This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

V–Velázquez

The artist asks questions. An image can be conceived of and executed in a thousand different ways. Which way would you prefer? The figure of the one who was, who is, or who will be? And where would you like to see it: in the place of the figure’s origin, final destination, or present location? In which places and at which times?

In the iconic art of Byzantium, the extreme, culminating symbol of medieval painting, there is only one possible response to these eternal questions: the time within a painting is a singular time, and that time is eternity, the domain of a single figure: God, the Pankreator. The gaze of the Byzantine Pankreator, like Pascal’s circumference, is everywhere and nowhere. It gazes at us and we gaze upon it, but there is a barrier separating us: divinity. We are here, now. He is here, everywhere. Tomorrow, we will no longer be here. He will continue to be here, for the centuries to come.

Fernando Botero is right when he says that it was Giotto who sparked the great modern revolution in art. Instead of the distant veneration of the Byzantine, Giotto infuses art with the urgent passion of the Italian and even perhaps the Franciscan world. St. Francis’s personal, passionate commitment is the very matter of religion and life, and is a mirror of the emotional engagement Giotto brings to the craft of painting. Piero della Francesca will strengthen the force of this revolution; the Arezzo and Sansepolcro frescos definitively yank painting out of its divine paralysis and its frontal gaze. Piero’s figures sometimes even dream — or dare to dream, like the sleeping figures at Sansepolcro. But most of all they dare to look. In Arezzo, the figures look out beyond the painting, toward a horizon or a person that we do not see. Piero died in 1492, the very same year of the American Discovery, and perhaps he is looking as far away as the Mundus Novus baptized by another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci. It almost seems as if Piero is telling us, I am going to paint a piazza with a deep perspective, one that is as fluid as the time that witnesses birth, growth, and death, and as slippery as the boundless space in which the designs of God are fulfilled through human action. This is where we find real houses, doors, stones, trees, men — no longer space without relief, or time without the hours of the original God Creator, but rather space as place and time as scar of creation. After Giotto and Piero the painter can say, “Blind men, look, I paint to look, I look to paint, look at what I paint, and what I paint, by being painted, looks at me and, in the end, looks at all of you, who look at me looking at my painting.” “Yes,” says Julián, the painter in my novel Terra Nostra, “only what is circular is eternal and only the eternal is circular, but within that eternal circle, there is room for all the accidents and variants of the freedom that is not eternal but instantaneous and fleeting.”

Paradoxically, Renaissance freedom is brought to its apogee by a Spanish court painter who produced commissioned works and used royal patronage to elevate the freedom of the artist to its very highest form and to revolutionize art itself. Just as Cervantes did in Don Quixote, Velázquez, in Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), uses the restrictions of time and space not only to mock them (that would be easy) but to create an alternate reality alongside the orthodox “truth,” and this reality is based on the freedom of the imagination. An infinitely more daunting task. While the Counter-Reformation orthodoxy accepts one single point of view, Cervantes in literature and Velázquez in painting offer multiple verbal and visual points of view. When they discover that their adventures have been made public — that is, published— Don Quixote and Sancho Panza realize that they have been read and seen by others. The others surround us. We read. We are read. We see. We are seen.

In Las Meninas, we surprise Velázquez while he is painting. He is doing what he wants to do, what he is able to do: paint. But this is not a self-portrait of the painter painting. It is a portrait of the painter who not only paints but is looking at what he is painting and who, moreover, knows that the people he is painting are looking at him as are the spectators who look at him from outside the painting, painting. Us. This is the necessary if uncomfortable or imperfect distance that Velázquez wants to eliminate, by introducing the viewer into the painting and projecting the painting beyond its frame and into the immediate, present space of the viewer.

But firstly: who is Velázquez painting? The princess, her maids, the midget girl, the sleepy dog? Or the gentleman dressed in black who appears at the entrance to the studio — the painting — upon an illuminated threshold? Or is Velázquez painting the two figures reflected, rather opaquely, in a cloudy mirror lost in the darkest corners of the atelier: the father and mother of the little princess, the king and queen of Spain — granting us, according to Michel Foucault’s celebrated interpretation, the “place of the king”?

In any event, we can also believe that Velázquez is there, brush in one hand, palette in the other, painting the painting that we are looking at, Las Meninas. We can believe that this is the case — but only until we realize that the majority of the figures in the scene, with the exception of the sleepy dog, are looking directly at us. At you and me. Is it possible that we are, in fact, the true protagonists of Las Meninas, the painting that Velázquez, at this very moment, is painting? Well now, if Velázquez and the entire court are inviting us to enter the painting, then the painting, at the very same moment, is most certainly taking a step forward to become united with us. This is the true dynamic of this masterpiece. We are free to look at the painting — and by extension, the entire world — in various different perspectives, not just one that is dogmatic and orthodox. And we are aware that both painting and painter are gazing out at us. Just like the luncheon companions in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which is scandalous because we find two clothed men and one naked woman gazing at us. Would there be any scandal at all in this painting if they weren’t looking at us — if they were looking out toward the forest, for example, or the background, or the edges of their little picnic site? The circle is completed. The icon, at one time, gazed out toward eternity, frontally. Piero della Francesca looks toward both sides, beyond the formal limits of the painting. And Manet looks straight back at us, not from the eternal but rather the present moment. Braque and Picasso, finally, would multiply the gaze simultaneously in all directions — both the gaze of the painting’s subject as well as our own gaze, directed toward a subject that we see simultaneously, in all its various perspectives.

For this reason, Velázquez is at both the center and the pinnacle, the base and the horizon, of modern painting. We must not forget that the canvas Velázquez paints — the painting within the painting — does not face us and is not yet finished, even though we are gazing at something we believe to be finished. Between these two central facts, however, two broad and shocking spaces open up. The first belongs to the painting’s original scene. Velázquez paints, the princess and her maids are caught by surprise as they look out, the gentleman enters through an illuminated vestibule, the king and queen are reflected in the mirror. Did this scene actually take place? Was it posed? Or did Velázquez simply imagine some or all of its elements? The second space is occupied by another question: did the painter finish the painting? Not only the painting that he is executing, one we do not see, but the very painting that we are looking at. Is it finished? Ortega y Gasset reminds us that Velázquez, in his own day, was not a popular painter. He was often accused of delivering unfinished works. Quevedo even accused him of painting “distant stains.” Today we can appreciate, from close up, that Velázquez’s “realism” springs to life through a profusion of abstract brushstrokes. Observed at close range, his paintings dissolve into a splendid pictorial abstraction — meticulous, free, and, I would say, self-sufficient. I don’t mean to suggest we dissect a Velázquez painting, but I do suggest that we approach him with a more inquisitive, intimate, microscopic gaze. That is how we may recognize the precision, the freedom, and the discipline of this “painter of painting,” as Ortega called him, recalling as well that Velázquez is more than a realist — he is a de-realist whose modes of derealization are innumerable and even opposed to one another. But in every case, there is a representation that is a visitation in the Henry James sense of the word: power exercised by an intangible presence. Ortega, who was the precursor to Foucault’s celebrated theories (the viewer occupies the king’s position), reminds us that before Velázquez, painting created a false world on canvas, a world alien and immune to time, “the fauna of eternity.” Although I believe that Ortega is wrong in this case, because that “fauna of eternity” pertains to pre-Renaissance art, I agree that Velázquez “does indeed paint time itself at the very moment that constitutes ‘being,’ just as it is condemned to stop being, to evolve, to become corrupted.”

In Las Meninas, Velázquez establishes a principle for modern art. The reproaches he endured in his lifetime for painting “unfinished works,” is, in today’s world, the very emblem of his modernity and, I would add, his freedom. Velázquez deposits his work in the gaze of the viewer. As such, the viewer’s responsibility is not to finish the painting but to continue it. . “A poem neither begins nor ends, ever,” wrote Mallarmé. “It only pretends.” This manner in which the work is a pose, or a fiction, that is open to all that preceded it and all that will succeed it, through the gaze of the present moment, is the great and eternal lesson of this greatest and most eternal of painters.

Velázquez does not finish his paintings. He opens them up to our reality. But he also tells us, with incomparable visual force, that in our world everything is unfinished, nothing is ever fully concluded. Why? Because we ourselves, men and women, have not finished, we have not closed the chapter on our own story, no matter how intently the borders of finality and certainty may close in around us. Unfinished, even in death, because whether we are remembered or forgotten, we still contribute to a past that our descendants must keep alive if they want to have a future.

The eternal aperture and innovation of Velázquez offer a response to the contemporary concern regarding the death of the artistic avant-gardes. These movements perished because they came to believe that art was something that progressed, something that was part of the modern world’s general movement toward political freedom, economic satisfaction, and social well-being. But in the twentieth century, when progress stopped progressing, murdered either by political horror or physical violence, the avant-gardes ceased to exist. The singularity and the coexistence of artistic works, however, prevailed.

A simplistic Marxism, contrary to the complexity of Marx himself in terms of aesthetics, disseminated the notion that art progressed. To begin with, Marx underscored “the imbalance between the development of material production and the development of artistic production.” Art provides people with a kind of pleasure that transcends the forms of social development that may prevail at the moment of the artwork’s creation. “Why does a work of art continue to provide aesthetic pleasure when it is the mere reflection of a social form that has long since been replaced and that should only be of interest to the historian?” asks Marx in his Grundrisse (Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy). In the same work, he reminds us that Greek art is intimately connected to certain kinds of social development. But it continues to provide us with aesthetic pleasure and to represent, in some way, “an unattainable norm and model.” Marx goes on to add, with an irony that escapes many stricter, square Marxists, that the discovery of gunpowder does not make Achilles obsolete, nor does the invention of the printing press condemn the Iliad to death. Industrial progress does not silence the song of the epic muse, Marx concludes.

Karel Kosik, the preeminent Marxist critic in Czechoslovakia, sheds even more light on the issue. Every work of art has a double nature within its indivisible unity. It is the expression of reality. But at the same time, it shapes the reality that exists, not before and not alongside the work, but more precisely within the work itself and only in the work. Kosik reconsiders Marx’s question: how can a work of art provide aesthetic pleasure if the social conditions that existed at the time of its creation no longer exist? Dante is more than just a poet who participated in the struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines in the Florence of the thirteenth century. Kafka is more than just a Czechoslovakian Jew who was terrorized by his father. Basic Marxism and psychologism believe that one’s social or psychic foundations, which are determined by familial and economic foundations, will determine the work of art. Kosik solves the dilemma: how and why does a work of art outlast the conditions under which it was created? Because a work of art exists as a work of art because it demands interpretation, and interpretation produces, in turn, multiple meanings.

Velázquez shows us, like no other artist, how a work of art moves from fact (he painted Las Meninas in 1656, during the reign of Philip IV, in an absolutist, decadent Spain) to event (that is, the continuity that allows us to appreciate the painting today as something contemporary for us — just as contemporary as it will be to the viewer who observes it a century from now).

Kosik the Marxist, incidentally, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Soviet tyranny that seized his homeland in 1968. His papers were confiscated. The philosopher had to rewrite them from memory.

Yves Bertherat tells us that if society, economy, and politics exhaust the meaning of a particular work of art, the work of art will become illegible (invisible) by “everyone but those erudite souls of the past” when this community or society perishes. This is true because the other side of the coin is to believe that art “progresses” and the avant-gardes are the driving force behind such progress. The avant-gardes are dead, as is the notion that progress is the inevitable condition of the human quest for perfectibility (Condorcet: “progress. . will never be reversed as long as the earth occupies its present place in the system of the universe”). And so our awareness of limitations — the limitations of progress in a general sense and of the avant-gardes in particular — bring us back to our question. Can any kind of new movement come about at a time in which everything seems to indicate that newness is no longer possible because progress has ceased to progress — not in the fields of technology and science, but rather as a guarantee of happiness?

The catastrophes of the twentieth century have driven many of us to think of nature as a safe, idealized refuge. The great artists are not exactly nostalgic for nature despite the mastery with which some of them may render it in their works. Painting is a kind of paradoxical cloister. Like the light in Vermeer’s windows, it comes from the exterior world but illuminates the interior. Géricault takes this double dispossession to its extreme in The Raft of the Medusa. The raft of the shipwreck victims is menaced and battered by the relentless forces of nature, a sea whose waves are briny ogres eager to devour the horrific confinement of a small group of shipwreck victims whose shelter from the merciless storm is the fragile raft that keeps them afloat; they are trapped in one of nature’s vast prisons. It makes perfect sense that this work by Géricault was the inspiration for one of Luis Buñuel’s greatest films, that incubus of confinement that is The Exterminating Angel. We live on the razor’s edge of a natural world and a culture that are contiguous but separated, and that constantly invite us to partake in the brutal exposure of one or the protection of the other.

Schopenhauer does not beat around the bush: “Try, just once,” he dares us, “to truly be nature.” The horror that the philosopher feels for nature stems from the fact that nature has never really gazed upon us. Nature is a place of convulsion, tumult, jungle. But as another German philosopher, Schelling, reminds us, it is also “the incomprehensible basis of reality.”

One of these realities is art and the example that is perhaps the most distant from nature — voluntarily so — is the painting of Velázquez, the extreme artifice that dares speak its name.

Let my figures gaze beyond the painting that temporarily places them there. Let them gaze beyond the walls of this palace, beyond the plains of Castile. . beyond the exhausted continent we have defiled with crimes, invasions, greed, and lust beyond measure, and saved, perhaps, with a few beautiful buildings and elusive words. Let them gaze beyond Europe toward the world we do not know and that does not know us, though it is no less real. . And when you, my figures, also grow weary of gazing, cede your place to new figures that will, in turn, violate the rule that you will ultimately consecrate. Disappear, then, from my canvas and let other figures take your place.

These words, which I ascribe to the monk artist of the royal court in Terra Nostra, could be those of Velázquez in his eternal dialogue with the past and the future of painting. Like nobody else, he understood that we will always be blind without knowing it, we will always be bereft of vision. For that reason nature comforts us even as it threatens us. It is there, we see it. For this reason art provokes and disturbs us, because it is not there. As it is not there, we must imagine it. To understand this is to understand why Diego de Silva y Velázquez occupies, at least to my way of seeing things, a central place in the realm of art.