Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt 9789048544585

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Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art

Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Dr. Allison Levy, an art historian, has written and/or edited three scholarly books, and she has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Getty Research Institute, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library of Harvard University, the Whiting Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. www.allisonlevy.com.

Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt Giles Knox

Amsterdam University Press

This book was published with support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Indiana University, and the Department of Art History, Indiana University.

Cover illustration: Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, New York, Metropolitan Museum. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Newgen/Konvertus isbn 978 94 6372 571 2 e-isbn 978 90 4854 458 5 doi 10.5117/9789463725712 nur 685 © G. Knox / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements7 List of Illustrations9 Introduction: Polemics of Painting

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Part One – Origin Stories and the Challenge of Italy

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1. El Greco: Italy, Crete, Toledo

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2. From El Greco to Velázquez: Juan Bautista Maíno49 Part Two – Illusion, Materiality, Touch

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3. Velázquez and Inversion: Making and Illusion

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4. Vulcan, Mars, and Venus: Erotic Touch

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5. Late Rembrandt I: Texture and the Skilled Touch141 6. Late Rembrandt II: Feeling with the Eyes

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Conclusion217 Bibliography219 About the Author

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Index231

Acknowledgements One of the great pleasures in writing a book like this one has come from the opportunity to see so many works of art in person. My travel to Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, and Madrid were supported by generous grants from three entities here at Indiana University: the College Arts and Humanities Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities program. I very grateful as well to the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, which covered the costs of the image rights. Another pleasure, of course, has come from the many conversations with friends and colleagues. For getting me interested in Spanish art in the first place I am indebted to Steven N. Orso, in whose footsteps I briefly followed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For involving me in Rembrandt I credit Ethan Matt Kavaler, whose brilliant lectures at the University of Toronto I can still recall almost word for word, even after the passage of so many years. For sparking my interest and engagement with the art writing tradition I credit my dissertation advisor, Philip Sohm. I should also mention two important people who are sadly no longer with us. The first is J. Douglas Stewart at Queen’s University, whose courses modeled the kind of close looking that remains the foundation of what I try to do as an art historian. Also at Queen’s, I was fortunate to receive support from Alfred Bader, whose enthusiasm for all things Rembrandt was truly infectious and continues to sustain the field. At Amsterdam University Press I am delighted to be working with the same superb team that saw my first project to completion, Erika Gaffney and Allison Levy. I presented some of this material at an international El Greco conference held in Athens. I would like to thank Nicos Hadjinicolaou for organizing this event and presiding over some very lively conversations. On the topic of El Greco’s Byzantinism I have also benefitted enormously from discussions with Sarah Bassett. I would like to thank my colleague Bret Rothstein for supporting this project and permitting me to trespass on his area of expertise. Also here in the Department of Art History, I would like to mention Julie Van Voorhis, who helped me understand the ancient sculptures drawn on by Velázquez. At the heart of our department are two members of staff, Alexandra Burlingame and Douglas P. Case. Their practical assistance was invaluable, as was their intellectual curiosity and encouragement. My thanks go out to Sheri Shaneyfelt, who invited me to speak at Vanderbilt University, where I presented an early version of this study. I also remember speaking with her in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum at the moment when I first realized just how much Aristotle’s chain projects from the surface of Rembrandt’s canvas. It was a key moment in prompting me to pursue this project. Another important figure in encouraging me on this path is Pamela M. Jones of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She very much helped me conceptualize the glue that binds

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together my discussions of these three very different artists. I would like to mention Adam Herring of Southern Methodist University, with whom I have spoken many times on the topic of this project. I extend particular thanks to Hannah Edgerton who proofread the manuscript and offered numerous important editorial suggestions. I only wish that my writing was as elegant as hers. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Diane Reilly, and my son, Ian Knox. Diane patiently put up with the long process of gestation and Ian tolerated what he still considers to be far too many trips to museums.

List of Illustrations Color Plates Plate 1. El Greco, Assumption of the Virgin, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago Plate 2. Juan Bautista Maíno, Adoration of the Shepherds, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY Plate 3. Velázquez, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY Plate 4. Velázquez, The Forge of Vulcan, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY Plate 5. Velázquez, The Rokeby Venus, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY Plate 6. Rembrandt, Woman Bathing, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY Plate 7. Rembrandt, Jewish Bride, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum Plate 8. Rembrandt, Lucretia, Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 34.19. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art Plate 9. Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art Plate 10. Rembrandt, Return of the Prodigal Son, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum

Black and White Figures Fig. 1. El Greco, The Vision of Saint John, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art Fig. 2. El Greco, Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 24.1. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art Fig. 3. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. North side, upper register, Anastasis. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 1974-1990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC Fig. 4. El Greco, Disrobing of Christ, Toledo, Cathedral. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 5. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. West wall, gallery level, lower register, Miraculous Discovery of the Relics of Saint Mark. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 1974-1990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC

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Fig. 6. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. West wall, gallery level, lower register, Miraculous Discovery of the Relics of Saint Mark, detail of heads. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 1974-1990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC Fig. 7. El Greco, Martyrdom of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 8. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. Sanctuary, East dome, Isaiah. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 19741990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC Fig. 9. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. South side, lower register, Kiss of Judas. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 19741990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC Fig. 10. Cathedral, Toledo. Retablo mayor. Photo: author Fig. 11. Retablo, Basilica, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional. Photo: author Fig. 12. Titian, Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 13. Retablo mayor, Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 14. El Greco, Resurrection, Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo. Photo: Album/ Art Resource, NY Fig. 15. Iconostasis, S. Giorgio dei Greci, Venice. Photo: author Fig. 16. Juan Bautista Maíno, Adoration of the Shepherds, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum Fig. 17. Caravaggio, Martyrdom of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 18. El Greco, Adoration of the Shepherds, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 19. Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 20. Caravaggio, Entombment, Musei Vaticani, Vatican City. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 21. Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY Fig. 22. Velázquez, Three Musicians, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Photo: bpk Bildagentur/Gemäldegalerie/Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY Fig. 23. Velázquez, The Luncheon, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum Fig. 24. Velázquez, Kitchen Scene, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago

List of Illustrations

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Fig. 25. Velázquez, Two Young Men at Table, London, Apsley House. Photo: Album/ Art Resource, NY Fig. 26. Velázquez, Adoration of the Magi, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 27. Luis Tristán, Santa Monica, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 28. Juan Sánchez Cotán, Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber, San Diego Museum of Art. Photo: San Diego Museum of Art Fig. 29. Velázquez, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 30. Juan Sánchez Cotán, Still Life with Game Fowl, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago Fig. 31. Velázquez, The Spinners, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY Fig. 32. Cherubino Alberti, Persian Sibyl, after Michelangelo. Photo: Rijksmuseum Fig. 33. Georg Pencz, Allegory of Touch (Tactus), from The Five Senses. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art Fig. 34. Jan Saenredam, Allegory of Visual Perception, after Hendrick Goltzius. Photo: Rijskmuseum Fig. 35. Velázquez, Las Meninas, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY Fig. 36. Velázquez, Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 37. Velázquez, Los Borrachos, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY Fig. 38. Antonio Tempesta, Apollo and Vulcan, from Ovid, Metamorphoses, Amsterdam, 1606. Photo: Rijksmuseum Fig. 39. Velázaquez, The Waterseller of Seville, London, Apsley House. Photo: V & A Images, London/Art Resource, NY Fig. 40. Barthélémy de Chasseneux, Catalogus gloriae mundi, Lyons, 1546, fol. 212 verso. Photo: The Getty Research Institute Fig. 41. Jost Amman, from Barthélémy de Chasseneux, Catalogus gloriae mundi, Frankfurt, 1571. Photo: British Museum Fig. 42. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens, Allegory of Taste, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY Fig. 43. Velázquez, Mars, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY Fig. 44. Bartolomeo del Bene, Portal of Touch, from Civitas very sive morum. Photo: The Getty Research Institute Fig. 45. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens, Allegory of Touch, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY

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Fig. 46. Michelangelo, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence, New Sacristy, S. Lorenzo. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 47. Ludovisi Mars, Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano (Palazzo Altemps). Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource Fig. 48. Hermaphrodite, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 49. Matteo Bonuccelli, Hermaphrodite, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 50. Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Portrait of Philip IV, after Rubens, Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY Fig. 51. Rembrandt, The Nightwatch, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum Fig. 52. Rembrandt, Portrait of Jan Six, Amsterdam, Collectie Six. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY Fig. 53. Rembrandt, Bathsheba, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 54. Rembrandt, Family Portrait, Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY Fig. 55. Gerrit Dou, The Doctor, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 56. Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp, The Hague, Mauritshuis. Photo: Mauritshuis Fig. 57. Rembrandt, Portrait of Frederik Rihel on Horseback, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY Fig. 58. Rembrandt, Portrait of a Lady with a Lap Dog, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY Fig. 59. Rembrandt, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum. Photo: Nationalmuseum Fig. 60. Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Jan de Leeuw, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 61. Rembrandt, Syndics of the Drapers Guild, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijskmuseum Fig. 62. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. Photo: National Gallery of Art Fig. 63. Rembrandt, The Blinding of Samson, Frankfurt, Städel Museum. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY Fig. 64. Rembrandt, Lucretia, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. Photo: National Gallery of Art Fig. 65. Rembrandt, The Apostle Bartholomew, San Diego, Timken Museum of Art. Photo: Timken Museum of Art

List of Illustrations

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Fig. 66. Rembrandt, The Apostle Bartholomew, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. Photo: J. Paul Getty Museum Fig. 67. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait at Age 34, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery London/Art Resource, NY Fig. 68. Titian, A Man with a Quilted Sleeve, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY Fig. 69. Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 70. Titian, Portrait of a Man with a Glove, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource Fig. 71. Titian, Venus of Urbino, Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY Fig. 72. Rubens, Het pelsken, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY Fig. 73. Cornelis van Kittensteyn, Touch, after Dirck Hals. Photo: Rijksmuseum Fig. 74. Abraham Bosse, Touch, from Les Cinq Sens. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art Fig. 75. Adriaen Collaert, Touch, after Marten de Vos. Photo: Rijksmuseum Fig. 76. Sisto Badalocchio, Isaac and Rebecca, after Raphael. Photo: Rijksmuseum Fig. 77. Concordia Maritale, from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, of Uytbeeldingen des Verstands, 1644. Photo: The Getty Research Institute Fig. 78. Cornelis Cort, Lucretia, after Titian. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art Fig. 79. Marcantonio Raimondi, Lucretia, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray from the collection of Francis Calley Gray, G2500. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College Fig. 80. Gonzales Coques, Touch, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY Fig. 81. Rembrandt, Touch, New York, Leiden Collection. Photo: Image Courtesy of the Leiden Collection, New York Fig. 82. Jacob van der Heyden, Touch. Photo: Rijksmuseum Fig. 83. Hendrick Goltzius, Lucretia as the Sense of Touch, New York, The Morgan Library & Museum. 1974.5. Purchased as the gift of Mrs. G. P. Van de Bovenkamp (Sue Erpf Van de Bovenkamp) in memory of Armand G. Erpf. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum Fig. 84. Maerten van Heemskerck, Return of the Prodigal Son. Photo: Rijksmuseum Fig. 85. Rembrandt, Return of the Prodigal Son. Photo: Metropolitan Museum Fig. 86. Jusepe de Ribera, The Sense of Touch, Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum. Photo: The Norton Simon Foundation

Introduction: Polemics of Painting A Greek working in Spain; a Spaniard who spent most of his career in Madrid; a Dutchman who never left the Netherlands; this is a disparate group of painters indeed. What joins them together is a new self-consciousness with respect to the artistic traditions of different parts of Europe. In particular, I am interested in looking at their varied responses to the authority of Italian Renaissance art and art writing. By the seventeenth century, arguably, the European art world had become more international than it had been since antiquity. At the center of the international conception of art was the idea that what happened in sixteenth-century Italy, especially in the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, established a standard against which other art, including later, contemporary art, should be judged. These artists’ skill and innovation are unquestioned. But their continued renown also stemmed from something beyond the high quality of their work: the advent and subsequent wide dissemination of published art writing from Italy. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was the first to tell the story of art in a compelling way, and he focused almost exclusively on Italy. As his words came to be known outside of Italy it was Vasari’s story, with the priority it gave to the heavyweights of the Italian High Renaissance, that set the pattern. The internationalism of the seventeenth century, from the perspective of art writing at least, placed Italy at the center, partially eclipsing traditions that had developed independently elsewhere, especially in the north of Europe. Scholars who study seventeenth-century art do so mostly in separate, nationally determined communities. One defines oneself, for example, as a scholar of Spanish art, or of Dutch art. These boundaries are rarely crossed.1 This is mostly a product of nineteenth-century nationalism, but it is also a reaction to how Vasari stole the story and thereby unfairly made it an Italian story. His prejudices set the tone for the development of academic art history. As Svetlana Alpers put it in her polemical book, The Art of Describing, “Since the institutionalization of art history as an academic discipline, the major analytic strategies by which we have been taught to look at and to interpret images – style as proposed by Wölfflin and iconography by Panofsky – were developed in reference to the Italian tradition.”2 My purpose here is not to follow in Alpers’s path and attempt to establish an alternative to italocentrism, thus further 1 When these national boundaries are crossed it is usually by scholars working out theoretical ideas. See, for instance, Stoichita, 1997. 2 Alpers, 1983, p. xx.

Knox, G., Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725712_intro

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reifying national boundaries. Instead, the pages that follow put defensive nationalism aside and reconsider the importance of Italian art and art writing in the works of three great innovators of late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European painting: El Greco, Velázquez, and Rembrandt. Rembrandt may well have been thinking about Dutchness in his own art, but surely not as it came to be narrowly, and sometimes even racially defined in the nineteenth century. By the same measure, we no longer hold in sacramental awe the achievements of the Italian High Renaissance and can therefore understand in a more historically nuanced fashion how that tradition was perceived outside of Italy. I will not judge the artists under discussion against the imagined gold standard of High Renaissance perfection in the manner of a Kenneth Clark.3 This study considers their art as the product of a dialogue with Italy, without at the same time robbing them of their individuality and uniqueness. My focus on three artists working in two nations – Spain and the Netherlands – is intentional and significant. Spain did not have a strong indigenous school of painting; the Netherlands rivaled Italy as a great crucible of innovation in the early modern period. The resulting relationship in the two lands to the new hegemony of Italy – one slightly subservient, the other, sometimes defiantly, not – was subtle and complex. I have separated the chapters into two parts, the first of which centers on the origins of the styles of El Greco and Velázquez. El Greco was once considered a cornerstone of a distinctive, Greek modernity; though ruled by the Ottomans for centuries the creative genius of the nation stayed alive in the form of the great painter from Crete. Understandably, modern scholarship has repudiated this nationalist view of El Greco’s achievement, but an unfortunate consequence has been an eclipse of his Byzantine roots. In Chapter One I will argue that the mature manner El Greco developed in Toledo emerged out of a self-conscious merging of an extraordinarily disparate group of sources. He combined his Italian training with the deeply ingrained traditions of his native Crete, enriched through contact with monumental Byzantine art in Venice. All were joined together so as to harmonize with the distinctive form and expressiveness of the Spanish retablo he encountered in Toledo. His way beyond the impasse established by Vasari – How does an artist do better than perfect? – was to create a unique style out of a variety of sources. Though the results could hardly be more distant, and the sources more diverse, the process was not so different from that undertaken by the Carracci in Bologna around the same time. Vasari would have understood, and perhaps even been sympathetic to the combinatory aesthetic of the Carracci reform. It is fair to say, I think, that he would have been most perplexed by the result developed by El Greco. The eccentricity of his style came from

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Clark, 1966.

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El Greco’s wide-ranging sources, however, rather than from the fundamental process of combination. There is no native tradition in Spain to explain the new naturalism that Velázquez developed during his early years in Seville. Some scholars have sought to distance the great Spaniard from Italian sources, especially the figure of Caravaggio. Others have advocated for an Italian connection but have struggled to explain how Velázquez could have come into contact with compelling examples to emulate. Implausibly, some have even argued that Velázquez developed his early manner without reference to other art. In Chapter Two I propose that Velázquez traveled to Toledo in 1611 with his master, Francisco Pacheco. In Toledo he would have been exposed to the art of El Greco and Juan Sánchez Cotán, and, most importantly, to the works of Juan Bautista Maíno, who in 1611 had just returned from a long stay in Rome. I argue that Maíno, with his understanding of recent Italian developments, including the full range of Caravaggio’s achievement, was key to the development of Velázquez’s early style. Once again, it is easy to imagine Velázquez’s choice as one motivated by the implicit gauntlet thrown down by Vasari to painters of future generations: how to improve upon perfection. Instead of following a route that Vasari would have approved of, or indeed one that Pacheco would have recommended, Velázquez turned to an example that largely repudiated orthodoxy. As with El Greco, this was an eccentric decision. In part two of the book, the theme of the challenge of Italy continues, but the focus shifts from stylistic origins to issues revolving around illusion, materiality, and the sense of touch, sense knowledge in other words. I devote two chapters to Velázquez, and two to Rembrandt. Velázquez was fascinated both by the physicality of making and by the illusions created through those processes. Thematic continuities that span Velázquez’s entire career are difficult to identify. While his trademark naturalism is clearly one such theme, his approach to nature shifted radically over time; use naturalism as a common thread and it reveals as much about the vagueness of the word as it does about Velázquez’s art. In Chapter Three, I will explore two themes present throughout Velázquez’s career. First, Velázquez thematized the mechanics of art making itself, especially with regards to the manipulation of the pigment. I will argue that he did this from his early work in Seville all the way through to the late paintings, namely The Spinners (Fig. 31) and Las Meninas (Fig. 35). Also, Velázquez was consistently fascinated by the ability of painting to trick the eye with its illusions. Both interests run very much counter to the Italian-sourced theoretical orthodoxy of his master, Francisco Pacheco. An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (Fig. 29), Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Plate 3), The Forge of Vulcan (Plate 4), and Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob (Fig. 36) exemplify an interest in allegorizing the skilled touch of the maker and the illusions that that touch created. It was an interest that would then blossom in The Spinners and Las Meninas. Vasari would not have approved.

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Chapter Four situates Velázquez’s The Forge of Vulcan, Mars (Fig. 43), and The Rokeby Venus (Plate 5) in terms not of skilled touch, but as painted prompts for thoughts of erotic touching. My argument is based on the shared allusion to a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – of Venus, Mars, and Vulcan – in which erotic touching propels the narrative. In this chapter I further explore iconographic connections to contemporary allegorical representations of the sense of touch, especially in The Forge of Vulcan. I consider the visual relationship of Mars and The Rokeby Venus to works of sculpture in the context of the paragone discourse – the Italian art theoretical debate on the relative merits of sculpture and painting – especially as it relates to the notion that painting could not be understood through touch, while sculpture could. In particular, I focus on the provocative relationship between The Rokeby Venus and an ancient sculpture known well by Velázquez, the Borghese Hermaphrodite (Fig. 48). The connection has often been cited, but little interpretative hay has been made of it. In Chapters Five and Six I will turn to Rembrandt, to the distinctive brushwork he developed in the last two decades of his career. Inspired by the late Titian, like Velázquez, Rembrandt reveled in richly worked surfaces with often discernable, individual brushstrokes. Unlike Velázquez and his Italian counterpart, however, Rembrandt sometimes built up his paint into a three-dimensional structure that, like a three-dimensional relief map, projected from the surface of the canvas. These two final chapters build on Svetlana Alpers’s argument that Rembrandt’s textured paint was meant to stimulate viewers to consider his paintings in terms of both sight and touch. For Rembrandt, touch supplemented sight. Chapter Five lays the groundwork for understanding those touch-stimulating paintings by exploring the range of purely visual effects for which Rembrandt employed textured paint, because for him projecting paint was not always about the sense of touch. I consider as well the relationship of the Portrait of Jan Six (Fig. 52) to ideas that developed around Titian’s late style, especially the courtly ideal of sprezzatura. In Chapter Six I really turn to the business of how Rembrandt used richly textured paint to elicit thoughts of touching. There is nothing random about this texturing. Careful observation of the paintings’ surfaces reveals that Rembrandt deployed rough paint very selectively, introducing texture to areas of the surface where thoughts involving the many varieties of touch might be especially resonant. It is not so much a matter of a texture relating directly to a particular kind of touch – he does not make the paint spiky to suggest painful touching, for instance – as it about using a single pronounced texture as a trigger for the suggestion of multiple sensations. For example, while erotic touch is thematized in the varied paint textures of Bathsheba (Fig. 53) and Woman Bathing (Plate 6), the warm touch of familial attachment is figured in the Jewish Bride (Plate 7) and the Braunschweig Family Portrait (Fig. 54). In his paintings of the suicide of Lucretia Rembrandt textured paint so as to emphasize the tactile side of the story, the physical pain of the

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self-inflicted wound (Plate 8 and Fig. 64). In the Return of the Prodigal Son (Plate 10), communication between father and son occurs through their touching embrace, given emphasis by the textured paint in the area of the canvas that depicts the touch of reconciliation. Touch that leads to poetic insight is the theme of Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (Plate 9). He fingers a thick chain with one hand, while the other rests on the sculpted bust. As with Velázquez, the paragone offers a interpretive key. In Rembrandt’s late paintings the basest of the senses takes its place alongside immaterial sight as an important tool for the understanding of fully embodied experience. There are many challenges in writing a book on three very different artists working in two very different contexts. The question naturally arises as to whether this a book, or just a collection of separate studies. It is, of course, a bit of both. Nonetheless, three themes in particular bind this study together: a critique of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists; the importance of Titian’s legacy; an engagement with the paragone. All three of these artists rejected one or more of the premises on which Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was based. El Greco dismissed Vasari’s disdain for the so-called maniera greca, or Byzantine style, in an annotation to the text of the Lives of the Artists, and made it a central pillar of his mature manner. Velázquez learned of Vasari’s text through his master, Francisco Pacheco, who cited many long passages from the Italian author in his own treatise, El arte de la pintura. Velázquez turned against the theoretical proclivities of his master from an early age and embraced the naturalism of Caravaggio. Vasari obviously did not know the works of the polarizing Lombard, but we can be certain that he would have been among the artist’s naysayers. Moreover, one of the abiding themes of Velázquez’s entire career was the thematization of the foundational role of the mechanical in the making of a painting. For Vasari, and for Pacheco, too, such matters were to be kept in the background, with ideation front and center. Rembrandt may not have made the making of art into a central theme of his paintings, but by laying on thick layers of paint in his late works he inevitably brought to mind the late Titian, and Venetian painting more generally. Famously, Vasari offered up a systematic critique of that brushwork, and it is to that critical tradition – known to Rembrandt through the paraphrase included in the introduction to Karel Van Mander’s great Schilderboek – to which his work is partially addressed. The rich textures that Rembrandt added, however, set him apart from that Italian tradition and made the experience of his late works a broader one, implicating more than just the sense of sight. Related to Vasari’s legacy, and to his repudiation, is that these three artists all worked in dialogue with Titian, either through direct experience, or through the mediation of written accounts. Vasari celebrated the Venetian painter, but for Vasari Titian could never rise to the heights of the Central Italian greats. First, Titian was deficient in the key discipline of drawing, or disegno, and was too much attached to the direct copying of the natural world. He suffered as well because he emphasized too much the superficiality of color and paint, and relied too little on the structural

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precision and ideal forms that would have come his way had he devoted himself to the study of antiquity, and to the practice of drawing. Finally, rubbing salt into an already wounded reputation, Titian’s late works laid out the messy process of painting for all to see and, presumably admire. El Greco, Velázquez, and Rembrandt all experimented with the innovations introduced by Titian. El Greco considered himself a student of Titian, and is recorded as being an advocate of the Venetian, while at the same time showing puzzlement at the high reputation enjoyed by Michelangelo, Vasari’s hero. Velázquez’s early works looked to Caravaggio, but once he had spent time with the royal collections of Madrid, and in Venice itself, he became intent on creating an updated version of Titian’s painterly naturalism. The Rokeby Venus (Plate 5) was an adaptation of an explicitly Venetian genre; The Spinners (Fig. 31) included a direct quotation of Titian’s Rape of Europa. Rembrandt’s thick deposits of textured paint may seem unrelated to the lively surfaces of Titian’s late paintings, but in some instances the connection is close. One salient example is the Portrait of Jan Six (Fig. 52), which leads one to think that Titian may underpin his other efforts as well, though with the goal of doing something quite different with the visibly worked paint. Titian’s legacy, both in terms of his actual works, and in terms of how Vasari wrote about them, is a constant backdrop to the principal narrative running through this book. All three artists under discussion also engaged with the paragone in their work. El Greco, for one, felt that the sculptural emphasis of Michelangelo as a painter was misplaced, and though he borrowed figures from the great Tuscan he consistently transformed them with painterly flourishes purportedly derived from Titian. Velázquez’s master Pacheco wrote extensively on the paragone, and its precepts help us understand what his protégé intended with his intensely descriptive early paintings. Later in his career, with the Mars (Fig. 43) and The Rokeby Venus, Velázquez drew inspiration from sculptures. I believe that in this way he invited his viewers to consider the different senses that came into play in the understanding of the two media, with a particular focus on the sense of touch. With paint that increasingly projected out from the surfaces of his canvases, Rembrandt’s rough, late work could at times approach the plasticity of sculpture. The thick plait of gold chain draped across Aristotle’s chest contrasts with the delicately rendered, thinly painted bust of Homer in Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (Plate 9), perhaps Rembrandt’s most eloquent essay on the complementary roles of vision and touch in our apprehension of the world. Touch might not seem to have much to do with painting; paintings are flat and their illusions are imperceptible by tactile means. That does not mean, however, that paintings cannot stimulate thoughts of touching. Velázquez did this in a couple of different ways. In The Forge of Vulcan (Plate 4) he treated a theme that revolves around touching and brought that theme to the thematic and visual foreground by

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using motifs drawn from allegories of touch. As a depiction of the goddess of physical love, The Rokeby Venus ignites thoughts of touching, and the silky smooth paint used to describe the receptive skin of the reclining figure speaks directly to that desire. Heightening that stimulus is the allusion to Hermaphrodite (Fig. 48), a sculpture understood in the seventeenth century to be all about the certifying power, surprising though it may have been, of touching. In all these instances paint successfully evokes in visual form the thought and theme of touching. Rembrandt also stimulated thoughts of touching in many of his late paintings, and did so intelligently across a wide range of his late paintings. Arend de Gelder is often cited as Rembrandt’s most faithful follower because of the way his roughly textured paint projects from the surface of his canvases. There is an important distinction to be made here, though, one that speaks to the unique calibration in texture that marks Rembrandt’s late paintings. Arend de Gelder’s paintings are textured across great swathes of their surfaces. Rembrandt’s paint does not just stick out willy-nilly, but is instead deployed around areas of haptic intensity, artfully introduced to mesh and blend with the unfolding of the story. This book is different from others in the study of seventeenth-century art in several key ways. One is that I consider the relationship of El Greco, Velázquez, and Rembrandt to Italy in more neutral terms than has been traditional, with Italy neither the standard of perfection against which all should be judged, nor the proverbial elephant in the room, ignored so as to craft national histories sealed off from the world around. The seventeenth century becomes a century of fruitful exchange among various European traditions. I also consider anew the relationship of art writing to art production. Across Europe during the seventeenth century artists read Italian-tinged writings on art. These texts informed how they contemplated their own practice; they represented a body of received knowledge against which art was made. Artists could choose to repudiate the tenets of this writing, or accept them. What is important is the notion that art was made in dialogue with these texts. All the artists discussed in this book knew this tradition well. El Greco annotated Vasari and Vitruvius, and Velázquez was schooled by one the leading art theorists of seventeenth-century Spain. It seems inconceivable that Rembrandt did not read Karel van Mander’s history of art, with its long paraphrase of Vasari. None of these artists tried to put into action an agenda set out by a theoretical author, but they did work with these authors’ ideas in mind. Finally, my book expands our understanding of how our response to works of visual art is not necessarily limited to the sense of sight, but can also encompass touch. My work, therefore, is situated within the broad field of sensory history that has attracted much interdisciplinary attention in recent years. A great deal has been said on this topic with reference to sculpture, but here I expand the discourse into the realm of painting.4 Velázquez and Rembrandt may not have intended their viewers

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literally to paw at the surfaces of their canvases, though that would not have been nearly as outré as it would be today, but they did want us to have an experience that was as fully embodied as possible, and they did so by having us conjure up thoughts about touching that resonated directly with the subject matter depicted.

4

There have been some exceptions to this general rule. See Honig, 2016.

1. El Greco: Italy, Crete, Toledo Abstract This chapter argues that the mature manner El Greco developed in Toledo emerged out of a self-conscious merging of Italian sources with the deeply engrained traditions of his native Crete, enriched through contact with monumental Byzantine art in Venice. All were joined together so as to harmonize with the distinctive form and expressiveness of the Spanish retablo he encountered in Toledo. El Greco’s way beyond the impasse established by Vasari – How does an artist do better than perfect? – was to create a unique style out of a variety of sources. Though the results could hardly be more distant, the process was not so different from that undertaken by the Carracci in Bologna around the same time. Keywords: El Greco style origins, El Greco Byzantine

El Greco’s icons have never made easy bedfellows with the rest of the artist’s output, neither with his Italian paintings, nor with those made in Toledo. They are small in scale and cleave mostly to a conservative style that the artist himself appeared to repudiate once he moved to Italy, home of the so-called modern style. What to do with these awkward reminders that the artist was trained to paint in a way that was radically different from any of the contemporary art he would encounter either in Italy or in Spain? Some have argued in recent decades that El Greco’s training as an icon painter in Crete had a continuing and long-lasting impact on his mature style, but without saying why this may have happened.1 Or, the Byzantine foundation has been thought of mostly in rather narrow terms, focusing on the specifically Cretan traditions in which he was schooled, or on isolated iconographic and stylistic motifs.2 1 Brown, 1998, p. 78: “Beneath the polished veneer acquired through the study of Titian and Michelangelo was an icon painter who had been trained in a tradition with little investment in naturalism or anatomical drawing or linear perspective. Under the right conditions, this Byzantine heritage could reemerge and recombine with all that he had learned in Italy.” Brown went further in 2001 in saying that El Greco aimed at “boldly fusing two distinct and even contradictory pictorial cultures in a way that had never been seen before.” Brown, 2001, p. 26. David Davies argues that El Greco returned to his Byzantine roots in his works after 1585 because this was when he turned away from nature and toward painting pure spirit. There are many problems with this analysis, but important among them is the blanket assumption that the purpose of Byzantine art “is to convey the transcendental world of the figures represented, rather than natural phenomena as perceived by the senses.” Davies, 2003, p. 45. Stoenescu, 2016. 2 Offering more in the way of concrete affinities between El Greco’s style and his Byzantine background is the essay by Papadaki-Oekland, 1995. Davies, 1995, posits that the dematerialized forms of El Greco’s figures should be tied ultimately to the Neoplatonism of the Greek fathers. Hadermann-Misguich, 1995, notes the persistence of Byzantine iconography and style in the Burial of the Count of Orgaz. Knox, G., Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725712_ch01

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Eager to distance the artist from Greek nationalist rhetoric that accompanied his revival in the nineteenth century, some scholars have no truck whatsoever with the notion that El Greco should have maintained an allegiance to a manner he seemed so comprehensively to have shrugged off during the near decade he spent in Italy.3 I will argue here that El Greco’s mature work maintained a strong connection with his Byzantine roots. To do this I am going to leave aside for a moment the icons of Crete, even though they clearly need to be considered in a broader study of El Greco’s Byzantinism. My interest instead is to add another dimension to our understanding of El Greco’s Byzantine heritage. I want to suggest that monumental Byzantine art may also have been an important inspiration for El Greco, especially once he arrived in Spain and was called upon, probably for the first time, to produce large-scale, multifigured works of art, altarpiece paintings in this case. The nature of this new challenge forced him out of the Italianizing mode he had developed while in Italy toward something quite different. In this chapter I shall consider El Greco’s early Toledo altarpiece paintings, for the cathedral, for El Escorial, and for Santo Domingo el Antiguo, as representing together a critical moment in his stylistic evolution; with these altarpiece paintings El Greco took the first steps toward his mature manner. Though contextual studies have offered valuable insight into the meaning of the ensembles he produced, and the networks within which El Greco worked, it is worth recalling that the artist’s unique style is the cause of all this interest in the first place. How he came to develop this style, often skirted in recent literature on the artist, is therefore of considerable interest. Before his early commissions in Toledo El Greco was not an especially accomplished artist in the Western mode. Had he died before his move to Toledo in 1577 the rich scholarship on the artist would never have flourished as it has. Rarely, for instance, do books on Italian art of the later sixteenth century make anything more than a passing mention of El Greco.4 So the question becomes, how did Domenikos Theotokopoulos become El Greco, the artist about whom we care so deeply? This 3 The most eloquent opponent of El Greco’s allegiance to his Byzantine roots has long been Nicos Hadjinicolaou. See Hadjinicolaou, 2008. A 2009 exhibition displayed Cretan icons, by El Greco and others, next to a late Coronation of the Virgin. This fact, joined with title of the exhibition, “The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete,” would seem to suggest that the organizers were intent on establishing continuity across the artist’s career. Writing in the catalogue, however, Hadjinicolaou, 2009, p. 36, establishes firm firewalls separating the different phases of El Greco’s career. Speaking of the Coronation of the Virgin, he says that “this is the ‘late El Greco’ in all his audacity and uniqueness, creating a pictorial universe entirely distinct from his Cretan beginnings but also from his Italian years and, even, from his first overwhelming creations at Toledo itself.” For a lengthy discussion of the historiography of the idea that El Greco was strongly Byzantine throughout this career, see Hadjinicolaou, 1990a. See also the numerous studies reprinted in Hadjinicolaou, 1990b. 4 Paoletti and Radke, 2012, p. 500, mentions El Greco in passing, but mostly as an example of Alessandro Farnese’s eclectic taste. He is mentioned twice in Campbell and Cole, 2017, vol. 2, pp. 532, 546, first among a list of artists who moved to Spain, and then as a critic of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. None of his paintings are discussed.

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Fig. 1. El Greco, The Vision of Saint John, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

chapter aims to broaden our understanding of how his distinct and highly individual style came into being. Let us start with the end and examine an example of this inimitable individual style, The Vision of Saint John (Fig. 1). There is really no way to match the poetry of this painting with words, but from a calmly rationalistic perspective we can take note of a number of salient characteristics: the markedly attenuated figures; the weirdly electric atmosphere these figures occupy; the lack of any coherent system marking out pictorial space; the curiously crinkled drapery folds; the unnatural colors and white highlighting. The surreal, dreamlike atmosphere that results has sometimes been explained with reference to Spanish mysticism, or to El Greco’s own statements on art theory, with mixed results.5 Here, at the beginning at least, I am not going to 5 David Davies is the leading advocate for the mystical argument. Among his many publications on the topic, see Davies, 2003. Fernando Marías highlights the importance of art theory. In particular, see Marías, 1999a.

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Fig. 2. El Greco, Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 24.1. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art

follow those investigative pathways. Instead, I am going to examine the visual evidence, and then I am going to consider how El Greco’s annotations to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists might help us to understand what we see. Finally, I will ponder the possibility that the task of assembling his paintings into the retablo format used in Spain, so unlike the altarpieces of Italy, reminded El Greco of the traditional Greek iconostasis. Let us look first at what El Greco had achieved in Italy and see if it helps to explain the artist’s mature style. The Minneapolis Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple (Fig. 2) stands as a good example. As many have argued, the painting offers eloquent testimony to El Greco’s goals as an artist during this period – he went to Italy intent on learning the lessons of art in the modern, Western manner. It was an art, loosely speaking, defined by naturalism of color, space, and figure. In a series of paintings of this same theme El Greco struggled to make good on his goal. The figures stand within a space defined by the rules of linear perspective. They twist and turn in order to convey the drama of the episode and to demonstrate the artist’s command over the complexities of the human form in motion. Colors are bright, but not systematically unnatural as would occur later. It is also true, however, that

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El Greco is not especially comfortable with any of these qualities – the perspective is inconsistent, the spatial intervals between the various figures are poorly defined, and the treatment of the human figure, evident especially in the rubbery forms of the reclining woman to the left, does not show El Greco to be an artist conversant with drawing after the live model. These are not the flourishes of creative license that define his mature manner and scholars have always been hard pressed in making any case for a logical stylistic evolution that connects one to the other. Moving forward just a little in time, but a lot in terms of space, 1577 saw El Greco in Toledo, where he received commissions for monumental altarpieces. These are precisely the kinds of commissions he had failed to secure in Italy, which may well have prompted his relocation to Spain. I shall focus mostly on the Assumption of the Virgin (Plate 1) he painted for the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. As is well known, El Greco went about this task by drawing on a stockpile of images. The Virgin of the Assumption was adapted from Titian’s famous Assunta at the Frari in Venice while the figure at the bottom right derives from Michelangelo’s St. Bartholomew in the Last Judgment. To adapt a figure from Michelangelo was very common among late-sixteenth-century artists, but it was a rather curious choice for El Greco to have made. Told by Giulio Mancini, one of the few records of any kind that bear witness to El Greco’s time in Italy has the artist suggesting that the Last Judgment might be demolished and that he “would do another, not a whit worse than Michelangelo’s as a work of art, which would be both chaste and decorous in addition. All the painters and patrons of the arts resented this and it became necessary for him to retire to Spain.”6 The same principle of eclectic borrowing of figures and compositions underpins the other compositions he executed for Santo Domingo el Antiguo. The harvest of pictorial allusions is bountiful indeed, sufficient to the fill the belly of the most ardent of motif spotters. Nonetheless, the result is not pastiche. All is transformed into El Greco’s individual style – the attenuated figures (though less marked than they would later become), the intentional spatial ambiguity, the peculiar colors, the white highlights, the faceted drapery folds, the charged and unreal atmosphere. I would argue that the stylistic shift from a work like the Assumption to the late work I analyzed earlier is not so enormous and that it is possible from this point to chart a relatively consistent stylistic trajectory, though never a straightforward linear progression toward a singular goal. Still, the later works for the most part simply show an exaggerated turning up of the volume on the qualities we can already observe here in the Assumption. 6 Mancini, 1956–1957, vol. 1, pp. 230–231: “Onde, venendo l’occasione di coprir alcune figure del Giuditio di Michelangelo che da Pio erano state stimate indecenti per quel luogo, proruppe in dir che, se si butasse a terra tutta l’opera, l’haverebbe fatta con honestà et decenza non inferiore a quella di bontà di pittura. Onde, provocatisi tutti i pittori e quelli che si dilettano di questa professione, gli fu necessario andarsene in Spagna, dove, sotto Filippo II, operò molte cose di gran buon gusto.” Translation from Waterhouse, 1930, p. 65. See also, Joannides, 1995, and, more recently, Hellwig, 2016.

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Other scholars, it should be said, have not seen it this way. Emboldened by the numerous quotations from Italian sources these scholars see the Assumption as continuing along the same lines as the works carried out in Italy.7 Those earlier works show El Greco as an artist intent on parroting Italian norms, even if uneasily. While the quotations from Italian sources seem to suggest the same goal for the Assumption, the visual evidence as a whole tells a quite different story. The assumed Virgin is shown from a different point of view than the apostles gathered below, a very un-Italian inconsistency certainly not found in Titian. The opening into the sarcophagus is tilted upward in a way that has nothing to do with perspective, even poorly understood perspective, and the same can be said of its lid.8 And most telling of all, the sense of spatial interval among the apostles at the left is collapsed into two-dimensional pattern.9 The Assumption and the Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple occupy quite different stylistic territories. My question is: How did El Greco make the leap from his Italian work to what we see in Toledo? Many earlier scholars have assumed that El Greco was consistently trying to be an artist in the Italian mode. It is an assumption that comes from his decision to leave Crete, travel to Italy, and try to learn how to be an Italian artist. The fact of the matter is, however, that he did not really achieve this goal, at least not in a way that could sustain him in Italy, and it is likely for this reason that he chose to relocate to Spain. It is also an assumption that ultimately has its origin in an acceptance of Vasari and his vigorous excoriation of the so-called maniera greca. Implicitly, Vasari’s hard line is made by some to stand for the attitude of an entire culture; this makes it hard for us to even contemplate that deep down El Greco may actually have never given up his allegiance to the Byzantine style.10 And we need to think about the factors that may have prompted El Greco to return to his roots as it were. One thing to consider is the very depth of those roots. After all, he was around 25 years old and fully trained as an icon painter when he moved first to Venice. You may or may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but we can safely assume that the old ones are not forgotten. We should also consider, as I mentioned at the outset, the new demands of painting on a monumental scale. The Assumption is four meters tall, making the figures around life size. The Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple by contrast is 117 cm tall, and the figures are proportionally smaller as well. Painting the Assumption and the other large works of his early career in Toledo presented a different set 7 Most recently, Casper, 2014a, pp. 151–160. 8 I owe this observation to a lecture by Rudolf Preimesberger: “Details in El Greco – Mostly Iconographic,” presented at the international conference “El Greco: From Crete to Venice, to Rome, to Toledo,” Athens, Greece, November 2014. 9 Brown, 1982, pp. 134–136. 10 Recently, scholars have begun to vitiate the assumption that Byzantine art was universally considered retardataire in Renaissance Europe. See, in particular, Lymberopoulou and Duits, 2013.

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of challenges. The challenge of the larger scale, I argue, prompted him to return to some of the conventions of Byzantine monumental art. Also, it is worth noting that El Greco likely chose to work on such a large scale. The documents surrounding the commission speak of the retablo’s architect changing his design so as to accommodate the dimensions indicated on El Greco’s drawing.11 It is peculiar that scholars investigating El Greco’s time in Italy speak only to his engagement with contemporary or near-contemporary art. Titian, Tintoretto, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Giulio Clovio all loom large, but rarely is anything made of other things he may have seen, including Venice’s great Byzantine heritage. Did El Greco really only look at modern painting while he was in Venice? It seems very unlikely. Venice had ruled El Greco’s native Crete from the thirteenth century on, and in 1453, of course, Constantinople had fallen to the Turks. Venice had long cast itself as a New Constantinople and the center of this association was the Basilica of San Marco, modeled after the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. My hypothesis is this: while in Venice El Greco looked carefully at the mosaics of San Marco; when, seven years later, he was asked to do big paintings for the very first time in his career he turned to Italian art, as we have seen, and to some of the conventions of monumental Byzantine art. It is worth mentioning as well that El Greco would also have had the opportunity to continue this interest during his years in Rome, especially with the renewed focus on monuments of the Early Christian period during the pontificate of Gregory XIII. To maintain my focus, however, I am going to restrict my analysis to the mosaics from San Marco.12 Pictorial space is pretty much absent from the Byzantine-style mosaics of San Marco. Just one example will suffice to demonstrate my point, the Anastasis (Fig. 3), in which the gold ground arrests any recession into an illusionistic space. Instead, the figures are present right on the surface, almost as if they were being pushed forward by the glittering ground. This is not quite the same effect as observed in the Assumption, obviously, but there can be no denying that relative to the earlier Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple the importance of perspective space in the later painting is much reduced. The same can be said of the Disrobing of Christ (Fig. 4), another large composition from the artist’s early days in Toledo. Scholars sometimes invoke Central Italian Mannerism to explain the reduction in pictorial space, and that makes a certain sense, but why, if this style exercised such a hold on El Greco, did this connection not emerge while the master was at work in Italy, especially during his years in Rome? Central Italian Mannerism can also be brought to bear as an explanation for how the artist does not create enough space for the figures within groups, but again Byzantine art offers a much better precedent visually. In the mosaics of San Marco 11 Marías, 2013, pp. 132–138. 12 I would like to thank Eva Papoulia for pointing this out to me.

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Fig. 3. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. North side, upper register, Anastasis. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 1974-1990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC

figures are often clumped together into groups, such as in this scene showing the Miraculous Discovery of the Relics of Saint Mark (Fig. 5). At the far left is a solid block of women. In the first rank we see the ladies full length. The second rank is arranged such that their faces slot neatly into the spaces between the shoulders. To suggest the third and subsequent layers the tops of the heads alone appear. Looking at the crowd mounting up behind Christ in the Disrobing of Christ with this template in mind it becomes clear that there is an affinity. There are standing individuals flanking Christ and the crowd behind consists of heads slotted into the spaces left between shoulders, culminating at the top in a bubbly foam of indistinct crania. The mosaic offers another fruitful example in the crowd of men just left of center (Fig. 6). In this instance the faces are squeezed together in a manner that seems almost cheek to cheek. Turning to another of the early Toledo pictures one finds a very similar bunching of faces in the group to the far right of the Martyrdom of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion (Fig. 7). Though altered by the inclusion of a figure whose back turns toward the viewer, the same highly artificial principle of lining up

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Fig. 4. El Greco, Disrobing of Christ, Toledo, Cathedral. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

heads in the spaces between shoulders is applied in the two groups of apostles flanking the empty sarcophagus in the Assumption, where the alternation of light and dark forms almost entirely collapses the suggestion of pictorial space.

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Fig. 5. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. West wall, gallery level, lower register, Miraculous Discovery of the Relics of Saint Mark. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 1974-1990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC

Fig. 6. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. West wall, gallery level, lower register, Miraculous Discovery of the Relics of Saint Mark, detail of heads. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 19741990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC

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Fig. 7. El Greco, Martyrdom of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

Another thing that changes in the works El Greco creates upon his arrival in Toledo is the treatment of drapery forms.13 In the Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple the highlights may be rather harsh, especially on the figure of Christ in the center and on the reclining woman to the left, but the patterns produced by the folds are clearly modeled after contemporary Italian examples. Tintoretto comes to mind 13 Papadaki-Oekland, 1995, pp. 420–421, also notes this moment as marking a shift in El Greco’s art toward a Byzantinizing mode of drapery representation.

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especially in this respect. The same cannot be said for the similar pair made by the Virgin and the apostle with back turned toward the viewer of the Assumption. Here there is no smooth clinging of the fabric to the body beneath, and nor are there the graceful curved lines created by the folds in their response to the forces of gravity. Instead, the folds are curiously faceted. Again, there is nothing quite like this in contemporary Italian painting. The overall effect is different but the geometricizing drapery of Byzantine mosaics is surely related (Fig. 8). In both, the surface of the drapery forms is divided into triangles, lozenges, and other shapes, each one quite distinct from its neighbor. It is not the same of course, but I cannot think of an Italian drapery source with a similar proximity of design principle. Finally, I would like to note that the composition of the Disrobing of Christ is quite similar to the Kiss of Judas from the Basilica of San Marco (Fig. 9). The theme is related, but what is really striking here is the closeness of the two compositions, with both centering on the frontal Christ flanked on both sides by dense and mounting crowds.14 I have identified stylistic and compositional affinities between El Greco’s early work in Toledo and the mosaics of San Marco in Venice. Take one of these alone and try to make the case for a connection and it does not amount to much. Put the treatment of pictorial space alongside the characteristically Byzantine approach to creating groups of figures, and the geometricizing treatment of drapery folds and suddenly you have an argument that is plausible, if not exactly bulletproof. Traditionally, the Assumption is explained in terms of Italy because scholars have assumed that Italy must surely have been on his mind, and because two of the figures have Italian sources. The problem, however, is that Italy does not explain a constellation of important features – the curious lack of pictorial space, the seemingly intentional collapsing of what pictorial space there is, the faceted drapery forms. And it turns out as well that these features are not incidental to the El Greco we care about. Even a brief glance at the end of El Greco’s career, with which I began, will reveal that it is precisely these features, along with a few others, that define El Greco’s fascinating explorations of form. What I am suggesting here is that one of the visual foundations of El Greco’s art, from beginning to end, with a slight hiccup in Italy, is Byzantine. The arrogant independence of thought and theoretical sophistication were nurtured by his experiences in Italy, and the open, painterly brushwork is inconceivable without an experience of Venetian painting, but his fundamental visual vocabulary remained stubbornly Byzantine.

14 As discussed by Hadjinicolaou, 1990a, pp. 95–97, a comparison with this iconography has frequently been made before. He dismisses the affinity, preferring to see El Greco’s composition as adhering to Western European traditions.

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Fig. 8. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. Sanctuary, East dome, Isaiah. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 1974-1990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC

And let us not forget as well that Venetian art in the modern mode was ultimately grounded, at least in part, in the Byzantine mosaic tradition, making El Greco as much a forward-looking artist as a retrospective one.15 I do not want to leave people thinking that El Greco’s style, which is ultimately why we study him after all, is about failure. Following that negative train of thought you could advance the following hypothesis: you could say that El Greco was not able to paint well, like an Italian, so he resorted to familiar Byzantine representational strategies and was nonetheless able to succeed because nobody knew any better in parochial Toledo, and, moreover, he was able to make a living by selling small devotional paintings to the faithful. There may be a kernel of truth to this perspective, I think, but it is not the whole 15 Hills, 1999, pp. 47–55 and 224–226. Brown, 1997, p. 33: “The mosaics of San Marco […] remained a living monument for the artists of Venice. They drew from them a subtle approach to color, attitudes about the physical craft of art, models for composition, a respect for the surface, and perhaps most important of all, a way of perceiving and of representing light as a powerful revealer – and, at the same time, dissolver – of form.”

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Fig. 9. Basilica of San Marco, Venice. South side, lower register, Kiss of Judas. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic Area, c. 1974-1990s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC

truth. It needs to be balanced with what we what know about his goals as an artist, and his sense of Greek identity, which I believe are interwoven. The signatures that adorn so many of his works speak directly to his Greek origins. These are always written in Greek script and it is safe to assume that he expected only a very select few of his viewers to be able to decipher the unfamiliar letters. Nonetheless, there was no colony of Greek artists in Toledo, so the presence of the distinctive signature would have been a clear signal that the work was by El Greco, and that El Greco, was, in turn, Greek. He signed his works much more often than his contemporaries in Spain or Italy. Velázquez, for instance, was just as keen on promoting himself and his art, but he rarely signed his paintings. El Greco was evidently intent on proclaiming his presence as creator and telegraphing the fact that he was a Greek creator. Significantly, other Cretan artists working for foreign clients did not follow

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this distinctive practice.16 Instead, they would generally inscribe their paintings in Latin when these were destined for a Western audience. Clearly, signing his name in Greek meant something important for El Greco. We need also to consider the defense of Byzantine art included among El Greco’s annotations to Vasari’s Lives. Vasari, of course, was famous for his critique of the maniera greca and his praise for Giotto, who, “transformed the art of painting from a style neither known nor understood by anybody (if not that, then considered very clumsy) into a beautiful, smooth and very pleasing style understood and recognized as good by those with judgment and a degree of reason.”17 El Greco underscored these very lines and wrote in the margin right next to them “If I knew truly that it is that Greek style that he is speaking about, or if he is talking about some other type, I say comparing it with what Giotto did, well, that is a simple thing in comparison with the Greek style which displays deceptive difficulties.”18 It is possible that “engañosas” should be read as “ingeniosas,” but either way the passage is a remarkable defense of the artist’s Greek cultural inheritance.19 Put it next to his insistence on signing his paintings in Greek letters, and the visual affinities with the mosaics of San Marco I have already noted and one really begins to think that there is something intentional going on here, and not just that the artist did not know how to paint on a large scale. One of the great challenges faced by artists in the generation following Michelangelo and Titian was how to surpass, or even match the legacy of these greats. For Vasari, Michelangelo was perfection. El Greco was very critical of Vasari in this regard because for him Michelangelo was not a great painter. Nonetheless, El Greco must have admired Michelangelo’s mastery over the human figure and would fairly often quote from the repertoire of poses created by the great Tuscan, as we have already seen. There was no escaping the legacy of the High Renaissance past. One way forward according to the theoretical writers of the late sixteenth century was to combine the excellencies of the different Italian schools of painting. Even Vasari could admit the supremacy of Titian in the realm of colorito, albeit an inferior claim to fame next to the disegno mastered by Michelangelo. Gian Paolo Lomazzo famously imagined two perfect paintings: Yet I would say that he who wants to conceive two paintings of the highest perfection, such as one of Adam and one of Eve – the most noble bodies in the world 16 Casper, 2014b. 17 Vasari, 1906, vol. 1, pp. 645–646: “Queste sono le proprie parole di Cennino, al quale parve, sì come fanno grandissimo benefizio quelli che di greco traducono in latino alcuna cosa a coloro che il greco non intendono, che così facesse Giotto, in riducendo l’arte della pittura d’una maniera non intesa né conosciuta da nessuno (se non se forse per goffissima) a bella, facile e piacevolissima maniera intesa e conosciuta per buona da chi ha giudizio e punto del ragionevole.” 18 Salas and Marías, 1992, pp. 77, 125: “Si supiera lo que es verdaderamente aquella manera griega que el di[…] de otra sorte la trataría en lo que dize digo conparan[…] la con lo que yzo Jotto que a cosa simple a comparaç[…] de lo que se ensenna # deficultades engen[…]sas en aquela.” 19 Hadjinicolaou, 2008, p. 224.

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– must, in my opinion, have Adam drawn by Michelangelo, colored by Titian, and the proportion and harmony come from Raphael; Eve must be drawn by Raphael and colored by Antonio da Correggio. These would constitute the two best paintings ever made in the world.20

The way forward, therefore, was to be the one artist who could do it all. It is clear as well that El Greco thought along similar lines. At the bottom right of his Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple appear portraits of four men, usually identified, from left to right, as Titian, Michelangelo, Giulio Clovio, and Raphael.21 Awkwardly housed in a sort of foxhole, the four figures are usually interpreted as inspirational footnotes to the painted scene above and behind. It is clear that this is not a random selection of artists. Guilio Clovio was his close friend. Raphael and Michelangelo were the leading lights of the Central Italian tradition. Titian stood for Venice and the north of Italy. Although he certainly fell short of his lofty goal, already in Italy El Greco attempted to combine the very different excellencies represented by the four artists he portrays. The Carracci family of artists, and especially Annibale Carracci, more fully put this theoretical desideratum into practice.22 The chief monument to the success of this agenda is the ceiling of the Farnese Gallery in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, where around 20 years earlier El Greco had himself been resident. That coincidence of place is almost certainly just that, but one cannot circumvent the fact that eclecticism, as this theoretical attitude was once pejoratively described, was one legacy of the High Renaissance and the theoretical writings that it ultimately engendered. Annibale Carracci created an authoritative style that would subsequently be developed into one of the dominant modes of seventeenth-century European artistic expression. El Greco created a unique style that had no real followers. Might they nonetheless have been motivated by a similar theoretical impulse? I think that El Greco created a style that drew on both East and West and that, moreover, it was his intention to do so. El Greco’s eclectic style is unique. It is not a product of one tradition, but a self-conscious amalgamation of several styles. El Greco’s art is an echo of his distinctive career path, from post-Byzantine Crete to a theoretically self-conscious Italy, and then to a Spain that lacked much in the way of its own, independent artistic tradition, in El Greco’s eyes at least. And to this already potent brew we must add the personality of the artist himself, just as full of contradictions as any synthesis of Byzantine and Renaissance may seem on the surface. 20 Lomazzo, 2013, p. 93. The date of Lomazzo’s treatise is 1590, but it is clear from other sources that the idea of combining different styles had a currency much earlier than this date. Lomazzo, 1590, p. 60: “Ma dirò bene che a mio parere chi volesse formare due quadri di somma perfetione come sarebbe d’uno Adamo, & d’un Eva, che sono corpi nobilissimi al mondo; bisognarebbe che l’Adamo si dasse a Michel Angelo da disegnare, a Titiano da colorare, togliendo la proportione, & convenienza da Rafaello, & Eva si disegnasse da Rafaello, & si colorisse da Antonio da Correggio: che questi due sarebbero I miglior quadri che fossero mai fatti al mondo.” 21 Davies and Elliott, 2003, p. 89. 22 Dempsey, 2000.

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Fig. 10. Cathedral, Toledo. Retablo mayor. Photo: author

Though the Spain where El Greco found himself from 1577 on may not have been one of the crucibles of European artistic innovation, it had developed some of its own distinctive forms. The retablo was one such form. Unlike the altarpieces of sixteenth-century Italy, where a chapel was usually focused around a single, large painting, with subsidiary paintings on the side walls, perhaps, the Spanish retablo consisted of a massive vertical structure featuring numerous scenes stacked on top of each other to a great height. Completed in an exuberant Gothic style in the early sixteenth century, the retablo mayor of Toledo Cathedral, for instance, rises so high that only the tops of the clerestory windows can be seen from below (Fig. 10). The shallow, superimposed compartments are filled with polychrome sculpture in high relief, pushing the sacred stories forward

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into the actual space of the church. Just steps away, in the sacristy of the cathedral, El Greco painted the Disrobing of Christ, a work that, as discussed above, has a number of characteristics that tie it to the artist’s training as a Byzantine artist. One result of that turning back to the Byzantine, as opposed to following up on the spatial experiments of his Italian work, was to increase the sense of physical presence, especially in the luminous central figure of Christ. El Greco came to an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar artistic tradition, one in which deep pictorial space was not important, at least in big, public works of religious art like the retablo of Toledo Cathedral. It is surely possible that, to adapt to this environment, he turned to his early experience with Byzantine art in order to create an analogous effect through forms that are strongly present because they are more or less coincident with the picture plane. The Gothic style of Toledo Cathedral’s high altar retablo soon gave way to Renaissance forms – even sometimes painted by Italians, as at the Basilica of El Escorial – but the overall format and impact of the Renaissance retablo was remarkably similar. It was still vertical, and was still made up of superimposed scenes drawn from sacred history (Fig. 11). Moreover, as demonstrated by Philip II’s micromanagement of the decorations in the Basilica of El Escorial, simple, clearly legible scenes with figures just behind the picture plane created the same kind of strong presence that the polychrome reliefs at Toledo did. It is telling in this regard that Philip II did not place at the center of the Escorial retablo the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence he specially commissioned from Titian, in spite of the fact that he was the king’s favorite artist (Fig. 12).23 Instead, Pellegrino Tibaldi’s composition took pride of place in the basilica, and even a cursory examination of the two paintings reveals why this must have happened. Titian’s painting is a spatially complex, multifigured composition that just does not read well from a great distance. Titian had never traveled to Spain and had never seen a retablo. What he painted, therefore, was a work that needed to be read from relatively close by, as in an Italian chapel. Recognizing this fact, perhaps, Titian’s painting was installed in the old church of El Escorial, and this smaller space allows for the kind of intimate viewing the work demands. Tibaldi’s painting thrusts the martyrdom into the viewer’s space.24 Retablos needed paintings with big figures that filled out their frames and stayed close to the surface. In the analysis presented above I have isolated the Assumption from the ensemble in which it played a starring role. Seen in the context of its original frame, which survives at Santo Domingo el Antiguo, it is clear that El Greco’s paintings formed part 23 For a discussion of this commission, see Mulcahy, 1994, p. 143. It is not clear from the documentary evidence exactly why Titian’s painting was never part of the basilica’s high altarpiece, but Mulcahy suggests that the darkness of the work may have been a factor, in addition to Philip II wanting the entire ensemble to be by the hand of a single artist. A century later, Martínez, 2017, p. 111, suggested that the measurements of Titian’s painting were not correct. This does not really make sense, however, as Mulcahy points out that the basilica itself had not even been started when Titian’s painting arrived in 1568. See also García-Frías Checa, 2003, pp. 32–33. 24 Mulcahy, 1994, p. 159 put it this way: “The martyrdom is thrust toward the spectator with all its terrible fascination, and the strong sense of chiaroscuro increases this effect.”

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Fig. 11. Retablo, Basilica, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional. Photo: author

of a vertically disposed retablo, with figures hugging the picture plane in a manner that harmonized beautifully with the tradition for this format (Fig. 13). It should be noted as well that the flanking altarpieces on the transept walls, the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Resurrection (Fig. 14), are framed in a way that would not look out of place in an Italian church. Significantly, perhaps, these two compositions treat pictorial space quite differently from the Assumption, where the repoussoir figure to the left serves more to draw forward the line of heads than it does to perform its traditional function of pushing them back into space. In both the Resurrection and Adoration of the Shepherds the figures in the foreground to the left create a layer of space that is succeeded by several further layers, one behind the other. El Greco struggled with the logic of pictorial space in these pictures, just as he had while still in Italy, but it is clear that the two altarpieces sit comfortably with his Italian experiments

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Fig. 12. Titian, Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY

in a way that the Assumption simply does not. It is a distinction that bolsters my contention that the format of the vertically disposed retablo created a different set of demands on the artist. The format of the retablo must also have reminded El Greco of a form very familiar to him from his youth, namely the iconostasis in Eastern churches. The iconostasis was usually a wooden screen that separated the laity in the main body of the church from the priests in the sanctuary. They were adorned from eye level on up with superimposed bands of icons representing saints and holy stories. The fact that the icons were layered in bands one above the other links them visually to the Spanish retablo tradition. Though theologians of the icon would always insist that images of the

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Fig. 13. Retablo mayor, Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY

saints were mere conduits to help connect the faithful with the represented saint, it is equally clear that they embodied something more.25 To approach and kiss an icon of the iconostasis was a tacit acknowledgement that these icons carried about them an aura of sacred presence. The surface of El Greco’s early St. Luke Painting the Virgin, for instance, is worn away in parts, perhaps evidence of exactly that kind of viewer response. In format, if not location, the Spanish retablo is not so different from the 25 On the theology of the icon screen, see Constas, 2006.

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Fig. 14. El Greco, Resurrection, Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY

Byzantine iconostasis (Fig. 15).26 Both lined up sacred images in a way that suggested looming, sacred presence. In taking on the unfamiliar and daunting task of painting a retablo, with its requirement that figures be pushed forward and present, it seems quite possible that El Greco would have marshaled all of his experiences as an artist, 26 For the origins of the iconostasis, see Walker, 1993. For a quick survey of its development, see Carr, 2004, pp. 143–144.

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Fig. 15. Iconostasis, S. Giorgio dei Greci, Venice. Photo: author

in Italy as a student of contemporary art, in Venice as an admirer of the mosaics of San Marco, and as a young man in Crete, a painter of icons. If we imagine for a moment Vasari as judge of this stylistic trajectory, it is easy to see points of contact with his ideas, and a remarkable divergence. Vasari may not have explicitly espoused the “eclecticism” that would characterize the Carracci reform, but the roots of their approach are to be found in his division of Italian painting into two schools. Central Italian art was clearly better than its northern counterpart,

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according to Vasari, but combining the merits of both into an artful synthesis represented for many a logical way forward. In combining different visual traditions as he did, El Greco followed Vasari’s implicit call. What makes him unique is that he chose to include in the mix a visual tradition that Vasari considered to be without merit, the maniera greca, the very epitome of all that modern art strove to overcome.

2. From El Greco to Velázquez: Juan Bautista Maíno Abstract There is no native tradition in Spain to explain the new naturalism that Velázquez developed during his early years in Seville. This chapter argues that in 1611 Velázquez traveled with Francisco Pacheco to Toledo, where he would have been exposed to the work of Juan Bautista Maíno, just returned from a long stay in Rome. Maíno, with his understanding of the full range of Caravaggio’s achievement, was key to the development of Velázquez’s early style. Velázquez was in part motivated by the implicit gauntlet thrown down by Vasari to painters of future generations: how to improve upon perfection. Instead of following a Vasari-approved route, Velázquez turned to an example that largely repudiated orthodoxy. Keywords: Juan Sánchez Cotán, Velázquez bodegones

El Greco’s legacy has traditionally been cast as rather slight. He had a long, fairly successful career in Toledo, where he enjoyed the patronage of a certain portion of the city’s elite. Later, El Greco’s distinctive style struck a chord with the Expressionist movements of the early twentieth century, as well as among Greek and Spanish nationalists. In his own day, however, he made little mark beyond the confines of provincial Toledo, and he did not spawn a school of followers. His son Jorge Manuel continued to paint in what has been described as a “debased version of his father’s manner,” and Luis Tristán sometimes adopted compositional formulas associated with the older artist, but the intense artifice of his style was soon displaced by the new naturalism that came to characterize the art of Spain’s Golden Age.1 Velázquez may have drawn on El Greco’s painterly openness as his own art moved in that direction following his return from Italy in 1631, but the example of the late Titian, represented so well in the royal collection, loomed much larger as a model in that stylistic evolution. A key figure in the rise of naturalism in Spain was Juan Bautista Maíno (Plate 2). He was a talented artist who was formed in Rome during one of that city’s most innovative decades, from around 1600 to 1610. He was in the thick of things when he returned to Spain, first in the Toledo of the elderly El Greco, then in the Madrid of the emerging Velázquez. Given his exposure to Caravaggio’s Rome, Maíno has often been understood 1

Brown, 1998, p. 87.

Knox, G., Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725712_ch02

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as a conduit through which the Lombard artist’s characteristic naturalism was transmitted to the Iberian peninsula. Close attention to the natural world is one of the fundamental characteristics of Golden Age painting, and in that regard Maíno was a pioneering figure. From early on, Maíno’s name came to be associated with Caravaggio, whose towering reputation overshadowed his connection to other contemporary artists in Italy. A 2009 exhibition at the Prado was a watershed in studies on this little-understood artist. This exhibition corrected the historiographic error of understanding Maíno only in relation to Caravaggio. It did so by clarifying Maíno’s stylistic indebtedness to other artists, especially Orazio Gentileschi and Guido Reni. Perhaps in an effort to focus on Maíno’s impact on future generations of artists, the authors of the 2009 exhibition somewhat undervalued Maíno’s engagement with the art of El Greco: “El Greco was an elderly artist working in an outdated style.” Any visual affinities to El Greco were therefore ascribed, by implication at least, to the demands of conservative patrons.2 In the first part of this chapter I argue that our desire to see the story move forward – to see Maíno as pointing to the naturalism of Velázquez, for example – does not do justice to the complexity of Maíno’s work. My analysis of precisely how Maíno emulated El Greco will not simply be a matter of confirming the catholicity of his taste and his respect for local tradition. I hope to demonstrate that the older artist’s example resonated more deeply with Maíno than hitherto suggested. Maíno adopted compositional schemes from El Greco, and also aspects of his distinctive approach to pictorial space. The second part of this chapter will address the troublesome question of the origins of the radical new naturalism that Velázquez developed in Seville. I propose that Maíno’s work is a key to understanding the surprising beginnings of a painter trained in the conservative stylistic environment of Francisco Pacheco’s studio. Though it cannot be proven in the absence of new evidence, I believe that Velázquez accompanied Pacheco on his 1611 trip to Toledo. We know about this trip from Pacheco’s account of meeting with the elderly El Greco.3 The presence of Velázquez on such a trip helps to explain the young Velázquez’s understanding both of Caravaggio’s naturalism, and of the relatively new genre of still life painting, pioneered in Toledo by Juan Sánchez Cotán. I will use visual parallels to make the case that Velázquez’s new naturalism most likely came about not primarily through a knowledge of Caravaggio gleaned from early copies, and not from some vague naturalistic impulse in the decades of Velázquez’s early maturity, but through his acquaintance with an artist who could explain and demonstrate the fundamentals of the Lombard painter’s artistic revolution. I will also turn to the account of Velázquez’s origins from Antonio 2 3

Ruiz Gómez, 2009, p. 291. Pacheco, 2001, pp. 36, 349, 417, 440, 737.

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Palomino’s Lives of the Eminent Spanish Painters and Sculptors (1724), usually considered a reliable source of information, but curiously ignored for the most part in discussions of Velázquez’s training. Palomino does not claim an early trip to Toledo, but the art of this city is front and center in his explanation of Velázquez’s decision not to follow the stylistic lead of his master. The proposed connection between Velázquez and Toledo also sheds light on affinities between Velázquez and El Greco, also mentioned by Palomino. Narrating a coherent history of art in Spain along the lines of what Giorgio Vasari did for Italy is difficult. What I hope to do here is establish a lineage connecting El Greco to Velázquez by way of Juan Bautista Maíno.

Part 1: El Greco and Maíno Palomino asserted that Maíno was a student of El Greco.4 From a visual perspective the connection seems absurd, and the documentary evidence does not support such a relationship. El Greco elongated and distorted his figures, employed fantastical, unnatural colors, and applied paint with broad, painterly strokes. Maíno created decidedly earthbound figures, both in terms of proportion and color, and he applied paint with careful precision. I argue that the bond between the two artists is compositional and spatial, rather than based on proportion or the treatment of surfaces. Maíno incorporated elements of El Greco’s style into pictures clearly marked by contemporary Italian artists, Caravaggio among them. He may not have been a student of El Greco in a formal sense, but when Maíno moved to Toledo around 1610 it is clear that he made an effort to understand the older artist’s style. Maíno’s diverse visual sources are perhaps clearest in his Adoration of the Shepherds from c. 1614 (Fig. 16).5 The repoussoir shepherd at bottom right, with the dirty soles of his feet turned toward the viewer, has been related to the figure who plays a similar compositional role in Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew (Fig. 17) and, of course, the filth of the feet depicted elsewhere in the artist’s oeuvre was a cause célèbre among those accustomed to the decorous, if vapid spotlessness of late Mannerism. The angels above are related to the same source, especially the one to the left

4 “Fuè Discipulo de Dominico Greco.” Palomino de Castro y Velasco, 1744, p. 58. For an English translation of the 1724 edition, see Palomino, 1987, p. 114. Angulo Iñiguez and Pérez Sánchez, 1969, pp. 302–304, are quick to dismiss any connection with El Greco. For Maíno’s connections with Italian painting, see Papi, 1992, and Gregori, 1984. Pérez Sánchez, 1997. 5 The painting is signed “F. IV BTA” (Fray Juan Bautista), which has led some to date the work after July 1613, when the artist took his vows as Dominican. It is less resolved in many ways, however, than the canvas of the same subject painted for the high altar of San Pedro Mártir de Toledo from 1612 to 1614, which prompts an earlier dating. On the debate, and for further bibliography, see Ruiz Gómez, 2009, pp. 300–301, and Kagané, 1997, pp. 107–108.

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Fig. 16. Juan Bautista Maíno, Adoration of the Shepherds, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum

who lies on and props himself up on a cloud that serves, implausibly, as a support. As with Caravaggio, one feels that the figure reveals its origin as a live model in the studio leaning over the side of a bench. The idealized figure of the Virgin, however, with her bright blue and red garments, is more in line with the work of Orazio Gentileschi. Similarities with El Greco are less obvious, but the portrait head of an old man, oddly wedged into the space between the Virgin and the shepherd standing to her right, is a good place to start. The old man looks past the Virgin, out toward the viewer.

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Fig. 17. Caravaggio, Martyrdom of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

While there is nothing unusual in this, his gaze distinguishes him from the other figures. Also, he has been painted in a different manner from the other figures. His face is elongated; he stares out with a curiously ecstatic expression; the modeling does little to suggest a three-dimensional form in space. To the left, just behind the knot of figures adoring the Christ Child, are two other male portraits. Their heads have natural proportions and are modeled with robust plasticity. They turn toward each other in three-quarter view, their expressions neutral. The wedged-in portrait of the old man is painted in the manner of El Greco.6 Moreover, the way Maíno squeezed the head of the old man into the “V” created between the Virgin and the shepherd, with the hem of his shirt running parallel to the Virgin’s long, flowing hair, and the side of his face cupped by the red of the shepherd’s sleeve, is also reminiscent of El Greco; he often employed such techniques, which have the effect of collapsing pictorial space. A remarkably similar wedging of portraits appears between the two protagonists standing to the right of El Greco’s Martyrdom of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion (Fig. 7), and it is a device he frequently employed.

6 The affinity has been noted before: Levinson-Lessing, 1965, no. 32; Gregori, 1984, vol. 2, p. 618n17; Kagané, 1997, p. 107.

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These visual debts to El Greco invite an investigation into subtler commonalities. As we have seen, from his earliest days in Toledo El Greco collapsed pictorial space so that his figures seemed to occupy an unreal, ethereal zone, appearing to hover in a narrow band of space behind, or even in front of, the picture plane. In his 1577–1579 Assumption of the Virgin (Plate 1) light and shade are disposed arbitrarily.7 The heads of the apostles grouped together at the left, for instance, form a series that alternates from light to dark. The light heads appear to move forward in space, while the dark heads tend to recede. The decidedly peculiar impression that results is that the face second to the right appears almost to grow out of the shoulder of the apostle in yellow and pink. All is reduced to pattern and the illusion of depth is confounded; the figures hover ambiguously between two and three dimensions. What can this aesthetic possibly have to do with the emphatically grounded physicality of Maíno? As discussed above, the distinctive manner of the male portrait head recalls El Greco, as does the way Maíno wedged it into the “V” created between the Virgin and the shepherd (Fig. 16). The figural grouping to the left of the Virgin in the Hermitage Adoration is also spatially reminiscent of El Greco. Joseph is seated at the far left. Immediately to his right looms the large head of an ox, its nostrils almost touching the head of the Christ Child. Framed to the right by the shepherd bowing down in adoration, the head of the ox is squeezed into the opening rather like the portrait of the old man to the right of the Virgin. Behind this tightly interlocking threesome the two male portraits are turned toward each other. Maíno gives little sense of spatial interval between the figures assembled at the left of the composition. There is no space for the large body that accompanies the head of the ox, and the grouping as a whole reads as if the figures had each been pasted separately onto the painting’s surface, like a collage. Maíno may not have replicated the confounding spatial constructions of El Greco, but the collapse of space into pattern is an important component of his aesthetic system. The large ox head is a motif El Greco used more than once in his own treatment of this theme, including in the painting he made for his own funerary chapel, precisely around this time, in which, in the same manner, he did not provide enough pictorial space to accommodate the ox’s body (Fig. 18). Maíno’s stylistic similarities to El Greco do not eclipse the well-known relationship with Caravaggio and other contemporary Italian artists. In the Hermitage Adoration, however, the connection to El Greco is strong, especially in the portrait of the old man and in the collapsing of pictorial space. Did Maíno paint the portrait in El Greco’s style as a way of signaling the identity of the sitter? Could this be a portrait of El Greco himself? A number of scholars are convinced it is, though unfortunately there is no firm tradition recording the features of El Greco.8 Absent such evidence, 7 In this analysis I am indebted to Brown, 1982, pp. 134–136. 8 Basing their conclusions in part on an unpublished, earlier version of my research, Marías and Cruz de Carlos Varona, 2009, p. 271, are quite definite in seeing the head as a portrait of El Greco.

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Fig. 18. El Greco, Adoration of the Shepherds, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

the idea that Maíno included a portrait of the great artist must remain inconclusive, but the fact that the image was created in El Greco’s style and inserted in such a way that we are invited to recall his own insertion of portraits into historical scenes, is suggestive enough for this to be an intriguing possibility.9 9 The portraits to the left, both in a decidedly non-El Greco idiom, have been said to represent Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni, but neither identification is convincing. Marías and Cruz de Carlos Varona, 2009, p. 271.

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El Greco did something similar in one of his early paintings. As discussed in the previous chapter, four men appear awkwardly squeezed into a kind of foxhole at the bottom right of the Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple (Fig. 2).10 Representing, from left to right, Titian, Michelangelo, Giulio Clovio, and Raphael, the four portraits proclaim El Greco’s artistic debts. If Maíno did something similar in the Hermitage Adoration, he becomes a more complex figure than has been supposed. While on the one hand he brashly established his position in Toledo with his new Caravaggesque naturalism (perhaps a critique of El Greco’s painterly artificiality), on the other he respectfully paid homage to El Greco. In the Saint Petersburg Adoration of the Shepherds El Greco was evidently very much on Maíno’s mind, along with the Italian sources more generally acknowledged in the historiography of the artist. Were these affinities sustained in other paintings by Maíno? Central to our understanding of Maíno’s output is the monumental altarpiece he painted for the Dominican convent of San Pedro Martír in Toledo around 1612 (Plate 2). One of the canvases for this retablo depicted the Adoration of the Shepherds. Once again, Caravaggio’s influence is strong here. The angels in the sky above recall Caravaggio in their physiognomy and in the way they grip the clouds as if they were solid and substantial. The rustic shepherd in the foreground similarly recalls figures in Caravaggio, and as with the Saint Petersburg Adoration the Madonna has been idealized in a way that brings to mind the example of Orazio Gentileschi. The composition is where an affinity with El Greco can be ascertained.11 The composition is organized into three quite separate horizontal bands. Two shepherds sit in the lowest zone, one playing pipes, the other grasping the legs of a bound sheep. In the second band a shepherd kneels in front of the Holy Family. The uppermost register contains the grouping of earthbound (they support themselves physically on the clouds), Caravaggesque angels. Like El Greco, Maíno refrained from establishing a convincing spatial recession between the two terrestrial zones. He ensured that the figures in the different bands do not significantly overlap. The bright white of the bedding on which the Christ Child lies brings him forward in space. The figures do not diminish in size as one scans up the canvas, supposedly back into space. The kneeling shepherd to the left of the Holy Family is instead slightly larger than the shepherd below and to the right, while the angels above are just as large as the young music-playing shepherd at the bottom left. As a result, the figures appear all to inhabit a shallow space just behind the picture plane. This is a decidedly un-Italian effect that surely is to be connected with the example of El Greco. Caravaggio may also have eschewed deep perspectival spaces, but he never manipulated the relative proportions of his figures in such a blatantly unnaturalistic manner. If Maíno had 10 Davies and Elliott, 2003, p. 89. 11 Ruiz Gómez, 2009, pp. 290–291, notes the compositional affinity with El Greco, though she does not comment on the matter of pictorial space.

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worked in a city other than Toledo, or at a different time, it would be tempting to see this treatment of space as an example of incompetence. The Toledo of El Greco, however, was a time and a place where such spatial ambiguities were well known, and must have been prized. Maíno lent surface naturalism to El Greco’s mature style, while retaining its distinctive spatial artificiality. Of all Maíno’s works, the Hermitage painting shows the strongest connection with El Greco (Fig. 16). It does not have a firm date, but the closeness of the figure of the shepherd to one that appears in the 1612 Resurrection from the San Pedro Martìr altarpiece suggests a date close to that, and most scholars put the painting at 1614.12 It may not be a coincidence that 1614 is also the year of El Greco’s death. Perhaps the Hermitage painting was created as a kind of memorial to El Greco and his role in forming Maíno’s mature style. Maíno’s principal claim to fame has long been his connection to Caravaggio. By importing Caravaggio’s innovations to Spain, Maíno energized the shift toward an art based not on flights of the imagination, like El Greco’s, but on sober r­ eality. A high appreciation for the natural world is the cornerstone of Spanish painting in the Golden Age. The scholarly orthodoxy that has considered Maíno’s Italian ­connection as paramount has prevented us from seeing the undercurrent of El Greco that manifests itself in terms of compositional and spatial design. We need to ask whether the affinity between Maíno and El Greco is enough for us to conclude, as Palomino did, that their relationship was as master and student. By the time of his first surviving paintings, the San Pedro Mártir retablo, Maíno had already had intimate, firsthand knowledge of the Italian tradition. He was just over 30 years old at this point in his career. Given the maturity of this ensemble of paintings, it is fair to assume that a body of now lost early work preceded his efforts in Toledo.13 This alone would seem to rule out an apprenticeship with El Greco. I propose a somewhat different relationship, that of mentor rather than master. Arriving in Toledo full of the latest Italian ideas (just as El Greco himself had, a generation earlier), but aware and respectful of the pictorial idiom established there by El Greco, Maíno adopted certain spatial and compositional ideas of his senior colleague. A persistent concern in the study of Spanish art revolves around the issue of what, precisely, constitutes the “Spanishness” of art made in Spain.14 This concern is most acute in the period before the maturity of Velázquez and the other luminaries of the Golden Age, when Spain seemed overshadowed by innovations developed elsewhere, in Italy and the Low Countries in particular. 12 A description in the online collection of the State Hermitage Museum, 2019, puts the date as “no earlier than 1613.” 13 Recently, a Repentent St. Peter from a private collection has been suggested as having preceded the work at San Pedro Mártir. Milicua and Cuyàs, 2005. 14 The anxiety is so important that it is one of the central themes of the introductions to both the major English-language surveys of Spanish art. Tomlinson, 1997, pp. 11–13; Brown, 1998, pp. 1–5.

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Given his training and experience in Rome, Maíno is easily slotted in to this anxious scenario. Maíno, however, emulated some of El Greco’s design principles. Surely, though, he was not simply trying to fit in by showcasing his Italian-derived innovations in a format palatable to a marketplace accustomed to El Greco’s compositions. Maíno did so, it seems to me, not just out respect, but because he understood the power of El Greco’s formula, which dramatically thrusts figures out into the space occupied by the viewer. Naturalistic description of figures and surfaces are joined in Maíno’s work with a disregard for the niceties of Italian spatial organization. It seems possible that Maíno used El Greco’s design principles in an effort to enliven the innovations he imported from Rome.

Part 2: Velázquez and Toledo Documentary evidence of Velázquez’s activity in Seville is sparse. He was baptized on 6 June 1599. On 17 October 1611 Francisco Pacheco and Velázquez’s father signed a document committing the young man to a six-year apprenticeship, with the start of this period backdated to 1 December 1610. The document is confusing. Why should it have been signed almost a year after the relationship was said to have begun? Did Velázquez’s apprenticeship begin in 1610, as the document states, or in 1611, when it was signed? I believe the purpose of the document of 1611 was to formalize an arrangement that had already begun.15 If so, the young Velázquez would have been Pacheco’s apprentice through all of 1611. In the spring and summer of that year Pacheco traveled to Córdoba, Toledo, Madrid, El Escorial, and El Pardo. We know this from the absence of documentary evidence for his presence in Seville during these months, and from several mentions he makes of this trip in his later El arte de la pintura.16 While there is no documentary evidence to say that Velázquez traveled with Francisco Pacheco as his new apprentice, there is nothing to suggest that the 15 Cherry, 1996, p. 90n1, proposes that the backdating of the contract was because Velázquez had already apprenticed for a year with Francisco de Herrera. There is no documentary evidence of the relationship with Herrera, but it is mentioned in Palomino, 1724, in Pacheco and Palomino, 2006, pp. 52–53, and there is also the suggestion in Pacheco, 2001, p. 49, that a second master was trying to steal Pacheco’s thunder by claiming to have been Velázquez’s teacher. The apprenticeship with Herrera remains a possibility, but the wording of the apprenticeship document should take pole position in any interpretation. The document states that Velázquez is to be apprenticed to Pacheco “por tiempo y espacio de seys años cumplidos primeros siguientes que empesaron a corer desde primero día del mes de diziembre del año que pasó de mill e seiscientos e dies, para que en todo este dicho tienpo el dicho mi hijo os sirua en la dicha vuestra casa.” Corpus velazqueño, 2000, vol. 1, p. 28. It might make sense to backdate the beginning of the apprenticeship so that the full six years of training could be seen to have been completed when it came time to sit for the painter’s guild exam, which took place on 14 March 1617, just a few months after the end of the six-year period, but it does not make sense to include reference to the accommodation of the young Velázquez in Pacheco’s house. On balance, the evidence is in favor of seeing Velázquez’s relationship with Pacheco as beginning in 1610. 16 Pacheco, 2001, pp. 36, 349, 417, 440, 737.

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twelve-year-old did not accompany his master, and much to imply that he did.17 But before I return to that possibility, I will review the various hypotheses that have been advanced to explain the sources for Velázquez’s distinctive naturalism. The figure of Caravaggio looms large in any discussion of the origins of Velázquez’s early style. Some consider him central to how Velázquez chose to paint during his Seville years, while others push him out of the picture altogether. The problem faced by advocates of Caravaggio is the absence of a way through which the Lombard artist’s forms might have been communicated to the young Velázquez. The opposing camp offers evidence, but that evidence tends to lack the necessary specificity. Let us consider the visual evidence that Caravaggio was an important inspiration to the young Velázquez. First and foremost, in his works from 1600 onward Caravaggio employed a focused and sharply directional light that created marked contrasts of light and shade; this light fragmented forms into a sometimes messy patchwork of brightly illuminated parts. He often employed this light to intersect meaningfully with the narrative content of the painting. The Calling of St. Matthew (Fig. 19) is a good example of these traits, with the shaft of light that parallels Christ’s gesture as he summons Matthew to follow him as his disciple. Caravaggio depicted figures enacting the holy narrative as if they were inhabitants of the here and now, and not the prettified protagonists of traditional religious painting. In The Calling of St. Matthew the artist even went so far as to show Matthew and his companions in contemporary dress, though most often it is not the costuming that connects the figures to the reality of Caravaggio’s world, but their portrait-like immediacy. This in itself was almost unprecedented in Italian art, at least in central Italy. Caravaggio’s decidedly plebeian rendering of saints and characters from the Bible stories was truly extraordinary. The man gripping the legs of Christ in the Entombment (Fig. 20) is an especially good example. Though such types had frequently appeared in Netherlandish painting, they were often deployed as figures to invite the scorn of viewers of superior station. What made Caravaggio different was his ennobling of the common folk who populated his compositions. Caravaggio was also innovative with respect to format, pictorial space, and still life detail. When not working on large-scale works for public settings, he would most often choose a half-length format where the figures, sometimes gathered around a table, pressed up against or even pushed through the picture plane. In the Supper at Emmaus (Fig. 21) the outstretched hand of the disciple to the right appears to reach through the canvas into the space of the viewer, an implied penetration that is marvelously thematized by the rent fabric of the elbow of his counterpart to the left, similarly in violation of the boundary between fiction and reality.18 The close-up, 17 Bustamante and Marías, 1999, vol. 1, p. 143, also consider that it is quite possible that Velázquez joined his master on this journey. The assertion is repeated in Marías, 1999b, pp. 24–25. 18 Ebert-Schifferer, 2012, p. 144.

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Fig. 19. Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

half-length format became a Caravaggio trademark, though the permeability of the picture plane was not always as overt as it is here. Caravaggio’s innovative use of still life is of a piece with his radical treatment of space. He was one of the first artists to paint an independent still life. In the Supper at Emmaus that skill is transferred to the realm of history painting. A meal should naturally appear on the table of a painting of this subject, but there was no tradition for the descriptive tour de force delivered by Caravaggio, with every object reacting in distinct and individual ways to the strongly directional light. The ceramic pitcher is marked by a diffuse gleam; on the glass carafe is a bright highlight, and the light refracts through the water and glass to create a focused spot of light on the table, as well as a shadow; the matte crust of the bread absorbs the incident light; each of the fruits within the wicker basket poised so precariously at the edge of the table reacts to the light in a slightly different way. The sparkle of the grapes is particularly eye-catching.

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Fig. 20. Caravaggio, Entombment, Musei Vaticani, Vatican City. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

A number of scholars reject the idea that Caravaggio was one of the sources for Velázquez’s Seville paintings. For them, the visual connections between the two artists are simply not specific enough. Dawson Carr acknowledges that the young artist likely saw some copies of Caravaggio compositions, but argues that if one compares the two artists “the similarity becomes vague and limited to the most general use of realism and strong contrasts in lighting.”19 Jonathan Brown is similarly dismissive of any meaningful affinity between the two artists, noting in particular that Velázquez was never 19 Carr, 2006b, p. 29.

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Fig. 21. Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

interested in the kind of dramatic intensity that marked the paintings of the Lombard painter. This is true, but it stretches our credulity when he states that Velázquez’s goal from the beginning of his career was to capture the “immediacy of the act of seeing” and that “This aim could be achieved only by inventing a new way to paint and would not be served by copying the work of other artists past or present.”20 Significantly, this kind of ex nihilo origin story was once applied to Caravaggio himself, who was said simply to have copied nature without a thought to how others had done so before. Thorough research into Lombard Cinquecento painting, however, long ago put this narrative to rest.21 In the case of Velázquez, the problem is the absence of a comparable body of Sevillian painting, though scholars have tried to make the most out of the city’s unpromising pictorial tradition, as we shall see. Another way of thinking about this question of origins is to consider the later stylistic evolution of Velázquez for what it might reveal about his beginnings. What we discover, of course, is that the artist was responsive to the styles of other artists. The way Velázquez started painting in the 1630s was not simply a variation on the examples of Rubens, Titian, and of the artists 20 Brown, 1986, p. 15. 21 Friedlaender, 1955, pp. 34–56.

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Fig. 22. Velázquez, Three Musicians, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Photo: bpk Bildagentur/Gemäldegalerie/Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY

he encountered on his first trip to Italy, but it is nonetheless scarcely conceivable without the example they offered. His late masterpiece, The Spinners (Fig. 31), was largely made to proclaim himself as a worthy successor to the tradition established by Titian and continued by Rubens.22 He was an impressionable artist late in his career, and must have been just as impressionable as a young man; Velázquez surely did not develop his distinctive naturalism without artistic models. This does nothing to diminish his originality. If the relationship with Caravaggio had been one of derivative subservience, there would be no debate. In some respects, it is precisely the distance from Caravaggio, in particular the lack of dramatic intensity in Velázquez, that renders the affinity convincing, even if that sounds like a contradiction. The points of contact are simply too numerous. Velázquez’s Seville period paintings resonate with the works of Caravaggio in terms of format, composition, pictorial space, lighting, and the use of rustic types.23 All of the genre paintings from this time, usually called bodegones, use the half-length format in which Caravaggio was a noted specialist. In all instances the principal 22 Portús, 2007, pp. 284–294; Knox, 2009, pp. 59–96. 23 Marías, 1999, p. 35, shares this point of view, saying “muchos de los rasgos del joven Velázquez serían inexplicables sin el conocimiento de alguna obra del pintor lombardo y quizá haya que pensar en una incidencia ‘indirecta’, casi de oídas, al ser fácilmente transmisibles, en cambio, por vía oral” (“many of the

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Fig. 23. Velázquez, The Luncheon, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum

figures are framed tightly and located close behind the picture plane. In a number of instances, the composition is built around a table, the leading edge of which is parallel to the picture plane: Three Musicians (Fig. 22); The Luncheon (Fig. 23); Kitchen Scene with the Supper at Emmaus at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin; Kitchen Scene (Fig. 24); Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Plate 3); and Two Young Men at Table (Fig. 25) stand out in this regard. A table is also present in The Waterseller of Seville (Fig. 39) and An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (Fig. 29), though the table is less central in these paintings than in the other examples. Caravaggio also frequently used this device. The most important examples are Bacchus, Supper at Emmaus, Bacchino Malato, Cardsharps, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Lute Player, and Martha and Mary Magdalen. As noted above, Caravaggio was a pioneer in the breaking down of the authority of the picture plane. Velázquez, it seems, was much less interested in creating a sense features of the young Velázquez would be inexplicable without knowledge of some work by the Lombard painter, and perhaps it is necessary to think instead of an ‘indirect’ occurrence, such as hearsay that is easily transmissible by word of mouth”).

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Fig. 24. Velázquez, Kitchen Scene, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago

Fig. 25. Velázquez, Two Young Men at Table, London, Apsley House. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY

of permeability, but in The Waterseller of Seville the large jar of water bulges outward, suggesting at least a pressuring of the picture plane. The light used by Velázquez in his early paintings has much of the strong directionality of Caravaggio’s famous chiaroscuro, and, similar to the paintings by the Italian artist, the backgrounds are dark and often ill defined. The Waterseller of Seville, The Old Woman Cooking Eggs, Saint Thomas in Orléans, The Luncheon, and The Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 26) are especially close to Caravaggio in their use of light. Un-idealized, portrait-like figures

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Fig. 26. Velázquez, Adoration of the Magi, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

appear in all of Velázquez’s Seville paintings. Javier Portús has suggested that some figures in the Adoration of the Magi may even be portraits of the artist’s family.24 The use of figures drawn from the here and now was central to Caravaggio’s artistic revolution. While the figures shown in Three Musicians and The Luncheon likely allude to 24 Portús, 2005.

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the northern European tradition, well known in Seville, that made sport of the lower orders, the remainder cannot be considered along those lines in any way whatsoever. Like the rustic figures of Caravaggio’s sacred histories, these men and women are deeply serious and dignified. The similarities between Velázquez and Caravaggio continue in the realm of still life detail. Both artists are interested in the description of things, in particular with regard to complex shadows, and to the different ways in which materials reflect, absorb, transmit, or refract light. This affinity is especially close in the objects laid out on the table in Velázquez’s Luncheon (Fig. 23) and Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (Fig. 21). In both images the surface is covered with a white cloth and the leading edge of the table is parallel to the picture plane. Light streams in from the upper left, from a source beyond the frame. The figures are ranged around the table in similar ways and the relationship of frame to figures is also similar. Most telling, however, is that in both pictures a small loaf of bread is placed at the front of the table to the left, with fruit to the right. Caravaggio’s arrangement is more complex, especially with regard to the basket of fruit, but the connection is more than the simple presence of bread and fruit on a white table cloth. Just in front of the pomegranates in Velázquez’s painting is a knife whose handle projects over the edge, as if to invite the viewer to reach in and take hold of it. Similarly, in Caravaggio’s painting the basket of fruit projects over the table’s edge. As we shall see, evidence that Velázquez actually encountered a Caravaggio original during his youth is slender indeed. But the long list of significant similarities makes it extremely likely that the young artist came to know about his work, and know it with a breadth that suggests acquaintance with someone who had seen many Caravaggios. Interestingly, Pacheco himself recognized the connection between his protégé and Caravaggio. In a rather rambling passage Pacheco applauds Caravaggio for following nature in his treatment of drapery, then goes on to praise how Ribera and Velázquez painted figures and heads: But I keep to nature for everything; if everything could be taken from nature, not only the heads, nudes, hands, and feet, but [also] the draperies of plain cloth and silk and everything else, it would be so much the better. This was done by Michelangelo Caravaggio, as can be seen in the Crucifixion of Saint Peter (even though it is a copy), with such pleasing effect. Jusepe Ribera did this also, since among all the great paintings [owned by] the Duke of Alcalá, his figures and heads alone appear to be living, and the rest only painted, even though they hang next to works by Guido Boloñés. The paintings of my son-in-law, who follows this method, also differ from the rest, because he works from nature always.25 25 Translation from Veliz, 1986, p. 41. Pacheco, 2001, p. 443: “Pero yo me atengo al natural para todo; y si pudiese tenerlo delante siempre y en todo tiempo, no sólo para las cabezas, desnudos, manos y pies, sino también para los paños y sedas y todo lo demás, sería lo mejor. Así lo hacía Micael Angelo Caravacho; ya se

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Pacheco makes no mention of Caravaggio in the passages he devoted to Velázquez’s apprenticeship. It is not until a much later chapter in his treatise, buried in a discussion of sketches, drawings, and cartoons, that Pacheco revealed that he considered his student’s work to be closely related to the work of Caravaggio. It is almost as if he was embarrassed by the connection. Recent scholarship for the most part embraces the idea that Caravaggio was an important source for the young Velázquez. As David Davies has put it, “The contrary begs disbelief.”26 At the same time, scholars have also spread the net of influences wider to include Ribera, Luis Tristán, and artists working in what has come to be known as a reformed Mannerist style. In a number of studies, Benito Navarrete Prieto (in collaboration with Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez until his death in 2010) has argued that a broad movement toward naturalism occurred, first in Italy, and then in Spain during the years of Velázquez’s formation.27 This is undoubtedly true, given the artists who came to Spain from Italy to work on the decoration of El Escorial. In Seville the trend they established bore fruit in the work of Juan de Roelas and Pablo de Céspedes. Seville was a great commercial city and paintings and prints arrived there from all over Europe, including works by artists influenced by Caravaggio. The question of whether Caravaggio was known directly in Seville, however, cannot be answered with any certainty. Pacheco mentions the presence of a copy after the Crucifixion of St. Peter, and though this evidence needs to be taken very seriously, scholars have not been able to locate the painting.28 This is important because not all copies are created equal. It is unlikely that an inferior copy would have inspired the young Velázquez’s explorations of naturalism, and the only candidate that survives in Seville is exactly that, a loose and low-quality adaptation of Caravaggio’s composition.29 According to Giulio Mancini, an early-seventeenth-century Italian source, Caravaggio may have sent some of his paintings to Seville in thanks for care he received in hospital, thus raising the possibility that some early originals made their way to Seville during the artist’s own lifetime. The account is plausible, but again, no such paintings have been identified.30 Ribera’s work could also have been a factor in

ve en el Crucificamiento de S. Pedro (con ser copias), con cuánta felicidad; así lo hace Jusepe de Ribera, pues sus figuras y cabezas entre todas las grandes pinturas que tiene el Duque de Alcalá paracen vivas y lo demás, pintado, aunque sea junto a Guido Boloñés; y mi yerno, que sigue este camino, también se ve la diferencia que hace a los demás, por tener siempre delante el natural.” The statement has not been entirely ignored. Calvo Serraller, 1991, p. 431n98, describes it as “Importantísima declaración en favor del naturalismo.” 26 Davies, 1996, p. 56. 27 Pérez Sánchez and Navarrete Prieto, 2001; Salort Pons, 2005, p. 57; Pérez Sánchez and Navarrete Prieto, 2005; Navarrete Prieto, 2015. 28 Pacheco, 2001, p. 443. 29 Pérez Sánchez and Navarrete Prieto, 2005, pp. 27–28. 30 Pérez Sánchez and Navarrete Prieto, 2005, pp. 28–29

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Velázquez’s early manner as his series dedicated to the Five Senses, painted in Rome in 1613, might have made its way to Seville at a fairly early date.31 Finally, there is the question of Luis Tristán, an artist who started his career as a student of El Greco in Toledo and then made his way to Italy, where he remained for a number of years, before returning to Spain around 1611, perhaps with a stopover in Seville.32 During this time perhaps he expressed to the young Velázquez his excitement about artistic developments in Rome, including by Caravaggio. Also, a number of Caravaggio’s paintings came fairly early on to Seville.33 This is a long list of possibilities, and if all were proven true, and there were in fact numerous paintings in Seville attesting to the latest Roman trends during Velázquez’s early maturity, then the question of his formation would be a closed case. None can be proven, however, which encourages the raising of an alternative hypothesis: the importance of early exposure to the school of Toledo. It is time now to introduce the evidence provided by Palomino, Velázquez’s most comprehensive early biographer. His testimony actually offers some near-contemporary credence to my hypothesis of a Toledo connection. The story of Velázquez’s artistic origins is rather lengthy and I will quote it and comment upon it in the order Palomino presents. First, he described a number of the bodegones, including The Waterseller of Seville, and explained that with works of this kind Velázquez had really struck out on his own stylistic path. Palomino then turned to the artist’s sources of inspiration: Velázquez rivaled Caravaggio in the naturalism of his painting and equaled Pacheco in his erudition. The former he esteemed for his uniqueness and the keenness of his invention, and he chose the latter as master for the knowledge of his learning.34

The pairing of the two artists in this statement offers potent ammunition to those in favor of the view that Caravaggio was a critical figure in Velázquez’s development, and so it should. In Pacheco’s account, Caravaggio was present among various other influences, but Palomino distinguishes him by pairing him with the artist’s formal master. As twenty-first-century readers, we are comfortable with thinking of Caravaggio as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the seventeenth century. Because of the dramatic immediacy of his art and its seeming abandonment of tradition, and 31 Pérez Sánchez and Navarrete Prieto, 2005, p. 42. 32 The presence of Tristán in Seville is attested to by a note he made in a copy of Vasari that once belonged to El Greco. Salas and Marías, 1992, pp. 141–142. The date of his visit to Seville is presumed to have occurred after the trip to Italy because most of the other notes refer to works he had seen there. 33 Pérez Sánchez and Navarrete Prieto, 2005, pp. 46–49. 34 Pacheco and Palomino, 2006, p. 59. Palomino, 2008, p. 23: “Compitió Velázquez con Carabagio en la valentía del pintar. A aquél estimó por lo esquisito, y por la agudeza de su Ingenio; y a éste eligió por Maestro, por el conocimiento de sus estudios, que le constituían digno de su elección.”

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also because of his personal reputation – his antisocial behavior and possible sexual proclivities – Caravaggio’s art exercises a strong hold on the contemporary imagination. Innumerable exhibitions and publications attest to this fascination. Such untrammeled enthusiasm does not, however, accurately represent the reaction of the artist’s contemporaries.35 Many were excited by his innovations, purchased his paintings, and followed his lead, but he was a polarizing figure who seemed to thumb his nose at the established ideals of art. According to his many detractors, he hid his inability to draw by shrouding his figures in darkness, and he relied too much on direct observation of nature. He was castigated as deficient in imagination because, it was said, he needed to have models literally in front of him for every one of his figures. For Giovan Pietro Bellori, writing in the late seventeenth century, Caravaggio was important because he restored naturalism to Italian art, and that is why he was included among the limited selection of biographies chosen to represent the century as a whole. But he was also there in a monitory capacity; his dark naturalism was not the way forward for the classicist Bellori, whose hero was instead Annibale Carracci.36 This late-century viewpoint, which saw Caravaggio as the enemy of painting, for the most part, set the stage for his misunderstanding and eventual oblivion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, there is no need to travel to late Seicento Italy to find negative assessments of Caravaggio. Vicente Carducho, Velázquez’s contemporary, fulminated against Caravaggio’s method of painting directly from life, and spoke of the folly of becoming an imitator of his manner: Thus this Anti-Michelangelo, with his showy and superficial imitation, his stunning manner, and liveliness, has been able to persuade such a great number and variety of people that his is good painting, and his method and doctrine the true ones, that they have turned their backs on the true way of achieving eternity.37

I indulge in this tangent because it is this sullied Caravaggio who occupied the imaginations of the contemporaries of Palomino. His name was not the one you would expect to encounter in a biography that was the capstone of Palomino’s entire project of celebrating the lives of Spanish artists. It is almost as shocking to see his name in this context as it would have been had Vasari credited a painter of the maniera greca for inspiring Michelangelo. It demands that we take serious notice.

35 Ebert-Schifferer, 2012, pp. 15–27, offers a good synopsis of Caravaggio’s critical reception. 36 Bellori, 2005, pp. 179–189. 37 Translation from Enggass and Brown, 1970, p. 174. Carducho, 1633, reprinted in Calvo Serraller, 1991, p. 308. “Así éste Ante Michael Ángel con su afectada y exteriór imitación, admirable modo y viveza, ha podido persuadir a tan grande número de todo género de gente, que quella es la buena pintura, y su modo y doctrina verdadera, que han vuelto las espaldas al verdadero modo de eternizarse.” For a recent discussion of this passage, see Roe, 2016, pp. 9–12.

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According to Palomino, Velázquez learned about contemporary Italian painting through works by a variety of artists that were brought to Seville. The list of artists includes Ribera and Baglione, both early followers of Caravaggio, along with artists not strongly in his orbit, including Guido Reni and Lanfranco. Paintings by Caravaggio himself were not mentioned. The paintings that seemed most agreeable to his eyes were those of a painter from Toledo, Luis Tristán, a disciple of El Greco because he followed a path similar to his own in the singularity of his thinking and the liveliness of his ideas. For this reason he declared himself Tristán’s follower and abandoned his master’s manner.38

Scholars have had trouble discerning any visual evidence to corroborate the connection between Velázquez and Tristán, especially in his work at court in Madrid.39 Their assumption, it seems, is that Velázquez could not have had meaningful contact with that artist’s works until that later date, so Palomino must be referring to that time. The problem with that assumption, however, is that Palomino is speaking here about the origins of the artist, not his mature style as it evolved at court. Luis Tristán enjoyed a successful career, confined mainly to Toledo, until his premature death in 1624. His art seemed pulled in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, he took compositional and spatial cues directly from El Greco (more so than Maíno, whose affinities with the Cretan master I discussed above). On the other, he sometimes painted in a naturalist, tenebrist style that closely recalled Caravaggio. The two strains in Tristán’s art are distinct, and do not converge into a single, new expressive dynamic, as was the case with Maíno. For this reason alone, Tristán has generally been dismissed as an important source for Velázquez. Recently, Tristán’s critical fortunes have improved and he is considered anew as a possible means by which the young Velázquez might have come to know the work of Caravaggio.40 How this knowledge could have been transmitted remains a question. At some point, likely on his return from Italy, Tristán passed through Seville. It is certainly possible that he met Pacheco and the young Velázquez at this time and told 38 Pacheco and Palomino, 2006, p. 59. Palomino, 2008, p. 23: “Las que causaban a su vista mayor armonía, eran las de Luis Tristán (Discípulo de Dominico Greco) Pintor de Toledo, per tener rumbo semejante a su humor, por lo estraño del pensar, y viveza de los conceptos; y por esta causa se declare imitador suyo, y dexó de seguir la manera de su Maestro.” 39 For a discussion of the historiography of this question, see Pérez Sánchez and Navarrete Prieto, 2001, pp. 188–193. 40 The best evidence for a connection between the two artists is seemingly to be found in paintings of The Penitent St. Peter, which are extremely close in format, style, and iconography. The same can be said for Maíno’s treatment of this theme. This trio would be perfect evidence for my hypothesis of an early trip to Toledo, were it not for the fact that there is no consensus as to the authorship of the “Velázquez” part of this threesome. The three paintings were exhibited together in Paris in 2015, where the attribution to Velázquez was strongly supported. Kientz, 2015b, pp. 144–149.

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Fig. 27. Luis Tristán, Santa Monica, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY

them of happenings in Rome. A number of Tristán’s paintings also made their way to Seville around this time. This would have allowed Velázquez’s engagement with Tristán’s work to continue. The most direct visual parallels are not offered by those Seville paintings, however, but by the Caravaggesque works, such as those painted for the parish church at Yepe near Toledo in 1616. Two fragments of this retablo project survive in the Prado museum, one a head of Saint Monica and the other a Mary Magdalene. The Saint Monica (Fig. 27) in particular is painted with an uncompromising descriptiveness, with every wrinkle on her face painstakingly delineated. The Saint Monica has productively been compared with the face of Velázquez’s Portrait of Sor Jerónima de la Fuente from around 1620. There are indeed visual parallels between Luis Tristán and Velázquez, which lends credence to Palomino’s assertion. Would a trip to Toledo on the part of the young artist better explain how these ideas were transmitted? I discussed above how Velázquez might have accompanied Pacheco to Toledo in 1611. On balance, that seems the only viable possibility. It hardly seems likely that a teenage Velázquez would have gone independently to Toledo in the years immediately following. Palomino pointed to Tristán to explain the strong Caravaggism in Velázquez’s work. The paragraph begins with

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Caravaggio. After establishing the relationship with Tristán, Palomino continues with this statement: Because he counterfeited nature in his works so successfully and with such verisimilitude – always keeping it present in all he did – Velázquez was called a second Caravaggio.41

For Palomino, Luis Tristán is simply the means by which Velázquez learned of Caravaggio. Perhaps he had some sketchy information on Velázquez’s early trip to Toledo and extrapolated from that a connection with the most important Caravaggesque painter in the city. That this might be so is suggested by what comes next in this paragraph: In his portraits he imitated Domenico Greco for, in his view, his likenesses could never be praised enough. And the truth is that this was true about everything in El Greco’s work that did not partake of the bizarreness into which he fell at the end. For we can say of El Greco that “whatever he did well, no one did better, and what he did badly, no one did worse.”42

The conventional reading is that this passage refers to Velázquez’s much later acquaintance with El Greco’s work, from around the time he made his first documented trips to Madrid. I would argue, however, that because of its placement here, right in the paragraph where Palomino establishes the kinship with Caravaggio, it refers to Velázquez’s formative years, not the years during which he established himself at court. It is not exactly proof – far from it – but if you think of it in that way, where does it lead? There is a strong possibility that Luis Tristán could have been in Toledo already in 1611. The documentary evidence places him in Toledo on 7 November 1606 and again on 10 May 1612, when he signed a contract obligating him to 48 pictures.43 He could certainly have been present in Toledo the previous summer without leaving any documentary trace of his return. It does not seem likely that somebody fresh off the boat after an absence of several years would immediately enter into a complex, demanding contract of this sort. On the contrary, it suggests

41 Pacheco and Palomino, 2006, pp. 59–60. Palomino, 2008, p. 23: “Diéronle el nombre de segundo Carabagio, por contrahazer en sus Obras al natural felizmente, y con tanta propriedad, teniéndole delante para todo, y en todo tiempo.” 42 Pacheco and Palomino, 2006, p. 60. Palomino, 2008, p. 23: “En los Retratos imitó a Dominico Greco, porque sus cabezas en su estimación nunca podían ser bastantemente celebradas; y a la verdad tenía razón en todo aquello, que no participó de la extravagancia, en que deliró a lo último; porque del Griego podemos dezir, ‘que lo que hizo bien, ninguno lo hizo mejor; y lo que hizo mal, ninguno lo hizo peor.’” 43 Pérez Sánchez and Navarrete Prieto, 2001, pp. 22–23, for a discussion of the documents, and pp. 278–279 for transcriptions.

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a considerable preceding period during which Tristán reestablished his reputation in the shadow of the aging but still active El Greco. What I plan to do next is assume that Velázquez did make this early trip and consider what he might have learned. What we will find, I think, is a set of visual resonances with the work he produced back home in Seville. These are resonances that go beyond the inconsistent Caravaggism of Tristán, though Palomino was surely right to speak of Tristán’s importance in Velázquez’s formation. In Toledo with Pacheco in 1611 the young Velázquez might well have been exposed to the work of Luis Tristán. He certainly would have seen work by Maíno, by El Greco, and by Juan Sánchez Cotán. Two of these artists had first hand exposure to early Seicento Rome, one was schooled in the theory and practice of the late Mannerism of the 1570s, and one was a pioneer in the field of still life painting. As discussed in the first part of this chapter, Maíno’s manner was profoundly bound up with his experience in Rome. The extent of his time in Rome has become clear in recent years through documentary discoveries. An illegitimate son of Maíno’s was baptized in Rome on 17 October 1605, and in 1609 and again in 1610 his name appeared in the parish register of Sant’ Andrea della Fratte.44 By 8 March 1611 he was in Toledo where he was recorded as working in the cloister of the cathedral.45 Unlike Luis Tristán, we know for sure that Maíno was in the imperial city during Pacheco’s visit. Nothing is said by Pacheco or Palomino, but I believe that Maíno could well have been one of the means by which Velázquez came to know of Caravaggio’s new way of painting. He was in Rome when Caravaggio’s reputation was at its highest, and their time in the city actually overlapped, though there is no evidence that the two artists met. What is clear is that Maíno would have seen a wide range of Caravaggio’s paintings – certainly all his public altarpieces, and perhaps also examples in private collections. He could have made drawings after these works as aide-mémoire, though none exist. Whatever the case, precisely this kind of broad knowledge is necessary to explain the significant parallels between Caravaggio and Velázquez that I described above. That kind of understanding is just too deep for it to have derived from seeing a few copies, or from the work of artists who drew inspiration from the Lombard painter’s style. It could have come from a first-hand experience of the full range of Caravaggio’s paintings, but we know that did not occur. Instead, I believe that Maíno was a key figure here. Not only did he have exactly that kind of experience, still fresh in his mind in 1611, we also know that he was an accomplished teacher, and was later a supporter of Velázquez at court in Madrid. In 1613 Maíno took vows as a Dominican friar. It is generally assumed that his religious obligations reduced his activity as a painter.46 That may be so, but a legal document written in 1619 by Maíno’s mother 44 Ruiz Gómez, 2009, doc. 27, p. 222; doc. 28, p. 223; doc. 31, p. 223. 45 Ruiz Gómez, 2009, doc. 32, p. 223. 46 Ruiz Gómez, 2009, doc. 37, p. 229.

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describes him as working as painting master to the prince (later King Philip IV).47 In a document dated 1620 Maíno gave testimony in a suit between painters and gilders. A marginal note identifies the painter as: “Fray Juan Bautista Maíno, maestro de pintura del Príncipe nuestro señor.”48 In 1621 Philip IV ordered that a pension be paid to Maíno, and this is presumed to be as compensation for his service as the king’s teacher.49 While Pacheco did not speak of a meeting between Velázquez and Maíno in 1611, he was familiar with Maíno’s work, and was aware of his position as drawing master to the prince.50 Whether he taught painting, drawing, or both, Maíno indubitably ingratiated himself with the king as a teacher of art. One can hardly imagine a better candidate for conveying to Velázquez the latest news from the center of the European art world at the time. Maíno knew the latest trends in Rome, and he would become an experienced teacher. Maíno was not just a talented imitator of Caravaggio; he was also indebted to Orazio Gentileschi and Guido Reni, among others. He understood the range of possibilities in Italian art of the early seventeenth century. He was clearly capable of imparting those possibilities, and he might have had the opportunity to do so, though I cannot build a case that puts the early meeting of Velázquez and Maíno beyond reasonable doubt. Maíno knew Velázquez at court in Madrid and was a supporter of the young artist’s career. Early on, rival painters accused Velázquez of being accomplished only in portraiture. What they meant was that his skill was limited to direct and unmediated copying of appearances; he was not equal, they claimed, to the more exalted task of conceptualizing complex narrative in the form of the history painting. Ever since Leon Battista Alberti had established the category of the istoria, the nobility of the painter and the intellectual heft of the painter’s undertaking came to be associated most closely with this genre. One result of the gauntlet thrown down by Velázquez’s rivals was an official competition among four of the court painters, Eugenio Cajés, Vicente Carducho, Angelo Nardi, and, finally, Velázquez, with the task being to paint an image of Philip III and the expulsion of the Moriscos, a doleful event from Spain’s recent history. Velázquez won. According to Pacheco, Maíno was one of the judges. Pacheco wrote that Maíno had “great knowledge in painting,” which presumably means that he was in favor of the winning composition.51

47 Ruiz Gómez, 2009, doc. 43, p. 230. 48 Ruiz Gómez, 2009, doc. 45, p. 232. 49 Ruiz Gómez, 2009, doc. 48, p. 234. 50 Pacheco, 2001, p. 220: “Ni di fray Juan Bautista Maino, pintor famoso de la orden de predicadores que enseñó a dibujar (siendo príncipe) a nuestro católico Rey Filipino IV.” 51 Pacheco, 2001, p. 206, where Maíno is described as “de gran conocimiento en la pintura.” On the competition, see Orso, 1993, pp. 40–96, and Jordan, 2017.

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There is some indirect evidence that places Maíno within the orbit of the CountDuke of Olivares, the power behind the throne during the early years of Philip IV’s reign, and a key figure in inveigling Velázquez through the door toward his appointment as court painter.52 That raises the possibility that Maíno might also have played a part, given that Maíno was the king’s drawing master and in a unique position to advise the king on new hires. Whatever the case with regard to Velázquez’s early moments at court, it seems clear that Maíno supported the artist during the 1627 competition. That support is not evidence of an earlier association, but it could be part of a pattern, one that even goes back as far as 1611. Pacheco is not especially forthcoming when it comes to the artistic training of his greatest project and most lasting legacy to the history of art. His own artistic talents were meager, and while his El arte de la pintura may be an important landmark within the history of art writing in Spain, Pacheco can hardly be considered a major innovator. His legacy was first and foremost his student, Velázquez, a legacy he sought to claim as exclusively his own, both artistically and theoretically. That this was not really the case, artistically at least, is revealed by straightforward visual analysis; Pacheco’s tepid manner could not have been a formative influence on the young Velázquez. Palomino’s life of the artist confirms what our eyes tell us. Through his proxy Luis Tristán, Palomino gives Caravaggio almost full credit. Pacheco casts the origin story differently. According to his brief account in El arte de la pintura, Velázquez’s apprenticeship lasted five years, after which Pacheco gave the young artist his daughter Juana in marriage. The next sentence reveals that another artist rudely claimed the honor of having nurtured Velázquez’s talent: “And because my pride in being his master is greater than the honor of being his father in law, it seemed just to obstruct the audacity of someone who wishes to appropriate this glory and rob me of the crowning pride of my last years.”53 The conventional reading of this passage is to see it in conjunction with what Palomino says about Velázquez’s earliest years, where he mentions an abortive apprenticeship with Francisco de Herrera.54 The style of Herrera’s work, however, has little to do with what Velázquez went on to produce, either in Seville or later, which seems to vitiate the association. As discussed above, the backdating of the apprenticeship document is best taken at face value, as a record of a relationship that had existed since the earlier date, but that was only formalized later. Could the unnamed artist have been Maíno? We know Maíno was still active as an artist during the “last years” mentioned by Pacheco. He painted the Recapture of Bahía in 1635 as part of the cycle of paintings for the Hall of Realms in the Buen Retiro, to which Velázquez also contributed. In that same 52 Maíno signed his name in a document confirming that Olivares was a patron of Santo Tomás in Madrid, of which the artist was a member. Ruiz Gómez, 2009, p. 216. 53 Pacheco and Palomino, 2006, p. 33. Pacheco, 2001, p. 202: “Y porque es mayor la honra de maestro que la de suegro, ha sido justo estorbar el atrevimiento de alguno que se quiere atribuir esta gloria, quitándome la corona de mis postreros años.” 54 Bassegoda i Hugas, 2001, p. 42, believes that this passage may refer to Herrera, but admits that there is no real evidence to support the connection.

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palace hung Velázquez’s early masterpiece, The Waterseller of Seville (Fig. 39), perhaps evoking thoughts of the artist’s origins and Maíno’s role in his turn toward a Caravaggesque mode.55 It was around this time that Pacheco was finalizing the manuscript that would posthumously become El arte de la pintura, which might help to explain the reference to “my last years” as the moment when the claim was made. Maíno might well have been just as eager as Pacheco to claim credit for having cultivated the genius of the Siege of Breda. The idea makes sense when one considers Maíno’s compatible style and his role as a teacher to King Philip IV. This is especially true when set next to Herrera’s incompatible style and fecklessness as a teacher.56 If he visited Toledo in 1611, Velázquez would doubtless have come across the paintings of Juan Sánchez Cotán. Though he was painter of both conventional religious scenes and still lifes, he is most famous as an innovator in the latter genre. Not many of these survive and the ones that do follow a similar pattern. All of them depict fruits and vegetables, sometimes alone, sometimes with the addition of dead game animals. For the sake of my argument, which is that Velázquez saw and was inspired by these still lifes, I am going to focus on his best-known painting, the Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber in the San Diego Museum of Art (Fig. 28). Set on what appears to be a deep and rather spare window sill, or suspended on strings from above, fruits and vegetables are arranged along a dramatic curve that begins with a quince at top left, continues with a cabbage almost directly below, flattens out with a melon and its slice in the center, and culminates in a cucumber at bottom right. Each fruit and vegetable is placed close to the picture plane articulated as discrete and separate objects, with no overlapping. The melon, sliced open, its juicy interior on display, anchors the composition in the center at the bottom. To the right of the cut-open melon is a slice of the same, poised at a diagonal, its point extending over the edge of the sill and into the space in front of the canvas, as if to tempt the viewer with its sweet delights. To its right the cucumber, set along an opposing diagonal, thrusts even more emphatically through the imaginary boundary between fiction and reality. The light is focused. It streams in from the upper left, causing the fruits and vegetables to cast strong shadows on the sill. Through the window behind is only blackness. Dated to around 1600, the painting is one of the first still lifes painted in Spain. Sánchez Cotán’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber shares a number of formal characteristics with Velázquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (Fig. 29). Superficially, such a comparison does not make sense. Velázquez’s work is a genre painting, a category developed in Spain in reference to north Italian market scenes – like those by Vincenzo Campi – and the Netherlandish tradition represented by Pieter Aertsen and 55 Palomino, 1987, p. 141, reports that the painting hung there. The work is also recorded the inventory of the Buen Retiro made in 1701. Presumably, it made its way there upon the sale of Juan de Fonseca y Figueroa’s collection that followed his death in 1627. Velázquez in Seville, 1996, p. 152. 56 We know of Herrera’s difficult personality and inability to keep students from Palomino, 1987, p. 128.

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Fig. 28. Juan Sánchez Cotán, Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber, San Diego Museum of Art. Photo: San Diego Museum of Art

Joachim Beuckelaer. There is a strong iconographic relationship between Velázquez’s bodegones and these sources, though there are differences. Formally, however, there is little similarity to these precedents, which is where Sánchez Cotán comes into play. Though always described as a bodegón, Velázquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs is as much a still life with figures added as it is a figural composition with still life objects in the foreground. Even the figures themselves are curiously still and do not communicate convincingly that they are engaged in a meaningful interaction. The boy to the left looks out in the direction of the viewer while the old woman is in profile and stares to the left in the direction of something unseen beyond the frame. Both wear neutral expressions. They seem more like objects that have submitted to the descriptive powers of the artist than like human beings capable of action, thought, and emotion. The most telling point of contact between the Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber and An Old Woman Cooking Eggs is in the composition. Both are built around a great curve that starts at the top left. In the Velázquez, the boy’s head takes the place of the quince; the melon tied with string is in the place of the cabbage; the pan of eggs mirrors the cut-open melon; the white plate with knife laid on top corresponds to the slice of melon; finally, the mortar and pestle replace the cucumber. Velázquez increased complexity through the addition of objects, such as the spoon and egg held by the old woman, the shiny metal basin below and to the left of the pan with the eggs, and the peppers, red onion and pitchers to the

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Fig. 29. Velázquez, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

right. If one erases mentally the old woman and the objects hanging above and to her right, the compositions are uncannily similar. Sánchez Cotán often repeated and complicated his designs, as in the example hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago where, to the simple curve of quince, cabbage, melon, melon slice and cucumber an additional fruit is added at bottom left and four hanging game birds above (Fig. 30). The horror vacui of this variant saps it of the San Diego painting’s compositional power, but it should be kept in mind when considering the Velázquez. Though more can be made out in the Velázquez than in the inky void that lies behind Sánchez Cotán’s fruits and vegetables, in all three paintings the forms are ranged in close proximity to the picture plane and set against a very dark background. With the exception of the melon cradled in the arm of the boy, each form is treated as a separate, isolated, discrete entity. Like the fruits and vegetables of the still life, Velázquez’s objects are mostly circular, or curved. The open top of the pan with the eggs corresponds to the open, exposed interior of the cut melon. The melon held by the boy is tied with string, as is the cabbage of the Sánchez Cotán. Long objects are foreshortened in both, and placed in contrasting diagonals with respect to the picture plane: the slice of melon and cucumber in the Sánchez Cotán; the knife and pestle in the Velázquez.

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Fig. 30. Juan Sánchez Cotán, Still Life with Game Fowl, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago

In a gallery talk on Sánchez Cotán’s still life the curator of European art at the San Diego Museum of Art, Michael Brown, observed that the painting is not as still as it seems.57 The quince and the cabbage both hang on strings, but those strings are almost, but not quite, parallel. This sets the San Diego painting apart from Sánchez-Cotán’s other compositions. It resonates with a pictorial fascination Velázquez felt throughout his career: the means by which a static painting can suggest motion and change over time. The most articulate expressions of this interest are found in The Spinners (Fig. 31) and Las Meninas (Fig. 35), in the blurred hands of the women and spokes of the spinning wheel, in the indistinct profiles of all the figures as they react to the king and queen standing in the space occupied by the viewer. It was no less an interest in his Seville period paintings, expressed in An Old Woman Cooking Eggs with the eggs, right in the middle of the cooking process, neither fully cooked nor fully raw. There is also the splash of water on the front surface of the large earthenware container in The Waterseller of Seville, where the drops of water dribble slowly downward. Velázquez introduces subtle motion, just as Sánchez Cotán does by painting those strings not quite parallel. More so than anything else, this conceptual affinity convinces one that the young Velázquez really must have seen one of these magnificent still lifes. Earlier in this chapter I argued that Maíno’s principles of compositional design aligned him with El Greco. Both largely eschewed the creation of pictorial space by means of linear perspective. Neither artist considered the problem of creating an 57 His observation is as yet unpublished, but a video of his presentation can be found at Brown, 2014.

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illusionistic painting as one that by necessity balanced the requirements of space and plane. Instead, both artists opted to prioritize the arrangement of colors and forms on the surface. Sánchez Cotán is another artist who considered painting in this way. As discussed above, in his still life paintings there is no concern for deeply receding pictorial space. Like El Greco and Maíno, Sánchez Cotán pushed forms forward, creating a strong sense of physical presence proximate to the picture plane. We can also add Luis Tristán to this group. Tristán’s surviving retablo paintings are compositionally and spatially very close to those by El Greco. Writing in 1996, Jonathan Brown provocatively suggested that what he describes as “counterclassicism” joins together the work of El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, and Picasso. Scholars have long struggled to define the essential character of the Spanish artistic tradition. What Brown suggested was that the four titans of the Spanish tradition listed above understood the classicism of Italy, but chose to defy its emphasis on mathematically constructed space, the integrity of the human form, a respect for the legacy of antiquity, and the legibility of narrative relationships. Brown begins his discussion with El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin (Plate 1), painted soon after the artist’s arrival in Toledo, in which the artist clearly decided to repudiate the spatial logic of paintings like the Purification of the Virgin, which he painted in Rome. He goes on to argue that Velázquez’s early Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 26) was built around the same compositional principles as El Greco’s Assumption: [L]arge figures are crowded together in the foreground and a notional landscape, comprising a tree or two and a distant hill, is wedged into the corner of the canvas. That said, the lack of space in the composition is offset by the powerful, roughhewn personages, who belong to a different breed than the ethereal, abstracted figures of El Greco.58

Brown’s fundamental argument is that the two artists used similar compositional principles. The proposed 1611 trip to Toledo offers a way of explaining how this compositional similarity came about. The trip to Toledo in 1611 is more than just a possibility, I believe, because this trip helps to explain so much about Velázquez’s early development. Luis Tristán could have been in Toledo that year, and he would have been able to transmit to the young Velázquez something of the latest Roman developments, especially the innovations introduced by Caravaggio. Sánchez Cotán’s still life paintings, with their object-by-object descriptiveness, were there in the city for Velázquez to see. Maíno is probably the most important of the figures whose work Velázquez could

58 Brown, 1996, p. 10.

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have seen in Toledo.59 Maíno was definitely in Toledo in 1611. Maíno was an accomplished artist in his own right, had spent a number of years in Rome, and would prove later both to be a supporter of Velázquez, and a successful teacher of art to Velázquez’s lifelong patron, the eventual Philip IV. His paintings in Toledo had the same qualities that Brown discussed in his analysis of Velázquez’s Adoration of the Magi. Maíno combined naturalistic description with a self-conscious inattention to the niceties of pictorial space, which I argue derives from El Greco. In sum, what I am suggesting here is that painting in Toledo, from El Greco through to Maíno, was crucial to the development of Velázquez. Earlier in this chapter I suggested that Palomino’s characterization of Luis Tristán and El Greco as early formative influences on Velázquez could be read as evidence of the 1611 trip to Toledo. This is not to say that Palomino knew about such a trip and concealed that information, but simply that his knowledge of the early formation of Velázquez was correct – as is his biography generally – though incomplete. Presumably, his sources knew that painting in Toledo was important to Velázquez’s formation, but were not clear on exactly how this influence could have been brought to bear. Palomino characterized El Greco’s work as bizarre, especially at the end of his career. Palomino’s statement is in the same paragraph where he links the names of Caravaggio, Luis Tristán, and Velázquez. Immediately following the memorable passage about El Greco – “For we can say of El Greco that ‘whatever he did well, no one did better, and what he did badly, no one did worse.’” – Palomino writes: Finally, Velázquez’s art shone with the energy of the Greeks, the diligence of the Romans, and the tenderness of the Venetians and the Spaniards, whose works were transmuted into his own, so that if their vast numbers were to be lost we could still know them from the brief compendium of his works.60

This statement concludes Palomino’s discussion of Velázquez’s stylistic origins. Taken out of context, it could be read as misguided praise, lionizing his hero beyond all reason. When one reads of the Greeks in this kind of writing one thinks immediately of ancient Greece and the deep roots of the classical tradition. Here though, this cannot be the case. The point is made clearest in the original Spanish text, where Palomino usually refers to El Greco as “Dominico Greco.” In the sentence immediately 59 It should be noted that Maíno’s earliest surviving dated works, the paintings for the retablo of San Pedro Mártir, were completed post 1611. He was around 30 years old by that date and one can assume that he had already become an accomplished artist; the paintings for San Pedro Mártir are assuredly not the works of a novice. In addition, documents attest to him being paid for paintings in Toledo in 1611. Ruiz Gómez, 2009, p. 223. 60 Pacheco and Palomino, 2006, p. 60. Palomino, 2008, p. 23: “Y últimamente lució el Arte Velázquez con la energía de los Griegos, con la diligencia de los Romanos, y con la ternura de los Venecianos, y Españoles; en cuyas Obras se transformó, de suerte, que si faltara el número immenso de ellas, se pudieran conocer en el breve mapa de las suyas.”

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preceding the assessment of Velázquez’s stylistic debts he becomes “del Griego” and the “energy of the Greeks” is “la energía de los Griegos” in the original. When Palomino speaks of the Greeks here, he must surely be referring to El Greco, and in doing so he must in turn be alluding to contemporary Greek art, the Byzantine tradition in other words. Is it possible that Palomino understood the “energy of the Greeks” as that aspect of El Greco’s art that was indebted to his training as a Byzantine artist? In Chapter One I asserted that the lack of pictorial space in El Greco’s art was a conscious rejection of classicism, and in this I align myself with Jonathan Brown’s argument. In addition, I argued that it was an equally conscious return to the artistic training of his youth. Following this train of thought to its logical conclusion, and keeping in mind Palomino’s words, one is compelled to see the beautiful abstractions of Byzantine painting as an inspiration for the “counterclassicism” that runs through Spanish art from El Greco to Velázquez to Goya to Picasso. Or maybe that is going one step too many along that particular train of thought. Stepping back for a moment from an attempt to craft a grand narrative for Spanish painting, it does seem clear that linking together the stylistic formations of El Greco and Velázquez is a shared and strong skepticism with respect to the qualities advocated by Vasari. El Greco turned back to his Byzantine roots and proudly proclaimed his attachment to the maniera greca so vilified by Vasari. By turning to the example of Caravaggio, Velázquez made no less radical a move, one that must have shocked Pacheco, even as he realized simultaneously that his protégé was taking Spanish painting in a totally new and interesting direction, inspired by Caravaggio’s radical naturalism, but by no measure dependent on that example.

3. Velázquez and Inversion: Making and Illusion Abstract This chapter explores two themes present throughout Velázquez’s career. First, Velázquez thematized the mechanics of art making itself, especially with regards to the manipulation of the pigment. He did this from his early work in Seville all the way through to the late paintings. Second, Velázquez was consistently fascinated by the ability of painting to trick the eye with its illusions. Both interests run counter to the Italian-sourced theoretical orthodoxy of his master, Francisco Pacheco. An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, The Forge of Vulcan, and Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob exemplify an interest in allegorizing the skilled touch of the maker and the illusions that that touch created. Keywords: Las Meninas, Velázquez The Spinners

Witty and meaningful inversion of viewer expectation was central to Velázquez’s pictorial enterprise. This approach is exemplified by his two late masterpieces, The Spinners (Fig. 31) and Las Meninas (Fig. 35), but these two works do not stand in isolation from what came before. Instead, they represent a summation of a continuous preoccupation stretching from Velázquez’s youth in Seville through to his final years at court in Madrid. Central to understanding The Spinners is Velázquez’s unexpected thematization of his own art making through the figures of the spinning women. One wonders whether a similar identification with lowly craft might have occurred elsewhere in Velázquez’s body of work. As this chapter will demonstrate, the answer is yes. There is a related, clear thematization of mechanical work in The Forge of Vulcan (Plate 4), from his first trip to Italy, and in some of his paintings from Seville, The Old Woman Cooking Eggs (Fig. 29) and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Plate 3). In each instance Velázquez chose a surprising proxy for his own activity as a maker of art. In The Spinners the act of spinning becomes a metaphor for Velázquez’s skill as a painter. In The Forge of Vulcan it is the beating of the hot metal that plays this role. The humble act of cooking serves the same purpose in The Old Woman Cooking Eggs, and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha. What really draws these works together is that Velázquez does not just represent work in progress. What he does is to illustrate that work with a marvelous example of his own work as a painter; work and its Knox, G., Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725712_ch03

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Fig. 31. Velázquez, The Spinners, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

product are joined together. In The Spinners it is the illusion of the motion of work. In The Forge of Vulcan it is glowing strip of red-hot metal. In The Old Woman Cooking Eggs it is the cooking eggs. An underlying message in these career-spanning paintings is that a good part of the nobility of painting lies in the mechanical skill with which it is created. Another of the themes connecting Velázquez’s work across the decades was his belief that to create a convincing illusion of reality was one of the principal goals of the artist’s labor. This may seem a self-evident goal for any European painter of the seventeenth century, but Velázquez gave it special priority and did so in opposition to the prevailing art theory of the day, which lauded the abstractions of the history painting ideal. Las Meninas speaks to this goal most directly, but the same preoccupation motivates the earlier Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob (Fig. 36) and The Waterseller of Seville. As with his choice as a young man to look to Caravaggio for inspiration, the themes of making and illusion run counter to the orthodoxy represented by Vasari and other Italian writers of art theory. That theory, after all, was at least partially motivated by a desire to distance art from the mechanical means of its production. And while Vasari’s theory of disegno may have been grounded in the practice of repeated drawing, it was not a practice that was to be emphasized in the finished product. Also, the end result of all that practice was not to be a straightforward illusion of the world, but a form idealized beyond the contingencies and irregularities of everyday appearances.

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I am going to explore the interwoven themes of inversion, making, and illusion in reverse chronological order, starting with analyses of The Spinners and Las Meninas and only then moving backward to treat The Forge of Vulcan, Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob, and the Seville paintings. My reason for doing this is that these themes are crystallized more clearly in the later paintings. With these cogent, mature examples in mind it is easier to discern the earlier development of Velázquez’s pictorial thinking. Let us begin, therefore, at the end.

The Spinners The background of The Spinners, brightly illuminated but only comprising a little more than a sixth of the painting’s surface area, represents the myth of Arachne (Fig. 31).1 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Arachne, a young mortal girl, rashly challenges Minerva to a weaving contest. The contest ends in a tie, which enrages the goddess. Worse, Arachne’s tapestries depict the loves of Jupiter, Minerva’s father. Contests between gods and mortals rarely end happily and this is no exception. Minerva beats Arachne with a shuttle and transforms her into a spider, condemning her to a life of weaving webs. Visual depictions of the Arachne legend usually show the punishment of the presumptuous weaver. Velázquez chose to depict the instant when Minerva proclaims Arachne’s tapestries equal to her own. Minerva stands to the left with hand raised while Arachne appears in the center, her arm extended and head slightly bowed in gracious acceptance of her de facto victory. The tapestry on the wall behind her, a copy after a famous Titian in the royal collection that was in turn copied by Rubens when he visited Madrid in 1628, shows the Rape of Europa. This suggests that Velázquez saw his own painting as a competition piece within the artistic lineage established by the great Venetian painter, long appreciated in Spain, and his Flemish successor, who also had deep ties with Spain. As I argued at length in my first book, The Late Paintings of Velázquez: Theorizing Painterly Performance, the visual focus of the composition is not the literary story in the background, but on the busy activity of the women in the foreground.2 For this reason, the traditional title – Las Hilanderas, or The Spinners – makes perfect sense.3 Some scholars have seen these women as representing an early moment in the story, where Minerva disguises herself as an old woman and tries to persuade Arachne to abandon her ill-advised challenge. It is, however, truer to Ovid’s narrative to see them as collectively representing the prodigious mechanical skill of Arachne, 1 For a much more detailed analysis of The Spinners, on which much of what follows in the next few pages is based, see Knox, 2009, pp. 59–117. 2 Knox, 2009, pp. 65–73. 3 Prater, 2014a, recognizes the centrality of the foreground women but sees as implausible the idea that they celebrate skilled labor. Instead, he sees them as a poetic meditation on the spinning of a tale and a proclamation of the independence of painting from text.

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used by the young woman to equal the work of Minerva.4 In this way, the painting becomes a representation of the rapid motion of skilled spinning, which thematizes in turn Velázquez’s own painterly prowess. The spinning wheel revolves so rapidly that its spokes have become a blur, while the hands of the young woman seen from behind to the right vibrate with the action of winding the wool. Their expert motion is depicted with Velázquez’s own masterful application of paint. By celebrating their mechanical skill Velázquez celebrates his own skill, and in so doing defies expectation. Not only has he relegated the literary narrative to a secondary position, the foreground emphasis on the crass materiality of paint on canvas runs counter to the theoretical norm that saw ideation as supreme. What Velázquez proclaims here is the centrality of the mechanical skill residing in the artist’s hand, just as the women’s skill in spinning resides in their moving hands. Velázquez inverts the conventional order of history and genre, mind and hand, metaphorically equating his own prodigious skill to the lowly, quotidian skills of the female figures. These figures are variations on two ignudi that Velázquez saw in Rome on the Sistine chapel ceiling. Pacheco reports that his protégé lodged in the Vatican during his first stay there and that he spent his time productively studying the work of Raphael and Michelangelo. A more immediate source, though, might have been the engraving of the Persian Sibyl made by Cherubino Alberti (Fig. 32). This print isolates the ignudi from the narratives they frame, inviting appropriators such as Velázquez similarly to extract them from the ceiling as a whole. The print still includes the frame of the Old Testament narrative above, and Velázquez places the floor of the Arachne scene at shoulder level to his working women, around the same level as Michelangelo’s frame. Nobody knows for certain what role the ignudi played from an iconographical perspective. Did they represent angels? Were they visual exercises in Michelangelo’s mastery of the male nude form?5 Perhaps it does not matter. These figures can have both a narrow iconographic significance and also broader meaning, both based on contemporaries’ understanding of what the great Florentine had achieved. For Vasari, his ability to create nude male figures was linked explicitly to his status as the divine Michelangelo. God had made Man, and Michelangelo modeled his own activity after that supreme prototype.6 The ignudi, therefore, embodied the very highest kind of art making. Velázquez clothed them, thus shearing them from any connection to prelapsarian creation, changed them into women, who came about only through a secondary act of creation, and had them perform a task of little social or intellectual prestige, just as he had pushed the other exemplification of art’s 4 The connection was first suggested by Diego Angulo in an article from 1948, reprinted in Angulo, 2007, pp. 90–95. 5 Gill, 2005, pp. 196–198, argues in favor of seeing them as angels. The idea that the ignudi serve as a demonstration of Michelangelo’s supreme skill comes from Vasari. Vasari, 1965, p. 355. 6 Vasari, 1965, p. 25. For Vasari, God’s creation of man constituted the creation of both the first sculpture and the first painting.

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Fig. 32. Cherubino Alberti, Persian Sibyl, after Michelangelo. Photo: Rijksmuseum

high intellectual condition, the history painting, into the background. Inversion is stacked on inversion. The sense of touch is also a theme of The Spinners. According to the traditional hierarchy established in antiquity, touch is the lowest and most material of the senses. The sense of touch brought to mind both positive and negative associations, as we shall see. Allegories of the senses emerged in northern Europe in the sixteenth century and these usually represent one aspect of the sense in question. Georg Pencz’s Allegory of Touch from 1544 takes a positive slant on this potentially most dangerous

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Fig. 33. Georg Pencz, Allegory of Touch (Tactus), from The Five Senses. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

of the senses (Fig. 33).7 In the upper left corner there is a spider at the center of its web, to the right of which is an inscription, “TACTUS,” and the monogram of the artist. Spiders embodied the sense of touch because of their supreme sensitivity to the tactile inputs transmitted to them via their webs. The web, of course, could be imagined as a trap, alluding to the pleasures and sin of sensual touching, but here that does not appear to be the dominant theme. In the foreground is a personification of touch in the form of a mostly nude woman seen from the side. This nudity, however, is not especially provocative. Her breasts are concealed, her hair is neatly braided, and she is shown working intently on an inkle loom. Two rolled-up ribbons 7 Assaf, 2005, pp. 86–88; Nordenfalk, 1985, p. 20, notes that the nudity of Pencz’s personification both ennobles and sensualizes.

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– products of this woman’s work – are laid out on a bench behind the industrious personification. The round ribbons echo the braids encircling the woman’s head and also the spider web close behind her. The spider web was not just a symbol of entrapment, and a sensory grid, it was also a product of the spider’s craft, just as the braids and the ribbons are. At the very center of the composition are the active hands of Touch, the skilled touch of the artisan at work. Once turned into a spider, Arachne was condemned eternally to exercise “her old-time weaver art” in the natural world. It follows that the foreground women of The Spinners might thematize not just the mechanical side of art making, but, more narrowly, the special, skilled touch that lay behind their mechanical aptitude. The spinner to the left particularly embodies this idea. She reaches forward with her right hand and sets the wheel into its speedy rotation, so fast that the spokes become but a blur. With her left hand the woman pulls from the puffy wool mounted on the distaff an impossibly fine and even thread. The woman’s head is turned to the left, away from her work, clarifying for viewers that it is her special skilled touch alone that lies behind the generation of this fine thread; she is not watching what she is doing. The drafting of this thread is the central metaphor of the whole painting. The spinner draws it out with her skillful touch just as Velázquez himself painted it with the skillful touch of his brush. It is this touch that creates the illusion of a living and moving visual reality. This is clarified not just by virtue of The Spinners being a painting; there is also a cat, unconcerned with the flurry of activity surrounding it, on the floor of the spinning room, behind the bare leg of the spinner to the left. In the context of The Spinners – a painting on the theme of painting – it is likely that the cat is a symbol of sight. Cats frequently appear in allegories of sight because of their ability to see so well in the dark. An engraving by Jan Saenredam after a composition by Hendrick Goltzius, for example, the Allegory of Visual Perception, presents the sense of sight in a variety of ways (Fig. 34).8 To the left, an artist paints a female nude. The model appears to the right, looking down and into a mirror held by a cupid figure. A cat sits in the foreground beneath this cupid and looks out toward the viewer. In The Spinners the cat does not look out, and is often overlooked in spite of being in the center, on the same axis as the figure of Arachne in the background above. Symbolically, the cat makes the point that the skillful touch of the artist is in the service of a visual illusion. Another inversion of expectation comes from the loose, open manner in which Velázquez has applied the paint in The Spinners. This seemingly spontaneous manner helps to convey the busy motion of the women at work (and is, of course, a defining hallmark of the artist’s mature and late style). Spiders and skillful spinners alike were admired for the fineness of the thread they spun. The act of painting was occasionally 8

Konečný, 1996; Sluijter, 1991–1992.

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Fig. 34. Jan Saenredam, Allegory of Visual Perception, after Hendrick Goltzius. Photo: Rijskmuseum

likened to the spinning of a spider’s web, with fineness the admired virtue. In 1613 the humanist Thomas Sagittarius commented on a painting he saw by Jan Brueghel the Elder: “You would say that he made these with lines which even a spider could not have made, so do the ultra-thin lines, drawn with such subtlety, trace their way, to such a degree that they are barely present before your two wide-open eyes.”9 With both spiders and spinners in mind, viewers of Velázquez’s painting might well have expected a finely painted work, along the lines of the Brueghel described by Sagittarius. Instead, the surface of the canvas is strewn with broad, and clearly visible brushstrokes, the borrones that so delighted those who revived Velázquez’s critical reputation in the nineteenth century yet so perplexed the theoretical writers of the seventeenth. The 9

Quoted in McFadden, 2014, p. 52.

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Fig. 35. Velázquez, Las Meninas, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

subject of Arachne would have led people to expect the fine touch of spider-like precision. In its place, Velázquez delivers an action painting avant la lettre.

Las Meninas Las Meninas is even more obviously a painting about painting (Fig. 35). Inversion is not as explicit as in The Spinners, where literary subject and genre demonstration are flipped, but it is nonetheless a composition of many surprises. We do not expect to be witness to a seemingly casual encounter among Velazquez’s contemporaries within the real spaces of the Alcázar in Madrid. The deep box of perspectivally correct pictorial space occupied by figures in depth is uncharacteristic of Velázquez. Nor do we expect to see the artist himself participating in this encounter, in the midst of painting a large canvas the front of which is hidden from our view. The genre of

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“self-portrait at work in the company of a mix of members of the royal court” simply did not exist in Spain, or anywhere else in Europe for that matter. It is especially startling in a culture that classed artists as artisans, for that is precisely what Velázquez shows himself as: he is painting with his own hands. Painters and admirers of painting had long sought to raise the status of painting to full inclusion among the liberal arts. Velázquez depicts himself dressed as an elegant courtier – a knight of Santiago no less – yet here he is, toiling away at the very mechanical activity that delayed his admission to that order for many long and frustrating years. Las Meninas contains some of the same elements that appeared in Goltzius’s Allegory of Visual Perception (Fig. 34). Both show an artist at work, and a mirror. The king and queen, however, the models for Velázquez’s painting, are not literally present. Instead, they stand where we as viewers stand, their presence implied by the many gazes, including that of the artist himself, that transit the picture plane, much as the cat’s gaze did in the Goltzius. In the process, the viewer becomes the viewed. It is assuredly a painting about the creation of an illusion that extends across the picture plane, like the cucumber in Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber (Fig. 28). As in The Spinners, Velázquez gives great emphasis to the fact that the artist’s touch is responsible for this illusion. Velázquez’s right hand holds a sharply pointed brush dipped in white paint. Hand and brush are painted in such a way that the two merge into one. The surface of Las Meninas literally dances with fine squiggles of white paint, evidence of the final touches made by a brush very like the one held in the hand of the self-portrait figure – a fine brush, dipped in white paint. The representation of making – the self-portrait at work – merges seamlessly with the evidence of the process of art making on the surface of the real canvas. As in The Spinners, visible brushwork plays a part in the inversion of expectations. In many ways, Las Meninas is a variation on Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait, which hung in the royal collection when Las Meninas was made.10 The position of the artist in the Flemish painting – as a reflection in the mirror – has been inverted in Las Meninas, as have the positions of the subjects – the king and queen. Van Eyck was famous in the seventeenth century as the inventor of oil painting, and for applying oil paint in glazes and with fine strokes, so that the surfaces of his paintings appeared entirely devoid of indexical presence. Velázquez inverted the positions of artist and subjects and at the same time animated the surface of his canvas with visible strokes of paint, completely alien to the Van Eyck tradition of concealment and antithetical as well to the Vasarian ideal of craft concealed, bound up in the long process of drawing, not in the mechanical application of pigment.

10 Knox, 2009, pp. 166–171. See also Seidel, 1993, pp. 194–197.

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Fig. 36. Velázquez, Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY

The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob Some of the themes raised in The Spinners and Las Meninas resonate with paintings made earlier in Velázquez’s career. Significantly, The Forge of Vulcan (Plate 4) and Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob (Fig. 36), like Las Meninas, were almost certainly not made on commission. This means that Velázquez himself would have determined the subject matter and its treatment. Both paintings were made during the artist’s first trip to Italy, a time when Velázquez had unprecedented freedom to learn from his surroundings and to determine on his own the direction his art would take. At the same time, he also clearly wanted to address some of the deficiencies in his training that had pushed him increasingly toward specialization in portraiture. His time in Italy prompted him both to look back, and to look forward. Time in Italy offered Velázquez a pause that permitted a kind of self-consciousness otherwise sidetracked by his duties and ambitions as painter and courtier. In Italy, Velázquez first mastered history painting. As discussed in the previous chapter, painting narratives drawn from classical mythology or the Bible was considered the most exalted task of any artist, a test of his ability to express communicative

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Fig. 37. Velázquez, Los Borrachos, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

nuances of gesture, expression, and pose. Velázquez, after all, had been accused of being able only to paint portraits, which condemned him in the theoretically charged atmosphere created by his rival court artists, almost all of whom had connections to Italy, as a mere transcriber of the visual. To his rivals, he lacked imagination, and though he may have won the competition in which he painted the ‘Expulsion of the Moriscos,’ that competition was judged by his supporters and he might have felt (with some justification) that his critics had a point. His competition piece does not survive, but Los Borrachos is from roughly the same period (Fig. 37).11 Velázquez’s reconceptualization of antiquity in naturalistic terms is deeply appealing, but it fails as a history painting. Gestures and expressions do not coalesce around any clear narrative core. As a result, the painting continues to provoke competing interpretations. The spatial relationships among the figures are muddled. The description of Bacchus’s nude torso reveals that Velázquez had not spent much time drawing from live nudes, or ancient statuary. By the Italianiate standards of his court rivals Los Borrachos is a mess. The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob correct the problems of Los Borrachos. Velázquez brought the two paintings back to Spain with him, where in 1634 they were sold to the king and became part of the royal collection. It is easy 11 Orso, 1993, pp. 40–96.

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to conclude that he painted them to demonstrate to himself that he was capable of painting a convincing history painting, and also to quiet the jealous bleating of those he had eclipsed at court.12 Velázquez could now legitimately claim to be a complete painter, a master of the portrait and also of the all-important history painting. The Forge of Vulcan depicts a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Just to the left of center Vulcan is shown at work at the anvil. He holds a red-hot strip of metal with pincers in one hand and with the other a hammer, poised to strike the next blow. At far left, Apollo stands draped in a rich orange-brown robe with an aureole behind his head radiating rays of light. A portion of Apollo’s drapery streams out behind him, suggesting the motion of his arrival. His lips are parted. He raises his right hand and points, announcing to Vulcan and his assistants (not shown as the one-eyed cyclopes of Ovid’s text) that he had that morning spied Venus, Vulcan’s wife, in the arms of Mars, god of war. As the shocking news radiates across the assembled group reactions range from to the steely defiance of Vulcan to the jaw-dropping surprise of the figure standing in dramatic silhouette against the flames of the fiery forge. This is a masterful history painting: gesture, expression, pose, and composition are dramatically and effectively employed to tell a story replete with pathos and empathy, and also to convey this moment’s depth and importance. Though Velázquez availed himself of an engraved source as the starting point of the composition, the transformation of the source stands as clear evidence of his imagination (Fig. 38).13 In addition to its expressive clarity, The Forge of Vulcan demonstrates an Italianate coherence of pictorial space and of compositional interval. Many of the figures are depicted full length, seen from a variety of angles and in different poses. There is none of the claustrophobic airlessness of Los Borrachos. The Forge of Vulcan is a remarkable achievement, especially when one considers that only two years separate it from Los Borrachos. Velázquez did not forsake his naturalistic roots in painting The Forge of Vulcan. Though ideal in their musculature, the facial features of the figures are strongly individualized, and the objects populating the forge are painted with loving attention to the particularities of their appearance. Velázquez had definitely not abandoned his interest in still life and naturalism. Similar observations can be made with respect to Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob (Fig. 36), perhaps painted slightly before The Forge of Vulcan, but almost certainly during Velázquez’s time in Italy.14 The story is from the Old Testament, another 12 The letter of payment appears in Corpus velazqueño, 2000, vol. 1, pp. 102–103, doc. 101. 13 Tempesta, 1606, plate 33. The source was first identified by Colombier, 1939, pp. 36–38. For a recent survey of the visual and textual sources potentially available to Velázquez, see Noble-Wood, 2014, pp. 12–49, 165–179. 14 It has recently been suggested that the two canvases were conceived of as a pair to be hung in Buen Retiro, and that they were therefore painted after Velázquez’s return from Italy. The hypothesis, though not beyond the realm of the possible, relies on a rather vague political reading of the two works. See Mena Marqués, 2017. For the most recent discussion of Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob and The Forge of Vulcan, see Pereda, 2017, pp. 175–208; Portús, 2017.

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Fig. 38. Antonio Tempesta, Apollo and Vulcan, from Ovid, Metamorphoses, Amsterdam, 1606. Photo: Rijksmuseum

of the sources lauded by history painting boosters because of its stories of dramatic import and deep significance. As with The Forge of Vulcan, this narrative revolves around deception. Joseph was the favorite son of the patriarch Jacob. Joseph’s favored status did nothing to endear him to his older half-brothers, whose antipathy grew so strong that they plotted to be rid of him. When Joseph visited them one day in the fields they threw him into a pit, stole his coat, and sold him into slavery. They smeared goat’s blood on Joseph’s coat to convince Jacob that an animal had killed Joseph. Velázquez shows two of Joseph’s brothers leaning forward, coat in hands, spinning their tale before Jacob, who sits to the far right, his arms thrown out in unrestrained despair. Mirroring his lament at the far left is another duplicitous brother, who dramatically twists his body in fictive, overacted agony. In the shadowy middle ground between the two coat-bearing brothers and the distraught Jacob are two more brothers, one of whom seems to smile while the other covers his mouth. The two brothers just left of center constitute the expressive core of the painting because together they hold the stained coat and present it to Jacob. The face of the brother to the left of this pair is almost in profil perdu, similar to the Apollo of The Forge of Vulcan, and his shaggy hair hides his eyes from view. He leans forward imploringly and his mouth is slightly open; it is he who likely relates the false story to Jacob. The facial expression of the brother to his right is much clearer. He turns sharply toward

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Jacob and, with his mouth also open, may be amplifying the tale told by his brother. With his right arm he gestures back toward the distant landscape, likely indicating the site of the supposed killing. The light catches the whites of his eyes and one senses his trepidation in trying to pass off a deception of such magnitude. Like The Forge of Vulcan, Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob is also an exercise in the creation of rational pictorial space. Here, Velázquez has fallen back on the perspectival crutch of a tiled floor, and one of the sticks lying on the floor just to the left of center even follows the diagonal of the checkerboard pattern, a classic check on the correctness of the construction oddly reminiscent of one of Paolo Uccello’s battle scenes. As with The Forge of Vulcan, the gulf between this painting and Los Borrachos is large indeed. It has often been suggested that The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob should be seen as a pair. The frieze-like arrangement of full-length figures in the two paintings, the emphasis in both on affective clarity and complexity, the similar dimensions, and the fact that both center on the theme of deception point to the two having been conceived in that way. Those who argue that Velázquez did not conceive them as a pair call attention to the dimensions, which originally were quite different.15 Also, following their sale to the king in 1634 the two works were not consistently hung together in the royal collection. This suggests that they were not created as formal pendants.16 Nevertheless, there are many points of contact, especially thematically. Ultimately, The Forge of Vulcan celebrates the mechanical skill of the artist, while Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob is about using an object to deceive, which also makes it a meditation on what painters do. The Forge of Vulcan was more than just a demonstration of Velázquez’s skill in history painting, for it was also a rumination on artistic process. In part, that was embedded in the theme he chose, for Apollo is god of the sun, and of poetic inspiration, emphasized here through the laurel wreath he wears. In addition to being a master craftsman, Vulcan was understood as a figure fundamental to all artistic endeavor, because he harnessed the power of fire to the making of things.17 When he chose to put these two figures together, Velázquez surely had in mind the contrast this would set up between the poetic and the mechanical. Without distracting from the dramatic narrative, The Forge of Vulcan places a great deal of emphasis on the tools, actions, process, and products of physical work. The foreground of the painting is littered with the tools of the metalsmith. A crowbar rests against a stone at the left. The same stone supports an anvil against which a hammer leans. A second hammer directs the eye up to the anvil where Vulcan grips with tongs a glowing strip of metal. Vulcan’s attendants all perform tasks in the forge. The man seen from behind holds a hammer, the head of which is dramatically backlit by the 15 Marías, 2017, pp. 65–69. 16 Mena Marqués, 2017, sees the pair as having been conceived as such. 17 Pérez de Moya, 1928, vol. 1, p. 172.

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bright flames of the fire. His companion to the right also holds a hammer while the parenthetical figure at the far right leans into the task of cutting metal with shears. In the background, a small figure works the bellows to keep the fire hot. Products of this sweaty labor are also on display; armor hangs on the wall behind Vulcan’s head; a gleaming breastplate rests on the floor. The inescapable focus of visual attention is the strip of red hot metal on the anvil in front of Vulcan. With breathtaking powers of description Velázquez has been able to convey the metal’s incandescence, so intense that it casts light onto the top of the anvil. Velázquez also conveys that the red is not just the metal’s surface color, but something that radiates from within; this he accomplishes by adding white pigment to the richly impastoed paint of this passage, and by varying the color along a gradient that ranges from the dark (and cool) end of the metal strip to its glowing, almost white, center. Vulcan tilts the metal up with his tongs as he prepares to strike another blow with the hammer he holds in his right hand. This tilting up is also what allows for the metal to cast light on the anvil, and for its surface to be displayed to viewers in its full, glowing glory. It is important to consider the choices Velázquez made in depicting this scene, keeping in mind that the artist for once was in total control of his subject. To begin with, most representations of the story did not show the meeting of Apollo and Vulcan in the forge, but the later moment when Mars and Venus are humiliatingly ensnared in a net made by the master metalworker. Velázquez purposefully chose to represent Vulcan’s physical work. As Oliver Noble-Wood has noted, all but one of the translations of Ovid likely available to Velázquez, and at least one illustration, differ in their descriptions of Vulcan’s reaction to the terrible news transmitted by Apollo. In the painting, Vulcan holds on to his tools in a way that proleptically alludes to the making of the net to trap Venus and Mars. In most of the sources, Vulcan drops his tools in shock.18 In choosing to adapt Antonio Tempesta’s illustration (Fig. 38), where Vulcan keeps a firm hold on his tools, Velázquez gave agency to Vulcan’s hands. As a center of visual attention, the tilted metal in The Forge of Vulcan recalls the woman spinning of The Spinners. In both paintings, an artisan engages in turning inchoate matter into something ordered and meaningful. The spinner turns wool into impossibly fine thread that is then made into a tapestry. Vulcan hammers the metal that eventually will become armor, like the shining breastplate that catches the eye at the bottom right of the composition. In The Spinners, I argued that the deft spinner, whose skill is so great that she turns away from the action and relies on touch alone, represented Velázquez’s own skill as a painter, able to make from masterfully applied brushstrokes the brilliant illusion of the women at work.

18 Noble-Wood, 2014, pp. 165–169. Sánchez de Viana, 1589, fol. 35. The illustration showing Vulcan having dropped his tools is in Bonsignori, 1497, fol. 28r. For a discussion of the image, see Noble-Wood, 2014, p. 33.

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The same argument can be made for The Forge of Vulcan. The deft hands of the lowly women spinning wool in The Spinners exemplified the mechanical skill that Velázquez saw as central to the performance of painting. In Las Meninas he showed himself with a hand that merged with the brush, and with a palette tilted up so the materials of painting would be on show, just like the glowing metal is tilted up in The Forge of Vulcan. With these two paintings it is clear that Velázquez gave priority to the mechanics of making. The Forge of Vulcan is similarly a scene of skilled making. In The Spinners, there is a competition for attention between foreground and background. The foreground women are the clear winners in riveting our attention. In The Forge of Vulcan the dynamic is played out between Vulcan and Apollo. Just as in The Spinners, where Velázquez chose to identify with the lowly act of mechanical skill, mirrored as well in Las Meninas, here it is Vulcan and not Apollo with whom he identifies. Some have argued that Apollo, not Vulcan, is the focus of The Forge of Vulcan. Apollo wears magnificent, luminous orange drapery, and there can be no doubt that the viewer’s eye is drawn to this figure. He is brighter than Vulcan and his assistants, and they all direct their attention toward Apollo.19 But the glowing metal on the anvil distracts significantly from Apollo. This distraction is intentional, is about the work of Vulcan and, by implication, the work of Velázquez himself. The heat of the metal can be read in terms of Vulcan’s hot anger at the news of his betrayal, or, given its positioning directly in front of his loins, of his passion for Venus. It can also be read as an illusionistic distraction from the narrative, a distraction that was actually no such thing for Velázquez and speaks to the priority he gave both to the physical act of painting, and to illusionism. The glowing metal in The Forge of Vulcan resonates with a story told by Pacheco in El arte de la pintura about a painting of The Last Supper by Pablo de Céspedes. Pacheco relates how a beautifully painted glass carafe on the table before Christ would transfix viewers and take them away from a consideration of the narrative. This violated one of the central tenets of how people should respond to a history painting, especially one on such a solemn theme. According to Pacheco, Céspedes honored this principle and painted over the vase, annoyed at people’s misplaced fascination with the trickery of illusionism.20 It has been argued that The Waterseller of Seville (Fig. 39) was an eloquent rejection by Velázquez of this system of priorities. Elevated subject matter is absent from The Waterseller of Seville, and the illusion of the oversized glass is the center of pictorial attention.21 That said, The Waterseller of Seville was not a history painting. The Forge of Vulcan is actually a better complement to Pacheco’s anecdote. The Forge of Vulcan is most definitely a history painting, and, as discussed above, Velázquez was committed to creating a work that would fulfill the requirements 19 Of particular importance for analyses that place Apollo front and center, see Tolnay, 1961; Gállego, 1990. For a good review of the literature on this painting, see Kientz, 2015a. 20 Pacheco, 2001, p. 521. 21 Veliz, 1996, p. 84.

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Fig. 39. Velázaquez, The Waterseller of Seville, London, Apsley House. Photo: V & A Images, London/Art Resource, NY

of that genre. However, it is hard not to conclude that he sought to undermine the authority of the history painting ideal by including an illusionistic distraction along exactly the same lines as the glass carafe painted over by Céspedes, the difference being that there was never any question of him painting over the red-hot iron. He did not follow the recommendation offered by Pacheco as the lesson to be gleaned from this anecdote: “Well then, it suffices to say that one must pay close attention to the most important and difficult things, which are the figures, and to keep away from the diversions so deprecated by the great masters.”22 On the contrary, Velázquez surely

22 Pacheco, 2001, p. 521: “Bastante documento para que se haga caso de las cosas mayores y más dificultosas, que son las figuras, y se huya de semejantes divertimientos despreciados siempre de los grandes maestros.” Translation from Veliz, 1986, p. 100.

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knew that viewers would be attracted to his tour de force of illusionistic skill, as well as to his figures. It is helpful to consider the relative priority of Apollo and Vulcan in The Forge of Vulcan in relation to Velázquez’s treatment of the human figure in his other works. In some ways, the figure of Apollo marks a new development in Velázquez’s art, away from dark, tightly applied paint that results in dense, opaque forms. Painted on a light ground, the loose strokes of the drapery passages in particular presage the open painterliness that will be a defining hallmark of Velázquez’s mature manner. The Spinners and Las Meninas are inconceivable without Velázquez having adapted this Venetian-inspired practice. While that needs to be kept in mind, the figure of Apollo itself has little do with any other figure in Velázquez’s oeuvre. Apollo is idealized in the classical mold. There is little sense that his body or facial features are those of an individual. As a result, the painting is built around a great contrast. The cyclopes of the forge may not have been shown as the one-eyed monsters dictated by the literary sources, and even though we can see none of them full face, they are all strongly individualized. Even the most casual glance at paintings by Velázquez reveals that all his works are grounded in a highly particularized reality; this is a consistent thread stretching from Seville all the way through to the late works. Apollo simply does not belong in this company. It is almost as if The Forge of Vulcan is a meeting of two cultures, with Apollo in the role of an effete Italy while Vulcan and his helpers play gruff, naturalistic Spain. Apollo is such an outlier that if one considers the painting in terms of a competition between the poetic and the practical, between Apollo and Vulcan, and if one sees this not just as a history painting demonstration but as a deeply felt meditation on Velázquez’s own priorities as an artist, then the unavoidable conclusion is that rough-hewn Vulcan and his companions easily trump flouncy Apollo. Velázquez might have chosen to identify with Vulcan because, as noted above, his control of fire was understood as a metaphor for all artistic endeavor. Juan Pérez de Moya’s Philosofía secreta (1585), a commentary on the myths of the ancients listed in Velázquez’s library, reveals that Vulcan was understood not just as a skilled blacksmith, but as a fundamental figure through which all artistic creativity could be understood: Fire, symbolized by Vulcan, is made by wit and art as are all things which imitate those objects wrought by Nature. Therefore, St. Augustine calls Vulcan the artificer of the goddess Minerva because without fire, understood to mean Vulcan, none of the arts represented by Minerva can be practiced.23 23 Translation from Moffitt, 1983, p. 324. Pérez de Moya, 1928, vol. 1, p. 172: “Que las ximias criasen a Vulcano, es decir, que así como las ximias imitan a lo que los hombres hacen, ansí con el fuego, entendido por Vulcano, se hacen con ingenio y arte, cosas que imitan a las que obra naturaleza. Por la cual, san Augustín le llama artífice de la diosa Minerva, porque sin fuego, entendido por Vulcano, ninguna arte entendida por Minerva se puede ejercitar.”

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Vulcan masters the fire just as Velázquez masters his pigments, and both are transformative acts, from metal to armor in one instance, from pigment to illusion in the other. The Forge of Vulcan also addresses the paragone, the theoretical discussion over the relative merits of painting and sculpture. I have discussed this connection extensively elsewhere. I shall recapitulate my argument here because it speaks to the relationship between The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob, and also because the paragone is a theme addressed in other works by Velázquez, and by Rembrandt.24 The seriousness of the paragone is sometimes dismissed out of hand because there is an absurd apples-versus-oranges quality to its arguments. For twenty-first-century viewers, the very notion that one might seriously advocate on behalf of one medium at the expense of another seems infantile. Painting and sculpture are simply different, made of different materials, according to different terms. That is not how painting and sculpture were considered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Advocates of painting believed this medium to be superior because it required less physical effort and was therefore nobler than sculpture. Painting was capable of representing a fuller range of visual phenomena than sculpture. On the other hand, sculpture was true to the forms it represented and did not rely on the base trickery of illusion like painting did. In The Forge of Vulcan Velázquez once again reveals himself as unorthodox in terms of theory. As I argued above, Velázquez identified with the work of Vulcan. Vulcan beats the metal into armor just the artist makes illusions through his own skill and labor. By showing Vulcan at work, by emphasizing that work and showing its products, like the breastplate, Velázquez seems to be saying that painting, like sculpture, is laborious. On the other hand, Velázquez also represents the full range of the visual world in a way that sculpture could not. For example, Velázquez depicts both the movement of fire, in the forge to the right where sparks dance their frenzied way up the chimney, and the incandescence of fire, in the glowing strip of metal hammered on the anvil. Moreover, that strip of metal is an object that simply cannot be represented convincingly in sculpture. Sculpture represents form and form alone. Cold or hot, the form is more or less the same. Only painting can describe the form of the strip of metal, and also its internal, light-generating heat. Deceit is a theme that links The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob. It is also an issue raised by the paragone. For advocates of sculpture the medium was founded on nothing less than truth because the forms of a sculpture were the same as the forms of the object represented. Painting, by contrast, relied on illusionism: the form of the paint has nothing to do with the object it depicts. A blind person can touch and know a sculpture, but touching a painting reveals only a flat

24 Knox, 2017.

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surface. Painters could claim that skill was needed to create these illusions, but there was no avoiding that sculpture was somehow a truer medium than painting. In Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob (Fig. 36), Velázquez focuses on the two brothers at the center presenting the stained coat to Jacob. With the coat, and the artful dissimulation of their true emotions, they convince their father that Joseph is dead. Velázquez represents the brothers’ deception through his own deception, the trickery of paint. Velázquez deceives us convincingly through his masterful rendering of their emotions by means of gesture, expression, and pose. The object used by Velázquez, therefore, is a cloth stained skillfully with pigment, a kind of painting in other words.25 In this way, it is possible to see Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob as yet another example of the artist’s unlikely identification with figures he represents. In The Spinners, the identification was with the lowly women of the foreground zone. In The Forge of Vulcan, the identification was with Vulcan, the crippled cuckold. Here, it seems, Velázquez identified his creative skill with the two brothers in the center of Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob. Like him, they make things to deceive the eye. Like him, they have made a stained cloth. In this way, Velázquez addresses his painting to the paragone, though not simply by parroting its conventions. He seems to embrace, partially at least, the sculptors’ needling claims that painting was about deception. He thereby reappropriated their critique and inverted its value. Yes, painting is indeed about deception, he seems to say, and the goal of the medium is to create affectively convincing illusions of reality. It makes for a good thematic pairing with the idea expressed in The Forge of Vulcan, which earmarked physical work, usually associated with sculpture, as central to the making of illusions. In taking these two positions Velázquez also pushes back at the authority of the history-painting ideal, all the while demonstrating his mastery of it. In The Spinners, viewers witness the work of turning raw wool into thread, which Velázquez saw as a metaphor for the transformative process of painting. In Las Meninas, the artist with his brush and palette references the act of painting directly. The act is suspended temporarily. Even if Velázquez had chosen to show himself at work on the canvas, it would be hidden from our view, tantalizingly near, yet impossible to discern. So, while the practice of painting is alluded to, the emphasis in the end is on the product of that process, the spectacular illusion of the movements unfolding within the rooms of the Alcázar. A similar contrast can be drawn between the two paintings discussed above. The Forge of Vulcan foregrounds both process and product, while Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob centers not on making itself but on the use to which a made object, the artfully stained coat in this case, is put. A similar parallel can productively be 25 Marías, 2017, p. 75, concluded his essay with: “Perhaps we should name this painting more precisely for the object that personifies, in an emotive form, the biblical hero and that is constituted as the very place of painting: ‘La camisa de José’ (‘Joseph’s Shirt’), a piece of white canvas stained with color.”

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made with respect to some of the paintings from the Seville period, as well. The Old Woman Cooking Eggs (Fig. 29), and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Plate 3) are paintings that place an unprecedented emphasis on humble acts of making, while the Waterseller of Seville (Fig. 39) indubitably revolves around the illusion of a product made by a skilled artisan; the magnificent glass.

The Old Woman Cooking Eggs and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha Though The Old Woman Cooking Eggs (Fig. 29) seems not to have had a literary source, it resonates with a variety of themes. In the previous chapter I discussed the work’s relationship to the art of Toledo, especially the still life paintings of Juan Sánchez Cotán. Elsewhere, I have argued that the work should be considered in relationship to the paragone.26 The litany of varied objects lovingly represented by the young artist speaks to the ability of painting to show the world in all its diverse forms. The cooking eggs seem present almost as a provocation to sculptors and their obsession with three-dimensional form. The form of the eggs stays more or less constant during the cooking process, but they change nonetheless, from raw to cooked, and it is this visual change over time that Velázquez specifically addresses. A sculpture of a cooked egg would be more or less the same as one of a raw egg. It is the same kind of provocation he wrought with the glowing metal of The Forge of Vulcan; a sculpture of hot metal would be more or less the same as one of cold metal. The humble act of making stands as another of Velázquez’s concerns here. The case for Vulcan was easy to make given his importance as armor maker to the gods, a skilled artisan in other words. Still, it was an unusual choice when Velázquez could have opted for the theoretically sanctioned figure of Apollo. Here, no sun god competes with the careful, skilled cooking performed by the humble old woman. Like Vulcan in The Forge of Vulcan, the old woman holds in her left hand the substance to be worked by the right hand, just as Velázquez himself does in Las Meninas with the brush and the palette. In place of Vulcan’s hammer, poised to strike its next blow, is a spoon, carefully gripped between thumb and index finger ready to pour hot oil on top of the cooking eggs, and to retrieve the slippery eggs from the cooking oil once the whites have hardened and are fully opaque.27 Vulcan works the metal. The old woman cooks the eggs. Velázquez creates the stunning illusion of the partly cooked eggs and red-hot metal. Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Plate 3) is frequently cited as a precedent for the kind of inversion used in The Spinners. In both, a genre scene fills the foreground, while the backgrounds, in both instances painted in a quite different manner, house a narrative drawn from a canonical source, the Bible in this case. Though 26 Knox, 2017, pp. 49–51. 27 On the specific kind of eggs she is preparing, huevos a la flamenca, see Alcock, 1996, pp. 19–20.

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clearly a resonance was intended between foreground and background scenes, a relationship I have discussed at length with regards to The Spinners, one needs to be wary of considering the literary text as an essential key to all aspects of the painting’s meaning. The celebration of physical skill is the dominant theme of The Spinners. This celebration develops out of the mythological tale, but it would be a mistake to favor the story over what the eye can see. As a consequence, scholars who insist on the centrality of the story must explain why it was pushed into the background. They can cite the precedents for such inversion in Netherlandish prints, and they are certainly correct to see inspiration in this area. The mere existence of these prints, however, do not explain Velázquez’s choice in employing them, and explanations advanced to explain the seeming inversion of narrative priority for the Netherlandish examples do not necessarily explain Velázquez’s purpose. Pointing to the brighter illumination of the background scene as evidence of its greater importance to the meaning of the painting as a whole ignores the visual priorities of the composition, where the foreground spinners dominate.28 The meaning of the painting is informed by the story of Arachne, but it is not first and foremost a depiction of that narrative. The same kind of analysis can produce very similar results when applied to Christ in the House of Mary and Martha. As with The Spinners, I believe this painting is a meditation on artistic process and the relative positions of labor and ideation within that process. Christ in the House of Mary and Martha is a painting divided. A humble scene of food preparation is ranged in a narrow space just behind the picture plane. Shown half-length, an old woman at the far left (perhaps based on the same model Velázquez used for The Old Woman Cooking Eggs) leans toward and points at a young woman right next to her. The old woman furrows her brow, and while we can only imagine the tenor of their conversation, the young woman looks out unhappily toward the viewer. With her left hand she steadies a mortar against the work of the pestle she holds with her right. The ingredients she is presumably pounding in the mortar are depicted on the table: garlic, pepper, eggs, and oil, are all mashed together into an aioli to accompany the four fish in a traditional Lenten meal. Though rarely remarked upon, the mortar and pestle are almost exactly at the center of the composition’s left-right axis. In the upper right corner of the canvas, taking up around one sixth of the painting’s surface area (as in The Spinners and its scene of Minerva and Arachne), is a rather traditional depiction of Christ in the house of Mary and Martha. The Gospel 28 Jonathan Brown, for instance, recognized that the foreground women “bring the picture to life,” but did not follow up on the implications of that observation, instead concluding that “the refined atmosphere of the artist’s atelier is perhaps Velázquez’ way of implying his conviction about the distinction between art and craft.” Brown, 1986, p. 253. Javier Portús’s lengthy discussion of the painting deals almost exclusively with the background, which he sees as having been specially emphasized by Velázquez. Portús, 2007, pp. 284–294.

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account tells how during Christ’s visit Martha busied herself with the tasks of a hostess while Mary sat in apparent idleness as she listened to his words. Martha scolded Mary for her indolence but was unexpectedly rebuked herself as Christ explained that attentive contemplation was more important than her domestic chores. With his hand raised to indicate speech Christ is seated with Mary at his feet, while Martha raises her hands in what one presumes to be indignation. Not only do the two parts of the painting represent different worlds – a contemporary scene in the foreground and an historically distant narrative in the background – they are also painted differently. The women in the kitchen are painted with the precise descriptiveness characteristic of so much of Velázquez’s Seville work, whereas the biblical event is loose and painterly. Light comes from a different direction in the two parts of the painting, from the upper left in the foreground and from the right in the smaller scene. Compounding the ambiguity of the relationship between the two parts of the painting are the orthogonals of the aperture that frames the narrative; these are incorrect if viewers are meant to read this part of the image as a view into a different room. It is impossible to know whether the episode of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha should be read as a mirror (the raised left hand of Christ, as well as the painterly technique, suggests this reading), as a painting within a painting (the very different technique suggests this reading), or as a view into an adjoining room (the appearance of an opening rather than a frame recommends this reading, albeit with the caveat of the incorrect orthogonals).29 How the two parts of the painting might productively be read together has been the focus of considerable scholarly attention. In spite of the spatial ambiguities noted above, there is a visual relationship between the two parts. The fish, for instance, are on the same axis as the figure of Christ. Fish had been traditional symbols of Jesus from an early date. This visual bond invites consideration of conceptual links, such as the fact that domestic work is one of the themes of the foreground action, just as it is for the Gospel story. Tanya Tiffany has argued that the painting as a whole is a meditation on the relative position of contemplative and physical work within the religious environment of early-seventeenth-century Seville.30 Surprisingly, the story was not interpreted as a simple win for the contemplative within the economy of salvation. Instead, contemporary religious literature considered physical work as an important preparatory stage leading the way toward contemplation. Physical work had value, and this was signaled in Velázquez’s composition by means of the emphasis he placed on the work of the young woman preparing aioli. The large foreground 29 Tiffany, 2005, reads the relationship of foreground to inset as intentionally ambiguous. Boyd and Esler, 2004, pp. 52–65, interpret the inset as the young servant woman’s indignant vision of the Gospel scene. Glen, 2000, considers the inset image to be a reflection of the scene the young woman in the foreground looks out toward. 30 Tiffany, 2005; see also Cacho Casal, 2000, where the author argues that the old woman represents Martha’s maid.

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women, therefore, painted with an emphasis on the concreteness of their forms to emphasize the materiality of their undertaking, contrast with the ethereal forms of the spiritualized background. One is a preamble to the other. Without in any way pushing aside the clear religious message of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, I would like to suggest that Velázquez’s painting may simultaneously have had an art theoretical purpose. The place of the physical within writing on art was vexed, especially in a Spain where the profession of painter was still considered a mechanical, artisanal, and therefore lowly profession. What I would like to argue is that Christ in the House of Mary and Martha anticipates by some 35 years the agenda of The Spinners and Las Meninas. In the later paintings Velázquez makes the counterintuitive claim that painting is fundamentally a mechanical undertaking. His bold statement made little sense in the court environment of the 1650s, at a time when his work as a painter stood in the way of his ambition to become a knight of Santiago. It made just as little sense in his Seville period, for this corresponded precisely to his time in the famous “gilded cage” of Pacheco’s academy. There was likely no place in Spain that offered a more intellectual atmosphere for the making of art. Yet it was at this time that Velázquez chose to paint bodegones, traditionally the least intellectual of all the genres, below even portraiture and its requirement for unthinking imitation. There is no need, it turns out, to leap forward all the way to the time of The Spinners to find a suitable context for the defiance of orthodoxy found in Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, even if the later painting does offer an appropriate parallel. As with The Spinners, the painting itself is the most eloquent advocate of the idea that it is to the work of the foreground that an appropriate burden of meaning must apply. There is no doubt of the importance of the biblical narrative to this parable of artistic process, yet it would be a mistake to consider this narrative as the only key to the picture’s meaning.31 Though the Gospel story is more brightly illuminated than the foreground women, it only comprises a small portion of the picture’s surface area. Moreover, our attention is not focused on the indistinct figures in that part of the composition. Instead, just as with The Old Woman Cooking Eggs, the beautifully painted still life objects transfix us, their surfaces carefully differentiated in response to the incident light: the squiggly lines of the dried garlic roots, which play off the wrinkles of the dried red pepper skin; the matte, papery white of the garlic skin; the reflective, moist iridescence of the four fish; the bright surfaces of the eggs, with highlights more diffuse than on the reflective metal of the mortar; the reflection of the bright egg on the edge of the back of the downturned spoon. The young woman at work also draws our attention. She looks out and meets the gaze of the viewer with

31 Bray, 2006, p. 122. After describing the foreground, he goes on to say: “It is beyond this scene, however, that the real subject of the painting is revealed through what appears to be a serving hatch.”

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an expression of dejection, or perhaps truculence in response to the admonishment she is presumably receiving from the old woman to the left. In giving priority to thought over action, Pacheco’s art theory reflected the values of Vasari and other, largely Italian sources. He lauded the history painting as the most prestigious of the genres because making a history painting required deep thought and an understanding of its unimpeachably intellectual sources: mainly classical mythology and the Bible. In his rather apologetic discussion of portraiture Pacheco makes it clear that history painting is superior: My opinion is thus because the name and fame achieved by Apelles in antiquity, and by Raphael of Urbino and the great Titian in their time, did not proceed from their portraits (although these were marvelous), but rather from the invention, skill, and grandeur of their histories.32

Technical ability had its place within his theory, of course, for without it nothing could be achieved, but the straightforward copying of appearances was but a step along the path to the more elevated concerns of ideal form.33 Artists should be careful observers of nature, but “perfection consists in passing from ideas to nature, and from nature to ideas, always seeking the best, most sure and perfect.”34 In the final chapter of El arte de la pintura Pacheco sums up why he believes painting should be considered a liberal art. He contrasts the liberal arts with the mechanical arts. These, “because they are exercised with the body, are called servile and worthy of subject people. In Greek, mechanical means thing of the body because it consists of bodily forces. […] The [liberal] arts and painting are marvelous habits of the mind, which is the free and immortal part of man.”35 It should be obvious that the duality of ideation and the practical in Pacheco’s art theory closely parallels the message of the Gospel story. Christ’s message is that contemplation is more important than physical work. Pacheco’s theory places the head over the hand. Not surprisingly, given what we know about Velázquez’s goals as an artist, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha does not present us with a clean recapitulation of the party line. 32 Pacheco, 1990, p. 522, “Hablo desta manera, porque el nombre y fama que alcanzó Apeles en la antigüedad, Rafael de Urbino y el gran Ticiano, en su tiempo, no les vino de parte de los retratos (aunque fueron maravillosos), sino de las invenciones, caudal y grandeza de sus historias.” Translation from Veliz, 1986, p. 100. 33 Villaseñor Black, 2009. Seeking to separate Pacheco from his Italian sources, Villaseñor Black presents an alternative reading of the relevant priority Pacheco places on theory and practice. 34 Pacheco, 2001, p. 275: “De manera, que la perfección consiste en pasar de las ideas o a lo natural, y de lo natural a las ideas; buscando siempre lo mejor y más seguro y perfecto.” 35 Pacheco, 2001, pp. 550–551: “Las mecánicas, porque se exercitan con el cuerpo, se dixeron serviles y dignas de gente sujeta. Mecánico en lengua griega […] quiere decir cosa de cuerpo, porque consiste en fuerzas del cuerpo. […] Son las artes y la pintura hábitos maravillosos del entendimiento, que es la parte libre e immortal del hombre.”

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In placing such emphasis on the work of the foreground young woman Velázquez appears to advocate on behalf of the mechanical foundation of painting. Like the women in The Spinners, or the old woman in The Old Woman Cooking Eggs, or Vulcan in The Forge of Vulcan, she stands as a kind of surrogate for Velázquez’s own actions as an artist, a role he finally played himself in Las Meninas. In doing so, Velázquez proclaims the centrality of technical ability to his theoretical vision of the artist. The work performed in the mortar and pestle in Christ in the House of Mary and Martha occupies the very center of the painting’s horizontal axis. The same mortar and pestle appear again in An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, also in a prominent position, this time just in front of the old woman’s left forearm. The mortar and pestle would not have been out of place in any seventeenth-century kitchen. They were standard equipment in most kitchens, even modest ones.36 They would also inevitably have brought to mind other contexts in which they were used. Apothecaries used the mortar and pestle to grind substances into medicinal powders. Pigments were also ground with these tools, which explains the historical associations between painters and apothecaries. Schematic representations of the mortar and pestle remain in use today in pharmacy logos. They are presented in both paintings as tools for food preparation, but they cannot escape association with the grinding of pigment, the basic raw material from which paint was made, and out of which artists crafted their illusions. The mortar and pestle sometimes made their way into allegorical representations of painting. In Bathélémy de Chasseneux’s Catalogus gloriae mundi, 1546, an engraving illustrating the practical arts includes a personification labeled “Architectura” (Fig. 40). Ranged around her are the tools used in architecture and sculpture, while on the wall behind hang four paintings, making clear that all three of these arts are to be considered under the rubric of architecture. On a shelf beneath two of the paintings appears a mortar and pestle. The 1579 edition of this encyclopedia featured engravings by Jost Amman. Once again, a personification of “Architectura” represents the three arts, and once again a mortar and pestle appear next to a group of paintings (Fig. 41).37 This tool does not appear frequently in allegories of art making, but it seems significant that these illustrations appear where painting is described as belonging to the practical arts. This likely resonated with Velázquez. In most representations of pigment preparation, the grinding of the pigments on a broad, flat stone is shown instead, and this becomes the standard way of showing the mechanical aspect of painting. Nonetheless, Antonio Palomino makes it clear that colors were first ground in a mortar: “All of these colors are ground on the losa, having broken

36 Information on the mortar and pestle in early modern Europe was provided by the online catalogue of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2017, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O127126/mortar-and-pestle/, accessed on 26 April 2017 37 King, 2007, pp. 23–26.

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Fig. 40. Barthélémy de Chasseneux, Catalogus gloriae mundi, Lyons, 1546, fol. 212 verso. Photo: The Getty Research Institute

them up first in the mortar until powdered.”38 In both paintings Velázquez alludes to this fundamental first step in pigment preparation.

38 Veliz, 1986, p. 155, from Palomino y Velasco, 1715–1724.

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Fig. 41. Jost Amman, from Barthélémy de Chasseneux, Catalogus gloriae mundi, Frankfurt, 1571. Photo: British Museum

Alchemists also used the mortar and pestle. The goal of alchemy, like painting, was to transform materials, quite literally in the case of alchemy, while painting sought only to create the illusion of other materials. Still, the two were often likened to each other.39 Eggs appear in both paintings as well. Egg yolks were the traditional binder for the making of paint before the advent of the oil technique. Oil is present as well, cooking the eggs in one painting. Also, the identical dark pitchers to the far right of both paintings presumably contain oil. In this way both paintings feature a tool used for grinding the painter’s pigments, as well as the two agents traditionally used for binding those pigments. Las Meninas, The Spinners, and The Forge of Vulcan are all explicitly paintings about the making of art, of painting, tapestry, and metalwork, respectively. The Old Woman Cooking Eggs and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha revolve around the humble act of food preparation. Cooking, however, like painting, was at its core an act of transformation. As Pacheco himself put it, the painter was like God, “who makes precious things out of nothing.”40 With humble pigments the painter was able 39 Newman, 2004, pp. 115–163. 40 Pacheco, 2001, p. 106: “También la ligereza y poco embarazo en le obrar, y la sencillez de materia, hace mayor la profesión de la pintura y más semejante a Dios, que de nada hace cosas preciocas.”

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Fig. 42. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens, Allegory of Taste, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY

to represent all the various things of the world. Likewise, cooking involved the combination of humble ingredients and their transformation into life-giving nourishment. There is evidence that the parallel I am making between painting and cooking existed in the seventeenth century and could certainly have been known by the young Velázquez. Recently, Elizabeth McFadden has argued that the Allegory of Taste (Fig. 42), part of a series of allegories of the senses by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens, can be read in precisely this way.41 Cooking as a metaphor for painting is one of many themes raised by the Allegory of Taste. Painted for the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, the rich display of fish, fruit, and game along the bottom edge of the composition alludes to the abundance of their realm. Plenty is also the theme of two of the paintings within the painting that hang on the wall above a long table. To the left is an adaptation of Pieter Bruegel’s engraving The Rich Kitchen, which presents a scene of overindulgence, whereas to the right a Marriage at Cana puts plenty in a positive light. At table left of center sits a young woman. She eats what McFadden reads as an oyster, while a lasciviously grinning satyr pours wine into a gold kylix. An abundance of tasty morsels is a good thing, the painting seems to say, but they are to be enjoyed in moderation. The sin of overindulgence in one realm can lead to sin in others, as the satyr with the wine makes clear.

41 McFadden, 2014. See also Meads, 2010, for the likening of cooking and the writing of plays.

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The hypothesis that the Allegory of Taste establishes a parallel between painting and cooking stems from the juxtaposition of the large painting-within-a-painting at the bottom left of the composition with the kitchen scene above and behind. The original of the painting shown in Allegory of Taste, Fruit Garland with an Offering to Ceres, was made by the same artist as the Allegory, though this time as a collaboration with Hendrick van Balen. As goddess of agriculture, Ceres keeps good company with the abundant display of the earth’s fruitfulness in the rest of the painting. As a painting within a painting, by the same artist as the Allegory, it also points to the ability of the artist to match the generative power of nature. Directly above and to the right is an opening into a kitchen scene behind. This resonates visually with the representation of Fruit Garland with an Offering to Ceres because both are bounded by a broad, black border, a picture frame for one, a doorframe for the other. Within the kitchen two figures are busy at work. One turns a spit to cook meat before a fire, and another, his back turned to us, seems to be preparing fowl to add to the spit leaning against the wall to his left, already furnished with one uncooked carcass. Close to the threshold, ingredients are laid out for our inspection: some fish, a cabbage, and a basket of plucked game. We witness the very process of transforming raw ingredients into food, just as we are presented with the foreground painting-within-a-painting, similarly reminding us that what we are looking at is the result of a transformative process, from pigment to magnificent illusion. Thinking of this transformative dynamic in terms of the Allegory as a whole we see the full spectrum of food, from living, to raw, to cooked. To the right are the fields and forest where the game lives and is hunted. In the foreground are the dead game animals. To the left is the kitchen where the animals are transformed into food, presented as a lavish display on the table in the center. Of particular note are the bird pies, one a peacock pie, the other a swan pie. The process of cooking has transformed their reputedly inedible flesh into palatable fare, all the while repulsively (to modern tastes, at least) reproducing the form of the original, living creature.42 The display thematizes the transformative artifice of cooking and, because of the painting-within-the-painting at the bottom left, the transformative power of the painter is introduced as a parallel. Painters create illusions of life just as the master chef has recreated the appearance of a living swan, and made it edible to boot. The religious interpretation of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha proposed by Tiffany harmonizes neatly with the art theoretical argument I have made above. In the religious literature of seventeenth-century Seville the story validated work because labor was a stepping-stone on the path to spiritual contemplation. For Velázquez, too, work comes first. Pacheco, you will recall, said that “perfection consists in passing from ideas to nature, and from nature to ideas.” What Velázquez does, 42 McFadden, 2014, p. 43. See also Varriano, 2009, pp. 15–17, for a discussion of the same idea in the Italian context.

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by contrast, is to place nature in the first position. He does so by showing the women and the objects laid out on the counter in the high naturalism of his best Seville period work, and by having the young girl work at an activity that alludes to the very first step in the making of a painting, the grinding of pigment. Without pigment, there can be no painting. The observation of nature comes first, before any ideas; it is from that fundamental activity that ideas develop. The evidence for concluding that Christ in the House of Mary and Martha may relate to art theoretical as well as religious concerns comes not just from the painting itself, and the fact that he was schooled in art theory by Pacheco, but from the whole body of work produced by Velázquez in these early years. Although it must have been immensely gratifying for Pacheco to have had such a supremely talented painter as apprentice, none of his early works conform with the insipid classicism the master advocated. Whether it is the excessive naturalism of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and the Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 26), or the insistence on painting in the lowest of the genres, as in The Waterseller of Seville and The Old Woman Cooking Eggs, Velázquez produced not a single work we know of that coincides closely with the principles conveyed to him by Pacheco. And when one considers that Velázquez would have understood Pacheco’s pictorial output as the outcome of those principles, it really comes as no surprise that the young artist turned his back on his master’s example. When put into practice by Pacheco, the proposed sequence for conceiving of a painting – ideas first, nature second, and then back to ideas – resulted in works that were stiff, clumsy and unconvincing. It was hardly material likely to stimulate a talented young artist to follow the same path. As I proposed in the previous chapter, the distinctive kind of naturalism developed by Velázquez might well have developed out of an early meeting with Juan Bautista Maíno in Toledo. From Maíno he could have learned about how Caravaggio famously proclaimed himself to have no need of exalted artistic exempla, or even ideas, preferring to copy nature directly.43 This theoretical stance aligns much more closely with what Velázquez seems to have done in his early work and further strengthens the hypothesis of an early connection to Caravaggio’s Rome through the person of Maíno. To copy nature as Caravaggio had done required mastery of the medium and its technical exigencies. To be clear: I am not suggesting that technique and the copying of an unmediated nature represented the be all and end all of Velázquez’s goals as an artist (nor those of Caravaggio!), in Seville, or much later in Madrid when he painted The Spinners. I am simply asserting that, 43 We do not, of course, have any direct evidence of Caravaggio’s art theoretical outlook, but commentators starting as early as Karel van Mander in 1603 comment on his lack of indebtedness to the past. Though this attitude would later become a cornerstone of the criticism directed at the artist, there seems no reason to doubt that Caravaggio himself put about the idea, thereby fashioning himself as more of a radical than he actually was. For a good discussion of the contrast between this critical perspective and the fact that Caravaggio was actually indebted to a wide range of earlier and contemporary artists, see Varriano, 2006, pp. 19–33.

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as this chapter has highlighted, technique mattered deeply to Velázquez, and that throughout his career he painted works that thematized its importance. Christ in the House of Mary and Martha and The Old Woman Cooking Eggs are the first in a long sequence of such self-conscious paintings. As with his choice of Caravaggio as a stylistic model, Velázquez’s insistence on the centrality of the act of painting ran counter to the theoretical precepts of Vasari.

4. Vulcan, Mars, and Venus: Erotic Touch Abstract This chapter situates Velázquez’s The Forge of Vulcan, Mars, and The Rokeby Venus as painted prompts for thoughts of erotic touching. Essential in this regard is the shared allusion to the story of Venus, Mars, and Vulcan, where erotic touching propels the narrative. Also explored are iconographic connections to contemporary allegories of the sense of touch. The visual relationship of Mars and The Rokeby Venus to works of sculpture is placed in the context of the paragone discourse, especially the different role of touch in the perception of the two media. Of particular focus is the provocative relationship between The Rokeby Venus and the Borghese Hermaphrodite. Keywords: Ludovisi Mars, Sculpture sense of touch, Painting sense of touch

Chapter Three centered on how Velázquez thematized mechanical skill, or, to put it another way, the artist’s touch. The delicacy of his touch is eloquently articulated by the spark-like brushstrokes animating the surface of Las Meninas (Fig. 35), or by the actual painted sparks that appear in The Forge of Vulcan (Plate 4). Touch is implicit in some of these paintings in other ways as well, both in terms of the representation of touching, and through iconographic allusions to touch, erotic touch in particular. Velázquez did not investigate the communicative value of touch nearly to the extent Rembrandt did, but skillful and erotic touch are both at play in the story of Venus, Mars, and Vulcan. Velázquez made The Forge of Vulcan, Mars (Fig. 43), and The Rokeby Venus (Plate 5) over the span of many years, for different venues, but these paintings are all driven by the same narrative, and they all emphasize the critical role of touch in propelling that story. Aside from Vulcan’s firm grip on his tools and materials, The Forge of Vulcan does not emphasize touching directly. The attentive viewer’s mind, though, inevitably remembers that Apollo discovered Mars and Venus in an erotic embrace, and recalls how that discovery led to the dramatic moment depicted in this painting, and to Vulcan’s clever response. Touch may have been associated with physical skill, as discussed in Chapter Three, but it was also among the material and most dangerous of the senses because of its connection with sex.

Knox, G., Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725712_ch04

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Fig. 43. Velázquez, Mars, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY

Upon hearing of his wife’s infidelity, Vulcan forged a nearly invisible net out of fine metal wire and hid it on the adulterers’ bed. When Mars and Venus came there to couple once more they became entangled and were unable to escape from Vulcan’s ingenious trap. Vulcan conspired to have the gods of Olympus come to witness the humiliating spectacle. His revenge was successful thanks to his cleverness, certainly, but also, subtly and importantly, to the skilled, artisanal touch required to manufacture the net. Contemporary audiences could readily have made the same association between the story of Vulcan’s revenge and the theme of touch. For example, Bartolomeo del Bene’s poem Civitas veri sive morum (1609) conceptualized the soul as a city with five gateways, each representing one of the senses. Appearing on top of the portal of touch, right above the inscription “P. DEL TATTO,” the nude figures of Venus and Mars

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Fig. 44. Bartolomeo del Bene, Portal of Touch, from Civitas very sive morum. Photo: The Getty Research Institute

are shown caught up in Vulcan’s net (Fig. 44).1 According to Elizabeth Harvey, Venus and Mars are featured in this way because their story condenses and embodies so much about the sense of touch: “pleasure and pain, illicit sex, manual skill, and social tact.”2 Vulcan’s net, moreover, was like a spider’s web, crafted with consummate skill, and strong enough to ensnare its victims. This sets up an association between Vulcan and Arachne that compounds the evidence I have presented that Vulcan serves as a kind of proxy for Velázquez’s own activity as a painter. Also, it is worth considering 1 2

Del Bene, 1609, p. 19. Harvey, 2011, pp. 392–393.

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Fig. 45. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens, Allegory of Touch, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY

a biographical echo, albeit not in the literal sense, in the events that unfolded following Apollo’s shocking revelation to Vulcan. Remember, Velázquez chose this subject himself to prove to his rivals in Madrid that he could create a history painting. He then went to the considerable effort of bringing this painting back to Spain from Italy, so that his rivals would be sure to see the evidence of his new mastery. Vulcan used his skill to craft a net to humiliate Mars and Venus; Velázquez painted The Forge of Vulcan. The same kind of biographical reading, though speculative, can also be applied to Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob (Fig. 36), executed around the same time, and with the same purpose in mind. Like the sons of Jacob, Velázquez convinces his rivals of his abilities with a stained cloth. Once again, Velázquez relies on his touch to create illusions of reality. The Allegory of Touch (Fig. 45) by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens, part of the same series as the Allegory of Taste (Fig. 42) discussed in the previous chapter, includes many of the same elements as Velázquez’s The Forge of Vulcan and further emboldens a reading of the painting in terms of this sense. In the middle ground just left of center is a group of smiths at work hammering out metal on an anvil.3 The results of these efforts – weapons and armor – are piled high in the foreground. To the right sits a mostly nude Venus, shown kissing winged Cupid. An orange cloth draped across Venus’s lap winds between her legs and cascades onto the floor. A rigid, upright suit of armor set on a pole in the center of the pile of weapons serves as a 3

For an excellent analysis of this painting, see Harvey, 2011, pp. 393–398.

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visual contrast to Venus’s soft, relaxed body. The hard, protective skin of the armor is thereby paralleled with the receptive, sensuous skin of the goddess of love – soft and receptive, for certain, but also vulnerable to the afflictions of pain, as represented by the painting of the Flagellation directly above her head. Love and war are figured in the parallel between Venus and the suit of armor, just as they are the off-stage protagonists very much on the minds of the smiths in Velázquez’s The Forge of Vulcan, where the vulnerable skin of the mostly naked workers stands in contrast to the shiny armor hanging on the wall behind Vulcan, and, more prominently, on the floor to the bottom right. Between the armor mounted in imitation of a standing man in the Allegory of Touch, and the soft and alluring figure of Venus, is an open brazier, present to indicate the sensation of heat on the skin, just as the figures in Velázquez’s painting stand next to the forge and the red-hot piece of metal, the heat of which is so intense that one can even see the light it casts onto the anvil below. Allegory of Touch is also a meditation on the imitative power of painting. In the middle ground to the left of Venus is a trompe l’oeil painting showing suits of armor, with a red curtain pulled back to reveal the illusion. Directly below, and also featuring a pulled-back curtain, are actual suits of armor, though of course everything is painted here and nothing is real. If they were real, however, one could distinguish one from the other through touch. One of the paragone’s persistent tropes was that sight and touch can apprehend sculpture, while understanding painting relies entirely on the sense of sight. Here, the painter exhibits his ability to show this distinction and make it submit to the sense of sight. Sight can distinguish the three dimensional from the flat – the armor from the framed painting of armor – all the while remaining true to the illusionistic trickery of the painting medium. Though more straightforward, The Forge of Vulcan also claimed for painting effects not possible in the medium of sculpture. The hot, incandescent strip of metal held by Vulcan is especially striking in this regard. Velázquez almost certainly did not know The Allegory of Touch before he painted The Forge of Vulcan. The Allegory was painted around 1617–1618, but the series of paintings on the senses did not make its way to Spain until 1634, after the date of The Forge of Vulcan.4 Rubens, however, was in Madrid in 1628 and it is generally supposed that he was one of the driving forces behind Velázquez’s trip to Rome. Velázquez surely told Rubens about the problems he was having with his detractors. Could it have been Rubens who suggested the subject of the painting Velázquez chose as his rebuttal piece? We cannot know, of course, but the rich allegorical references made by The Forge of Vulcan, to the paragone, and to the sense of touch, most certainly would not have been alien to Rubens, perhaps the most learned of all seventeenth-century painters. As mentioned above, Velázquez’s thematic choice invites biographical association. Through Vulcan, Velázquez proclaims his confidence that 4

Suchtelen, 2006.

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his skill will embarrass his rivals, just as Vulcan’s net humiliated Venus and Mars; just as Vulcan and his assistants make armor, using their skill to make an object that offered protection against the thrust of the sword; just as Velázquez made this painting to deflect the barbs of his rivals. Fast-forward just a few years and Velázquez once more turned his attention to the theme of Venus and Mars, and once more Venus is present only by implication. In Mars (Fig. 43), the god sits on the edge of an unmade bed. He is naked except for a blue cloth pulled around his middle and an absurd helmet that casts a dramatic shadow across his lavishly mustachioed face. A shield, armor, and a sword fill the foreground beneath his feet. With his left hand raised up to his chin Mars looks dejectedly toward the viewer. Adding to the masculine diminishment suggested by the discarded weapons below is the downward-turned baton of command held in his right hand. Scholars have long found this rather fatigued figure perplexing, for he appears to exemplify the exact opposite of what the god of war usually signifies. While clearly not a narrative painting in any conventional sense – it is hard to tell a story with only one, silent, and undemonstrative protagonist – the best explanation for the painting’s melancholy mood is that it represents the aftermath of Vulcan’s embarrassing reveal. This would account for his state of undress, the unmade bed, the discarded armor, and the melancholic introspection.5 Velázquez’s Mars recalls works of art he had seen a few years before in Italy. The position of the arms and the inward focus of the expression have long been linked with Michelangelo’s tomb sculpture of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence (Fig. 46). The way Mars’s left leg is lifted and bent, his heel hooked into the bed frame, is often associated with the Ludovisi Mars (Fig. 47). Velázquez surely would have seen this while in Rome. The Ludovisi Mars was discovered in 1622 and soon achieved enormous fame.6 When Velázquez returned to Italy in 1650 he oversaw the making of a plaster cast of the sculpture, which was then sent back to Philip IV.7 These Italian reminiscences, along with the theme of the awkward and humiliated Mars, make one wonder whether Velázquez might have painted this 5 Kahr, 1976, p. 92, was the first to suggest this reading. Brown, 2008, p. 158, follows this interpretation, as does Carr, 2006a. Brown and Garrido, 1998, p. 172, also argue that, inspired by Lucian, there may be a comic intent in depicting the rather deflated figure of Mars. For Cherry, 2007b, p. 258, the “picture is not a selfcontained narrative, and nor does it represent a specific moment from ancient mythology,” though he does suggest that viewers would associate what they see with the Venus story. Alpers, 1971, p. 136, read the painting in relationship to the hunt that took place at the Torre de la Parada. The hunt was where people honed their skills for war, and “Mars is at rest in respect to the hunt.” For a more recent discussion of how the Mars may relate to the overall program of decoration at the Torre de la Parada, see Georgievska-Shine and Silver, 2014, pp. 193–196. Prater, 2002, pp. 109–114, read the painting in political terms, as an emblem of peace. For an excellent discussion of the numerous hypotheses advanced to explain the Mars, see Noble-Wood, 2014, pp. 179–194. 6 Haskell and Penny, 1981, pp. 260–262. 7 Cherry, 2007a, p. 332.

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Fig. 46. Michelangelo, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence, New Sacristy, S. Lorenzo. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

Fig. 47. Ludovisi Mars, Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano (Palazzo Altemps). Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource

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image with The Forge of Vulcan in mind, as bookends to the central narrative of Venus and Mars. The earlier painting shows Vulcan receiving the dreadful news of his wife’s infidelity. Here, it seems, the story has come to its conclusion, with Vulcan having completed his humiliation of Mars. Once again, the work seems to invite a biographical reading. In the late 1630s, when this was likely painted, Velázquez’s position at court was no longer as fluid as it had been in the years before his trip to Italy; he was in an unassailable position as principal painter to the king. If one accepts that in a certain sense he cast himself in the role of Vulcan in the earlier painting, could it also hold true that he continued this association in the later work? This time, in place of the humiliated Vulcan/Velázquez, ready to exact his exact his revenge on Mars/court rivals, we have Velázquez/Vulcan as the painter of this image, in triumph while Mars slumps in defeat. However speculative, what makes this hypothesis attractive is that Velázquez has figured his own triumph in such antiheroic terms, yet again snubbing his nose at those rivals who cleaved to Italian-inspired ideals of perfected forms. To clarify, Velázquez’s adaptation of exalted prototypes – Michelangelo and antiquity – invited comparison with this idealizing tradition, all the while unabashedly announcing that his paintings depicted the wrinkles of reality, quite literally in this instance. The unusual presence of the slack, and wrinkled skin drooping around Mars’s mid-section highlights the skin’s varied texture. It brings to mind touching that skin, and the skin-to-skin contact of the love making of Mars and Venus. In 1650 Velázquez made his second trip to Italy. Around this time Velázquez painted The Rokeby Venus (Plate 5), which also references the tale of Mars and Venus. The connection with this theme is here even subtler than in Mars. The image is of a fully nude, unusually slender woman who gazes into a mirror held up by a winged Cupid. In this painting Velázquez has made an uncharacteristically direct allusion to Italian art, to Titian and the other Venetian painters who pioneered the genre of the reclining female nude. The Spinners (Fig. 31) and its background image of the Rape of Europa, based on Titian’s famous composition in the royal collection, is an apt reminder that Velázquez considered his own art to have emerged out of the painterly innovations first introduced by Titian. For this reason, it is fitting that he painted The Rokeby Venus in a way that directly alludes to the artistic lineage that he embraced as his own. At the same time, as frequently noted, Velázquez’s painting is original in its iconography, combining the reclining Venus format with the rear view that sometimes was part of the Toilet of Venus type.8 Clearly, Velázquez wanted his viewers to consider The Rokeby Venus in relationship with Titian’s many female nudes. Such a comparison yields similar results to what I observed with respect to the Mars and its

8 See the most recent discussions of this painting for reference to this iconographic manipulation, and for complete bibliography. Prater, 2014b; Gerard Powell, 2015.

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sources, though here any implied critique of Titian is milder than Velázquez’s rebuffing of Michelangelo and the antique. The proportions of the nude figure in The Rokeby Venus are particularly notable. Titian’s female figures conform to the expectations established by classical sculpture, by their relatively thick waists in particular. Velázquez has here depicted a woman with long, slender legs and a notably thin waist, accentuated by the sharp curve of her hips. These slender proportions and sinuous curves are recognizably ideal by today’s standards; I can think of no other seventeenth-century image of the female form featuring similar proportions. Was Velázquez insisting here, as he had done with Mars, on grounding his image in the observed reality of an actual model, and asserting that he was unaffected by the received visual vocabulary of the antique? It seems likely. I think another agenda is present here as well, and it involves an unexpected adaptation. The proportions of The Rokeby Venus do not reflect classical representations of the female body. The subject does, though, and an additional source lurks behind the scenes here, namely the sculpted Hermaphrodite (Fig. 48). While Velázquez’s first trip to Italy was prompted by his desire, likely encouraged by Rubens, to develop as an artist through the study of modern and ancient art (though with a bias toward the former), Velázquez’s second trip occurred because Philip IV charged him with purchasing ancient sculptures for the royal collection. Philip IV instructed Velázquez to have copies made and sent back to Spain if the originals were not available. We have already observed that the Ludovisi Mars was one of those copies (Fig. 47). Another of the works he had copied, along with others from the Borghese collection, was Hermaphrodite. A surviving contract from 1649 records the agreement with Girolamo Ferrer to make a plaster cast of the sculpture.9 The cast was shipped to Madrid, though it has subsequently disappeared. Clearly the sculpture struck a chord with Philip IV, however, because he ordered another copy of the ancient sculpture to be made, this time in the prestigious and long-lasting medium of bronze. The resulting work, by Matteo Bonuccelli (dated 1652), was also sent to Spain, to the royal collection (Fig. 49). It remains today in the Prado.10 The original work was one of the most famous pieces from the Borghese collection, and would have been well known to Velázquez’s Spanish contemporaries through the two copies ordered by the king. In the 1666 inventory of the Alcázar the Hermaphrodite was even given a value higher than that of most paintings. Only Las Meninas and some works by Titian were valued more highly.11 Moreover, the northwest 9 Corpus velazqueño, 2000, vol. 1, pp. 214–216. The date of the contract between Velázquez and Giacomo Ferrer is 29 December 1649. 10 For a recent discussion of these works, and their relationship to the Borghese original, see Perez, 2015. 11 On the importance of this piece in the seventeenth century, see Haskell and Penny, 1981, pp. 33, 234–236. The 1666 inventory describes the work in these terms: “Otra tambien de bronce de un muchacho desnudo sobre un colchón de lo mismo y una almoada 900 ducados de plata.” (“Another, also of bronze, of a naked boy on a mattress of the same, and a pillow, 900 ducats of silver.”) Bottineau, 1958, pp. 170–171.

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Fig. 48. Hermaphrodite, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Fig. 49. Matteo Bonuccelli, Hermaphrodite, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY

tower of the Alcázar came to be called the torre del hermaphrodita after the sculpture was installed in a “room in which the King keeps his books.”12 The relationship between The Rokeby Venus and Hermaphrodite is far from exact, but close enough that many others have remarked upon the affinity.13 Both figures lie on their side; in both, one leg is fairly straight while the other is pulled up and markedly bent; both raise one arm up above the shoulders to support the head, though in 12 Orso, 1986, p. 18. 13 The association was made most recently in the 2015 Paris exhibition, where the Louvre Hermaphrodite, which was purchased by Napoleon from the Borghese collection, was exhibited in the same room as the painting by Velázquez. The catalogue of the exhibition, however, does not make much of the connection.

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slightly different ways. The most telling similarities are the emphasis in both on the buttocks and swelling curve of the thigh, and the extremely slender proportions of the two figures. The proportions of The Rokeby Venus can certainly be explained by Velázquez’s insistence on a real model and his eschewal of classical ideals of beauty. But the existence of a work of art known to the artist at the very moment when he likely painted his nude, which, moreover, shares these unusual proportions, as well as other visual characteristics, points very strongly in the direction of Hermaphrodite as a source. The adaptation of Hermaphrodite in The Rokeby Venus can also be explained through Velázquez’s enduring engagement with the paragone. Velázquez already invited one comparison through the obvious play on Venetian painting. This second comparison, to an ancient sculpture that would have been well known to his audience (if one puts the execution of The Rokeby Venus during his Italian sojourn at least, about which more later), invites a different set of considerations, this time revolving around the themes of touch and sight, erotic and otherwise. As I have discussed, a standard distinction made between painting and sculpture was that sculpture could be understood by means of touch, whereas painting relied solely on the trickery of illusion. The Rokeby Venus makes significant reference to a Hermaphrodite, a widely known ancient sculpture. In this way, viewing The Rokeby Venus would have brought to mind the sculpture, and, I believe, the idea of touching associated with that sculpture, a coming to terms with its forms through means of the tactile.14 This is turn would have resonated with the subject of Velázquez’s painting, for what does the reclining figure of Venus suggest if not erotic touching? Cupid is there (redundantly) to remind us that this is an erotic image, and it is worth recalling at this point the Allegory of Touch (Fig. 45) by Rubens and Brueghel, known to Velázquez by this date, in which Venus and Cupid are shown kissing. Such thoughts of erotic touching in turn might well have brought to mind the union of Mars and Venus. Mars and The Rokeby Venus are likely separated by around a decade, and were painted for different clients, yet the two share a great deal, both visually and iconographically.15 In Mars, the god is deep in thought, most likely in the immediate aftermath of his humiliation at the hands of Vulcan. Could it be that in The Rokeby Venus the goddess lies in bed waiting for Mars, before Apollo discovered them in flagrante? Both paintings refer to and aim to supersede Italian precedents. Both are adaptations Gerard Powell, 2015, p. 222. Clark, 1990, pp. 150–151, 373, notes that The Rokeby Venus “ultimately derives from the Borghese Hermaphrodite.” Harris, 1982, pp. 137–138, notes that “the unusual view of Velázquez’s Venus was probably suggested by the classical statue of a sleeping Hermaphrodite.” Marías, 1999b, p. 169, includes Hermaphrodite among Velázquez’s probably sources. Pérez Sánchez, 2005, remarks that Velázquez turned, “ovviamente, alla scultura ellenistica dell’Ermafrodito.” 14 For a general discussion of the touching of sculpture in this period, with reference to burgeoning literature on art and the senses, see Johnson, 2014. 15 Gerard Powell, 2015, p. 222, notes the visual and iconographic affinities.

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of ancient sculptures Velázquez knew in Rome. It seems significant that Philip IV requested plaster casts of both these works – of the Borghese Hermaphrodite and the Ludovisi Mars.16 Both works show the protagonists on a bed draped in sheets of similar color. In both there are white sheets, grey-blue sheets, and the same coral curtain hanging behind Venus and Cupid seems to appear crumpled around the legs of Mars. I am not suggesting that viewers were expected to consider The Rokeby Venus in terms of a painting made around ten years before. Mars is usually connected with the Torre de la Parada, but it should be noted that the first reference to the work at that location is only from 1701. Mars could have been made for a different destination. The dating is also a matter of debate, with at least one author suggesting that Mars and The Rokeby Venus were created at the same time.17 Still, whatever the truth is regarding the dates, nothing precluded the artist from considering these two paintings as a thematic pair. After all, it is not as if the infamously phlegmatic Velázquez was a prolific painter, especially of mythologies. The painting of the Venus inevitably would have prompted memories of his earlier treatment of Mars. The erotic touch that was suggested in the textured skin of the morose Mars is suggested even more strongly in the shimmering white expanse of flesh in The Rokeby Venus, a touching intensified through the association of the painting with a sculpture, and a sculpture, moreover, that was most certainly associated with touching. The Rokeby Venus is not just a painting about touch. The painting is also about seeing, a fact made clear by the presence of a mirror, an object traditionally used in allegories of sight. José Muñoz has argued that the ties that once bound Cupid’s hands have been untied, almost as if we are witness to an allegory of the consummation of love, which involves both sight and touch.18 Though of no significance to a historical reading of The Rokeby Venus, it is worthwhile recalling that in 1914 the painting was slashed in seven places by Mary Richardson, a woman protesting the arrest of a fellow activist in the suffragist movement, Emily Pankhurst. The tears in the canvas were confined to the body of the represented figure and stretched from the area of the lower back up to the neck; they were read in the contemporary press coverage of the outrage as if they were wounds to an actual body, with the canvas read as a kind of proxy for the figure’s own skin. At the same time, the cuts revealed the painting to be just that, a mere illusion of a figure and nothing more.19 Touch and sight worked together in Hermaphrodite (Fig. 48), as they did for other sculptures with erotic subjects. Praxiteles’s Cnidian Venus, as recounted in Pliny’s Natural History, is particularly noteworthy: “There is a story that a man once fell in love with it and hiding by night embraced it, and that a stain betrays this lustful 16 17 18 19

Carr, 2006a. Prater, 2002, p. 109. Bernal Muñoz, 1990. Nead, 1992, pp. 34–43.

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act.” The infamous stain was preceded by an erotic embrace.20 As a work that shows the figure lying flat on a cloth, Hermaphrodite was particularly available to being touched. No pedestal impeded the direct address of inquisitive hands. Lorenzo Ghiberti description of his experience with a statue of Hermaphrodite in Rome speaks directly to touching as an aspect of experiencing and understanding art: Hermaphrodite […] the size of a thirteen-year-old girl […] was made with marvelous ingenuity. […] It is not possible to express in words the perfection of this statue, of its doctrine, artifice, and mastery. [The figure] was on turned-over soil, upon which a linen-cloth was spread, and the statue lay atop the cloth and turned in such a way that it displayed the male and female members, and its arms rested on the ground and were crossed at the wrist […] and one of its legs was stretched out; the cloth was caught on the big toe and where it was pulled an admirable art was displayed. […] In this statue there were a great many delicacies, the sight discerned nothing [of them] if the hand by touching did not find them.21

As Mary Pardo explains, this passage suggests that Ghiberti appreciated the twist of this figure, so that from one side it seems female, while from the other it appears female and male.22 While sight suggests this to be true, touch supplements seeing and adds another dimension to Ghiberti’s understanding of the work. The exploration of his hands helps Ghiberti understand the subtlety of the forms, but it clearly offers him erotic delight as well.23 Velázquez could not have known Ghiberti’s passage, but Hermaphrodite was also touched in the seventeenth century.24 In 1619, Scipione Borghese commissioned Bernini to sculpt a mattress for the sleeping figure, and Velázquez’s contract with Giorlamo Ferrer specifies that this mattress should be included in his cast. The mattress is ostentatiously quilted, with the swelling curves of each of its sections repeatedly echoing the curved buttocks of Hermaphrodite above. The mattress was made much wider than was necessary as a support, in this way expanding on the theme of the sculpture as a surface receptive to the touch. After all, mattresses are experienced first and 20 Pliny, 1962, p. 17. 21 Ghiberti, 1998, pp. 107–108: “una statua d’uno Ermafrodito di grandeza d’una fanciulla d’anni tredici, la quale statua era stata fatta con mirabile ingengo. […] La quale statua, doctrina et arte e magisterio, non è possibile con lingua potere dire la perfection d’essa. Esso era in su uno terreno vangato; in esso terreno era gitato uno pannolino; essa statua era in su detto pannolino et era svolta in modo mostrava la natura virile e la natura feminile, e le braccia posate in terra et incrocicchiate le mani, l’una su altra, e distesa tiene l’una delle gambe; col ditto grosso del piè aveva preso el pannolino, in quella tirata del panno mostrava mirabile arte. Era sanza testa, nessuna alta cosa aveva manco. In questa era moltissime dolceze; nessuna cosa il viso scorgeva, se non col tatto la mano la trovava.” Translated by Mary Pardo and quoted in Pardo, 1993, p. 62. 22 Pardo, 1993, pp. 62–64. 23 For a reading that considers this touch to be one primarily of discernment, see Hall, 2014, pp. 197–202. 24 The Hermaphrodite in the Borghese collection that Velázquez knew was uncovered early in the seventeenth century and does not, therefore, correspond exactly with the work described by Ghiberti. Nonetheless, it is a sculpture of a fairly widespread type, with the same essential features.

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foremost in terms of the support they offer the body. Moreover, we know from Jacopo Manilli’s 1650 guidebook to the Villa Borghese that Hermaphrodite was installed against a wall in front of a window, and that in front of it was a couch featuring a real mattress, similar to the one sculpted by Bernini.25 In 1619, Bernini was just at the beginning of his very productive relationship with the Borghese, which would result in a spectacular series of works, each one seeming to defy expectations for what hard, cold marble could suggest. One need only think of the hand of Pluto sunk into the elastic surface of Proserpina’s thigh to realize that Bernini wanted to make the marble appear soft and receptive to the touch. And touch itself was thematized in a whole variety of different ways in Apollo and Daphne, as Andrea Bolland has so eloquently argued.26 One early-eighteenth-century visitor to the Borghese collection admired the mattress greatly, and did so explicitly with the sense of touch in mind: “to see it, and to pass one’s hand over it, it is no longer marble, it is a real mattress of white leather or of satin which has lost its sheen.”27 The quilted surface of the mattress Bernini made for Hermaphrodite marked a beginning of his interest in activating the sense of touch, in this case amplifying what the sculpture mounted upon it already implied. Whether one approached Hermaphrodite with the eyes or with the hands, rude surprise was obviously its principal expressive charge. Ovid tells that Hermaphrodite was the son of Mercury and Venus. Hermaphrodite turned away the amorous advances of the nymph Salmacis. Unable to live with this rejection, Salmacis pleaded with Jupiter that their two bodies be joined into one. Hermaphrodite’s anatomical anomaly was Jupiter’s witty solution to Salmacis’s unsatisfied sexual desire. Hermaphrodite seems consciously to play with surprise and inversion of expectation. From one side, the figure is soft and feminine. Unsuspecting viewers would assume that the subject of the sculpture was a reclining female nude, in the midst of unsettled sleep. The other side of the figure reveals the uncomfortable truth, and does so quite crudely with a semi-erect penis lying on the sheet and projecting at right angles from the body. The phallus is large in the context of ancient art and viewers were clearly meant to notice it. The penis creates a surprise effect typical of the Hellenistic period, one that was also much appreciated in the seventeenth century. At the Villa Borghese, the sculpture was kept concealed in a wooden chest most of the time. Only when Scipione wished would it be revealed to visitors, in an unveiling that anticipated the transformation in understanding that took place during the subsequent process of viewing, and perhaps touching.28 Could this all have been on Velázquez’s mind when he painted The Rokeby Venus? The visual affinity between the

25 Manilli, 1650, pp. 72–73, as discussed in Warwick, 2012, pp. 92–94, 243n40. 26 Bolland, 2000. 27 Brosses, 1986, vol. 2, p. 44, as quoted in Montagu, 1989, p. 161. See also Kalveram, 1995, pp. 119–122, 231–233; Winner, 1998. 28 Warwick, 2102, p. 94.

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painting and the sculpture is clear; and by 1651 or so, both were in Velázquez’s Madrid (though the sculpture was a copy). The date of The Rokeby Venus is unknown. Some scholars date the work to the 1640s, before Velázquez’s trip to Italy, though others prefer a date within the boundaries of that Italian sojourn; there are no hard data to back any one hypothesis.29 Stylistically, Velázquez’s works do not manifest a steady or coherent evolution in the last two decades of his life, so a style-based pathway to a plausible date is more or less a dead end. The visual reference to Hermaphrodite offers the most compelling evidence for a date during his second trip to Italy. Though The Rokeby Venus could conceivably have been developed independently of the ancient sculpture, we have documentary evidence tying Velázquez to it at that time. It is likely that Velázquez also saw Hermaphrodite on his first stay in Rome, when the Borghese collection would have offered a magnetic attraction to an artist interested in the latest artistic developments. On balance, though, it seems better to depend on the evidence that provides a date for when Velázquez saw the sculpture, and that points to 1649. As others have suggested, an Italian date is also likely because the painting of the female nude in Rome was much more acceptable than it would have been in Inquisition-bound Madrid. The original destination for The Rokeby Venus is also not clear, and documentary evidence is confused and ambiguous. The painting may have been recorded in the inventory of Domingo Guerra Coronel’s pictures made on 18 November 1651, two days after his death. Even Ángel Aterido, however, who argued strongly in favor of seeing this man as the first owner of The Rokeby Venus, admitted that “certainty is alas not possible” in the matter.30 The first unambiguous record of the work appears in the June 1651 inventory of Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, Marquis of Heliche, where the painting listed is unquestionably The Rokeby Venus: “222 Una pintura en Iienço de Una muger desnuda tendida sobre Un paño pintada de espaldas Recostada s.re El braco derecho mirandose en Un espejo q. le tiene Un niño de la mano de Velazquez de dos baras y media de ancho y Una y media de Cayda con su marco negro.”31 The different dates – June 1651 for the clear-cut reference to The Rokeby Venus, and November 1651 for the inventory of Coronel’s estate – would seem to put to rest the question of the painting’s first owner, but there are complicating factors. One of them is a document recording the later sale of a Velázquez nude to Haro – from the estate of Coronel no less – and the fact that the 1651 inventory could well have been added to after the June date of the header. This is not, however, the place to rehash the details of the inconclusive evidence that the painting was created for the relatively 29 See Prater, 2014b, and especially Gerard Powell, 2015, for a summary of this debate. 30 Aterido Fernández, 2001, p. 91. 31 Burke and Cherry, 1997, p. 476. “222 A painting on canvas of a naked woman lying on a cloth, painted from the back lying on her right arm looking into a mirror that a child holds, by the hand of Velázquez, two and a half baras wide and one and a half tall, with its black frame.”

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insignificant figure of Coronel. It is sufficient for the purposes of this discussion simply to note that without the existence of the ambiguous documents, Coronel would never have appeared on a list of potential first owners. Velázquez was not a prolific painter. To own one of his works, especially one of the only nudes painted in Spain in the entire century, would have been a significant privilege. It is hard to imagine that Velázquez would have denied Philip IV, the “King who loved Nudes” as Javier Portús has aptly described him, a nude by his hand had there not been a good reason to do so.32 The collection of Coronel does not provide such a justification. As Javier Portús has argued, the best way forward in terms of interpretation is to take as a starting point the collection for which we have the definitive record.33 Gaspar de Haro made The Rokeby Venus a cornerstone of his important collection. Portús’s analysis reveals that The Rokeby Venus once hung in the principal room of Gaspar de Haro’s palace, a room whose paintings were specifically chosen to reflect and evoke the royal collection. The most important room of the Alcázar, from the point of view of paintings at least, was the Hall of Mirrors (Salón de los Espejos). This room was the particular target of Gaspar de Haro’s emulation. The Hall of Mirrors was rehung under Velázquez’s direction in the 1630s.34 Gaspar de Haro’s counterpart housed The Rokeby Venus, as well as copies by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo of Rubens’s Portrait of Philip IV (Fig. 50), and of the major poesie painted by Titian, including The Rape of Europa, Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon, and Venus and Adonis. Together, these paintings and others, including The Rokeby Venus, were meant to proclaim Gaspar de Haro’s cultural sophistication, and through this his political connections to the royal family.35 Portús does not say so directly, but his argument implies that Velázquez’s painting may have been made especially for this locale. My contention that The Rokeby Venus referenced Hermaphrodite, a plaster cast of which had just recently entered the royal collection through the agency of none other than Velázquez himself, adds clout to Portús’s implied hypothesis. Moreover, the plaster cast was such a success that a bronze copy of Hermaphrodite was ordered as well (Fig. 49). The allusion to Hermaphrodite added another layer to the visual referencing of the royal collection made in Gaspar de Haro’s palace. It hardly seems accidental that a mirror should be featured in a painting that was part of an ensemble that referenced the Hall of Mirrors. And if reflecting on works of art in the royal collection was one of the themes of The Rokeby Venus, as Portús has argued, then one is further emboldened to see the work as having been made in reference to the Mars, which may have hung in the king’s Torre de la Parada, and was in any case almost certainly in the royal collection. 32 33 34 35

Portús, 2002, p. 11, where the quotation appears as the title of one the catalogue essays. Portús, 2006. Orso, 1986, pp. 32–117. On Gaspar de Haro’s political fortunes and collecting history, see Burke and Cherry, 1997, pp. 462–465.

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Fig. 50. Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Portrait of Philip IV, after Rubens, Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

Spanish artists of the seventeenth century rarely painted the female nude. For the most part, mythological painting, and especially the painting of the nude, was the territory of foreign painters. Rubens and his school dominated this field, though Italians were invited to the party as well. The Rokeby Venus is a distinctively Spanish take on a quintessentially Italian subject, housed in a collection assembled to match the sophistication of the king’s. The painting references a specific work in the royal collection that Velázquez knew well indeed, Hermaphrodite. In The Rokeby Venus the viewer is not made privy to the face of the figure represented here. The breasts are concealed and so is the sex. Provocatively, Cupid holds a mirror up in front of the groin, though it reflects the face and does so with such blurriness that the viewer is left none the wiser regarding the details of appearance or gender. Scholars have tried to pin down the perspective of this mirror in hopes of determining what it should be

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reflecting. This is a fool’s errand. Velázquez has not given us sufficient information; this is not the perspective puzzle that he develops so eloquently in Las Meninas.36 Instead, one needs to read the arrangement of forms on the surface for what they tell us. The mirror is aligned with the sitter’s genitalia. Indubitably, Velázquez at once targeted and frustrated male desire by reflecting a blurry face in the mirror. Is this just reticence on the part of Velázquez, or is the joke here that The Rokeby Venus is actually a representation of Hermaphrodite? We can never know, and it certainly would have been a radical choice for him to make. But remember, this is the artist who claimed that painting was noble, yet at the same time figured this noble profession in the humble hands of spinning women. Also, let us not forget the collector here, a man intent on doing the king one better in terms of the sophistication of his collection. Owning a painting by Velázquez, a nude no less, was part of that sophistication, and perhaps for most visitors that was enough. For those who wanted to scale the heights of allusion, the possibility that this was Hermaphrodite could have been suggested by its proud owner, inviting quick rebuttal, and then, perhaps, further consideration. At first glance, this painting is obviously of Venus (though some have suggested Danaë), but what prevents it from being Hermaphrodite? Only a view of the figure’s invisible side could resolve this conclusively. With the mirror and its blurry visage Velázquez declares that we are not permitted certain knowledge. The Rokeby Venus is the only surviving major painting of the female nude painted by a Spanish artist in the seventeenth century. Owning paintings of nudes was frowned upon in Spain, even as these works simultaneously carried great cultural prestige. They were considered dangerous because they led to sin, and they were prestigious because of their associations with Italy, with Renaissance art, and with antiquity.37 In some ways, these contradictory responses are figured in Velázquez’s painting, especially if one ponders the proposed relationship with Hermaphrodite. This ancient sculpture was meant to attract the viewer with its erotically thrustup buttocks and youthful proportions. Once drawn in, however, further inspection revealed the hard fact that initial impressions were quite incorrect. The sculpture betrayed the attentions of its enamored viewer. The inscription found on one bronze copy of the Borghese original conveyed this idea: “Behold a double form in one body: Wonder at its beauty. You will often find a double heart in one breast. Beware of treachery.”38 The same inscription could have appeared on the version Velázquez himself saw in the Borghese collection. It speaks to the idea mentioned above, of attraction betrayed by a physical reality. In The Rokeby Venus the mirror is placed in a way that promises to reveal the figure’s sex. The promise is shifted on to the features of the face, but they are blurred so much that nothing is revealed. It is easy to imagine 36 Brown, 1986, p. 182. 37 Portús, 2006, pp. 62–64. 38 Warwick, 2012, p. 93.

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at least two ways of approaching the meaning of The Rokeby Venus. For those who placed artistic sophistication over traditional morality, the painting was a witty play of concealing and revealing, a delicious exercise in the dangling of desire, so close, yet completely unattainable. For those of sterner, more proscriptive stuff, the painting is a warning. Yes, this is a nude, but is all what it seems? Perhaps not. And it is perhaps for this reason that the inventory of Gaspar de Haro’s collection does not list it as a painting of Venus, but simply as a “nude woman.” It certainly appears to be a painting of that subject, but unlike the sculpture, touch cannot be employed to put one’s doubts to rest. I not advocating here that the painting should have its title changed. This is a painting of a nude Venus. But its forms evoke Hermaphrodite. Surely, the visual resonance between these works did more than pay due homage to one of the glories of antiquity and the royal collection. With Hermaphrodite in mind it is impossible to disregard how Velázquez has highlighted the hiding from view of the very secret that makes Hermaphrodite so shocking in its inversion of our expectations. As we have seen in these two chapters, the embrace of the unexpected spans Velázquez’s entire oeuvre.

Plate 1. El Greco, Assumption of the Virgin, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago

Plate 2. Juan Bautista Maíno, Adoration of the Shepherds, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY

Plate 3. Velázquez, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

Plate 4. Velázquez, The Forge of Vulcan, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY

Plate 5. Velázquez, The Rokeby Venus, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

Plate 6. Rembrandt, Woman Bathing, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

Plate 7. Rembrandt, Jewish Bride, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum

Plate 8. Rembrandt, Lucretia, Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 34.19. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art

Plate 9. Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Plate 10. Rembrandt, Return of the Prodigal Son, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum

5. Late Rembrandt I: Texture and the Skilled Touch Abstract This chapter treats the distinctive brushwork Rembrandt developed in the last two decades of his career. Inspired by the late Titian, Rembrandt reveled in richly worked surfaces with often discernable, individual brushstrokes. Unlike Titian, however, Rembrandt sometimes built up his paint into a three-dimensional structure that projected from the surface of the canvas. The chapter explores the range of purely visual effects for which Rembrandt employed textured paint. Considered as well is the relationship of the Portrait of Jan Six to ideas that developed around Titian’s late style, especially the courtly ideal of sprezzatura. Keywords: Painterly brushwork, Baldassare Castiglione, Arnold Houbraken, Karel van Mander, Samuel van Hoogstraten

From around 1650 until his death in 1669 Rembrandt painted in a new and distinctive manner. He had experimented with visible, rough, brushwork before, but in the last two decades of his life Rembrandt built up paint on the surface of his canvases such that it came to assume a radical prominence. Rembrandt’s late paintings shift in narrative tone, too. In place of dramatic figural groupings ranged dynamically in space is a new, quiet introspection and close-up focus. Scholars have puzzled over why Rembrandt insisted on pursuing such a style, especially given how unfashionable it was at a time when the clear, bright lucidity of the classical style, grounded ultimately in Raphael, was becoming de rigueur in Dutch painting. Understanding why an artist changes style is never a precise science, but this should not prevent us from drawing inferences from what is available. According to Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt’s late style resulted from a crisis. For Van de Wetering this was not the crisis of the Romantic Rembrandt, struggling heroically against tides of misunderstanding, but a crisis of more narrowly defined artistic concerns. Van de Wetering considers the painting of The Nightwatch as a key transitional moment in this process (Fig. 51). With The Nightwatch, Rembrandt famously took the static tradition of group portraiture and pushed it in the direction of history painting. The members of the militia company do not stand still and pose for a portrait. Instead, they move together en masse, in action to defend the hard-won liberties of the Knox, G., Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725712_ch05

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Fig. 51. Rembrandt, The Nightwatch, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijksmuseum

emerging Dutch nation. With this work, Rembrandt realized that he had reached an impasse. According to Van de Wetering, Rembrandt came to understand that to capture a precise pose in the midst of a particular motion, as flash photographs would do centuries later, was to enter into a contradiction. Painting was a static medium. The petrified motion of a striding figure like Captain Frans Banning Cocq was simply not natural. In the 1650s, Rembrandt sought out new ways of animating his subjects. The way he chose was a sketchy manner that played upon chance effects and which required viewers to complete in their minds the image they saw only partially complete before them. Rough paint also brought the eye insistently to the surface of these canvases, conferring upon the objects painted in that way a sense of tangibility. Finally, the visible brushwork of this late manner brought to mind the moving hand of the artist, which in some ways replaced the moving figures of paintings executed prior to The Nightwatch.1 The following two chapters consider further the variety of meanings attendant to Rembrandt’s late style. Central to this discussion is Rembrandt’s broad address to the sense of touch. In his Portrait of Jan Six (Fig. 52) Rembrandt presents us with 1

Van de Wetering, 2016, pp. 260–281.

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Fig. 52. Rembrandt, Portrait of Jan Six, Amsterdam, Collectie Six. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY

a showy display of gestural brushwork. This is a performance that showcases the artist’s manual dexterity, his skillful touch. This sketchy brushwork puts Rembrandt in direct dialogue with Titian and with the courtly ideals of sprezzatura. Bathsheba (Fig. 53) and Woman Bathing (Plate 6) suggest erotic touching, with the pigment laid on smoothly and fluidly in order to bring to mind the touch of a hand on skin, a kind of painterly caress. This further expands Rembrandt’s dialogue with Titian and his famous focus on depictions of the female nude. Though without the overt eroticism of the previous two examples, the richly layered paint of the Jewish Bride (Plate 7)

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Fig. 53. Rembrandt, Bathsheba, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

and the Braunschweig Family Portrait (Fig. 54) bring to mind the kinds of touch that cement the connectedness of the family unit. Touch can also be violent and painful, and this aspect of the sense is picked up in Rembrandt’s paintings of Lucretia, where the self-inflicted yet virtuous wound appears, in the Minneapolis version (Plate 8), to slit the very canvas on which the scene is painted. In The Return of the Prodigal Son (Plate 10) Rembrandt used textured paint to supplement the illusion he provides of the touch of reconciliation. In Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (Plate 9) touch is once again central to the illusion as the philosopher touches with one hand the richly sculptural gold chain that hangs around his neck, while the other hand rests on a sculpted bust of the blind Homer. This painting revolves around sight and touch, and it suggests that real insight derives from the concerted deployment of both senses.

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Fig. 54. Rembrandt, Family Portrait, Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY

Those familiar with the rich literature on Rembrandt will recognize the origin of this interpretation in the work of Svetlana Alpers. In “The Master’s Touch,” the first chapter of her Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, Alpers proposed that Rembrandt built up paint in his late paintings in order to “engage our sense of touch as it is mediated through our sense of sight.”2 Alpers constructed her argument around a number of superb comparisons, the most poignant of which pitted Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, about which I will have more to say in the next chapter, against Gerrit Dou’s The Doctor (Fig. 55). In the former, the ancient philosopher interacts with the bust of the poet not through sight, but through touch, a point made clear by the way Aristotle directs his gaze away from the bust, all the while touching it with his hand. Aristotle literally feels his way to a knowledge of the world. Rembrandt did this not just by showing the touching, as artists had always done, but through the textured paint, especially the “substantiating impasto” of the chain.3 In Gerrit Dou’s The Doctor, by contrast, the physician makes his diagnosis by means of looking alone, 2 Alpers, 1988, p. 22. 3 Alpers, 1988, pp. 14, 22–26. She used this term to describe a different painting, but it is equally applicable to Aristotle’s chain.

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Fig. 55. Gerrit Dou, The Doctor, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

isolated from any other sensory input. With his eyes, he scrutinizes the flask of the patient’s urine, and the surface of the painting is smooth and shiny, as one would expect from the fine brushes of Gerrit Dou. When Rembrandt took on a medical theme during his early years in Amsterdam, in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp (Fig. 56), his emphasis was not on sight, but on the skilled hand of the surgeon. Alpers noted that in his late work Rembrandt enlarges hands and has them do most of the work of establishing affective narrative communication. Two of the best examples of this are perhaps the Jewish Bride and The Return of the Prodigal Son. In Rembrandt’s paintings hands could function in two ways; they could serve to remind viewers of the manual skill of the painter, as in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp, or they could be vehicles for communication and for coming to know the world. Add textured paint to the mix and the viewer’s sense of touch is implicated as well. We see touching, and we imagine both the touch of the artist’s paintbrush on the canvas and our own literal touching of the textured surface.

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Fig. 56. Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp, The Hague, Mauritshuis. Photo: Mauritshuis

Remarkably, Alpers’s provocative analysis of Rembrandt’s late painting style has had few followers, in spite of the fact that his late style continues to fascinate.4 As I adumbrated above, my plan here is to analyze in detail a group of paintings where 4 Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 278, is content to dismiss Alpers’s analysis of textured paint with a single sentence: “This is a matter of purely visual perception, and in this context I would rather not speak of an ‘appeal to the physical activity of touch’ as suggested by Alpers.” Schwartz, 2006, p. 92, dismisses Alpers’s notion as a “chic idea” for which he “can find no justification […] either in the paintings or in contemporaneous writing on art.” Binstock, 1999, p. 143, insists that the materiality of Rembrandt’s paint should be seen in terms of the optical effects it creates. Suthor, 2014, most certainly deals with the hapticity of Rembrandt’s paint, but does not systematically investigate the differentiated textures of these paintings’ surfaces and the connection of those surfaces with the narrative meaning of touch. Hadjinicolaou, 2016, pp. 156–172, offers an excellent discussion of the tactility of Rembrandt’s paint, but does not connect touch to meaning. The best evidence of the continued interest in Rembrandt’s late style is offered by the major exhibition held in London and Amsterdam in 2014–2015. Bikker and Weber, 2014. The curiously hostile response to Alpers’s study is summed up well in a footnote to a review of the book by Mieke Bal: “I wish to add that I know of no other book that has been so oddly reviewed as this one. Not only are the reviews widely divergent in opinion, but the negative reviews invariably complain about the tone of the book. I have read it once more to find out what was wrong with the tone, and honestly do not understand the criticism. I do find, however, that the tone in which reviewers complain about Alpers’s tone is itself strange. With hardly concealed irritation, the book is called irritating; with unwavering positivity, reviewers call the book too positive; with a Romantic longing for a more sympathetic Rembrandt, reviewers claim Alpers espouses 19th-century Romanticism. I decline to speculate about the reasons for the self-reflexivity in these reviews, but it surely does not encourage debate.” Bal, 1990, p. 138n1.

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textured paint and meaning seem to coincide in significant ways. I bring to this analysis material that Alpers did not treat comprehensively in her short chapter. First, there is the issue of differentiated texture. Rembrandt’s late paintings are not rough all over, and nor is this roughness always the same. In other words, there are different sorts of roughness, and it is unevenly distributed across these late canvases; we need to pay attention to these characteristics if we are to succeed in our interpretive venture. Variability in texture and the distribution of textured paint are both laden with significance. Rembrandt drew our eyes to certain parts of his canvases for a reason, often, though not always, bound up with evoking our sense of touch. Numerous forms in Rembrandt’s late paintings are like sculpture. For Alpers, Rembrandt attempted to “represent objects by recreating them in paint.”5 This evokes the paragone, which was still alive and well in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, as it was in Spain. In a similar spirit, we need to reexamine contemporary responses to Rembrandt’s late style with an eye to this connection to sculpture, and with respect to the legacy of Titian, discarded out of hand by Alpers in her quest to distance her northern hero from Italy. Finally, we need to examine the hierarchy of the senses in Rembrandt’s time. It cannot be accidental, for instance, that Rembrandt chose to show Aristotle using his sense of touch in Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. Aristotle was a key figure in the early codification of the five senses. Related to the establishment of this historical context is the need to examine the iconography of the senses, a tradition in which Rembrandt himself was a participant. The pages that follow also draw on the remarkably rich body of scholarship on the senses that has emerged in the decades since Alpers’s work first appeared. Recent scholarship has emphasized the interdependency of the senses. Though historically the senses were considered as separate and distinct, we now know that our perception of the world involves the body as a whole; one should not construct impermeable boundaries between the senses. This was understood in Rembrandt’s own time.6 Before turning to the particular late works by Rembrandt in which I will demonstrate how touch and roughness of the paint are interwoven, I will discuss examples that show how Rembrandt had optical and spatial purposes in mind when building up pigment on the surface of his canvases. The reason I start with these examples is to put to rest any notion that I intend to propose a unified theory for the expressive variety of Rembrandt’s brushwork. Thick paint is not always about touch.

5 Alpers, 1988, p. 15. 6 Harvey, 2003; Classen, 2012; Quiviger, 2010; Johnson, 2014; Boyle, 1998; Paterson, 2007; Smith, 2007; Johnson, 2011.

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Metalwork and Jewels Rembrandt often used raised paint when depicting metalwork or jewels. This is noted early on in the critical response to the artist’s late work, perhaps for the first time in Arnold Houbraken’s biography of the artist. Houbraken writes: “You see also jewels and pearls painted by him in necklaces and turbans so impastoed that they stand in relief – it is on account of this manner of working that his pieces appear so powerful, even when seen from a distance.”7 Examples of this technique can be found throughout Rembrandt’s late paintings. In the Portrait of Frederik Rihel on Horseback (Fig. 57), for instance, the highlights along the edge of the stirrup that supports Rihel’s foot project along that edge. The paint also projects markedly on the chest tackle of the horse and on the hilt of the rider’s sword. In the Portrait of Lady with a Lap Dog (Fig. 58), the bauble in the hair of the sitter sticks out from the surface of the canvas. The same can be said of the brim and band of decoration on the helmet of A Man in Armour (Alexander the Great) in Glasgow. As I mentioned above, the chain worn by the protagonist in Aristotle with a Bust of Homer is prominent in its plasticity. For these examples, I have verified in person the plasticity of the paint. The three-dimensionality of these images does not transmit well in photographs, which make paintings look flat. Standing in front of the pictures, however, one immediately perceives the three dimensions of their surfaces. Van de Wetering has noted that the technique of raised paint is related to the raised, gilded surfaces used by Italian painters of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.8 This gilding, called pastiglia, was applied to sculpted gesso built up on the surface of the panel. Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi is a perfect example of this technique. Though Rembrandt used the oil paint itself to create relief, there is a clear affinity. In both, light catches the highlights of the jeweled or metal areas from the side, which has the effect of making the highlights more legible from a distance. Rembrandt undoubtedly took viewing distance into account when composing The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis (Fig. 59), intended originally for Amsterdam’s Town Hall. What survives is the center of a massive composition, cut down by Rembrandt himself after the picture was removed from the Town Hall and returned to the artist.9 In situ, the original hung in a corridor high above floor level. Rembrandt applied paint thickly to the necklace of Claudius Civilis and to the jewel that adorns the rim of his hat, which would seem to confirm Houbraken’s observation. Similarly, the necklace worn by the man in profile to the right of Claudius also projects from the surface. Making a stronger impression at a distance does not, however, exhaust the possible motivations for Rembrandt having used projecting paint to depict reflective, precious materials. For one thing, insisting on a proper distant view, thereby ignoring the 7 Houbraken, 2007, pp. 84–87. Houbraken, 1718–1721, vol. 1, p. 269: “Dus zietmen ook gesteente en paerlen, op Borstcieraden en Tulbanden door hem zoo verheven geschildert al even of ze geboetseerd waren, door welke wyze van behandelen zyne stukken, zelf in wyden afstand, kragtig uitkomen.” 8 Van de Wetering, 2016, pp. 143–144. 9 Westermann, 2000, p. 296.

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Fig. 57. Rembrandt, Portrait of Frederik Rihel on Horseback, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

close-up view, has a long history in critical writing about painting that, for any reason, breaks with the mirrorlike smoothness of the illusionistic surface. One problem was that the close-up view revealed the mechanical processes by which painting was created, anathema to writing that, in general, sought to intellectualize art. Just sentences before Houbraken speaks of the great power that projecting pigment confers upon the depiction of jewels, when seen at a distance, he tells of how Rembrandt himself would respond to those who visited his studio and wanted a close view of his paintings. By this point in his career, Houbraken writes, “his paintings looked as if they had been laid on with a trowel. This is the reason why, when people visited his workshop and wished to view his works from close to, he pulled them back saying ‘the smell of the paint will upset you.’”10 This passage is sometimes read as confirmation that Rembrandt toed the line when it came to visible brushwork or pastiglia-like effects, and that he 10 Houbraken, 2007, p. 87.

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Fig. 58. Rembrandt, Portrait of a Lady with a Lap Dog, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY

Fig. 59. Rembrandt, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum. Photo: Nationalmuseum

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was using these techniques entirely to advance the illusionism of his paintings. This anecdote likewise reveals the common desire of his admirers to look attentively at surfaces, and to do so because of the troweled-on paint, rather than in spite of it.11 Once one looks closely at these surfaces from a short distance, as Rembrandt’s contemporaries seemed to have wanted to do, it is clear that illusionism is not the only goal. Viewers are confronted with what Alpers described as a “substantiating impasto,” in which paint replicates the three-dimensional form of what it represents. With that in mind, it is worth analyzing a little further the comment ascribed to Rembrandt by Houbraken. Anecdotes told of painters in early modern lives often follow a conventional pattern, often with allusion to tales of artists in Pliny’s Natural History and other classical sources. This anecdote is different because it does not have the odor of a classical source. It should serve, as I suggested, as evidence of the desire viewers had in Rembrandt’s day to look at his paintings close-up. Because it does not sound like one of the conventional stories told of artists, it is more likely that it actually records something of Rembrandt’s own thinking. Thought of in this way, we can imagine Rembrandt, a glint in his eye, disingenuously warning his studio visitors to avoid immersion in his pictures for fear of focusing in too much on the craft of their manufacture. By warning them off in this way Rembrandt suggests that the close view might afford viewers insider access into the means by which his paintings were created. It is not a real warning, of course, but an invitation to those interested in the craft of painting. Even if one does not accept Houbraken’s anecdote as accurate reportage, it is nonetheless possible that Rembrandt rendered his jewels with three-dimensional paint in order to emphasize his role as craftsman. The tradition of pastiglia existed in the north as well as in Italy. One particularly relevant example is Jan van Eyck’s ­Portrait of Jan de Leeuw (Fig. 60), which depicts a goldsmith holding up a ring for viewers to inspect. As Walter Melion eloquently put it, Painted relatively thickly, the ring projects beyond the otherwise smooth surface of the panel, sustaining the pictorial illusion of lustrous gold, even while concretizing the painter’s artifice. Descriptive means and ends converge in the ring, whose identity shifts between pigment and gold, the luster of paint and of metal, the handiwork of the painter and of the goldsmith.12

Rembrandt could well have had a similar range of associations in mind when he painted his own metals and jewels. Before turning our attention to other ways that Rembrandt left visible and significant traces of his own handiwork, it is worth noting that it is a multisensory experience that Houbraken’s Rembrandt warns against. The text does not mention viewers seeing visible brushstrokes up close, as was the 11 Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 204. 12 Melion, 1991, p. 84.

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Fig. 60. Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Jan de Leeuw, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

convention, but instead considers the experience of close viewing in terms of a second sense, the smell of the oil paint. His viewers are not just looking at a painting, they are experiencing it with another sense as well. Houbraken’s anecdote broadens the possibilities to include the other senses, including the sense of touch, one of the baser senses along with smell and taste, because of their insistent materiality. Houbraken, and maybe even Rembrandt, saw engagement with a painting as a full-body experience.

Space and Skin Rembrandt employed differentiated paint texture to create pictorial space. With roughly textured paint, he suggested the projection forward of that area. Smoothly painted parts of the canvas step back into space. In some instances, the advance of the forms was sufficient to suggest that they were actually pushing through the picture plane from behind, as if in response to a mysterious force. In a number of

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Fig. 61. Rembrandt, Syndics of the Drapers Guild, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Photo: Rijskmuseum

the late paintings this address to the picture plane was less about pushing and more about piercing. Rembrandt thematized this sense of piercing with knives or wounds, as if the canvas were a membrane either before or after an act of violence. In the Syndics of the Drapers’s Guild (Fig. 61) Rembrandt used textured paint to organize space. His sitters are ranged behind and to one side of a table draped with red cloth. In addition to creating space using traditional methods, including linear perspective and the overlapping of figures, Rembrandt employed texture on the tablecloth. The highlighted red corner of this tablecloth draws in the eye, and not simply by virtue of its rich color and bright illumination; the paint itself is complexly worked and forcefully impastoed.13 The warmth of its color joins with the perspective and the texture of the surface to advance the corner of the table toward the viewer. Samuel van Hoogstraten, a one-time student of Rembrandt noted that rough texture can indeed operate in this fashion. In his Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst. Anders de zichtbare werelt (Introduction to the academy of painting, or the visible world) published in 1678, Van Hoogstraten articulated many of the ideas he must have learned in Rembrandt’s studio. Even if the relationship between Van Hoogstraten’s writing and Rembrandt’s practice is not as direct as some would have it, the text still articulates a contemporary understanding of certain pictorial effects; 13 Wieseman, 2014a, p. 129.

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it can usefully be marshaled in the service of our interpretive venture.14 Van Hoogstraten’s comments on texture and space are particularly helpful: I therefore desire that that which is to appear in foreground be painted roughly and briskly, and that that which is to recede be painted the more neatly and smoothly the further back it lies. Neither one colour [n]or another will make your work seem to advance or recede, but only the kenlijkheyt [perceptibility, being the roughness of the paint surface] or onkenlijkheyt [imperceptibility, being the smoothness] of the parts.15

While Rembrandt may have disagreed with his erstwhile student as to the role of color in creating space, he does seem to have believed in the capacity of rough paint to advance forms. In his 1659 Washington Self-Portrait (Fig. 62), the paint is in noticeable relief on the highlights of Rembrandt’s famously bulbous nose. This raised paint was intended to advance the nose with respect to the face behind. The plasticity of the nose makes for a remarkable parallel with a comment from Houbraken’s “Life of Rembrandt,” in the sentence directly following the one cited above advising people not to approach his canvases too closely for fear of being upset by the smell of paint: “It is said that he once painted a portrait with paint so thick that one could pick it up by its nose.”16 I shall return to this comment, which focuses on the relationship of touch to the perception of a painting, when I discuss the thematizing of touch in these paintings. The immediately preceding line warned of smell – like touch, a base sense. In the next sentence Houbraken continues the theme by singling out a nose, but now the nose is not the viewer’s nose, smelling the paint; it is the nose represented in the painting, that sticks out and is imagined as an object one can touch. Houbraken considers smell and touch as senses relevant to the understanding of Rembrandt’s late paintings. And as if that were not enough, Houbraken also invokes sound in another passage, describing a now-lost self-portrait: “Indeed, the head appears to project and to speak to the spectators.”17 The speaking likeness is a commonplace in discussions of portraiture, but here it is joined to another description of how Rembrandt’s figures 14 Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 80, aimed to tease out Rembrandt’s theoretical ideas from the contradictory body of theoretical material presented in Hoogstraten’s text. While I do not disagree with his conclusions, the premise that one can so neatly dissect a text as complex as Hoogstraten’s seems dubious at best. 15 Van Hoogstraten, 1678, p. 307: “daerom wil ik, datmen ‘t geen voorkomt, rul en wakker aensmeere, en ‘t geen weg zal wijken, hoe verder en verder, netter en zuiverder handele. Noch deeze noch geene verwe zal uw werk doen voorkomen of wechwijken, maer alleen de kenlijkheyt of onkenlijkheyt der deelen.” Translation from Van de Wetering, 2016, pp. 76–77. 16 Houbraken, 2007, p. 84, Houbraken, 1718–1721, vol. 1, p. 269: “Ook word ‘er getuigt dat hy eens een pourtret geschildert heeft daar de verw zoodanig dik op lag, datmen de schildery by de neus van de grond konde opligten.” 17 Houbraken, 2007, p. 87, Houbraken, 1718–1721, vol. 1, p. 269: “ja het hoofd scheen uit het stuk te steken, en de aanschouwers aan te spreken.”

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Fig. 62. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. Photo: National Gallery of Art

projected forward of the picture plane, and it adds hearing, or at least the imagination of hearing, to the roster of sensory inputs experienced by viewers in front of a painting. In the Jewish Bride (Plate 7) Rembrandt textured the embracing sleeve of the man standing to the left so forcefully that it almost seems to push through the picture plane and into the space of the viewer. This sleeve is among the most famous passages in all of Rembrandt’s late works, and is very frequently excerpted as a detail photograph, made implicitly to stand for the late style as a whole. Unconsciously, this may be because the heavily worked paint accords so nicely with Houbraken’s observation that “his paintings looked as if they had been laid on with a trowel.”18 It should be noted, however, that the thick accretion of pigment, deposited as if by “the outcome of a geological process,” as Ernst van de Wetering put it, is actually quite 18 Houbraken, 2007, p. 84, Houbraken, 1718–1721, vol. 1, p. 269: “inzonderheid in zyn laatsten tyd, toen het ‘er, van na by bezien, uitzag of het met een Metzelaars truffel was aangesmeert.”

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Fig. 63. Rembrandt, The Blinding of Samson, Frankfurt, Städel Museum. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY

rare, appearing in this picture and also the Braunschweig Family Portrait (Fig. 54), but in no others to quite the same degree of plasticity over such a large area.19 In the 2015 Amsterdam Rembrandt: The Late Works exhibition, the Jewish Bride and the Family Portrait were hung right next to each other. This highlighted their similar format, subject matter and meaning, as we shall see, and, most important for my argument here, the fact that projecting surfaces makes them real outliers within this body of work. The Jewish Bride does not exemplify the late style as a whole. Nonetheless, the painting does demonstrate one aspect of this late style: Rembrandt’s new dialogue with the picture plane. Rembrandt’s treatment of pictorial space changed significantly over the course of his career. In his work with narrative subjects from the 1620s, the protagonists for the most part kept their distance from the picture plane, safely contained within an illusionistic space. In the 1630s Rembrandt worked with dramatic, baroque diagonals to create a sense of coextensive space that heightened the perception that his narratives connected with the world of the viewer. A perfect example of this dramatic spatial play is the Blinding of Samson (Fig. 63), where the head of the tortured hero is pressed up against the picture plane and whose body leads the eye back along a 19 Van de Wetering, 2009, p. 157.

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plunging diagonal to reveal the fleeing Delilah. Theatrical, boundary-breaking spatial design also lies behind The Nightwatch (Fig. 51), where the halberd of Frans Banning Cocq’s lieutenant, Wilhelm van Ruytenburgh, is foreshortened so steeply that it appears primed to poke through the boundary of the picture plane and into our space as viewers. This thrust through into our reality succinctly expresses the martial vigor of the gathering company. The narrative tenor of the Jewish Bride is quite different. A quiet, tentative embrace shared shyly by a mature man and a young woman replaces emphatic movement. Concern with the picture plane, however, connects the Jewish Bride with the more dramatic works leading up to The Nightwatch. The preparatory sketch of the later composition is fairly traditional in its format and treatment of space. The embracing couple is shown almost full length, with a balustrade in the foreground and hints of an architectural setting in the background. In the finished Jewish Bride, however, the figures are no more than three-quarter length and the only hint of a setting is the murky trace of the balustrade and potted plant just to the right and, presumably, slightly behind the couple. The changes Rembrandt made between sketch and finished product speak to his purpose for this painting and for many others among his late works. In this image, space is largely eliminated. The viewer is compelled to focus attention on the figures who, with the very thickly applied paint, especially on the sleeve of the man and the red paint of the young woman’s dress, advance toward the picture plane, pushing up against it.20 We are compelled to approach these figures just as they approach us, and we become bodily implicated in the narrative they represent (more on this in Chapter Six). For now, it is sufficient to recognize the formal strategies Rembrandt has utilized to draw us close, and to understand as well how these are not unrelated to the more conventional spatial theatrics he engaged in up until the creation of The Nightwatch. Introspection displaces drama – the two figures in the Jewish Bride appear lost in their own thoughts, in spite of sharing an intimate embrace – but like the drama, introspection draws viewers in, binding us to an action that transpires across the picture plane. Rembrandt painted a number of works in his late period where knives seem poised to break through the picture plane. This is not an especially surprising choice on Rembrandt’s part if we think back to the advancing halberd of The Nightwatch. In the Minneapolis Lucretia (Plate 8), as in the Jewish Bride, the figure is just over half length, her torso almost parallel to the picture plane. This invites viewers to consider her body and the surface of the canvas as almost one and the same thing.21 Her left hand lunges 20 Suthor, 2014, p. 170, has argued along similar lines: “Die ‘Abstraktheit’ des Ärmels bietet dem Betrachter eine Reibungsfläche, welche zur sinnlichen Erfahrung der Wirkkraft der Farbe einlädt und ihn näher an das Paar heranführt.” Binstock, 1999, p. 143, argues, by contrast, that the thick paint on the sleeve of the man in the Jewish Bride breaks down “the sense of tactile surface and volume in order to suggest our optical impression from the distance, and the play of shimmering, intangible light.” 21 For further bibliography, see Keyes et al. 2011, pp. 156, 200; Weber, 2014, pp. 243–245.

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Fig. 64. Rembrandt, Lucretia, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. Photo: National Gallery of Art

forward to grasp a cord, however, so the remainder of her body must lie behind the picture plane. Her foreshortened sleeve is roughly textured. The cord, too, projects from the surface of the canvas. The plasticity of the paint in this area helps to advance these forms, even more dramatically than the sleeve in the Jewish Bride. Less roughly textured is Lucretia’s right hand. In it, she holds a knife. Its edge is marked out and emphasized by a raised line of paint, which gives tangible presence to its capacity to cut. The thickness of the paint encourages us to examine these pictures from a variety of angles. Looking at the knife-wielding hand from a position to the left of the painting, the tip of the knife appears to point outward, as if about to pierce the canvas. Draped across Lucretia’s torso and traversing a great diagonal is another textured object, this time a necklace or chain, not unlike the chain worn by Aristotle in Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (Plate 9). And like Aristotle’s chain, this one also stands up on the surface like a sculptured relief, advancing that form forward and bringing the white, almost canvas-colored blouse along with it. Helping in that, of course, is the red of the blood that stains this blouse. With the forms all in such proximity to

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Fig. 65. Rembrandt, The Apostle Bartholomew, San Diego, Timken Museum of Art. Photo: Timken Museum of Art

the picture plane, with the knife poking and the blood draining out from Lucretia’s body, it is hard to escape from the idea that Rembrandt imagined the canvas itself as a kind of skin, a skin given life and meaning – and death in this case – by his pigment-laden brush. Skin, of course, is the “organ” most closely associated with the sense of touch. A similar dynamic is at work in at least three other paintings from this period, the Washington Lucretia (Fig. 64), and the two pictures of The Apostle Bartholomew (Figs. 65 and 66) in California collections. In the Lucretia, the format is again halflength. Here, her body is even closer to the picture plane and even more closely parallel to it than in the Minneapolis version. Her left hand seems to push at the picture plane. Her right hand is extended, poised to plunge the knife for the first time into her torso. Texture again works to make her form move forward, though it is

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Fig. 66. Rembrandt, The Apostle Bartholomew, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. Photo: J. Paul Getty Museum

not as subtle in its differentiation as in the Minneapolis Lucretia. Here, emphatically three-dimensional paint is isolated to the jeweled belt that rests on her dress just below the waist. This textured paint, the half-length format, and the lack of setting, together with the planarity of Lucretia’s body, conspire to join figure and canvas. We wait with baited breath for skin/canvas to give way to the point of the knife. There is less drama in the two paintings of St. Bartholomew, and much less thick impasto, but in both the saint holds the knife that will flay his skin close to the picture plane. This is particularly true in the Timken Museum painting (Fig. 65), where the hand that holds the knife is brightly illuminated and the cutting edge of the instrument is highlighted with white paint. Though sometimes employed as a simple device for creating and organizing a pictorial space, as in the Syndics of the Drapers’s Guild (Fig. 61), visibly thick paint was also employed by Rembrandt to push forms forward of the picture plane, into the world of all the senses.

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The Touch of the Artist and the Legacy of Titian It is important to consider briefly how visible brushwork was understood in the art literature of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, for textured surfaces fell under the rubric of this discourse. The key figure in this was Titian, whose legacy we explored in the chapters on El Greco and Velázquez. Rembrandt was fascinated by Titian and in his Portrait of Jan Six (Fig. 52), he sought, I will argue, to emulate the Venetian painter’s masterfully fluid handling of paint. In doing so he embraced Italian ideals of courtly sprezzatura and demonstrated the authority of his own skilled, artistic touch. Giorgio Vasari was ambivalent about Titian’s late style. He praised with few reservations the artist’s more tightly painted early paintings, but disliked the visible brushwork of his late works. As I have discussed elsewhere, Vasari’s reservations likely centered on the fact that, because the brushwork is visible, Titian’s late, painterly painting inevitably recorded the actions of the artist’s hand, and thus highlighted the mechanical nature of art making, a messy reminder of painting’s materiality.22 It was precisely because of this fact, of course, that Velázquez seems to have been so attracted to Titian’s example. Vasari’s text might have been available to Rembrandt, but the likelier source for his knowledge of Titian’s late style was the work of Karel van Mander, whose Schilder-Boeck (Book of painting) begins with a theoretical preface, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const (The foundation of the noble, free art of painting), that includes significant passages paraphrased from the Italian:23 We learn from what Vasari has written, to our great profit, about the great Titian, how in the bloom of his youth he used to execute his artworks industriously with incredible neatness; and his works were beyond reproach, indeed they pleased everyone, whether one stood at a distance or close up. But in the end he executed his work very differently, with blotches and rough strokes and of course that looked well if one stood at quite a distance, but it could not be viewed close up.24

A little distance was all that was needed to make the brushwork blend seamlessly together and dispel any notion that the paint might not be fully subservient to 22 Knox, 2009, pp. 11–40. 23 Jan Six owned a copy of Van Mander’s treatise, along with three editions of Vasari. It seems unlikely, however, that Rembrandt would have read Italian. Courtright, 1996, p. 493. The partial list of books in Rembrandt’s library does not include Van Mander’s work, but Golahny, 2003, pp. 238–239, concluded that he most likely owned it. 24 Quoted in Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 202, from Van Mander, 1604, Cap. 12: 22 and 23, fol. 48r: “Van Tizianus den grooten wy mercken, / Wt Vasari schriften ons wel profijtich, Exempel Tizianus, zijn dingen stonden eerst wel van by, en van verre. / Hoe hy in de bloeme zijns Ieuchts verstercken / Plocht uyt te voeren zijn constighe wercken, / Met onghelooflijcke netticheyt vlijtich: / De welcke niet te berispen verwijtich / En waren, maer behaeghden wel een yder, / T’zy ofmender verre van stondt oft byder. / maer ten lesten met vlecken en rouw’ streken, Tiziaen, veranderde zijn handelinghe, datse / van verre alleen woude ghesien wesen.”

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mirrorlike illusionism. Van Hoogstraten later repeated the same idea, thus neatly bracketing Rembrandt’s career: The early pieces by Titian are painted in a manner with the colours smoothly merging into one another, which nevertheless was done with a full brush, but in his last [phase], when the sharpness of his eyesight was failing, he left the broad brushstrokes unworked, which, seen from a distance further than an arm’s length, have all the more powerful effect.25

One significant change, of course, other than ascribing visible brushwork to a medical condition, is that Van Hoogstraten believed that broad strokes helped to make the forms more powerful at a distance.26 Also, in specifying that the distance need only be “further than an arm’s length” Van Hoogstraten allows for a fairly close “distant” view. Clearly, he was not thinking only about large public works seen across a vast span of space. Aside from these changes, the prejudices of Vasari crossed the Alps intact and remained influential throughout the seventeenth century. Though surprising to those weaned on modernism, the close-up view did not find many champions in seventeenth-century Europe. There was Marco Boschini in Italy, but no Dutch equivalent to put into words what close viewing might have meant to those who appreciated it.27 Instead, there was the repeated denial of its importance and insistence on the distant view. There must have been people who valued looking closely at painting, however, and Rembrandt himself invited viewers to scrutinize his works from distances much shorter than the length of an arm. Close viewing of artworks was important to Rembrandt throughout his career. Early on, this predilection was manifested in a small-scale format that absolutely required intimate viewing. He also employed fine and detailed brushwork during his early career. In view of his late works, it is hard to imagine that students of Rembrandt founded the school of Leiden fijnschilders, or fine painters, and that they were following Rembrandt’s lead. Even during the period of his greatest public success, with the notable exception of the Nightwatch (Fig. 51), his paintings were not especially large. There is no equivalent in Rembrandt’s oeuvre to the acres of canvas painted by some of his contemporaries, especially for large decorative cycles. No gallery of Rembrandt’s paintings can compare with the display of Rubens’s Marie de’ Medici cycle in the Louvre. Rembrandt’s paintings were painted on a human scale and were meant to be appreciated up close. In some of the late paintings, as I noted above, forms are pushed up to the 25 Quoted in Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 205, Van Hoogstraten, 1678, pp. 233–234: “De vroege dingen van Titiaen zijn zeer in een vloejende geschildert, ‘t welk nochtans met een vol pinseel gedaen is, maer in zijne laetste, toen hem de scherpheit van ‘t gezicht faelde, heeft hy de vlakke plaetstreeken onverwerkt gelaten, welke uit de hand staende, ook dies te grooter kracht hebben.” 26 On Titian’s response to the effects of aging, see Sohm, 2007, pp. 76–103. 27 On Boschini, see Sohm, 1991.

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picture plane, surfaces are textured, space and setting are eliminated, and figures fill almost the entire painted surface. These are all strategies that invite close viewing. Passages from Van Mander, Van Hoogstraten, and Houbraken confirm the historical pertinence of these observations. The hero of Van Mander’s story of northern painting was Jan van Eyck. With the exception of the Portrait of Jan de Leeuw (Fig. 60) mentioned above, Van Eyck’s painted surfaces displayed virtually no impasto and very little visible brushwork. Venetian painting is closely associated with the opposite – thick impasto and visible brushwork – and Van Mander knew this tradition, albeit largely secondhand; one of his teachers, Pieter Vlerick, had worked with Tintoretto.28 The contrast Van Mander makes between the handling of paint in Venetian art and that of Van Eyck and others working along similar lines is critical to the argument of this chapter. Van Mander writes that Van Eyck: did not load the panels [with paint] as they do now [he’s talking about Venetians here], when one can almost blindly feel and trace by touch the whole work on all sides; for in our time the paint is applied so roughly and unevenly that one would almost think that the paintings had been sculpted in stone relief.29

Van Mander describes close viewing, and using touch to understand the work of art. He may not advocate the museum guard’s nightmare of literally rubbing one’s hands over the surfaces of painterly paintings, but he does ask that we imagine doing so and suggests at the same time that we would garner significant information from this groping. This attitude is consonant with a culture in which visitors to collections of art fully expected to be able to touch what they could see, including paintings. The prohibition against touching was a product of the modern museum of the nineteenth century.30 What this means is that my observations, building on what Alpers said, are not just empty speculations without historical validity. People did think of this kind of brushwork in terms of touch, and they could do so only from close up. Moreover, the surfaces of Titian’s and Tintoretto’s canvases are not nearly as built up as those of the late Rembrandt, which means that Van Mander’s comment is even more apposite to the paintings under investigation here. According to Van Mander, textured paint led viewers to thinking about understanding a painting by tactile means. Though tangential to the historically specific argument I want to present, there is also evidence from the Italian context of a similar affinity for the topography of paint. Marco Boschini, the great Venetian champion of painterly 28 Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 200. 29 Translation by Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 201, Van Mander, 1604, fol. 48r, Cap. 12: 20: “Ginghen de penneelen so niet belasten / Als nu / dat men schier blindelijck mach tasten En bevoelen al t’ wreck aen elcker sijde Want de verwen ligghen wel t’onsen tijde / Soo oneffen en rouw / men mochtse meenen / Schier te zijn half rondt / in gehouwen steenen.” 30 Classen, 2005.

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brushwork, reports that whenever in front of Jacopo Bassano’s St. ­Valentin Baptizing St. Lucy, “I kneel in front of this altar with great reverence and touch with my hands those colpi, those machie, those bote which seem to me precious stones, pearls, rubies, emeralds and diamonds that glitter in the night.”31 Even more ahistorical, I will share a personal anecdote. Some years ago, in the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, a child of around ten ran up to a painting and rubbed his hand back and forth on its surface. Too far away to intervene, I stood in shocked silence. Was it mere coincidence that this child chose a textured painting, a Renoir to be precise? My point is: texture invites touch. The idea that rough texture draws the eye to the surface, and not just the hands as in Van Mander’s observation, is also not an anachronism inspired by modernist orthodoxy. It appears in Van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding: Why is it, when you draw outdoors from life, on blue paper, a blue sky with drifting clouds, that your paper appears to be so close to you and the [actual] sky’s azure so infinitely distant? It is because your piece of paper, however smooth it may appear, nevertheless has a certain perceptible roughness, into which the eye can stare [focus], wheresoever you choose, which is not possible in the even blue of the heavens.32

The subtle roughness of a piece of paper reifies that surface and diminishes the illusion of a world beyond the picture plane. Such reification is stronger when the surface is very rough, as in some of Rembrandt’s late paintings. Texture, of course, is visible, but is primarily apprehended by means of the sense of touch. Again, the conclusions I drew above, where I argued that textured paint encouraged viewers to consider the surface of the canvas as something real and not just a window onto another world, find support in a contemporary source, and though Van Hoogstraten does not discuss rubbing the surface of the paper, as Van Mander had imagined with paintings in the Venetian mode, Van Hoogstraten’s reasoning is grounded in texture and, ultimately, in hapticity. It is worth remembering that Van Hoogstraten developed many of his ideas during his experience in Rembrandt’s studio. That close viewing of brushy paintings happened in Rembrandt’s time is also evidenced in Houbraken’s biography of the artist, quoted above. I refer, of course, to those sentences that I will cite here again, in their entirety now:

31 Boschini, 1966, p. 302: “Quando per questo mi son stà a Bassan, / Procurete d’aver buon licencia / D’inzegnochiarme con gran reverencia / Su quel Altar, per tocar con le man / Quei colpi, quele machie e quele bote, / Che stimo preciose piere fine, / Perle, rubini, smeraldi e turchine, / Diamanti, che resplende fin la note.” Translation from Sohm, 1991, p. 155n302. I would like to thank Philip Sohm for pointing me to this particular quotation. 32 Quoted in Van de Wetering, 2016, pp. 77–78, Van Hoogstraten, 1678, p. 307: “Wat is’t, als gy op blaeuw papier een blaeuwen Hemel met drijvende wolken in ‘t veld na ‘t leven tekent, dat uw papier zoo na by u schijnt te zijn, en het Hemelsch lazuur zoo oneindelijk verre? ‘t Is om dat uw papier, hoe effen gy’t ook oordeelt, een zekere kenbaere rulheyt heeft, waer in het oog staeren kan, ter plaetse, daer gy wilt, ‘t welk gy in ‘t gladde blaeuw des Hemels niet doen en kunt.”

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Many years in succession his painting kept him so busy that people had to wait a long time for their works, notwithstanding that he worked so rapidly. This was especially the case during his last years when, seen from nearby, his paintings looked as if they had been laid on with a trowel. This is the reason why, when people visited his workshop and wished to view his works from close to, he pulled them back saying “the smell of the paint will upset you.” It is said that he once painted a portrait with paint so thick that one could pick it up by its nose. You also see jewels and pearls painted by him in necklaces and turbans so impastoed that they stand in relief – it is on account of this manner of working that his pieces appear so powerful, even when seen from a distance.33

Houbraken believed that projecting paint helped Rembrandt’s paintings to carry over a distance. He understood this new technique in the later period not as a result of failing eyesight, as Van Hoogstraten had explained Titian’s similar stylistic shift, but in terms of speed of execution. This was another common way of understanding visible brushwork, also introduced, as we shall see, in discussions of Titian. As I said earlier about this passage: it actually explains the desire to look closely at the paintings as a product of the visibility of the paint. Houbraken goes on to invoke the sense of smell and the sense of touch, prompting one to imagine the comic nose-tonose address of viewer and portrait, with Rembrandt himself as an attentive nanny, shooing visitors back from this sensory address to his painting’s materiality, of which he was surely proud. Rembrandt imagined viewers seeing the paint, approaching the paint, smelling the paint, and finally, touching the paint by picking up the portrait by its nose. The passages from Van Mander, Van Hoogstraten, and Houbraken make it clear that viewers looked at paintings close up because they were attracted by their texture. What were people to think once they stood with their noses thrust up against one of Rembrandt’s paintings? This is much more difficult to discern than merely identifying that that desire existed. Just because seventeenth-century Dutch writers on art, along with their contemporaries in the rest of Europe, did not lay out an explicit agenda for those who enjoyed close-up viewing of paintings with textured or painterly surfaces does not mean that such an agenda did not exist. It means that

33 Houbraken, 2007, pp. 84, 87. Houbraken, 1718–1721, vol. 1, p. 269: “Vele Jaren agter den anderen heeft hy het met schilderen zoo druk gehad dat de menschen lang naar hunne stukken moesten wagten, niettegenstaande dat hy met zyn werkvaardig voortging, inzonderheid in zyn laatsten tyd, toen het ‘er, van na by bezien, uitzag of het met een Metzelaars truffel was aangesmeert. Waarom hy de menschen, als zy op zyn schilderkamer kwamen, en zyn werk van digteby wilden bekyken, te rug trok, zeggende: de reuk van de verf zou u verveelen. Ook word ‘er getuigt dat hy eens een pourtret geschildert heeft daar de verw zoodanig dik op lag, datmen de schildery by de neus van de grond konde opligten. Dus zietmen ook gesteente en paerlen, op Borstcieraden en Tulbanden door hem zoo verheven geschildert al even of ze geboetseerd waren, door welke wyze van behandelen zyne stukken, zelf in wyden afstand, kragtig uitkomen.”

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these writers were either uninterested or unable to articulate an appreciation for surface that militated against their belief that painting was primarily about illusionism. Moreover, it is hard to describe brushwork and texture. Authors contemporary with Rembrandt did, however, hint at some themes to bear in mind as one approached the smelly materiality of the paint, and some of these themes have their origin in Vasari’s appraisal of Titian. In discussing sketchy drawings Van Hoogstraten describes how the viewer completes the forms in the mind. “Just as when one espies a friend in the distance, or on meeting him in the twilight, one suddenly sees his form and recognizes him in the mind, in the same way a rough sketch frequently makes such a great impression on connoisseurs of art that they see more in it than the one who made it.”34 Though intended to address the sketchiness of drawings, the analogy holds in front of paintings, especially those intended for sophisticated clients. The Portrait of Jan Six (Fig. 52) is a particularly good example. Jan Six’s wealth may have come from the family cloth business, but Rembrandt’s sitter was much more interested in poetry, humanism, art collecting, and in being a country gentleman. He wrote a Latin chronogram in response to this very portrait that articulates a subtle understanding of the painting as a meditation on the theme of the threshold, of the inner versus the outer self, of private versus public.35 Jan Six’s collection of art also included oil sketches, which was unusual at the time, suggesting that the completion of sketchy forms in the mind, as described by Van Hoogstraten, may well have been of interest to him.36 Rembrandt depicts Jan Six half-length. A bright red cloak draped casually over his left shoulder, Six looks up at the viewer, interrupted in his pulling on of a fringed glove with his right hand. The background is dark and indistinct but one imagines that once Six has his gloves on he will pull his cloak over his shoulders and head out into the world. We surmise from the clothes he is wearing that he is likely preparing to ride his horse, perhaps to go hunting, a gentlemanly pursuit of the highest order.37 Rembrandt applied paint in the Portrait of Jan Six in a manner quite unlike most of his late paintings.38 What makes this painting stand out is that its paint does not; we are not confronted with richly layered impasto. The portrait is much more a pictorial essay on how a painting can be made out of broad, distinct brushstrokes. Marching down the face of the cloak’s embroidered border, for instance, is a series of horizontal strokes, each stroke separate from its neighbor. Even in the modeling of the red cloak itself there is little or no blending of the strokes. The most spectacular brushwork is reserved for the hands and gloves of Jan Six, where one can discern the remarkably economical application of the paint as it describes the complex interaction of bare 34 35 36 37 38

Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 272; Van Hoogstraten, 1678, p. 27. Smith, 1988. De Jongh, 1985, p. 67. Winkel, 2006, pp. 93–132. Haak, 2003, p. 355, notes this as well.

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hand, gloved hand, dangling glove and sleeve. With each stroke of paint separate and unblended like the lines a pen might make on a drawing, this is sketchy brushwork par excellence. Following Van Hoogstraten, one can imagine a sophisticated man such as Jan Six completing the suggestive forms in his mind. The seventeenth-century sources confirm that contemporary audiences appreciated visible brushwork that was executed with skill. Frustratingly, these sources do not reveal exactly what this skillful brushwork looked like, or how one is to determine its success. With that in mind, let us quickly survey those passages where skill is mentioned. Van Mander is thought to have been referring to Tintoretto when he said: So they see to it that their work makes lusty progress, and as a result honourably executes their intentions. This is how the Caesars in the art of painting proceed, who are constantly increasing in art and expanding their realm by their daring painting; but although one can learn to paint boldly in this way, with no inhibitions, yet this manner of working is not appropriate for everyone.39

According to Van Mander, painting in the manner of Tintoretto was bold, daring, and uninhibited, but it also required skill. Had this not been true, all could have followed in his footsteps. Only some can learn how to paint boldly. Van Hoogstraten also praised Tintoretto, and warned that not everyone had the requisite ability: There is also that danger in too much haste, of falling short in the best parts of art. Antidotus painted roughly, but frequently fell short in proportions. They are not all Nicomachuses who have a skilled hand: nor are those who are daring with the brush all Tintorettos, the virtue of the work lies in an appealing faithfulness to life, and if one loses one’s potency with haste, then one ought to take more time.40

Tintoretto may be able to work fast, but it is not something an artist should do without a “skilled hand.” When executed correctly, this kind of dexterity can result in a greater impression of life, again according to Van Hoogstraten:

39 Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 200. Van Mander, 1604, fols.46v-47r, 12:6. “Iae vorderen alsoo hun werck met luste, / Hun voornemen uytvoerende met eeren, / Dit mach wel voeghen de Schildersch’ Augusten, / Die in Consten toenemen sonder rusten, / En in stout schilderen t’rijcke vermeeren: Ten eersten schier sonder teyckenen schilderen, wil hem met yeder niet schicken.” 40 Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 206. Van Hoogstraten, 1678, p. 240: “Al te grooten haest is ook gevaerlijk, om in de beste deelen der konst te missen. Antidotus schilderde ruw, maer miste dikwils in de maetschiklijkheyt. Ten zijn niet al Nikomachen, die een vaerdige handt hebben: noch Tyntoretten, die stout in ‘t penseel zijn, De deugt van ‘t werk bestaet in bevallijke natuerlijkheyt, en als men die met haest onmachtich is, zoo behoortmen ‘er tijdt toe te nemen.”

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So it is now necessary that one should get used to a way of doing [i.e., painting] such that it is able to obey readily what the mind dictates: thus the most praiseworthy of all is this: that one should become accustomed to a brisk brushstroke, which indicates distinctively those passages that differ in some way from other passages [in the painting], giving them their proper character, and where acceptable a playful liveliness without ever applying and merging the brushstrokes (too) smoothly; for this dispels the merit [of this brushwork], and yields nothing more than a dreamy stiffness at the expense of an honest distinction between [shades of colour].41

Here, he added that varying the brushwork according to what was being represented was a key characteristic of what he meant by skill. In the end, these quotations from Van Mander and Van Hoogstraten do little to clarify what characteristics would permit a viewer to distinguish good from bad painterly brushwork. As we have seen, a common characteristic ascribed to visible brushwork was that it was imagined as having been created quickly. Houbraken implied this when he said that Rembrandt worked rapidly, especially in his late years when he layered the paint on with a trowel. Some artists did not have the skill to work fast, and therefore should not do so. As Van Mander pointed out, again paraphrasing Vasari, some artists followed Titian’s late style out of a misunderstanding: Several masters, wishing to follow this in their work, have made nothing substantial but have rather produced a lot of ugly dross. They thought they could do as well as those who were well practiced and have deceived themselves with a mistaken idea, because they thought that his [Titian’s] works had been made effortlessly,

41 Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 208. Van Hoogstraten, 1678, p. 233: “Zoo is ‘t nu van nooden, dat men zich een wijze van doen gewenne, die ‘t verstand vaerdich kan gehoorzamen: dies is allermeest te prijzen, datmen zich tot een wakkere pinseelstreek gewoon maeke, die de plaetsen, die van andere iets verschillen, dapperlijk aenwijze, gevende de teykening zijn behoorlijke toedrukkingen, en de koloreeringen, daer ‘t lijden kan, een speelende zwaddering: zonder ooit tot lekken of verdrijven te komen; want dit verdrijft de deugt, en geeft niets anders, als een droomige stijvicheit, tot verlies van d’ oprechte breekinge der verwen.” 42 Van de Wetering, 2106, p. 202. Van Mander, 1604, fols. 48r-48v, 12:23–25. “Ginck hy zijn wercken al anders beleyden, / Welck natuerlijck wel stondt, als men gheweken / Wat verre daer van was, maer niet bekeken / Van by en wou wesen, het welck verscheyden / Meesters willende volghen in’t arbeyden, / En hebbender niet van ghemaeckt te deghe, / Dan een deel leelijck goets ghebracht te weghe. / Sy meenden den wel gheoeffenden slachtenVeel hebben Tiziaen meenen volghen, en zijn verdwaelt. / En hebben miswanich hun self bedroghen, / Om dat sy zijn werck sonder arbeydt dachten / Te wesen ghedaen, daer d’uyterste crachten / Der Consten met moeyt’ in waren gheploghen: / Want men siet zijn dinghen overghetoghen / En bedeckt met verwen verscheyden reysen, / Meer moeyt isser in als men soude peysen. / maer dees maniere van doen uyt bysonder / Goet oordeel en verstandt van Tizianen, / Is schoon en bevallijck gheacht te wonder: / Want (seyt Vasary) den arbeydt daer onder Tizianen dinghen, die met arbeydt ghedaen zijn, / schijnen sonder arbeydt ghedaen. / Groote Const bedeckt is, en dat soodanen / Schildery te leven men schier mocht wanen, / En als gheseyt is, dat zijn dinghen schijnen / Lichtveerdich, die doch zijn ghedaen met pijnen.”

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whereas in fact the utmost competence had been deployed with [great] effort; for one sees that his works have several times been painted again and covered with [fresh] paint: There is more effort in it than one would think, […] the effort is hidden in it by great artistry.42

According to Vasari’s account as related by Van Mander, Titian did not work quickly. His canvases were repeatedly reworked, and one can observe this on the surfaces of the paintings themselves. The idea that Van Mander repeated led to a powerful means for interpreting painterly brushwork. Such brushwork looked as if it had been laid down quickly, without effort, but with great skill. Seemingly effortless skill was associated in Italian culture with the courtly ideal of sprezzatura. Vital to this connection is the last phrase quoted above: “the effort is hidden in it by great artistry.” As described in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, first published in 1528, the courtier was a man accomplished in many things. Outwardly, his accomplishments came about without the exertion of any effort. Brushwork in the manner of Titian was in this way equated with an ideal of aristocratic deportment.43 An explicit connection between sprezzatura and brushwork was never made in Netherlandish art literature, but it is nevertheless possible that such an association existed. Jan Six was a perfect candidate to have made such a link. He owned editions of Van Mander and Vasari, as well as three copies of Castiglione’s Courtier. The 1662 translation into Dutch, published by Lambert van den Bos, was dedicated to Jan Six.44 As Eddie De Jongh suggested, “I do not think it inconceivable that Six appreciated the apparent nonchalance of Rembrandt’s brush as being the artistic equivalent of the pretentious negligence in affairs and appearance which was the attitude of behaviour recommended by Baldassare Castiglione.”45 David Smith argued that the association with sprezzatura was also grounded in how Six is posed, or, rather, how he is studiously not posed; he casually pulls on a glove as if about to head out for a ride or some other suitably aristocratic pursuit. In donning gloves, he is “putting on the social mask of a gentleman.”46 For both De Jongh and Smith the sprezzatura of Rembrandt’s magnificent painting all revolves around the sitter. His casual pose joins together with the nonchalance of the brushwork to express something important about Jan Six and his social aspirations. The fluid, ostensibly careless brushwork of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Jan Six also speaks to the artist’s own ambitions and self-fashioning. Though no author in the Netherlands explicitly made a connection between visible brushwork and sprezzatura, Van Mander does hint at such a bond. In his comments on Pieter Aertsen, for instance, he tied the handling of the brush with masculinity: “I do not think one can 43 44 45 46

Knox, 2009, pp. 16–17; Sohm, 1985. Smith, 1988, p. 44. De Jongh, 1985, p. 67. Smith, 1988, pp. 45–46

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Fig. 67. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait at Age 34, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery London/Art ­Resource, NY

see bolder or more Manly Brushstrokes, or handling.” What Van Mander was suggesting here was an equation between the act of painting and the skill involved in military combat, “‘knights’ of the brush” as Maria-Isabel Pousão-Smith has put it.47 Rembrandt’s brushwork in the Portrait of Jan Six could well have been read as implying the artist’s own knightly deportment, or least his worthiness to be considered a member of that elite through his unequalled skill in the laying on of paint.48 In the Portrait of Jan Six Rembrandt proposed not just that he was a noble wielder of the brush, but that he was, more specifically, like Titian. Rembrandt had long held a fascination for the Venetian painter. In his Self-Portrait at Age 34 (Fig. 67) 47 Pousão-Smith, 1998, pp. 139–140. 48 Binstock, 1999, p. 143, argues that Rembrandt’s “emphatically bold approach is the contrary of sprezzatura, which disguises the work of the artist behind a courtly façade of effortless perfection.”

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Fig. 68. Titian, A Man with a Quilted Sleeve, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

from 1640, Rembrandt played a complex game of making allusions both to Italian art, and to poetry.49 The work shows the artist with a chain, an honor given first to poets and then later to painters in recognition of the intellectual status of their arts. Rembrandt had never himself received such a chain. Instead, he has cast himself in the role of the honored artist. The work is reminiscent of a portrait by Titian thought in the seventeenth century to represent the famous Renaissance poet Ariosto (Fig. 68). We know with virtual certainty that Rembrandt knew this painting. It was in an Amsterdam collection at the time and that collector had also purchased a picture from Rembrandt.50 Rembrandt has positioned his body in a very similar position to “Ariosto,” his arm is propped on a ledge in a related way, and in both paintings the 49 Chapman, 1990, pp. 72–78; MacLaren, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 339–341; De Jongh, 1969. 50 Bloch, 1946.

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Fig. 69. Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

artist’s signature appears on that ledge. Is Rembrandt intending to allude to the Italian poet? Given what we know about Rembrandt’s ambitions as an artist this makes perfect sense. In doing so Rembrandt would be trying to make the point that painting was on the same level as poetry. The imitation works on another level as well because Rembrandt shows himself as being worthy of being painted by a great artist, Titian, and then paints his image himself. He suggests thereby his double worthiness, as both subject and artist, a paragone two-for-one. In the process, Rembrandt has likened himself both to Ariosto and to Titian, who, incidentally, did receive exactly the kind of gold chain Rembrandt shows in this portrait. There are a number of differences between the Rembrandt Self-Portrait and the so-called Ariosto. Rembrandt employs much more muted tones, the sitter is more frontally posed, and he wears a beret cocked at a jaunty angle. A second Italian portrait comes into play here, Raphael’s Baldassare Castiglione (Fig. 69). Rembrandt

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Fig. 70. Titian, Portrait of a Man with a Glove, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource

knew this work. In 1639, just one year before he painted the Self-Portrait in question, he made a drawing after the Raphael in which the beret has already begun to assume its tilt. Rembrandt’s annotations to the drawing show that he knew that Castiglione was the sitter. Rembrandt has offered up a potent set of associations, all of which are meant to fashion a richly nuanced sense of the self that he wished to project to the world. As sitter, Rembrandt was like a man of letters, like Ariosto or Castiglione. As painter, he was like one of the greats of the Italian tradition, like Titian or Raphael. In the Portrait of Jan Six Rembrandt brought his identification with Titian up to date. In the Self-Portrait from 1640 the format and pose of the sitter were similar to two Italian precedents. The Portrait of Jan Six is also very Italianate in these respects, even if we are unable to point to a specific source that we know Rembrandt had seen. Titian was famous as a portraitist, especially of the aristocratic half-length, which often showed the sitter with gloves, as in the Louvre Man with a Glove (Fig. 70). It was a well-known formula in the north of Europe during Rembrandt’s time, not just through the importation of originals, but through the inspiration it gave to numerous

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artists, especially Anthony Van Dyck. It is his distinctive brushwork, though, that really ties Rembrandt’s Portrait of Jan Six to Titian. In the 1640 Self-Portrait, Rembrandt had adapted the forms of Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione. Here, Rembrandt employed brushwork that sought to embody Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura, just as Titian had done in his late work, according to Vasari and Van Mander (at least implicitly). The scale of the Portrait of Jan Six also plays into to this interpretation. I always tell my students that one of the downsides of the classroom lecture is that projected images are all the same size. Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait looks comfortable next to Velázquez’s Las Meninas even though the latter is an enormous painting with lifesize figures and the former is quite small. Illustrations in books can be similarly misleading. When I saw the Portrait of Jan Six for the first time, I was expecting it to be life-size. After all, it shows the figure half-length, and it depicts an intimate encounter. When seen in reproduction the strokes of paint look as though they belong to a life-size portrait. The painting is noticeably, surprisingly, over-life-sized. It stands out in this way from other portraits by the artist. Rembrandt painted the figure larger, and at the same time he proportionally enlarged each brushstroke. It is almost as if Rembrandt chose to make the portrait bigger than one might expect, and then to make the brushstrokes commensurately larger so as to emphasize those strokes. Jan Six is shown larger than expected and is painted with supersized brushstrokes so that we are sure to notice them. This brings us back to what I was saying above about textured brushwork, in that both draw the eye to the surface. The difference here, of course, is that this brushwork is not really textured. The brushstrokes are visible but the surface does not stand out in relief as it does in so many of his other late paintings. The Portrait of Jan Six invites viewers to admire up close the dazzling display of painterly sprezzatura. As Bob Haak has noted, however, and which I have tried to emphasize above, this “virtuoso and spontaneous technique” does not really appear elsewhere in Rembrandt’s oeuvre, so even though I have devoted considerable time to the reception of this brushwork it represents an isolated example.51 The painting does, however, play into the theme of touch that I have been hinting at for so long, though not the kind of invitation to touch the rough surface as described in Van Mander. Instead, the visible brushstrokes referred, I believe, to the skilled touch of the artist’s hand. In Chapter Four I introduced Georg Pencz’s Allegory of Touch (Fig. 33) in support of my interpretation of Velázquez’s The Spinners (Fig. 31) as a painting that thematized the skilled touch of the spinning women and, by implication, the masterful touch of the artist himself. The Allegory emphasized the intimate connection between tactile sensitivity and skilled artisanal production. Rembrandt’s supersized brushstrokes in 51 Haak, 2003, p. 355.

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his Portrait of Jan Six invite knowledgeable viewers to make a whole range of associations: they could complete the image in their own minds; they could admire the courtly sprezzatura of the brushwork, that reflected both on the sitter and on the artist; they could note the connection with Titian, an exalted Italian source; they could admire the skillful touch of an artist capable of such fluid suggestion.

Conclusion Rembrandt’s fascination with visible brushwork took many forms. Using textured paint, Rembrandt drew the viewer’s eye to the surface of his canvases, and suggested that the forms he represented pushed up against – or even through – the picture plane. Rembrandt reveled in the possibilities of the close-up view, where viewers could engage with the materiality of his paint. Like Velázquez, Rembrandt sometimes painted in a way that emulated the mode established by Titian in late-sixteenth-century Venice. I have discussed the connection between painted texture and the desire to touch that it creates, an observation that is grounded in the art literature of Rembrandt’s own time, but I have not analyzed the ways in which Rembrandt’s late works build on that observation. It is to this topic, where the meaning of a painting comes from stimulating thoughts of actual touching, that the following chapter turns.

6. Late Rembrandt II: Feeling with the Eyes Abstract Rembrandt used textured paint to elicit thoughts of touching. He deployed this rough paint very selectively, introducing texture to areas of the surface where the sense of touch was especially resonant with the subject matter. He thematized erotic touch in the varied paint textures of Bathsheba and Woman Bathing, and the warm touch of familial attachment in the Jewish Bride and the Braunschweig Family Portrait. In the Minneapolis Lucretia Rembrandt textured paint to emphasize the physical pain of the self-inflicted wound. Father and son communicate in the Return of the Prodigal Son through touching that is emphasized with textured paint. In Aristotle with a Bust of Homer touch joins forces with sight in the generation of poetic insight. Keywords: Painting sense of touch, Svetlana Alpers

Textured paint invites touch. While that observation may generate little controversy, art historical orthodoxy has long held that paintings should be interpreted exclusively in terms of opticality. For the most part, that makes perfect sense. But as Svetlana Alpers argued, in Rembrandt’s late paintings textured paint can act in concert with touching, both real and represented. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, I will demonstrate that Rembrandt used textured paint in a highly selective way: he textured the paint in areas where meaning emerged in connection with that texture. Second, I will argue that Rembrandt deployed textured paint in order to suggest different kinds of touching.

Touch, from the Erotic to the Familial Like the Portrait of Jan Six (Fig. 52), Bathsheba (Fig. 53) and Woman Bathing (Plate 6) speak to Rembrandt’s consummate skill in applying paint. They also add another dimension to the theme of touch: the erotic touch of the assumed male viewer. In the Bathsheba, this touching is inherent in the story and evoked by the emphasis on depicted touching, and by the differentiated paint surfaces. There is no certainty with regards to the story, if any, of the Woman Bathing, but bathing is an inherently erotic theme in the European tradition, and once again the act of touching is represented, Knox, G., Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725712_ch06

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and called attention to through the varied textures of the paint surface. The Jewish Bride (plate 7) and the Braunschweig Family Portrait (Fig. 54) deemphasize the erotic and lead viewers to consider touch as the force that bonds discrete family members together into one. The story of David and Bathsheba is one that revolves around beauty that gives rise to erotic desire and erotic consummation. It is a story of sight leading to touch. One day, David catches sight of Bathsheba bathing. He becomes so aroused that he summons Bathsheba to his chambers even though she is married to Uriah, who serves in David’s army. Bathsheba becomes pregnant with David’s baby. In an effort to mask the pregnancy, David orders Uriah to return from the battlefield immediately so that he should sleep with his wife. A dutiful servant of Israel, Uriah refuses to return. Out of desperation, David condemns Uriah to inevitable death by sending him to the most hotly contested section of the front. In the end, David marries Bathsheba. I retell this story here because of Rembrandt’s unique interpretation of the narrative. Bathsheba holds a letter in her right hand. The bright white of its paper catches the light, riveting our attention just as it must have riveted Bathsheba’s just moments ago. She no longer looks at the letter, which can be none other than David’s request, and having read its contents she casts her eyes downward and to the left. As many have commented, it is clear that Bathsheba is considering the implications of David’s proposition. She makes no eye contact with the viewer, or with any other figure in the composition. Bathsheba’s unfocused gaze prods the viewer into thinking beyond what we can see, to consider instead the interior life of Bathsheba as she ponders her decision. She is posed awkwardly, with her head and crossed legs parallel to the picture plane, and her torso turned into the plane at an angle. She braces herself with her left arm. Visually, her body is open to the viewer, but psychologically she is closed off, lost in thought. The setting does little to distract from the figure of Bathsheba. To the left an old woman washes Bathsheba’s feet. Behind, a patterned and textured brocade arches between the two figures. An indistinct architectural form rises up behind Bathsheba to the right. A dark cloth is stretched across the remainder of the background, blocking any view of David’s spying.1 Rembrandt’s Bathsheba appears troubled by David’s summons, but she obeys it. The sight of Bathsheba’s naked body made David want to touch her, and his wish came true. As Svetlana Alpers argued, one way that touching is emphasized in this painting is through the hands of Bathsheba, which are unusually large.2 More than that, her hands cast shadows that appear almost like thick outlines, highlighting them against the creamy white of the letter in her right hand and the cloth under her left. They stand out against the brightest parts of the composition, and the right hand also lies right along the median line of the painting. Significantly, both hands are 1 2

Sluijter, 2006, pp. 333–341. Alpers, 1988, p. 23.

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ostentatiously touching objects with a very particular texture. One clasps the crinkly sheet of paper; the letter has not been opened carefully to preserve the flat smoothness of the paper. Even more telling as an index of texture is the white cloth that takes up so much of the bottom right-hand corner of picture. The cloth is complexly bunched up and this bunching is underscored by the agitated working of the fluid paint. This turbulent and rough surface contrasts with the exquisite smoothness of the paint that describes Bathsheba’s skin.3 The contrast of creased, rough cloth and silky, smooth skin brings to the fore thoughts of touching, erotic touching in particular, just as seeing had made David think of touching. The only other figure present in the painting is also touching; she dries the feet of her mistress. Mounded up behind her is a great pile of textured brocade. The bracketing textures of white linen and golden brocade are a contrapposto to Bathsheba’s rosy, warm, supple skin. Bathsheba’s downcast expression is often interpreted as indicating her sadness about agreeing to David’s proposed assignation.4 In addition, her body is ambiguous in its relationship to the viewer, closed off to a certain extent, in that she crosses her legs and averts her gaze, but open as well because her torso is turned toward the viewer in a way that allows for both profile and frontal views of her breasts.5 The way she touches the sheets also seems to invite us to imagine that perhaps she is anticipating David’s erotic embrace, a kind of proleptic touching. Rather than melancholy, perhaps she is simply in the midst of reflection. There can be little doubt that, like Velázquez in The Rokeby Venus (Plate 5), in Bathsheba Rembrandt was positioning himself with respect to Italian art. Titian had established the female nude as an important type within European art. It was a fairly rare theme within Rembrandt’s oeuvre, and within Dutch art in general, especially on such a scale; the Bathsheba is life size. Rembrandt may have adopted this type from Venice, but he was not one to invite direct comparisons of like to like. Instead, he preferred to invert or undermine tradition, in this way establishing his own unique style. As Houbraken explains in the conclusion to his “Life of Rembrandt”: As regards his method of painting (although contemptible in many ways) I have to conclude that he did as he did on purpose. Had he painted in a manner which followed that of anyone else, or laid his brush at the foot of any celebrated Italian, or at the feet of any other highfliers, the world would recognize his borrowings by comparing the one with the other. By doing the very opposite he anticipated any unfavourable comparison, like Tiberius, as related by Tacitus, “who always avoided

3 The contrast was noted by Alpers, 1998, p. 148, but she did not draw any conclusions from it. The same can be said of Sluijter, 2006, pp. 355–358, though he does describe very sensitively the textural differentiation of the skin itself, even going so far as to suggest that this might “strongly appeal to touch.” 4 Westermann, 2000, pp. 248–249. 5 Steinberg, 1998, pp. 113–114.

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Fig. 71. Titian, Venus of Urbino, Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività ­culturali/Art Resource, NY

anything that would give the people an opportunity to compare him with Augustus, knowing that his memory was fondly cherished by all.”6

The comparison with Titian cannot be avoided in this instance, even if he did make numerous alterations. The biggest change that Rembrandt made with respect to tradition is that Bathsheba turns away from the viewer and appears lost in thought. This makes her a more complete human being than any of Titian’s sometimes vacuously erotic Venuses. By showing her with crossed legs Rembrandt also did not grant the viewer the same sense of possession that lay at the heart of the traditional appeal of paintings of the female nude.7 On the other hand, by turning Bathsheba away Rembrandt allows the viewer to focus, visually at least, on her skin and its texture, and little 6 Houbraken, 2007, p. 94. Houbraken, 1718–1721, vol. 1, p. 273: “Zyne wyze van doen ontrent de Konst (schoon in vele deelen te mispryzen) doet my besluiten dat hy zulks voordagtig gedaan heeft; want indien hy zig een wyze van schilderen, die naar die van anderen geleek, had aangewent, of zyn penceel op den voet van eenige berugte Italiaanen, of andere hoogvliegers geschoeit, zoo zou de waereld, uit vergelyking van ‘t een met het ander, zyne verdienste hebben konnen opmaken, daar hy nu, met het tegendeel te doen, die proefneming heeft vooruit geloopen, en gedaan als Tacitus van Keizer Tiberius zeit: Dat hy alles vermyde waar uit het volk gelegentheid konde nemen van vergelykingen tusschen hem en Augustus te maken, wiens gedagtenis hy zag dat by yder aangenaam was.” 7 Alpers, 1998, p. 156.

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else. Like David, we are permitted to immerse ourselves in observation, undisturbed by a return gaze, a purely voyeuristic and, by extension, guilty contemplation.8 It is not dissimilar to the kind of voyeuristic indulgence offered by Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus. But there are points of contact with Titian. In the Venus of Urbino (Fig. 71), for instance, Titian plays a similar game of touch, though not with the exact same integration of facture and meaning.9 Venus lies on a bed covered in sheets. She holds flowers in one hand, touches her sex with the other. Her hand is not enlarged, as in the Rembrandt, but it does not need to be, because like Bathsheba’s letter-holding hand this one lies along the median line, which here is emphasized by the line of the wall that neatly bisects the composition. In the background, the two maids work with fabric, one by rummaging through a cassone, the other by pushing up the cloth of her own voluminous sleeve. Rembrandt had never seen Titian’s Venus of Urbino, but both artists understood the importance of evoking the sense of touch in erotically charged or erotically suggestive paintings. In Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, she ruffles the sheets and anticipates the sensations of amorous coupling. At the same time, the viewer is invited to consider the same sort of touching, though from a distance, and without the consent, implicit or otherwise, of Bathsheba herself. This reading of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba resonates with more than just the Venetian tradition of painting. One origin of that tradition lay in antiquity and in the story of Apelles and Campaspe. According to the story told in Pliny, Apelles had painted a nude portrait of Alexander the Great’s favorite concubine. The painting was such a resounding success that Apelles gave Campaspe to the artist. Alexander rewarded Apelles’s full possession of Campaspe through sight, in the form of his painting of her, with the prize of gratification through touch. A worthy successor to that painting was Rubens’s portrait of his wife, Hélène Fourment, wrapped in a fur, Het Pelsken (Fig. 72).10 As viewers of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, however, we are not given full possession of the nude and are instead invited to look, and to contemplate the imagined future delights of touching. In this case, the narrative describes the thought that precedes an action that is thematized through the depiction of touching, and through the actual textured paint. Some art historians read the Bathsheba in biographical terms, as an historiated portrait of Rembrandt’s mistress, Hendrickje Stoffels.11 Such readings, however, rely on being sure of the woman’s identity, for which there is no good evidence. It is not even clear whether Bathsheba is a portrait, which is often a problem in Rembrandt’s history paintings because he tended to avoid obviously generic figures. This does not preclude a reading that considers the painting in terms of an erotic relationship 8 Alpers, 1998, p. 148, notes that viewers visiting the Louvre seem to pass quickly by the Bathsheba, preferring to contemplate at length the guilt-free pleasures of the Slaughtered Ox in the same gallery. 9 Cranston, 2013, pp. 47–49. 10 Carroll, 1998, p. 165. 11 Sluijter, 1998, p. 75, does not believe the Bathsheba to be a portrait at all. And in Sluijter, 2006, pp. 327–331, he argues forcefully and convincingly against the Hendrickje Stoffels identification.

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Fig. 72. Rubens, Het pelsken, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY

between artist and model. Such a relationship is more than implied in the story of Apelles and Campaspe, for in possessing her beauty in pictorial form he also clearly developed an amorous attachment to her. The same can be said of another of the famous stories of an artist’s love, that of Pygmalion, who so loved his statue of Venus

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Fig. 73. Cornelis van Kittensteyn, Touch, after Dirck Hals. Photo: Rijksmuseum

that he prayed that it would come alive. Through the artist’s touch (and the intervention of Venus) the statue did indeed come to life.12 In Bathsheba, we can imagine Rembrandt as David.13 It is easy to imagine Rembrandt/David’s desire to caress the creamy smooth skin given life by his brush, and hard to escape the expressiveness of the translucent strokes of white paint that describe the gauzy cloth that flirts with Bathsheba’s concealed sex. This playful dalliance of the brush literally paints the target of David’s erotic aspirations. Here, the touch of the artist at its most intimate replaces the hand of Venus as it appeared in Titian’s famous composition. Bathsheba may have turned away from the viewer’s attentions, but, as David would learn, that does not mean that those attentions were stymied. Near contemporary allegories of Touch sometimes addressed the theme of erotic touch, albeit in a moralizing fashion. A c. 1620 print by Cornelis Van Kittensteyn after a composition by Dirck Hals depicts an elegantly dressed couple embracing within an orderly domestic interior (Fig. 73). The young man reaches around the shoulder 12 Rembrandt’s print after Pieter Feddes van Harlingen, Pygmalion, 1615, attests to his interest in this famous story. Rembrandt, The Artist Drawing from the Model, c. 1639, Bartsch, 1993, no. 192. 13 Alpers, 1998, p. 153. It should be noted that Carroll, 1998, p. 162, equates Rembrandt with Uriah, not David.

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Fig. 74. Abraham Bosse, Touch, from Les Cinq Sens. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

of his lover and grasps her right hand. His left hand moves toward her breast. Just below his left hand she holds a coin between her index finger and thumb. All is not what it seems! Behind them, a maid prepares sheets on a bed. Cast onto the floor to the bottom right is a hat that sports a long and presumably very ticklish feather. Filling out the scene to the left, a contented cat lounges in front of a warm though smoky fire. The sensation of temperature falls under the rubric of touch; it is not confined to contact. This allegory is part of a series that tells an unambiguous moral story: the senses lead to sin. This same couple leads us through an experience of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and finally touch. Seduction may start with sight, but it is consummated through touching. Abraham Bosse conceived a similar series devoted to the five senses around 1638. The culminating image, Touch, is related to the one just discussed, though in this instance the couple, not the cat, enjoy the heat of the fire (Fig. 74). The woman is seated on her lover’s lap, with one exposed leg thrown wantonly over his; they have progressed further toward erotic consummation. The very same trajectory can be traced in David’s response to seeing Bathsheba, and in our responses to Rembrandt’s painting of that theme. And the moralizing theme of the Hals allegory is not out of place in a painting of Bathsheba. The maid washing her

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feet was associated with scenes of prostitution, and at least one sixteenth-century print of the theme was used to illustrate the seventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”14 Erotic touch may also be a key to understanding Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing (Plate 6), also from 1654, and a painting that is often discussed in conjunction with the Bathsheba.15 Both images are erotically charged depictions of young women (perhaps the same woman); both deny the viewer direct access to the subject, and the paint is handled in a similar manner in the two works. Like the Bathsheba, Woman Bathing is built around the contrast of soft skin and crinkly fabric. Rembrandt shows the young woman pulling up her shift as she moves cautiously toward the viewer. As with the agitated cloth on which Bathsheba rests her hand, the fabric of the shift in Woman Bathing is painted very broadly, with long, thickly impastoed strokes of paint. The woman touches her garment and at the same time the particular way it is painted brings to mind thoughts of how that garment might feel to the touch. As in Bathsheba, here the crisp texture of the white cloth is set off against the rich intricacies of a golden-brown brocade. Touch is implied in a different way as well; the woman’s feet and calves are immersed in a pool of still, reflective water. As she considers taking a further step forward we imagine the wetness, and temperature of the water, much as we imagine the warm air around the cat in Dirck Hals’s composition.16 The foreground Marten de Vos’s allegory of touch features a personification and some animals traditionally associated with touch, while in the background three biblical scenes exemplify the sense (Fig. 75). To left is the Expulsion from Paradise, while to the right Christ saves Peter from drowning. Like the Woman Bathing, Peter is immersed in water. Touch, unlike sight, implicates the whole body, and is not localized to a single organ. The contemporary allegorical tradition recognized this.17 Whole body touching is the theme in Woman Bathing; crisp cloth rests against smooth skin and contrasts with roughly textured brocade; warm, still water envelops the legs. Whatever the literary subject may be, be it Susanna or Callisto (or absent a literary subject altogether), the woman’s partly clad body is the subject of the viewer’s tactile imaginings.18 As with Bathsheba, these musings are voyeuristic. The woman looks down toward the water where, perhaps, she sees a reflection of herself. As in Bathsheba, we voyeuristically witness a scene of bathing, with all its attendant erotic associations.

14 Sluijter, 2006, pp. 335–336. Harmen Jansz. Muller after Maarten van Heemskerck, Bathsheba Receiving David’s Message (from a series of The Ten Commandments), c. 1566. 15 MacLaren, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 332–333. 16 Modern science considers touch in terms of four phenomena, proprioception (about the positioning of one’s body), mechanoreception (skin sensations such as texture), nocireception (pain), and thermoreception (temperature). See Quiviger, 2010, p. 105. 17 Quiviger, 2014, pp. 171–172. 18 On the problem of the subject, see Kelch, 1991; Suthor, 2014, pp. 105–106. Bikker, 2014b, pp. 199–200, argues in favor of Susanna, with viewers as surrogates for the elders.

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Fig. 75. Adriaen Collaert, Touch, after Marten de Vos. Photo: Rijksmuseum

Sexual desire is stimulated by seeing and consummated through touching. In Bathsheba and Woman Bathing Rembrandt depicted desirable young women from the perspective of an assumed male viewer. The women in both paintings look down, or away, off to the side, so that viewers are denied any direct psychological rapport with the subjects. Instead, through an intelligent variation in the texturing of the paint, and through emphasizing the action of touching over other narrative or affective content, Rembrandt prodded viewers into thinking about touching what they were seeing, which were, of course, figures of erotic desire. An erotic touch of meaningful attachment is at the heart of the Jewish Bride (Plate 7). In the previous chapter I discussed how the raised paint of the man’s sleeve, the half-length format, the lack of setting, and the red of the woman’s dress pushed the forms toward, even through the picture plane, attracting the attention of the eye. It seems unlikely that Rembrandt should have intended such a painting to be seen from a distance, as long advised in theoretical writings on visible brushwork. In recent years a tentative consensus has emerged that the story shown here is Isaac and Rebecca in

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Fig. 76. Sisto Badalocchio, Isaac and Rebecca, after Raphael. Photo: Rijksmuseum

the land of the Philistines (Genesis 26:1-10).19 The couple had been sent there during a famine and God told them that if they stayed and obeyed his laws the land would become theirs and they would populate it. Isaac, however, worried that the beautiful young Rebecca would cause him grief, for if the Philistines knew she was his wife they might try to kill him, so he spread word that she was his sister. One day, however, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out of his palace and spied the two exchanging a furtive embrace. Abimelech immediately understood their relationship and reprimanded Isaac for spreading this lie because Rebecca could easily have become a victim of rape. Abimelech followed his reprimand with a pledge to protect the couple. Though there may be general agreement that the painting represents Isaac and Rebecca, enough doubts remain that the work is still generally referred to by its traditional title, the Jewish Bride. The doubts come from the decidedly oblique treatment of the narrative, and from the fact that the figures represented appear to be portraits. Most art historians see the origin of this composition in a fresco by Raphael that Rembrandt could have known through a print by Sisto Badalocchio (Fig. 76). 19 Bikker, 2014b, p. 193; Bikker, 2013, p. 7; Natter, 2006, argues rather unconvincingly that the painting shows Jephthah and his daughter. For a good historiographical discussion of the subject of the Jewish Bride, see Suthor, 2014, pp. 149–162. Lavin and Lavin, 2001, layer on top of the conventional reading associations with the Song and Songs, the Venus Pudica, and Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait among other things. Schwartz, 2006, p. 361, is not in favor of the Rebecca and Isaac orthodoxy but does not offer an alternative. In his earlier book, Schwartz, 1985, p. 328, suggested Cyrus and Aspasia, characters from a contemporary play.

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In Badalocchio’s print a couple amorously embraces within a palatial loggia. Abimelech peaks down at them from a window set above. Rembrandt’s preparatory drawing, discussed in the previous chapter, drew on this source. In the Jewish Bride, however, the focus is much closer. Abimelech is nowhere to be found.20 In this respect, the painting is like Bathsheba, in which David in his palace is similarly left out. The embrace of the couple is less erotic and more dignified than in the drawing. Isaac appears significantly older than his bride, which is in harmony with the biblical source and must take precedence over our contemporary sensibilities, which see the couple as mismatched. He leans toward Rebecca and places his left hand upon her shoulder, over which is draped a chain painted with projecting paint. The eye is drawn to his right hand, which is more brightly illuminated than either of their faces. His right hand presses gently against her chest, against the red fabric of her dress, and, like the left hand, against the bumpy surface of the chain. The chain, in a sense, completes the embrace and binds the figure of Isaac to Rebecca.21 The hand on the chest is an intimate gesture, but not really a sensual caress. As with the Minneapolis Lucretia (Plate 8) Rembrandt has scrupulously flattened Rebecca’s chest, draining Isaac’s gesture of its erogenous potential, though not entirely. We know that it is an appropriate and welcomed gesture because Rebecca reciprocates. Her left hand, similarly emphasized through its brightness, gently touches the back of Isaac’s hand, in clear acceptance of his address to her. Rebecca’s right hand rests at waist level and in it she holds a round object, perhaps a citrus fruit.22 The eyes of the couple do not meet, nor do they turn out toward the viewer. Instead, Isaac and Rebecca appear lost in thought, not unlike Rembrandt’s Bathsheba. Like her as well, Isaac and Rebecca appear sufficiently individualized that we are prompted to read them as portraits.23 The intimate gesture of hand on chest might seem to preclude the possibility that this is a historiated portrait; but other more explicitly sexual portraits of respectable couples survive from seventeenth-century Holland. We need to be careful not to impose our own Victorian-inspired prudery upon the past.24 The requirements of 20 It has been suggested that the canvas was cut down at a later date and that Abimelech was originally included. Bikker, 2013, p. 30, agrees that the canvas was cut down, but presents technical evidence to demonstrate that it was Rembrandt himself who likely cut down the primed canvas. 21 According to Held, 1991, p. 44n108, the older man is “not just touching the young woman’s body, but drapes a golden chain over it, holding it with both hands.” Neither hand is really holding the chain, however, and his right hand in particular is flattened out such that its palm presses against her chest. He is touching this chain, not draping it. 22 Bikker, 2013, p. 23, tentatively reads the object as an orange, symbol of love, chastity, and purity. 23 Valiant attempts have been made to identify the couple but no real evidence exists to make a convincing case. See Bikker, 2013, p. 49 for a summary of the possibilities. 24 Bikker, 2013, p. 45, cites two examples. In Frans van Mieris, Portrait of a Couple on a Terrace, 1678, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, the husband leans toward his wife and points to her décolletage. In Ferdinand Bol, Wigbold Slicher and Elisabeth Spiegel as Venus and Paris with Cupid, 1656, Dordrecht, the wife’s breasts are fully exposed. Another Ferdinand Bol, Allegorical Portrait (Bacchus and Ariadne), 1664, St. Petersburg, Hermitage, similarly depicts the wife with a bared breast.

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portraiture likely explain Rembrandt’s decision to zoom in on the figures, as compared to the more traditional focus on discursive narrative in the preparatory drawing, and to retreat from the heated embrace shown in the Badalocchio print, where the intertwining of the limbs marks the moment as a preamble to more intimate coupling. Isaac and Rebecca were, in fact, lauded as a prototypical good couple, a model for the married condition. They often appeared in pamphlets related to weddings and on medals given as wedding presents, and there is at least one clear-cut example of a couple shown posing in the guise of Isaac and Rebecca (by Ferdinand Bol, a student of Rembrandt).25 As Charles de Tolnay argued long ago the couple in Rembrandt’s painting is quite similar to Cesare Ripa’s Concordia Maritale from the Iconologia (Fig. 77).26 This source was widely disseminated in seventeenth-century Europe, and in 1644 Dirck Pietersz. Pers published a Dutch translation in Amsterdam that included variations on the Italian illustrations.27 In the image as it appeared in the Dutch edition the couple stand side by side with a chain binding the two into one. The accompanying text specifies this as a gold chain that connects the two at neck level. From the chain hangs a heart that is held by the right hand of the husband and the left hand of his wife. According to Ripa, the gold chain, “shows that marriage is comprised of love, friendship, and kindness between a woman and a man.”28 Rembrandt narrativized Ripa’s allegory. Instead of the rather ominous heavy chain shackling the two together like galley slaves, Rembrandt has Isaac embrace Rebecca and place his hand on her heart; her hand moves to join his in this position. One can easily recognize Isaac’s embrace as a less contrived equivalent to the clunky chain of Ripa’s image, especially when considering the way both of Isaac’s hands lie on the chain, or necklace, that rests on her shoulders, completing the circle. And we are surely meant to read the sparkly chain Rebecca wears as a gold chain. It is as if Rembrandt made a deeply meaningful genre painting out of an allegory and a history. As Tolnay put it, Ripa’s exterior symbolism “is internalized and changed into a moving gesture expressing the impulse of the soul.”29 25 Ferdinand Bol, Erasmus Scharlaken and Anna van Erckel as Rebecca and Isaac, c. 1650, Dordrecht. Cited by Bikker, 2013, p. 42. 26 Tolnay, 1935, pp. 277–278. 27 Ripa, 1644. 28 Ripa, 1644, p. 99: “Een Man staende aen de rechter syde van een Vrouw, beyde in purper gekleet, alwaer een goude keeten beyde halsen verbint, waer uyt een Hert op de borst neder hangt, ‘t welck met de hand van den Man en van de Vrouwe wort opgehouden. De goude keeten op de maniere als geseyt is, betoont dat het Houwilijck is gemaeckt van liefde, van vriendschap, en van goeddadigheyt, tusschen Man en Vrouwe: geschickt door de Natuere en door de Wet Godes, diewelcke gebiet dat Man en Vrouwe twee in een vlees sullen wesen, die niet, als door den Dood, konnen worden gescheyden.” 29 Tolnay, 1935, p. 278: “Le symbolisme extérieur du début du 17e siècle est intériorisé et changé en un geste émouvant, exprimant la poussée de l’âme.”

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Fig. 77. Concordia Maritale, from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, of Uytbeeldingen des Verstands, 1644. Photo: The Getty Research Institute

Many of the decisions Rembrandt made in modifying his sources can also be related to a desire to make this a painting about touch. As Alpers remarked, Rebecca and Isaac do not communicate through sight but by touching, which is emphasized, as in the Bathsheba, through large, brightly illuminated hands, all engaged in touching.30 Isaac’s hands are touching the metal of the chain hanging around Rebecca’s neck; the roughness of this chain is signaled directly to the viewer by the bumpy, raised paint. Three of the four hands depicted here are close to the picture plane and also parallel to it, as if modeling for us how one of our hands might appear on the surface 30 Alpers, 1988, p. 24.

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of the canvas, rubbing its rough, raised, almost jagged surface. At this point it is worth remembering what Van Mander said in reference to Venetian painterly painting; it was so rough that one “can almost blindly feel and trace by touch the whole work on all sides.”31 Van Mander had never seen a painting as roughly textured as Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride, where the paint seems to push through the picture plane, where hands touch textured objects nearly coincident with that plane, where touch is so essential to the story itself. Isaac and Rebecca are revealed to Abimelech as a married couple through their touching. Touch is also central to the generative purpose of marriage, and just as Rebecca and Isaac will propagate the biblical race through sex, itself an act of touching, the portrayed couple presumably also wished to express the desire that their union be fertile.32 The allegory of touch conceived by Dirck Hals (Fig. 73) presented the sense of touch in terms of an embrace, as did the allegory by Abraham Bosse (Fig. 74). In the allegory by Bosse there are the same unmet gazes, as the young woman looks out toward us without focus while distractedly cupping her lover’s chin with her right hand. The older man turns to the right but his eyes do not meet hers as he reaches out with his right hand to touch the young woman’s chest, while his left arm reaches behind so that the hand rests on her shoulder. The physical relationship between the two figures in the Bosse allegory and those of the Jewish Bride are remarkably similar, even if the emotional tenor is quite different. The embrace of the couple in the Jewish Bride is less lusty than in either of these allegories, and it certainly has none of the moralizing illegitimacy of the Hals allegory, but it is not chaste either. They share an intimacy of “love, friendship, and kindness.” Their touching is associated with physical love, and physical love is all about touching. The Braunschweig Family Portrait (Fig. 54) builds on the theme of touch as a sense that creates a bond between people.33 Bathsheba helped with understanding the Woman Bathing; the Jewish Bride will play the same role for the Family Portrait. It is easy to compare the Jewish Bride and the Family Portrait. The paintings are almost identical in size and format, they both show half-length figures against indistinct backgrounds, both are about the bonds of familial affection, and the two share an approach to surface that goes beyond mere texture and borders on sculptural relief.34 For Houbraken, that troweled-on paint was what was distinctive about the 31 Quoted in Van de Wetering, 2016, p. 201, from Van Mander, 1604, fol. 48r, Cap. 12: 20: “Ginghen de penneelen so niet belasten / Als nu / dat men schier blindelijck mach tasten En bevoelen al t’ wreck aen elcker sijde Want de verwen ligghen wel t’onsen tijde / Soo oneffen en rouw / men mochtse meenen / Schier te zijn half rondt / in gehouwen steenen.” 32 Lavin and Lavin, 2001, pp. 89–94, emphasize the generative significance of this couple. 33 Brückner, 1997. 34 It has also been suggested that the two paintings represent the same woman. There is no doubt that they are similar looking, but in my opinion there are some telling differences. The mother in the Family Portrait has a longer face and a nose with a slightly curved profile. Could they be sisters? Could the two paintings have been conceived as sisterly pendants? Without documentation we will never be able to answer these questions. Klessmann, 1983, pp. 169–171. The thematic and textural affinities are noted in Gatenbröcker, 2006, p. 28.

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late Rembrandt. His story of the projecting nose implied that all of Rembrandt’s late works were done in that way. The truth is subtler than this, though; many of Rembrandt’s late paintings are painted quite smoothly, or surfaces alternate between smooth and rough – think of how Bathsheba’s skin is painted smoothly while her sheets are crinkly and stiff. Textured paint is never accidental in the late Rembrandt. Here it has been deployed in the service of touch. There is no story for the Family Portrait around which one can build an interpretive armature. Unlike in the Jewish Bride, the sitters here do not appear to represent any particular historical figures, even if their costumes are quite fanciful, mixing as they do costumes from previous centuries. This is a portrait of a family in fancy dress. The father stands behind and to the left of the composition, soberly looking out toward the viewer. In front of him are his three, animated young children. The eldest child is shown in profile directly in front of her father and she carries a bowl of flowers toward her mother to the right on whose lap squirms the youngest of the three. The middle child nestles behind and between her older and younger siblings, and looks back with a smile toward the rather serious girl carrying the flowers. The paint used to describe the flowers is substantial, so three dimensional in its presence that one can imagine reaching in and picking up a flower. Thoughts of actually doing so inevitably draw the viewer into a close inspection of the surface, reifying it. Intriguingly, Rembrandt signed this painting on the side of the bowl, further inviting viewers to inspect the surface closely. I would not want to make too much of this, but the intimacy this image invites calls to mind Houbraken’s anecdote about visitors to Rembrandt’s studio who were warned not to approach the paintings, even though they clearly wanted to do so, to avoid smelling the nasty odor of freshly applied paint. Here, by contrast, we have Rembrandt drawing us in with the texture of the paint and the signature, and then presenting us with flowers, which obviously bring to mind the idea of their pleasant perfume. The painting is a witty inversion of what Houbraken reported Rembrandt said. The right half of the Family Portrait is where touch is the dominant theme and where the paint is most exuberantly textured.35 The youngest child wears a long, salmon-colored dress that spreads across his mother’s lap.36 He looks out at the viewer and holds a rattle in his right hand. He touches the bare skin of his mother’s chest with his left hand.37 As Jonathan Bikker has pointed out, Rembrandt painted 35 Gatenbröcker, 2006, pp. 80–83, beautifully describes how there is great variation in the handling of the pigment in different parts of the composition. She is also one of the few scholars willing to entertain Alpers’s idea that hapticity played a role in how this painting, and other textured, late paintings by Rembrandt were understood. 36 Given that we do not know the identity of the family represented here it is impossible to know for sure that the child on the mother’s lap is a boy. Both boys and girls wore dresses like the one in this painting. My reasoning for seeing the figure as a son is that he is pretty much in the center of the composition, he and his father are the only two figures to look out toward the viewer, and he also wears a gold chain, which raises him above the other children. The sex of this child is not, however, a key element of my interpretation. 37 Gatenbröcker, 2006, p. 48, identifies the object held in his hand as a rinkelbel, a special kind of rattle.

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an unusual open-fronted shirt for the mother figure, and must have done this so that the contact between mother and child would be skin on skin.38 The mother looks downward toward, but not directly at her son. Her communication with him is instead effected by means of touch. While presumably her right hand supports the child’s back, her left hand, described with great economy in just a few strokes of paint, pushes up against her son’s white shirt. Across that shirt lies a gold chain. The chain is incongruous for a child so young and is at odds with the relative informality of the picture as a whole. Two of the mother’s fingers butt up against that gold chain in a gesture of maternal affection and solicitude. Her gesture is a virtual mirror image of Isaac’s embrace of Rebecca in the Jewish Bride. In that painting, Isaac’s body is angled obliquely with respect to the picture plane as he reaches across his body toward Rebecca. Though seated, the mother in the Family Portrait is also disposed obliquely with respect to the picture plane. She, too, reaches across her body and presses her hand against her son’s chest, with its gold chain. The figural dispositions are like mirror images of each other, as if one were a reworking of the other. As I mentioned above, in the Amsterdam hanging of the 2015 exhibition of late works by Rembrandt the two pictures hung side by a side. Richard Verdi, in a review of the exhibition, noted the similarities, especially in motifs and theme, but wondered – without ­specificity – whether there might be a more substantial thread to connect the works.39 Touch surely provides that thread. In the Family Portrait the bond between mother and son is established by means of touch. They touch each other, and in that area of the canvas the pigment is especially rough, signaling to viewers not the literal textures of the objects represented, but the fact that they have textures, and that communication between mother and child may well involve seeing, just as communication between spouses involves and indeed requires seeing, and listening, but it also involves the full body experience of touch. It is as if Rembrandt set out to render in pictorial form the idea that human connections are established not just through the intellect, but through all the senses. None of this is to deny the opticality of what Rembrandt has achieved. One does not exclude the other. Just as the rough, textured paint of the child’s dress and mother’s sleeve make one think of touching, they also suggest the child’s uneasy squirming on his mother’s lap. The description of these fabrics stands in stark contrast to the careful patterning of the elaborately embroidered dress worn by the stiffly formal oldest child bringing in the flowers to the left. The optical and the haptic are not necessary at odds with each other.

38 Bikker, 2014b, p. 196. 39 Verdi, 2015.

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Pain The Minneapolis Lucretia (Plate 8), discussed above in terms of how the textured paint helped to advance the forms, also depicts a story that, like David and Bathsheba, revolves around the sense of touch. In Lucretia, though, erotic desire leads to unwanted touching, to violation, pain and, ultimately, death. Told by Livy, the story of Lucretia takes place in the early history of Rome, before the establishment of the republic. Lucretia is the upstanding wife of a nobleman, and a model of wifely virtue. She is raped by Sextus, the son of King Tarquin. Sextus threatens to kill Lucretia and a slave and to arrange their bodies next to each other so as to make people believe that Lucretia had been caught in the midst of committing adultery. In the face of this double threat, to her life and to her honor, Lucretia submits to Sextus’s desires. Ashamed, and also to discourage any other woman from committing adultery (no matter the circumstances) Lucretia summons her father and husband, tells them what has happened, then pulls out a hidden knife and thrusts it into her heart. This exposes Sextus’s crime and prompts a revolt that leads to the establishment of the Roman Republic.40 The iconography of this theme traditionally focused either on the violence of the rape, as in a painting by Titian (Fig. 78) (which Rembrandt could have known through a print by Cornelis Cort made after the composition), or on Lucretia’s suicide.41 A print by Marcantonio Raimondi shows a beautifully serpentine figure of the virtuous heroine standing under a loggia, one breast alluringly revealed, ready to plunge a dagger into her chest (Fig. 79). In isolating the figure of Lucretia in his interpretation of the story Rembrandt may have taken inspiration from Raimondi’s print, in this way again raising the issue of Rembrandt’s competitive relationship with Italy and his desire either to repudiate its authority, or supplant its authority with his own.42 Unlike the Raimondi composition, and many others as well it should be noted, Rembrandt deemphasizes the erotic allure of the young Lucretia.43 The white shift she wears is suggestive of bedroom attire, but in spite of this, and in spite of the long narrow opening along its front, her clothing is firmly clasped at the neck, and a glistening gold chain is neatly draped across her chest. That chain, along with the heavy coat pulled on to her shoulders, create a dissonant formality that does not harmonize with the undergarment these elements frame and traverse. Rembrandt could have chosen to reveal or emphasize the bulge of Lucretia’s breasts, as many other artists 40 Rembrandt may have had a German translation of Livy in his library. Golahny, 2003, pp. 147–156. 41 Donaldson, 1982; Hults, 1991. 42 Westermann, 2000, p. 310. 43 Hults, 1991, pp. 232–236, reads Rembrandt’s interpretation of the theme in biographical terms. Basing his analysis on a contemporary poem on a Lucretius by Govert Flinck, in which the heroine’s blood is connected to the theme of freedom, Schwartz, 1985, p. 330, suggests a political reading.

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Fig. 78. Cornelis Cort, Lucretia, after Titian. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

had done. Instead, Rembrandt’s Lucretia is ostentatiously flat-chested and in a state of unsettling and decidedly not eroticized dishevelment. Lucretia is far from wanton. Like Bathsheba, she looks down, lost in thought, and her eyes do not meet the gaze of the viewer. Iconographically, therefore, Rembrandt moved away from a tradition that offered up delectable nudity dressed in the legitimizing veneer of a virtuous subject. Instead, he invites the viewer into a contemplation of the dark interior life of woman forced into a tragic corner through no fault of her own.

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Fig. 79. Marcantonio Raimondi, Lucretia, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray from the collection of Francis Calley Gray, G2500. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Contemporary allegories of Touch from the Netherlands are helpful for understanding another dimension to Rembrandt’s innovative treatment of this subject. In the 1650s, Gonzales Coques painted a series of the Five Senses. His depiction of Touch shows a young man letting blood from his raised left arm, which he gathers in a plate

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Fig. 80. Gonzales Coques, Touch, London, National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

held in his right hand (Fig. 80). Touch is understood not in terms of erotic skin-toskin contact but as a painful breaking of that skin and subsequent release of blood. Rembrandt himself had experimented with this aspect of the sense of touch in what may be one of his earliest paintings. Rembrandt’s image of Touch (Fig. 81), also part of a series of the Five Senses, is a scene of surgery. Pushing down on the head of an older man, the surgeon cuts in to the man’s head; the intense pain this stimulates is marked by clenched fists, wrinkled brow, and teeth biting into the lower lip.44 Another image, this one from the first quarter of the seventeenth century, marries eroticism and pain. Jacob Van der Heyden’s engraving of Touch depicts a profile-view of an

44 Keyes et al., 2011, pp. 89–92.

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Fig. 81. Rembrandt, Touch, New York, Leiden Collection. Photo: Image Courtesy of the Leiden Collection, New York

elegantly dressed young woman enclosed within a circular frame (Fig. 82). Her dress is cut low, and her breasts are pushed up from below. With the stiletto held in her left hand she pricks the skin of her exposed chest just above the cleft between her breasts. In the corners of the page, beyond the boundaries of the circular frame, are a spider and its web, a turtle (thought to be especially sensitive to touch, in spite of having a thick shell), a thorny holly branch, and a pair of spurs. Two of these allegories of Touch make for a meaningful comparison with the theme of Lucretia. In one there is the blood-letting, while in the other there is the pairing of an attractive young woman with the self-inflicted piercing of the flesh. This example demonstrates that the theme of Lucretia resonated with contemporary understandings of touch. Rembrandt was most certainly sensitive to the psychological implications of Lucretia’s story, but he was also sensitive to the way pain was central, figured especially by the representation of the breaking of the skin. Even closer to traditional representations

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Fig. 82. Jacob van der Heyden, Touch. Photo: Rijksmuseum

of Lucretia is a drawing by Hendrick Goltzius of Touch, in which a seated female nude figure is shown stabbing herself in the chest (Fig. 83). While the forest setting might seem to preclude a literal identification with the Lucretia theme, the Morgan Library catalogues it as Lucretia as the Sense of Touch.45 In any case, this drawing blurs the iconographic boundary between Touch and Lucretia. Rembrandt makes touch a theme of the Minneapolis Lucretia by showing the blood soaking out of her wound and into a shift, and also by selectively texturing the paint. It is not just a matter of showing touch here, but also of inviting touch and inviting thoughts of touch. I have already discussed how the edge of the knife is defined by a raised, white bead of paint, and how it appears poised at the picture plane. The chain that lies across Lucretia’s chest projects ostentatiously from the surface of the canvas. Similarly raised up and projecting into the space of the viewer like relief sculpture is the emphatically beaded cord on which Lucretia pulls with her left 45 The Morgan Library & Museum, CORSAIR Online Collection Catalog, http://corsair.themorgan.org/ cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=128198, accessed 1 September 2017; Konečný, 1996, pp. 36–37, argues that the natural setting and presence of the turtle in the bottom left of the composition excludes an identification with Lucretia.

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Fig. 83. Hendrick Goltzius, Lucretia as the Sense of Touch, New York, The Morgan Library & Museum. 1974.5. Purchased as the gift of Mrs. G. P. Van de Bovenkamp (Sue Erpf Van de Bovenkamp) in memory of Armand G. Erpf. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum

hand. Some have seen this as a theatrical prop, or even a studio sling, intended to help models maintain difficult poses, but it is surely a bell pull, which Lucretia uses to summon her father and husband.46 This does not follow the strict chronology of Livy’s story, where her father and husband are already present when Lucretia stabs 46 For a summary of the literature on this question, see Hults, 1991, p. 234n82; Alpers, 1988, pp. 80–81.

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herself, but Rembrandt already departed from the story by showing her removing the knife which, in the text, is removed by her husband, who then witnesses her collapse and death. Clearly, Rembrandt was not wedded to the precise sequence of the text and chose here to collapse various scenes from the story into a single moment. For the purposes of my argument, the beaded cord adds another richly textured object to the list of other such objects, all of which prompt us to think of the painting in terms of touch. The paint of Lucretia’s sleeve, for instance, is also textured, and some of that paint was even worked with a knife, just as Lucretia has used a knife to stab herself. The fatal and obviously painful wound Lucretia has made is obscured by the bloodsoaked fabric of her canvas-colored shift, but its presumed shape is alluded to by the narrow slit of the opening in this garment directly beneath her chin. Rembrandt’s Minneapolis Lucretia is selectively textured and the reason is, simply put, that texture makes sense here. The theme of the painting is Lucretia’s virtue, but it is also about Sextus Tarquin’s violation of her, an act of painful touch, and the subsequent piercing of her own skin. In this painting, Rembrandt creates forms that emerge through the picture plane and become substances that can be touched. One such textured object, the beaded cord, Lucretia touches herself, as if modeling our own touching of that cord, or of the chain she wears across her body. Rembrandt arranges the figure in such a way that the canvas itself becomes coincident with her body and the dagger appears to have made a wound in that very canvas, echoed by the slit in her shift. Rembrandt textures paint with control, and with understanding of the consequences.

Reconciliation The Return of the Prodigal Son (Plate 10) further reveals the communicative power of touch. In the image, the father forgives his son by means of a truly immersive embrace, reconnecting him with the family he had forsworn. Visually, this is expressed through hands, though touch, not through sight. The paint is rough, so one imagines touching it. One sees touching in the painted illusion. The seeing of touching acts in concert with the thought of touching the painting. Touch communicates the forgiving reconciliation of father and son. Told by Christ in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, the parable of the prodigal son is a story that expresses the infinite capacity of God to forgive and to bring the errant back into the fold (Luke 15:11-31). A father had two sons, one of whom asked for his inheritance early. The father granted him his wish and the son went off to live a life of sensual indulgence in taverns and with prostitutes. The son ran out of money and was forced to take care of a farmer’s pigs, at which point he repented and returned to his father to beg for forgiveness, which he granted. The father gave his son fine new clothes to replace the rags in which he had returned home and arranged for a fatted calf to be slaughtered. The brother who had dutifully stayed at home all this time understandably

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Fig. 84. Maerten van Heemskerck, Return of the Prodigal Son. Photo: Rijksmuseum

resented the attentions showered upon the prodigal but the father explained that the return of his son was like the miraculous return to life of a beloved departed.47 Rembrandt’s treatment of this theme is powerful and for this reason it is easy to forget that there was a strong iconographic tradition upon which he drew, and which he significantly modified. A print by Maerten van Heemskerck from c. 1548 is a good example of this tradition (Fig. 84).48 The full-length figures of the father and the son are more or less parallel to the picture plane and dominate the composition. Dressed 47 On the sectarian resonances of this theme, see Haeger, 1986. 48 Kuretsky, 2006, pp. 25–26, notes the importance of this particular print.

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Fig. 85. Rembrandt, Return of the Prodigal Son. Photo: Metropolitan Museum

in just a single piece of cloth wrapped around his middle the son kneels to the left, his hands clasped together far in front of his torso as he leans imploringly toward his father. The father twists his body and steps down toward his son. He reaches his right arm around his son’s shoulder and with his left hand he touches his son’s clasped arms. In the threshold to the right stand three figures who seem to react with disgust to this unexpected arrival, while in the background through an arch one can see the slaughter of the fatted calf. In an etching of 1636 Rembrandt himself adapted this composition (Fig. 85). Both images are organized around a threshold to the right and an arched opening to a distant landscape at the left, with the father and son emphasized by the corner of the building that appears behind. In his 1666 painting, Rembrandt alters the point of view and drains the image of motion and explicit expression, both of which were critical to the earlier compositions. Instead of placing the father and son so that their contact is enacted friezelike, parallel to the picture plane, viewers now look directly into the arched opening

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of the family house, though that opening is only dimly discernable just to the right of the father figure. We see the action from directly behind the prodigal son. Outside of this opening to the right are two figures, one standing, one seated, looking toward the embrace of father and son. In the murky entranceway behind stand two further figures. One of these four ancillary figures must, presumably, be the dutiful but unhappy brother, though it is impossible to know for sure which one he is. Some say he is the figure standing right next to the door jamb, while others identify him as the luxuriously dressed man in red to the far right.49 No matter which is the older son, pictorially all three serve the same purpose, which is to appear closed off physically and psychologically from the prodigal son receiving his surprising and, in their minds, undeserved welcome. These figures are hard to read because Rembrandt chose throughout his composition to downplay outward expressiveness. Their faces are neutral and they hold their hands close to their bodies. The central father-and-son pair is also still, in contrast to the lunging movement implied by the Van Heemskerck print (Fig. 84). Instead, we witness the calm contact that occurs after the motion that has brought the two together. The son’s ragged clothes, worn-out shoes, and single bare foot eloquently speak to his abject condition. He turns his shorn head to the right and buries it in his father’s chest. We cannot see the son’s hands, but his right arm is bent and close to his side, so we imagine that his hands are clasped together as they were in the print. Facial expression plays no role in signifying communication between figures in this painting. The son’s face is scarcely visible. Light from above illuminates the father’s face but his eyes, only half open, are cast downward. As Alpers explains, the changes wrought by Rembrandt to the iconographic tradition make hands the principal agents of communication.50 The figures standing to the right look on but appear not to understand. The business of communication is transacted through the hands of the father. He leans forward and lays his hands on the creamy white, rough fabric of his returning son’s pathetic clothing. Framed by those two oversized hands is a rent in the fabric revealing a great patch of bare skin. Hands are differentiated from the fabric they touch through the strong shadows they cast, each finger clearly marked off from its neighbor, yet at the same time sufficiently similar to the fabric that they connect father and son. With the arch of the father’s back echoing the arch of the threshold behind father and son, it is almost as if the father becomes the threshold and the passing of the prodigal son across the threshold takes place not spatially, but through the touch of the warm embrace.51

49 Kuretsky, 2006, p. 23, identifies the young man in the doorway as the older brother. Proimos, 2011, p. 293, identifies the man to the right in the red cape as the brother, as do Tümpel and Tümpel, 2006, p. 275. 50 Alpers, 1988, pp. 24–25. 51 I am indebted to Kuretsky, 2006, p. 29, for this observation.

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Earlier I discussed how in the Jewish Bride (Plate 7) Rembrandt chose to advance forms toward the picture plane and arrange hands so that their palms are parallel to that plane. He does something very similar in the Return of the Prodigal Son, where, after having rotated the father-son group through 90 degrees, the hands that rest on the son’s back are parallel to the surface of the canvas. As with the Jewish Bride, this surface is remarkably close to the canvas before which we stand, and it is a canvas-colored surface he touches. It is as if the father were modeling our own touching of the painting, as if we were being invited to consider it by means of touch, just as touch is central to the communication that we observe. In other paintings by Rembrandt I have observed that the actual texture of the paint forwards these considerations. First, it should be noted that the paint on the surface of the Return of the Prodigal Son does not stand out in relief nearly to the same extent as it does on the Jewish Bride. It can nonetheless be discerned while standing in front of the painting, without any special technical assistance. The areas where the paint stands out particularly are along the length of the stick held by the tall man to the far right, perhaps the prodigal’s brother, and on the wrists of the father. One can easily imagine that the emphasis on the stick could have alluded to the reception the jealous brother would have preferred for his scruffy boomerang brother – punishment rather than forgiveness – but without a firm identification of this figure such speculation remains simply that. The interpretive ground is much firmer with regard to the textures around the embrace of prodigal and father. Around the head of the prodigal is a kind of halo of real and illusionistic textures, a veritable hothouse of haptic associations. The sleeves of the father feature paint that projects the most in relief above the plane of the canvas, especially right around his wrists where the paint rises up into crests. His hands are painted slightly more roughly than the tunic they touch and quite differently from the revealed sections of the skin on the son’s back, which they so eloquently frame. The skin itself is painted with smooth, long, horizontal strokes of paint. Marking the bottom of the topmost swath of exposed skin appears a raised line of paint that catches the light and bridges the gap between the father’s two hands. By contrast, the worn-out neckband of the son’s tunic is made up of a series short, vertical strokes with raised-up ridges of paint establishing the boundary between each stroke. Continuing this textural envelopment are the two tassels hanging suggestively just to the left and right of the son’s neck and face, so close to touching him, and painted with long, fine strokes of paint, almost as if poised to tickle his nose. Completing the circle is the tunic of the father, slightly textured so as to catch the incident light. In the raking light that strikes the painting from the window to the right of where it hangs today in the Hermitage a ring of highlights appears around the head of the prodigal son. These highlights are generated by means of very slightly raised paint. Also of note is the dark outline, or shadow of the son’s head. Visually, this darkness resonates with the similar outlines of the father’s hands. This serves to liken the hands, as they press into the son’s back, and the head, as it likewise sinks into the father’s chest.

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The touch of reconciliation does not appear in the allegorical tradition for the representation of the senses. It is, however, related to the touch of familial bonding that I discussed above with respect to the Jewish Bride and the Family Portrait (Fig. 54). And here, I think, one could add the idea of the healing touch. Many of Christ’s miracles were set in motion through touch. The healing of the blind man (John 9:1-7), and the healing of the leper (Mark 1:41) are evidence of this kind of touch.

Insight The theme of touch is dominant in Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (Plate 9). The ancient philosopher fiddles with a chain at waist level with his left hand. His right hand rests on a sculpted bust of Homer. Aristotle looks off to the left, but his gaze does not meet the bust, or anything in particular that we can discern.52 He is lost in thought. Behind the bust to the left is a great stack of books, in front of which a pair of eyeglasses lies inconspicuously on the red cloth covering the table.53 One of the most influential interpretations of the painting, by Julius Held, builds on a contrast between what the two hands touch. Aristotle’s privileged right hand rests on the bust of Homer. This hand is more brightly illuminated than its sinister counterpart. The left hand is not only in the dark, but is touching a chain of “barbaric splendor,” as Held put it.54 Gold chains such as this one were signs of worldly honor and reward.55 In tilting his head toward the bust of the poet Homer, so goes the argument, Aristotle comes to the realization that the eternal values of poetry surpass the ephemeral baubles of the secular world.56 And just in case the triumph of the eternal is in any doubt, Rembrandt put his signature at the base of the bust, thus aligning himself with the choice seemingly made by Aristotle: the permanence of poetry trumps the evanescent glitter of gold. It is also possible, I think, to interpret the picture as an expression of Rembrandt’s goals as an artist. It is very likely that Rembrandt himself chose the subject of this painting. The work was ordered some time before 1653 by Don Antonio Ruffo, a Sicilian collector of contemporary and Renaissance paintings. It is generally agreed that Ruffo’s desire was simply to own a half-length picture by the Dutch master, presumably to add variety to his largely Italian collection.57 For Rembrandt this was surely an

52 Carroll, 1984, argues that Aristotle is actually looking at the bust. This is not borne out by the visual evidence. 53 I am indebted to Suthor, 2014, p. 118, for this observation. 54 Held, 1991, p. 47. 55 Carroll, 1984, pp. 48–50, argues instead that the chain represents “the golden chain of Homer,” a symbol of the interconnectedness of all knowledge. It is an appealing hypothesis, but one that needs to be set against the numerous chains of honor found in Rembrandt’s work, including the Self-Portrait at Age 34. 56 Held, 1991, p. 53. 57 Held, 1991, pp. 19–27. For a detailed discussion of the commission and the ensuing disputes between artist and patron, as well as the other paintings Rembrandt made for Ruffo, see Crenshaw, 2006, pp. 125–133. Giltaij, 1999.

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opportunity to create a piece that declared something of his own distinctive approach to the art of painting. After all, an international commission, from Italy no less, was not an everyday event in Rembrandt’s career. I would like to argue, as have others, that in this painting Rembrandt was commenting on art theory, particularly on the paragone, and on the relative roles of seeing and touching in the understanding of the world and of a work of art.58 Based ultimately in the comparison between painting and poetry introduced by Horace, the paragone debate might seem rather distant to the artistic concerns of seventeenth-century Holland. One of the only writings on art that survives from between the publication of Van Mander’s Schilder-boeck in 1604 and Van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding of 1678 is Philips Angel’s Lof der Schilder-konst of 1642, and this text is replete with references to the paragone.59 Rembrandt is mentioned in the text, which might suggest that he was familiar with Angel and his ideas. Even closer to home, in 1653 the members of the Guild of St. Luke in Amsterdam collaborated with the poets of the city to put on a celebration of the bond between the poet Apollo and the painter Apelles.60 In a poem written to commemorate the event Rembrandt was listed first among the painters: “Apollo and Apelles will be joined, / And poetry with her daughter song. / Here is Rembrandt, Flinck, de Wit, Stockade.”61 In the next year the event was held again, though this time painting and sculpture were paired.62 The paragone was far from a distant Italian memory; it retained vitality in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam precisely at the time he was painting Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. The sculpted bust of Homer introduces the theme of poetry. Though Homer was not universally lauded in seventeenth-century Europe, in the Netherlands he was considered the most important of the ancient poets.63 Poetry, expressed here by Homer, raises the original comparison between painting and poetry. We know that this paragone, at least, was of interest to Rembrandt, even if we are on less certain 58 Moshenska, 2014, pp. 144–174, devotes an entire chapter, “Touching the Beautiful: The Feeling of Artworks in the European Renaissance,” to a discussion of touch and Rembrandt’s painting of Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. The chapter very productively insists upon the mutually reinforcing nature of visual and touch sensations, and includes an excellent discussion of the paragone. Analysis of the painting itself falls short, however, especially in the author’s peculiar insistence that art always revolves around beauty, which so clearly is not the goal of Rembrandt in this painting, or more broadly. Also, the author discusses the texture of the painting as a kind of undifferentiated rough surface, which it is not. Liedtke, 2004, also discusses the relevance of the paragone to this painting, but he does not even mention the texture of the painting. For Liedtke, the work revolves entirely around what it represents, and not how those forms are represented. Liedtke, 2004, p. 84n4, dismisses out of hand the arguments of Svetlana Alpers. In an expansion of his 2004 essay, Liedtke, 2007, vol. 2, pp. 629–654, and especially pp. 640–642, argued that the painting is about the high nobility of the sense of sight and, therefore, about the triumph of painting over sculpture. 59 Angel, 1996. 60 Crenshaw, 2006, pp. 149–150. 61 Strauss et al., doc. 1654/17. 62 Potsma and Blok, 1991. 63 Held, 1991, pp. 33–34.

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ground when it comes to the sculpture/painting paragone. Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at age 34 (Fig. 67) is evidence of this interest, for what the painting suggests, as I discussed above, is that Rembrandt saw his achievement in terms of Italian Renaissance art, and in relation to poetry. There is also, of course, the evidence of the St. Luke festival of 1653. Let us turn back to the Aristotle with a Bust of Homer to see if that second paragone, between painting and sculpture, is of relevance. One reason for thinking that Rembrandt was addressing that paragone in the painting is, quite simply, the presence of the sculpted bust. Also, touching, seeing, and eternal value are all integral to its discourse. Sculpture can be known through both touch and sight, whereas painting is perceived only by means of sight, and works only because of a trick of illusion. Sculpture lasts longer and is truer to what it represents, all according to the advocates of sculpture, of course.64 Jusepe Ribera’s painting of Touch (Fig. 86) clearly thematizes this aspect of the paragone, though Rembrandt could not have known this painting.65 By showing a blind man running his fingers over the surface of a sculpted bust the painting appears to advocate in favor of sculpture, but in the foreground lies a steeply foreshortened painting within the painting. It is as if to say that sculpture may well be understandable by means of touch, and thus be more “true,” but painting demands special skill (such as foreshortening, and, more generally, perspective) beyond that required by the plastic arts. Describing sculpture, Angel says that: all that one finds in it that is round, wide and otherwise is not due to their art, for it already had thickness and height and all those members needed for an integrated body. So in this respect their art does no more than give the contour, which is the surface membrane. For this reason, as has been said, the embraceable and three-dimensional does not come from art but from nature.66

Painting can represent sculpture, the world at large, and even itself, but if you touch a painting, whether it is Ribera’s painting, or the painting within that painting, then the result will be the same – the surfaces are smooth and unrevealing. Sculpture was deemed superior to painting because it was more durable, though Angel dismisses that out of hand by saying that painting is also long lasting. These art theoretical themes resonate with what we see in Rembrandt’s painting. The spectacles just to the left of the bust reify the act of seeing, just as the gestures of Aristotle (and his chain) make the case for touching. 64 Angel, 1996, pp. 239–240. 65 Liedtke, 2004, pp. 78–80, notes the figure of the old man in Ribera’s painting resembles traditional images of Aristotle. 66 Angel, 1996, p. 239.

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Fig. 86. Jusepe de Ribera, The Sense of Touch, Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum. Photo: The Norton Simon Foundation

The idea that touching and seeing worked together in the appreciation of sculpture was a commonplace in the seventeenth century. Cesare Ripa describes how Sculpture should be shown as a beautiful young woman “with her right hand on the head of a stone statue; in the other she holds various instruments necessary to the exercise of this art.” She is adorned with a green laurel branch that shows how sculpture “survives the malice of time.” The hand on the head of the statue: shows that even though sculpture is principally a subject of the eye, it can also in the same way be a subject of touch, because the solid mass around which this art operates […] can equally be the subject of the eye and of touch. From which we know that Michelangelo Buonarroti, light and splendor of sculpture, almost blind

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in old age as a result of continuous study, lifted up statues and stroked them […] giving his judgment on price and value. And in this regard, sculpture is better than painting.67

Touch, in other words, can supplement, or even supplant sight in perceiving sculpture. The great, thick chain that lies across Aristotle’s body sparkles with gold highlights, but what really catches the eye (and attracts the hand!) when standing in front of the piece is the way the chain projects so markedly from the surface of the canvas.68 This is a spectacular instance of the “substantiating impasto” described by Alpers.69 Rembrandt’s paint is rough in this late work, but it is not evenly rough. This unevenness plays out here in a seeming contradiction; the painted chain is sculptural while the painted sculpture is painted thinly and as a result is not sculptural at all. The chain is also a pictorial illusion, because of the sparkles of gold that catch the light from all different angles. 67 Ripa, 1644, pp. 37–38: “Een schoone jonge dochter met een slecht hulsel op ‘t hoofd, waer op een groene Lauwertack gevlochten is, gekleet wesende in laecken van seer schoone verwe: zy sal de rechter hand op een steenen beeld houden; en sal in d’ander hand verscheyden instrumenten hebben, die tot dese konst noodigh en gebruycklijck zijn, staende met haere voeten op een kostelijck tapijt. Zy wort met een bevalligh wesen gemaelt, maer weynigh geciert, om dat, terwijl de mensch mette fantasyen en gedachten besigh is, om de dingen, door de konst, mette natuere over een te brengen, en het een met het ander te doen gelijcken, soo bekommertse haer niet seer met het ciersel en opproncken van ‘t lichaem. De Lauwertack, die nae de strengigheyt van den Winter, noch de groenigheyt aen haere blaeders behoudt, betoont dat de Beeldhouwerie, door haer arbeyd, schoon en levendigh bewaert wordt, tegens de quaedaerdigheyt des tijds. Het kleed van schoone verwe, sal haer Beeld gelijck zijn, ‘t welck tot lust en vermaeck gebruyckt, en door heerlijckheyt wort onderhouden en gehandhaeft. De hand op ‘t Beeld, druckt uyt, dat alhoewel de Beeldhouwerie het voornaemste ontwerp van ‘t oogh is, soo kanse niet te min oock een ontwerp wesen van ‘t gevoel, want haere vaste stoffe, waer ontrent sich dese konst oeffent, om konstelijck de natuere nae te bootsen, kan seer wel te gelijck wesen een ontwerp van ‘t oogh en van’t gevoel. Waer over wy oock weeten, dat Michel Angelus van Buonarota, die een licht en glants van dese konst geweest is, wanneer hy, door sijne gestaedige naerstigheyt, in sijn ouderdom blind geworden was, soo plagh hy de Beelden te betasten en te bevoelen, en kost daer van sijn oordeel strijcken, of het oude of nieuwe gemaeckte Beelden waeren, oock watse in deughd of prijs waerdigh waeren. Het tapijt onder haere voeten, betoont, gelijck geseyt is, dat de Beeldhouwerie geheel door de heerlijckheyt en pracht wort opgehouden, en datse sonder den Rijckdom veracht, en misschien geen kracht soude hebben.” 68 Moshenska, 2014, p. 147, speaks eloquently to the desire to touch that comes from seeing richly textured surfaces. The author does not make note, however, of the fact that the surface is highly differentiated, and that the chain projects a lot more than any other element of the painting. Though Liedtke, 2007, vol. 2, p. 650, describes Alpers in the following terms: “penning an appreciation of Rembrandt’s technique, evidently as studied in photographs,” his only mention of how thickly the chain is painted comes on page 643 when he mentions in passing its “impasto links.” Liedtke most certainly did not rely on photographs for his analysis, but he did almost entirely ignore the plasticity of the chain. In effect, the physicality of the chain is written out of his story and the painting can thereby become entirely about its literary theme and optical effects. 69 For her discussion of this painting, which she contrasts with Gerrit Dou’s The Doctor, see Alpers, 1988, pp. 25–26.

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I already observed that Rembrandt associated himself with Homer, and thus with poetry, by placing his signature at the base of the bust in Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. In this way, Rembrandt expressed his desire to achieve eternal fame, like that enjoyed by Homer. This can be taken a step further because, like the poet, the painter creates illusions, just as he has created an illusion of the sculpture of Homer. Rembrandt underscores that the sculpture is an illusion by placing his signature on the surface of the canvas, and not as an inscription, say, on the depicted bust itself. Eternal fame comes from the making of illusions.70 This runs counter to the claims made on behalf of sculpture in the paragone discourse, where sculpture is better than painting because it lasts longer. Here, by linking the illusion-making abilities of the painter to those of the poet, and by suggesting that these qualities last forever, Rembrandt trumpets the virtues of painting by having it take on one of the virtues usually connected to sculpture. Painting and poetry are about making illusions, which leads to eternal fame. Painting also vanquished sculpture within the paragone by virtue of the materiality of the plastic art. It is material and base, like the literally sculptural chain Aristotle fingers with his left hand. This would seem to confirm Held’s reading of the painting, with the chain in second place behind the bust of Homer as the center of Aristotle’s attention. One is an illusion, while the other is three dimensional, and tangible. I think there is more to it than that. Sculpture vanquished painting within the paragone because sculpture can be apprehended via the eminently reliable sense of touch. Here though, part of the painting can also be discerned with the sense of touch, even though it is a painting. If this were not part of a pattern within Rembrandt’s late work one might be able add the paragone dimension as a simple buttress to the traditional reading of the painting, which sees the bust in a positive light, and the chain in a negative one.71 But it is part of a pattern, however, one in which, as Alpers put it, “touch supplements sight as the primary vehicle of human contact, understanding, and love.”72 This complicates our reading of the painting under discussion, and makes it more ambiguous, more open-ended. Bearing in mind Rembrandt’s broad exploration of the various ways the body understands the world through touch, and the beautiful intertwining of sculpture and glittering illusion represented by the chain, it is possible that what we witness is not a fait accompli, with illusion and poetry as the clear winners, but an artful circumventing of the debate, as if to suggest that illusion and tactility need not be at odds. In this regard, Aristotle was hardly a neutral figure to have chosen for a painting on the themes of touch and sight. The seventeenth century understood the senses from a variety of sources but one of the leading ones was Aristotle’s De 70 The relationship of signature to bust was also noted by Suthor, 2014, p. 118. 71 In large measure this is what Liedtke, 2004, argues. 72 Alpers, 1988, p. 29.

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Anima, in which he established the hierarchy of the senses.73 For Aristotle, Touch was the lowest sense, but it was also the only sense essential to life itself, and the sense that differentiated animal from vegetable.74 Aristotle believed that understanding of the world emerged through the use of all of the senses. Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer can be read, in part at least, through touching, and is in this way like sculpture. It also employs the trickery of illusion, both visual and, by implication, poetic. The virtues of poetry, painting, and sculpture are bound together and mutually reinforcing. Yet another factor must be considered within this already complex web of associations related to touching, seeing, and thereby knowing the world. The bust of Homer shows the poet blind. Because he was blind, Homer was thought to have special insight into the world beyond the senses. Far from being a disability, Homer’s blindness was associated with prophetic abilities and poetic inspiration. It seems that Rembrandt is suggesting that he, like Homer, has special insight into phenomena that lie beyond the senses, and he joins this special insight with the apprehension of the world through the senses of touch and sight, like Aristotle. After all, when we think for a moment about what is distinctive about Rembrandt as a painter, his thick application of paint looms large, but more crucially perhaps, his achievement revolves around the suggestion of things that are not there in any physical sense: thought, introspection, and reflection. This painting seems to suggest that one comes to know the world in a variety of ways: through seeing and the understanding of clever illusions; through touching and coming to know the physical world in that way; through thinking and inward contemplation.75 Rembrandt sets before us in paint a kind of epistemological primer in which, among other things, the texture of the painted chain reminds us of the fundamental nature of the sense of touch in the exploration of the world.76 Aristotle with a Bust of Homer is also a work of artistic self-fashioning and self-promotion. I discussed Rembrandt’s 1640 Self-Portrait at Age 34 (Fig. 67) as a demonstration of the artist’s interest in the paragone. I also mentioned how Rembrandt assimilated himself as sitter with Ariosto and Castiglione. Though not a self-portrait, of course, it is clear that in inventing the subject of Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, and having it represent his artfulness in a collection of Italian art, Rembrandt also fashioned an image of himself with respect to his subjects. Aristotle and Homer, therefore, become expressions of his self, suggesting that as an artist he generated 73 Freeland, 1995. 74 Moshenska, 2014, p. 146. 75 Recently, Bikker, 2014a, pp. 216–218, has plausibly suggested that Aristotle with a Bust of Homer revolves around the theme of melancholy, which, when not excessively unbalanced, was thought to lead to philosophical, poetic, or artistic inspiration. 76 Though she does not make the sense of touch part of her argument, Carroll, 1984, pp. 54–55, comes to a similar conclusion.

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works of poetic insight with recourse to all the senses. Aristotle does not just finger a chain; a medal hanging from that chain represents Aristotle’s employer, Alexander the Great.77 In the history of ancient art as known to the seventeenth century, Alexander the Great was the patron of Apelles. When I analyzed the Self-Portrait at Age 34 I talked as well about how Rembrandt likened himself to the painters of the Ariosto and Castiglione portraits, to Titian and Raphael in other words. Here, I would suggest that Rembrandt has cast himself as a new Apelles, worthy successor to his ancient counterpart.78 In the process he would naturally have flattered Don Antonio Ruffo, his Sicilian patron, by likening him, in turn, to the person who would naturally have owned a painting by Apelles, Alexander the Great. A few years later Rembrandt painted one of his most imposing self-portraits. Showing the artist seated, holding a scepter-like stick, and looking directly out at the viewer, the Frick Self-Portrait has been read convincingly as an expression of Rembrandt’s desire to see himself as Apelles.79

Conclusion Activating the sense of touch through the texturing of the paint does not offer a blanket explanation for the extraordinary turn taken by Rembrandt in the last decades of his life. There can be no doubt that this turn also implicated the optical, with the idea being that loose forms resolve and appear stronger at an appropriate viewing distance. But the optical and the tactile are not mutually exclusive. Instead, they complement each other. As Sophia Rosenfeld explains, Europeans in Rembrandt’s time “generally conceived of the body’s senses in interconnected, networked terms,” which has come to be called intersensoriality.80 Grounded in part in the allegorical tradition, a number of Rembrandt’s late paintings explore touch in a myriad of ways. The fluidly applied strokes of paint of the Portrait of Jan Six (Fig. 52) speak to Rembrandt’s dexterous sprezzatura and to Venetian painting, Titian in particular. Rembrandt’s dexterous touch becomes a caress in the Bathsheba (Fig. 53) and the Woman Bathing (Plate 6), and a means of creating bonds of erotic and familial attachment in the Jewish Bride (Plate 7) and the Family Portrait (Fig. 54). In Lucretia (Plate 8) touch is associated with violence and pain. In the Return of the Prodigal Son (Plate 10) touch 77 For Held, 1991, p. 53, the presence of the medal of Alexander was tied to the negativity of the gold chain, binding him to another and compromising his autonomy. It is an overly Romantic view of the artist and his relationship to his patrons. It should be noted that Carroll, 1984, pp. 44–46, identified Minerva as the subject of the medal. 78 Crenshaw, 2006, pp. 149–155, suggested that the figure usually identified as Aristotle should instead be seen as Apelles. This suggestion has been convincingly rejected by Liedtke, 2004, p. 76. 79 Chapman, 1990, pp. 88–95; Wieseman, 2014b, p. 45. 80 Rosenfeld, 2011, p. 319.

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creates a bond of reconciliation between father and son. In Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (Plate 9) touch is associated with both painterly and poetic insight. This list emphasizes the sheer range of tactile associations in this body of work, articulated in terms of the artist’s touch, the representation of touch, and the remarkable intersection of represented touch and richly textured surfaces. The texturing of paint in Rembrandt’s late works is systematic and intentional. Rembrandt’s focus on touch in this late work ran counter to the prevailing winds of cultural change. It is not my intention to revive the Romantic notion of the artist striking out steadfastly to follow an unstoppable internal impulse, consequences be damned, but it is still extraordinary to imagine Rembrandt developing his late manner just at the time when a more finely finished, classicizing taste was coming to the fore. The Claudius Civilis (Fig. 59) commission for the town hall offers a particularly good example of his pig-headed insistence on following his own path. By insisting on repeatedly invoking of the sense of touch, Rembrandt was defying an increasingly ocularcentric culture. The Reformation’s insistence on the word, and on faith, represented in many ways a repudiation of the physicality of late medieval religion, with its cult statues and miracle working relics, sacred objects the faithful were often invited to touch, and which were bearers of the sacred.81 Add to that the scientific revolution and its increasing emphasis on optics and you do not have an environment primed for a new exploration of the haptic. That said, it makes perfect sense that Rembrandt should have been the artist to turn to something new in painting, something that none of his rivals had ever done. It is worth bearing in mind that though the seventeenth century may have seen a divorce between body and intellect, and a move toward prioritizing the abstract senses, it was also the century in which Descartes, in his Dioptrique of 1637, spoke of “seeing with the hands,” a notion that spoke to the idea that sense data from one source – touch – can be understood in terms of another sense, sight.82 Rembrandt, too (though surely not as a result of reading Descartes), seems to have understood the potential interdependence of the senses. But in place of seeing with the hands, Rembrandt proposes feeling with the eyes. Why did Rembrandt adopt a sculptural approach to painting that, as we have seen, invited a broad range of thoughts, many of which can be connected to the sense of touch? Nothing quite like this ever happened in Italian art, as far as I know, yet it was in Italy, with Titian in particular, that it first became acceptable to paint with visible brushstrokes. One reason, surely, was Rembrandt’s sense of competition with Italy, his desire to create something very new and different, all the while looking over his 81 Moshenska, 2014, pp. 10–13; Paterson, 2007, pp. 1–8; on the touching of paintings and religious objects such as relics, see Classen, 2012, pp. 130–132, and pp. 151–152, for the Reformation repudiation of the lower senses. 82 Quoted in Paterson, 2007, p. 8. Kambaskovic and Wolfe, 2014.

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shoulder at the authoritative tradition of the Renaissance, either directly, as in the case with the Self-Portrait at Age 34 (Fig. 67), or through the filter of Rubens. Inspired by Titian, or, more properly, by how Van Mander understood Titian, Rembrandt made his paintings resonate with more than a single sense at a time. What set him on his particular path, however, might well have been the distinctive way Venetian painterly painting was discussed in the north of Europe. Van Mander, you will recall, thought of touching paintings created in the Venetian manner. He described them as painted so roughly that one wanted to touch them, and that one could learn from this touching. Italian criticism, starting with Vasari, did not use the same terminology. In Italy, discussion of painting of this sort focused on action, and sketchiness, on visible “stains” laid on with the movement of the artist’s hand.83 Italian art criticism does not generally address rough paint, at least not roughness in the literal sense. In his late work, was Rembrandt responding to the particular terminology employed in the north? Venetian paintings are not really rough, yet they were described as such by Van Mander. Did Rembrandt take inspiration from this term and make it true by actually texturing the paint and making that texture carry meaning? We can never know, but such a relationship between words and images is not without precedent in the history of art. Rembrandt’s experience of Venetian painting was based on only a few firsthand experiences, so the textual tradition established by Van Mander, and, not unimportantly, continued forward by Van Hoogstraten, his own student, looms rather large.84 Van Hoogstraten referred to painterly painting as “rough” and this a term that Rembrandt must have used as he taught his students how to paint. The roughness of paint, which was secondary in Italian art criticism, became central to how painting with visible brushwork was characterized in the north. Rembrandt, it seems, may have been prompted by a distinctively northern way of describing brushwork to make the surfaces of his paintings literally rough.

83 On the terminology used in Italy to describe painterly brushwork, see Sohm, 1991, pp. 25–62. 84 Baxandall, 1971.

Conclusion Joining together the last four chapters of this book is the fact that Velázquez and Rembrandt were both interested in exploring the idea that painting could stimulate a multisensory experience. They did so, however, in ways that were similar, and quite different. Both Velázquez and Rembrandt embraced the messy materiality of the late Titian. Velázquez knew Titian’s work first hand, through the numerous examples present in the royal collection, and through his two trips to Italy. In addition to this, he benefitted enormously from knowing Rubens, who spent much of his time in Madrid in 1628 studying the Titians he found there and encouraging Velázquez to do the same. It is hard to know exactly how much direct experience Rembrandt had with Titian’s late work, but we can be confident that he knew some examples, and he very likely perused the writings of Van Mander, largely cribbed from Vasari. Both artists clearly knew that Titian had introduced open, painterly brushwork to the European tradition, and that this shift inaugurated new expressive avenues. I suspect as well that Vasari’s disapproval of Titian’s late paintings, which for him could only meaningfully be seen at a distance, acted for both artists as a kind of encouragement. I say this because the critical consensus around Rembrandt considers him an artist who defied the norms of classically inspired orthodoxy, even if I did not discuss this aspect of his career in the chapters of this book. I did, however, argue this for Velázquez, whose earlier choice of Caravaggio as a model must have surprised Pacheco, torchbearer in Spain for Vasari’s Central Italian classicism. His switch to Titian would have been an improvement for Pacheco, but he would still have shaken his head at Velázquez’s choice of the late style as his point of departure. Velázquez must also have been attracted to Titian’s late style because it is a style that seems to reveal and even revel in the process of painting. From an early date, well before his exposure to Titian’s late works, Velázquez was intent on thematizing the mechanical means by which paintings were produced, as I argued using Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Plate 3) and The Old Woman Cooking Eggs (Fig. 29). He continued the same theme with The Forge of Vulcan (Plate 4). In all three works the action of making took pride of place within the composition. In defiance of theoretical writing that mostly sidelined the mechanical actions of the artist’s hand and prioritized supposedly more elevated ideas, Velázquez made the performative act of painting central to his two late masterpieces, The Spinners and Las Meninas (Figs. 31, 35). With the notable exception of Las Meninas, where his own Knox, G., Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725712_concl

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prestige was forthrightly signaled with the cross of Santiago, the acts of making that he emphasized across his career are mostly carried out by humble folk, often women. Velázquez’s pictorial celebration of the lowly ennobled their activity, and by implication his own as well, inverting the usual priority of making and ideation. Both Velázquez and Rembrandt recognized that they took a risk in laying bare the process of painting. Titian’s manner may have appeared easy, as early critics noted, but to carry it out convincingly required a skillful touch. The Spinners in particular was intended as a demonstration of painterly skill, with the nonchalant efforts of the spinning women serving to allegorize Velázquez’s own abilities, so amply evident in the shimmering, blurred spokes of the rotating wheel. While Rembrandt was not as invested as Velázquez in thematizing the process of painting, he was determined to demonstrate his considerable ability in painterly painting in the manner of Titian. His Portrait of Jan Six (Fig. 52) is a remarkable pictorial essay in skilled, suggestive brushwork, evoking courtly sprezzatura both in his sitter and in himself. Mostly though, Rembrandt did not aim to follow in Titian’s footsteps. In this he was quite different from Velázquez, who always seemed to have Titian in the rearview mirror. Rembrandt wanted to take Titian’s example in a new and rather different direction. It is fair to say that Rembrandt explored the multisensory potential of the painted image more than Velázquez did. The contrast is best set up with a comparison of The Rokeby Venus (Plate 5) and Bathsheba (Fig. 53). As large-scale female nudes, both works clearly looked to the example of Titian, and both were meant to stimulate thoughts of erotic touching. The Rokeby Venus achieves this goal through its subject, of course, but also through a visual reference to the ancient Hermaphrodite (Fig. 48), well known to the painting’s audience. That sculpture, with its luxuriously pillowed mattress, was famous for being touched, and for then betraying the expectations of those who groped it. With Bathsheba, Rembrandt also had an erotic subject, but in his painting touching is emphasized much more. First, there is the emphasis he placed on touching hands, but most radically different from Velázquez, and from any other artist for that matter, is the paint itself and its remarkably varied texture. Textural differences appear in discrete areas of the painting, and become areas where touch is figured. Rembrandt did not mean us to lean in and rub the surfaces of his works, in the manner of the boy I once observed at the Art Institute of Chicago, but he did want those textured areas to remind us of the act of touching, and thus broaden the experience of the work of art beyond the optical realm. So while Velázquez appeals to the sense of touch through an association with a sculpture, Rembrandt sets out to make painting that is three dimensional, like sculpture. He does not make paintings that can be understood by a blind person, as sculpture could be understood according to the tradition recorded in the paragone debate. At the same time, through his textured paint he made his images express the fact we do not experience the world one sense at a time, but through all of the senses simultaneously. We come to know the world with our bodies, not just with our eyes.

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About the Author Giles Knox is Associate Professor at the Department of Art History of Indiana University. He has edited, together with Tanya J. Tiffany: Velázquez Re-Examined: Theory, History, Poetry, and Theatre, Brepols, 2017. He is the author of The Late Paintings of Velázquez: Theorizing Painterly Performance, Ashgate, 2009.

Index Aertsen, Pieter 77, 170–171 Albert, Archduke 116 Alberti, Cherubino Work: Persian Sibyl, after Michelangelo 90–91 Alberti, Leon Battista 75 Alexander the Great 149, 181, 213 Alpers, Svetlana 15–16, 18, 145–148, 152, 164, 177–178, 190, 204, 210, 211 Amman, Jost 113, 115 Angels, Philips 207 Apelles 112, 181–182, 207, 213 Ariosto 172–174, 212–213 Aristotle 19–20, 144–145, 148, 206–213 Aterido, Ángel 135 Badalocchio, Sisto Work: Isaac and Rebecca, after Raphael 187–189 Baglione, Giovanni 71 Balen, Hendrick van 117 Bassano, Jacopo 165 Bellori, Giovan Pietro 70 Beuckelaer, Joachim 78 Bikker, Jonathan 192–193 Bol, Ferdinand 189 Bolland, Andrea 134 Bonuccelli, Matteo Work: Hermaphrodite 129–130 Borghese, Scipione 133–134 Boschini, Marco 163–165 Bosse, Abraham Work: Touch 184, 191 Brown, Jonathan 61–62, 81–83 Brown, Michael 80 Bruegel, Pieter 116 Brueghel the Elder, Jan 94 Works: Allegory of Taste 116–117, 124 Allegory of Touch 124–125, 131 Byzantine art 16–17, 25–48, 70, 83 Cajés, Eugenio 75 Campaspe 181–182 Caravaggio 17, 19–20, 49–54, 56–57, 88 impact on Velázquez 59–77, 81–83, 118–119, 217 Works: The Calling of St. Matthew 59–60 Entombment 59, 61 Martyrdom of St. Matthew 51–53 Supper at Emmaus 59–60, 62, 64, 67 Carducho, Vicente 70, 75 Carr, Dawson 61 Carracci, Annibale 16, 40, 47, 70 Castiglione, Baldassare 170–171, 173–175, 212–213

Céspedes, Pablo de 68, 103–104 Clark, Kenneth 16 Clovio, Giulio 31, 40, 56 Collaert, Adriaen Work: Touch, after Marten de Vos 185–186 Correggio 40 Cort, Cornelis Work: Lucretia, after Titian 194–195 Coques, Gonzales Work: Touch  196–197 Davies, David 68 De Chasseneux, Barthélémy de Work: Catalogus gloriae mundi 113–115 De Jongh, Eddie 170 Del Bene, Bartolomeo Work: Portal of Touch 122–123 Descartes, René 214 De Vos, Marten Work: Touch 185–186 Dou, Gerrit Work: The Doctor  145–146 Escorial, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El 26, 42–44, 58, 68 Eyck, Jan van Works: Arnolfini Double Portrait 96, 175, 187 Portrait of Jan de Leeuw 152–153, 164 Ferrer, Girolamo 129 Fourment, Hélène 181 Gelder, Arend de 21 Gentile da Fabriano 149 Gentileschi, Orazio 50, 52, 56, 75 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 133 Giotto 39 Goltzius, Hendrick Works: Allegory of Visual Perception 93–94, 96 Lucretia as the Sense of Touch  199–200 Greco, El 19–21, 73 and Byzantine art 16–17, 25–48, 83 impact on Maíno 49–58 Works: Adoration of the Shepherds 54–55 Assumption of the Virgin 29–31, 36, 42–44, 54, 81 Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple 28–30, 35

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Disrobing of Christ 31–33, 36 Martyrdom of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion 32, 35, 53 Resurrection 43–44 Saint Luke Painting the Virgin  45 The Vision of Saint John 27–28 Guerra Coronel, Domingo 135–136 Haak, Bob 175 Hals, Dirck Work: Touch 183–185 Haro y Guzmán, Gaspar de 135–139 Harvey, Elizabeth 123 Held, Julius 206, 211 Heemskerck, Maerten van Work: Return of the Prodigal Son 202 Hermaphrodite 18, 21, 129–139, 218 Herrera, Francisco de 76–77 Heyden, Jacob van der Work: Touch 197–199 History painting 60, 75, 88, 90–91, 98–105, 107, 112, 124, 141, 181 Horace 207 Houbraken, Arnold 149–153, 155–156, 164–167, 169, 179–180, 191–192 Isabella, Archduchess 116 Kittensteyn, Cornelis van Work: Touch 183–185 Lanfranco, Giovanni 71 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo 39–40 Ludovisi Mars 126–127, 129, 132 Maíno, Juan Bautista impact of El Greco 49–58 impact on Velázquez 71–77, 80–83, 118 Works: Adoration of the Shepherds, Madrid, Museo del Prado 49, 56–57 Adoration of the Shepherds, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum 51–55, 57 Recapture of Bahía 76–77 Mancini, Giulio 29, 68 Mander, Karel van 19, 21, 162, 164–166, 168–171, 175, 191, 207, 215, 217 Manilli, Jacopo 134 Mannerism 31, 51, 74 Mazo, Juan Bautista Martínez del Work: Portrait of Philip IV 136–137 McFadden, Elizabeth 116–117 Melion, Walter 152 Michelangelo 15, 20, 25, 26, 29, 31, 39–40, 56, 70 Works: Ignudi 90–91 Last Judgment 29

Lorenzo de’ Medici  126–129 Persian Sibyl 90–91 Nardi, Angelo 75 Navarrete Prieto, Benito 68 Noble-Wood, Oliver 102 Olivares, Count Duke of 76 Ovid 18, 89, 99, 102, 134 Pacheco, Francisco 17, 19–20, 111, 112, 115, 117–118 and the hierarchy of the genres 103–104, 111–112 and the training of Velázquez 50, 58, 67–69, 71–77, 83, 90, 217 Palomino, Antonio 50–51, 57, 69–74, 76, 82–83, 113–114 paragone 18–20, 106–108, 125, 131, 148, 173, 207–213, 218 Pardo, Mary 133 Pencz, Georg Work: Allegory of Touch (Tactus) 91–92, 175 Pérez de Moya, Juan 105 Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E. 68 Pers, Dirck Pietersz. 189 Philip II 42 Philip III 75 Philip IV 75–77, 82, 126, 129, 132, 136–137 Pliny 132–133, 152, 181 Portús, Javier 66, 136 Pousão-Smith, Maria-Isabel 171 Praxiteles 132–133 Pygmalion 182–183 Raimondi, Marcantonio Work: Lucretia 194, 196 Raphael 15, 31, 40, 56, 90, 112, 141 Works: Baldassare Castiglione 173–175, 213 Isaac and Rebecca 187–189 Rembrandt and Titian 18–20, 143, 148, 162–176, 179–183, 213–215, 217–218 and the sense of touch 18–19, 148, 149, 177–215 Works: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp 146–147 The Apostle Bartholomew, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum 160–161 The Apostle Bartholomew, San Diego, Timken Museum of Art 160–161 Aristotle with a Bust of Homer 19–20, 144–145, 148, 159, 206–214 Bathsheba 18, 143–144, 177–186, 188, 190–192, 194–195, 213, 218 The Blinding of Samson 157–158 The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis  149, 151 Family Portrait 157, 178, 191–193, 206, 213 Jewish Bride 18, 143, 146, 156–159, 178, 186–193, 205–206, 213 Lucretia, Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Art 18–19, 144, 158–161, 188, 194–201 Lucretia, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art 18, 144, 159–160

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Index

The Nightwatch 141–142, 158, 163 Portrait of Frederik Rihel on Horseback 149–150 Portrait of a Lady with a Lap Dog 149, 151 Portrait of Jan Six 162, 167–168, 170–176 Return of the Prodigal Son  19, 144, 146, 201–206, 213–214 Self-Portrait at Age 34, London, National Gallery  171–174, 206, 208, 212–213, 215 Self-Portrait, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art 155–156 Syndics of the Drapers Guild 154–155 Touch 197–198 Woman Bathing  18, 143, 177–178, 185–186, 213 Reni, Guido 50, 71, 75 Renoir 165 Ribera, Jusepe de Work: The Sense of Touch 208–209 Ripa, Cesare 209–210 Concordia Maritale  189–190 Roelas, Juan de 68 Rubens 62–63, 89, 125, 129, 137, 163, 215, 217 Works: Allegory of Taste  116–117, 124 Allegory of Touch 124–125, 131 Het pelsken 181–182 Portrait of Philip IV 136–137 Ruffo, Don Antonio 206 Sagittarius, Thomas 94 Sánchez Cotán, Juan 17, 50, 74 Works: Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber 77–81, 96, 108 Still Life with Game Fowl 79–80, 108 Saenredam, Jan Work: Allegory of Visual Perception 93–94 Smith, David 170 sprezzatura 143, 162, 170–171, 175–176, 213, 218 Stoffels, Hendrickje 181 Tempesta, Antonio Work: Apollo and Vulcan 99–100, 102 Tibaldi, Pellegrino 42 Tiffany, Tanya 110, 117 Tintoretto 31, 35–36, 164, 168 Titian 15, 49, 89 impact on El Greco 18–20, 25, 29–31, 39–40, 56 impact on Rembrandt 18–20, 143, 148, 162–176, 179–183, 213–215, 217–218 impact on Velázquez 62–63, 128–129, 136, 217–218

Works: Lucretia 194–195 A Man with a Quilted Sleeve 172 Martyrdom of St. Lawrence 42, 44 Portrait of a Man with a Glove 174 Venus of Urbino 128, 180–183 Toledo Cathedral 41–42 Santo Domingo el Antiguo 42–45 Tolnay, Charles de 189 Tristán, Luis 69–76, 81–82 Work: Santa Monica  72 Van de Wetering, Ernst 141–142, 149, 156–157 Van Dyck, Anthony 175 Van Hoogstraten, Samuel 154–155, 163–169, 207, 215 Van Mander, Karel 19, 21, 162–166, 168–171, 175, 191, 207, 215, 217 Vasari, Giorgio 15–17, 19–20, 21, 51, 69–70, 170 and El Greco 28, 30, 39, 47–48 and Rembrandt 162, 167–168, 170–176 and Titian 162–163, 167, 169–170, 175, 215, 217 and Velázquez 83, 88, 90, 96, 112, 119 Velázquez, Works: Adoration of the Magi 65–66, 81–82 Los Borrachos 98–99, 101 Christ in the House of Mary and Martha 17, 108–119, 217 The Forge of Vulcan 17–18, 20, 87–89, 97–108, 113, 115, 121–126, 128, 217 Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob 17, 88–89, 97–101, 106–108, 124 Kitchen Scene 64–65 The Luncheon 64–67 Mars 18 20, 121–122, 126–129, 131–132, 136 Las Meninas 17, 80, 87–89, 95–97, 103, 105, 107–108, 111, 113, 115, 121, 129, 138, 175, 217–218 An Old Woman Cooking Eggs 17, 64–65, 77–80, 87–88, 108–109, 113–115, 118–119, 217 Portrait of Sor Jerónima de la Fuente 72 The Rokeby Venus 18, 20–21, 121, 128–139, 179, 181, 218 Siege of Breda 77 The Spinners 17, 20, 63, 80, 87–97, 102–103, 105, 107–109, 111, 113, 115, 118, 128, 175, 217–218 Three Musicians  63–64, 66–67 Two Young Men at Table 64–65 The Waterseller of Seville 64–65, 69, 77, 80, 88, 103–104, 108, 118 Venice S. Giorgio dei Greci 46–47 San Marco 31–39 Vlerick, Pieter 164