425 ANNIVERSARY OF VELÁZQUEZ (2024) - SILVER SET

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.

Despite a growing number of documents relating to his life and work, much of what we know comes from his earliest biographers. In a treatise completed in 1638 and published in 1649, Velázquez’s teacher, Francisco Pacheco, who later became his father-in-law, furnished important though fragmentary information about his apprenticeship, his first years at court and his first trip to Italy, with abundant personal details. The artist’s first complete biography, by Antonio Palomino, was published in 1724, over seventy years after his death, but its value lies in the fact that it is based on biographical notes written by one of Velázquez’s last disciples: painter Juan de Alfaro. As a court painter himself, Palomino was intimately familiar with Velázquez’s works in the royal collection, and he also had contact with people who had known the painter when they were young.

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.