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Greco composed his palette with white vermilion, lake, yellow ochre, ivory black. Señor Beruete says that "he generally laid on an impasto for his flesh, put on in little touches, and then added a few definite strokes with the brush which, though accentuated, are very delicate... The gradations of the values is in itself instructive."
The first Spanish edition of the Beruete monograph appeared about 1897; the same year saw it in French, and from the latter tongue it was translated into English by Hugh E. Poynter in 1906. Señor Beruete is considered with reason as the prime living authority on the great Spanish realist, though his study is not so voluminous as that of Carl Justi.
But Greco is on the side of the angels; Berlioz, like Goya, too often joined in the infernal antiphonies of Satan Mekatrig. And Greco is as dramatic as either. Beruete admits that his idol, Velasquez, was affected by the study of El Greco's colouring. Canaille Saint-Saëns, when Liszt and Rubinstein were compared, exclaimed: "Two great artists who have nothing in common except their superiority."
He had a sort of enraptured vision of the earth as beautiful, the innocence of the eye we encounter in children only. The truth is, Stevenson, Cortissoz, and Beruete are all three in the right.
Senor Beruete, who has studied the work of Velasquez more closely and more intelligently than any one else, considers that whereas there is not a single touch upon the former that is not from the brush of Velasquez, the latter cannot be properly attributed to him at all any more than can another popular favourite, the Alexandro del Borro in the Berlin Gallery, now given to Bernard Strozzi.
Señor Beruete, the Velasquez expert, truthfully says of Sorolla's method: "His canvases contain a great variety of blues and violets, balanced and juxtaposed with reds and yellows. These, and the skilful use of white, provide him with a colour scheme of great simplicity, originality, and beauty."
Those silver-grays, resonant blacks, browns, blues, and reds sing in your memory long after you have forgotten the tumultuous golden waves breaking upon the decorative coasts of Rubens. We are constrained to question the easy way Beruete and other critics deny the attributes of imagination and poetry to Velasquez.
In technical skill Beruete claims a far higher place for Velasquez, going so far as to say that the Lesson in Anatomy is not a lesson in painting. But the difference between the two is not as great as that in technique, though infinitely wider in the mental process which led to the production of a picture.
However, in Rome, at the house in which this picture was found, it was held to be the portrait of Cardinal Pamphili, nephew of Innocent X, who according to Palomino was painted in Rome by Velasquez at the same time as the Pontiff, that is in 1650." Beruete believes Palomino was wrong in declaring that Velasquez painted the young cardinal in Rome; Madrid was the likelier city.
Beruete is real, so Cossio, the author of the El Greco biography; so the realistic novelist Blanco Ibañez; but the best, after those of his, Sorolla's, wife and children, is that of Frantzen, a photographer, in the act of squeezing the bulb. It is a frank characterisation.
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