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Updated: June 4, 2025
Las Matas de Farfan, 64 miles northwest of Azua, was established in 1780 and suffered greatly during the wars with the Haitians. Like the other villages of the Maguana valley its chief industry is stockraising. Banica, 75 miles northwest of Azua, on the Haitian frontier, was one of the towns established by Diego Velazquez in 1504.
In one of the chapels is an artistic gem, a well preserved picture of Our Lady of Antigua, presented by Ferdinand and Isabella who are represented in an attitude of devotion at the foot of the Virgin. It is probably by Antonio del Rincon, their court painter. Other very old and obscure paintings in the church are ascribed to Velazquez or Murillo.
When Buckingham came down to Spain with Charles of England, the Conde-Duque of Olivares was shocked and scandalized at the relation of confidential friendship that existed between the prince and the duke. The world never saw a prouder man than Olivares. His picture by Velazquez hangs side by side with that of his royal master in Madrid.
He preferred those of the women noble dames with short-cropped, curled hair bound by a knot of ribbon on the temple, like those that Velazquez loved to paint, and long faces of the century following, with cherry-colored mouth, two patches on the cheeks, and a tower of white hair. The memory of the Grecian basilisa appeared to emanate from these paintings.
They consoled themselves for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by the delights of sensual life, and imagined they preserved some distant likeness to their great forerunners by encouraging and protecting Velazquez and Lope de Vega and other intellectual giants of that decaying age.
The suit between Cortez and Velazquez was referred to a special tribunal, composed of the grand chancellor and other persons of note, and was decided in 1522. The influence and intrigues of Fonseca being no longer of avail, a triumphant verdict was given in favor of Cortez, which was afterwards confirmed by the emperor Charles V, and additional honors awarded him.
The Jimenez and Velazquez forces effected a combination, as a result of which Juan Isidro Jimenez was elected president a second time, and took the oath of office on December 5, 1914. For a moment it seemed as though the country was at last entering upon an era of peace and prosperity.
Far back stretches a prospect singularly unlike those rich-toned studies of sub-Alpine regions in which Titian as a rule revels. It has an august but more colourless beauty recalling the middle Apennines; one might almost say that it prefigures those prospects of inhospitable Sierra which, with their light, delicate tonality, so admirably relieve and support the portraits of Velazquez.
Returning to the Museum and to Velazquez, we find ourselves in front of his greatest historical work, the Surrender of Breda. This is probably the most utterly unaffected historical painting in existence. There is positively no stage business about it. On the right is the Spanish staff, on the left the deputation of the vanquished Flemings.
It was a copy of the black and white Infanta, with the pink rosettes, which, like everything else that France possesses from the hand of Velazquez, is to the French artist of to-day among the sacred things, the flags and battle-cries of his art. Its strangeness, its unlikeness to anything of the picture kind that his untrained provincial eyes had ever lit upon, tied his tongue.
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