Spanish Painters :: essays research papers

Spanish lynx, the countrys greatest baroque creative person, who, with Francisco de Goya and El Greco, forms the great triumvirate of Spanish painting.Velzquez was natural in Seville on June 6, 1599, the oldest of six children both his p arents were from the minor nobility. Between 1611 and 1617 the upstart Velzquez worked as an apprentice to Francisco Pacheco, a Sevillian Mannerist painter who became Velzquezs father-in-law. During his student years Velzquez absent the most popular contemporaneous styles of painting, derived, in part, from both Flemish and Italian realism.Many of his earliest paintings show a strong naturalist bias, as does The Meal, which may have been his offshootly work as an independent victor after passing the examination of the Guild of Saint Luke. This painting belongs to the first of three categoriesthe bodegn, or kitchen piece, along with characterizations and religious scenesinto which his youthful works, executed amid about 1617 and 1623, may b e placed. In his kitchen pieces, a few figures are combined with studied still-life objects, as in Water Seller of Seville. The masterly effects of light and shadow, as well as the draw a bead on observance of nature, make inevitable a comparison with the work of the Italian painter Caravaggio. Velzquezs religious paintings, images of simple piety, portray models drawn from the streets of Seville, as Pacheco states in his archives of Velzquez. In Adoration of the Magi, for example, the artist painted his own family in the dissembling of biblical figures, including a self- depiction as well.Velzquez was also well acquainted with members of the adroit circles of Seville. Pacheco was the director of an informal humanist academy at its meetings the young artist was introduced to such people as the great poet Luis de Gngora y Argote, whose portrait he executed in 1622. Such contact was important for Velzquezs afterward work on mythological and classical subjects.In 1622 Velzquez m ade his first trip to Madrid, to see the royal painting collections, but more possible in an unsuccessful search for a position as judicatory painter. In 1623, however, he returned to the capital and, after executing a portrait of the king, was named official painter to Philip IV. The portrait was the first among many such sober, direct renditions of the king, the royal family, and members of the court. Indeed, throughout the later 1620s, most of his efforts were dedicated to portraiture. Mythological subjects would at times occupy his attention, as in Bacchus or The Drinkers.