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Velasquez's Flagellation, if indeed it be his, in our National Gallery, has a pathos, a something that catches you by the throat, in that melancholy weary body, broken with ignominy and pain, sinking down by the side of the column, which is inseparable from the dreary grey light, the livid colour of the flesh there is no joy in the world where such things can be.
From Rome Velasquez proceeded to Naples, where he was enabled by his prudence and forbearance to face without injury the disgraceful 'reign of terror' which the Neapolitan artists had established in the south of Italy. The Neapolitan artists more than any other Italian artists are believed to have influenced Velasquez's style.
There is as absurd a story of Velasquez's perfection in painting as that of Raphael's, whose portrait of the pope, left upon the terrace to dry, imposed upon passers by.
Sterling gives an extract from a poem by a Venetian, Marco Boschini, which was published not long after Velasquez's journey to Italy, in which part of a conversation is given between him and Salvator Rosa, who asked him what he thought of Raphael. You will like to see it, if you have not Sterling by you. Dictionary of Americanisms.
He produced a good many valuable pictures and a great many sketches, which were mostly given away. Yet today, Seville, with her splendid art-gallery and her hundreds of palaces, contains not a single specimen of the work of her greatest son. It was a rather daring thing for a young man of twenty-four to knock boldly at the gates of Royalty. But the application was made in Velasquez's own way.
It is pretty difficult to find out why a man was named so-and-so in the days of the early Italian and Spanish painters. More likely than not they would be called after the master to whom they had been first apprenticed; or after their trade; after the town from which they came, and rarely because their father had had the name before them. In Velasquez's case, he was named after his mother.
In its realism it is even more surprising than most of the other portraits, considering how ugly the face had to be made to resemble nature, although the sitter was of a still higher rank than Velasquez's royal master.
The higher art of composing into the unity of a group all its parts, and keeping their perfections within such limits as best co-operate in the transcendent perfection of the whole this was the labour and the crown of both their lives. Velasquez's best and greatest groups are such a realized vision of life that they have remained the despair of artists to this day.
His paunch was of imposing dimensions. His face was large and fleshy. He had thrown himself into the arrogant attitude of Velasquez's portrait of Del Borro in the Museum of Berlin; and his countenance bore of set purpose the same contemptuous smile. He advanced and shook hands with Dr Porhoët. 'Hail, brother wizard! I greet in you, if not a master, at least a student not unworthy my esteem.
In this picture his biographer acknowledges, that 'choosing rather to display his unrivalled skill in delineating vulgar forms than to risk his reputation in the pursuit of a more refined and idealized style, Velasquez's 'Hebrew patriarchs are swineherds of Estramadura or shepherds of the Sierra Morena.
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