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Diego Velázquez`s works

spanish golden age

Garden

View of the Garden of the Villa Medici is a masterpiece in the history of Western landscape painting, in which Velázquez set out his idea of landscape without any narrative excuse to justify it. This is a faithful depiction of place in the Villa Medicis, one of the most important palaces in Rome, and it has no identifiable story, as the figures seem to be moving around the gardens without participating in any particular event. The singular in this work is the type of impression of nature that it seek to transmit: this is not an unchanging, timeless view of part of a garden; instead, there seems to be a will to reflect the experience of a moment.

Landscape painting was rare in Spanish painting of this time, with most commissions being religious works or portraits, and so Velázquez was somewhat cut off from the mainstream of French and Italian landscape art (as practised by Claude Lorrain or Poussin for example), making his use of an oil sketch rather than a studio-painted work unusual. Velázquez looks ahead to the Impressionist painters in choosing landscape as a topic and in rendering the scene broadly with small brushstrokes that are better appreciated when standing further back from the painting than close to it.

Female Figure

Female Figure is a small, probably unfinished, 1648 oil on canvas painting and is noted for its "restrained elegance, muted color harmonies, and the evocative poetry of the figure's parted lips and "lost" profile." The work presents something of a problem: what is the dark-haired young woman pointing to on the empty panel in front of her? She may be either Arachne seen as the personification of painting, or a Sibyl or prophetess pointing to the future.

In medieval Christian tradition, sibyls became prophetesses warning the pagan Romans of the coming of Christ. Sibyls were often, as here, portrayed with tablets (or with open books), although they were usually depicted in late Renaissance and Baroque art in sumptuous robes and head-dress. In contrast, this woman has disheveled hair, with loose strands spilling on her neck and exposed upper back, and is dressed in relatively plain clothing. Against this, it has been argued that she is portrayed in an unusually spontaneous manner for the time, captured as if in the fleeting moment in which she gives her prophecy. Her skin is rendered in pearly white tones, her lips are parted as if about to speak while her finger rests on the seemingly blank tablet (tabula rasa). Art historian Simona Di Nepi, among others, has noted Velázquez's habit for employing unexceptional looking models to sit for classical subject matter and for rendering their features in a realistic, unidealised manner.

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. It was painted in 1656 in the Cuarto del Príncipe in the Alcázar in Madrid, which is the room seen in the work. Las Meninas has one meaning that is immediately obvious to any viewer: it is a group portrait set in a specific location and peopled with identifiable figures undertaking comprehensible actions. The painting`s aesthetic values are also evident: the setting is one of the most credible spaces depicted in western art; the composition combines unity and variety; the remarkably beautiful details are divided across the entire pictorial surface; and finally, the painter has taken a decisive step forward on the path to illusionism, which was one of the goals of European painting in the early modern age, given that he has gone beyond transmitting resemblance in order to successfully achieve the representation of life or animation.

There's figures of the court servants on the painting 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, the dwarves 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.