path, Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velázquez is oddly more often linked with the name of Manet than with his contemporaries, an odd post hoc justification of his worth by virtue of his appreciation by a proto-modernist. But Velázquez was no pariah among his contemporaries--indeed, rather than the classic Romantic scenario of the under-appreciated genius understood only after his death, here is an artist who found universal favor in life, moving up the social ladder in Madrid, painting the pope in Rome, winning a painting competition in the Pantheon; he not only operated within the bounds of the canonical, he did so with grace and detachment rather than angst and resentment. The key to his success is the economy of his painterly rhetoric--like an athlete so far above his peers he only exerts the effort necessary to win without exaggeration; like a perfect courtier of the Castiglione mould, Velázquez was in such full command of the rhetoric of painterly technique he only dazzled enough to make his audience aware of how much more he could have done--sprezzatura in Italian, or effortlessness.

In championing the brush-stroke (il pittoresco, the root of the word picturesque), Velázquez legitimized the collecting tendencies toward the Venetians of his royal Hapsburg patrons, but he also made a claim for the painting act itself as noble; rather than hiding the evidence of his hand, he celebrates it. In that sense he was in the best humanist tradition, where the noblest work synthesizes the mind and maniera.