"LAS MENINAS / MARS" VELÁZQUEZ (2024) 50 EURO

Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva and
Seville, 1599 - Madrid, 1660

He adopted his mother's surname, as was common in Andalusia, signing his name ‘Diego Velázquez’ or ‘Diego de Silva Velázquez’. He studied and practised the art of painting in his native city until he was twenty-four, when he moved with his family to Madrid and entered the service of the king from then until his death in 1660. Much of his work was destined for the royal collections and then passed to the Prado, where it is preserved. Most of the pictures he painted in Seville, however, went to foreign collections, especially from the 19th century onwards.

Considered the most important painter of the Spanish Baroque period, Diego Velázquez became a court painter at the court of Philip IV, which enabled him to study the great masters of national and international art. His enormous artistic output, including such emblematic works as ‘Las Meninas’, has left an indelible mark on the universal history of painting.

Las Meninas.

This is one of Velázquez`s largest paintings and among those in which he made most effort to create a complex and credible composition that would convey a sense of life and reality while enclosing a dense network of meanings. The artist achieved his intentions and Las Meninas became the only work to which the writer on art Antonio Palomino devoted a separate section in his history of Spanish painters of 1724, entitling it In which the most illustrious work by Don Diego Velázquez is described. Since then the painting has never lost its status as a masterpiece. From Palomino we know that it was painted in 1656 in the Cuarto del Príncipe in the Alcázar in Madrid, which is the room seen in the work. He also identifies most of the figures of the court servants grouped around the Infanta Margarita, who is attended by two of the Queen`s meninas or maids-ofhonour: María Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco. In addition to that group, we also see the artist himself working on a large canvas, Mari Bárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, the latter provoking a mastiff, and the lady-in-waiting Marcela de Ulloa next to a guardadamas (attendant), with the chamberlain José Nieto standing in the doorway in the background. Reflected in the mirror are the faces of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, the Infanta`s parents who are watching the scene taking place. The figures inhabit a space that is modelled not just through the laws of scientific perspective but also through aerial perspective. In the definition of this space the multiplication of the light sources plays an important role.

Mars.

Velázquez's Mars is first documented in the Torre de la Parada, a royal hunting residence where Philip IV could practise his favourite pastime. It was also dedicated to the king's artistic hobbies, as it was decorated mainly with mythological Ovidian themes commissioned in 1636 from Rubens and his workshop. It was fitting that the royal painter, Velázquez, should be represented in such an important collection, where his images of Aesop, Menippus and various portraits of jesters were also installed. The stylistic contrast between his works and those of the Flemish artists would be a source of delight for a connoisseur of painting such as the king. Velázquez portrayed Mars life-size, from a live model, perhaps a veteran soldier, in a pose reminiscent of the famous Ares Ludovisi.