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Updated: June 21, 2025
Imagination was denied to him, asserts Beruete; he had neither the turbulent temperament of Rubens nor possessed the strained, harsh mysticism of El Greco a painter of imagination and the only painter allowed by Beruete to have affected the Velasquez palette. In a word, Velasquez was a puzzling comminglement of the classic and the realist.
Why so well-known and authoritative a work as Velasquez, by Aureliano de Beruete, should have been so long in reaching America is a puzzle when you consider the velocity with which the Atlantic Ocean is traversed by so many mediocre books on art.
Beruete claims that the Rubens influence is not to be seen in Velasquez, only El Greco's. Every object, living or inanimate, that swam through the eyeballs of the Spaniard surely the most wonderful pair of eyes in history was never forgotten. His powers of assimilation were unexcelled.
The style proves an earlier date than 1650. The cardinal withdrew from the cardinalate after three years, 1644-47 > and married. The portrait was acquired by the American artist the late Francis Lathrop. Stevenson grants to the Metropolitan Museum a fruit-piece by Velasquez. Not so Beruete.
Of the "supposed portrait of Cardinal Pamphili," a real Velasquez, now hanging in the Hispanic Society, 156th Street, Beruete writes: "In the winter of 1902 there appeared in Paris a bust portrait of a cardinal brought from Italy by Messrs. Trotty & Co., which had been alluded to by Professor A. Venturi of Rome in L'Art.
Beruete says that Ribera more than Zurbaran affected Velasquez; "El Greco taught him the use of delicate grays in the colouring of the flesh." His salary at the court was two and sixpence a day in 1628. Even Haydn and Mozart did better as menials. Yet some historians speak of the liberality of Philip IV. An "immortal employee" indeed, as Beruete names his idol.
All of these owe some of their charm to the youth and attractive personality of the subject; but if we want to see the power of Velasquez without any outside element to help us to appreciate it, there is the portrait of the sculptor Martinez Montanes at the Prado. "The head is wonderful in its colour and its modelling," writes Senor Beruete; "and what a lesson in technique!
Señor Beruete believes her to represent the daughter of the painter Mazo and his wife, Francisca Velasquez, therefore a granddaughter of Velasquez. The tonalities of this picture are subtly beautiful, the modelling mysterious, the expression vital and singularly child-like.
Whereas Stevenson in his invaluable book studies his subject broadly in chapters devoted to the dignity of the Velasquez technique, his colour, modelling, brushwork, and his impressionism, Beruete follows a more detailed yet simpler method.
Picture by picture, in each of the three styles he adopts Justi's and Stevenson's classification he follows the painter, dealing less with the man than his work. Not that biographical data are missing on the contrary, there are many pages of anecdotes as well as the usual facts but Beruete is principally concerned with the chronology and attribution of the pictures.
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