Day 47 - Diego Velazquez

The most famous of the Spanish Baroque painters was Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599 – 1660) who was the lead artist in the court of King Philip IV.  He painted a large number of portraits of the Spanish Royal family and other famous and notable European's who visited their court.  His masterpiece Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour ) was painted in 1656 which is such a complex and has such an enigmatic composition that is has been one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting.  The viewers relationship to the figures is unclear, but has been said that it could be from the King's and Queen's perspective and that they are reflected in the mirror at the back of the room - it is their portraits, as well, that dominate the upper back wall behind the central figures.  The central focus is unclear, and it may be that the painter himself was the true subject of the painting.  The scene itself is reminiscent of a Jan van Eyck interior scene, but in the macro perspective and with a much more sensitive attention to detail, light, perspective, etc.

His painting style was genre pieces for the most part, but he also visited Classical themes as seen in Mercury and Argos.  This painting is unusual because it is a scene pictured outside, whereas most of his paintings were of interior scenes, but also because the landscape and stormy sky is so realistically portrayed and the figures are not as idealized as traditional Classical representations.  This painting was possibly the last one he completed, believed to have been signed in 1660.  He also did allegorical paintings of the King and there are religious paintings done with the conventions of earlier Catholic paintings showing halos and dramatic and idealized scenes.

Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656)

Diego Velazquez, Mercury and Argos, (c. 1660)

References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Meninas
3. http://www.diegovelazquez.org/Mercury-and-Argus-c.-1659.html