![]() Velásquez painted An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (on this month's cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases) when he was 19 years old. In spite of his meticulous depiction of reality, he seemed more interested in the tensions between reality and appearance than in reality itself ( 5). Velázquez was gifted with exacting technique and preferred to paint from life. His painting showed exceptional mastery of space and light and exuded naturalness and restraint, both in its objectivity and choice of colors, often browns and ochers. This wish, expressed in a letter to a friend, reflects the mystique associated with Velázquez' work and the breadth of its influence on all modern art schools, even if limited to 100 or so surviving works. "To go to Madrid to see the Velázquez" was Monet's wish near the end of his life ( 4). During his first journey, he traveled with Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens, who was also influential in his artistic career. The artist led a quiet life, interrupted only by his travels to Italy, sponsored by the king. He was appointed court painter, a position of great privilege, which gave him access to royal collections including paintings by the Venetian Renaissance master Titian, who greatly influenced the development of his style. Soon a member of the Seville painters' guild, Velázquez moved from bodegón to portraits and was summoned to the court, where he received his first commission to paint King Philip IV, a discerning patron of the arts. He apprenticed with influential biographer, theoretician, and artist Francisco Pacheco, who later wrote about his student: "After five years of education and training, I married him to my daughter, moved by his virtue, integrity, and good parts and by the expectations of his disposition and great talent" ( 3). Like the great literature of that era, his art concerned itself with the life, culture, and traditions of the people. Velázquez grew up in the cosmopolitan climate of Seville, southern Spain, along the banks of the Guadalquivir, an area also home to Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and other luminaries of the Spanish Golden Age. These objects (still life), prominently displayed in realistic terms including their imperfections, assumed a life of their own, introducing a new naturalism in Spanish painting, which had been dominated by the ideal beauty of classical and academic themes ( 2). In a style reminiscent of Caravaggio, Velázquez created and popularized a new genre, the kitchen or tavern scene (bodegón), which showed peasants eating or preparing meals and the objects they used to assemble and serve them. In 17th-century Spain, genre painting (scenes of everyday life) reached new heights with the work of Diego Velázquez. From ancient times and particularly during the development of genre painting in the Middle Ages and later, food-its appearance, abundance, or decay-has been a popular subject. In nature and on the table, quite apart from its direct link to human survival, food has been an object of intrigue featured prominently in art throughout history. A man of many interests, among them archaeology, astronomy, and chemistry, Savarin wrote treatises on economics and history, but his fascination with food was what most informed and entertained readers and followers in his native France and around the world. "Tell me what you eat, I will tell you who you are," boasted famed gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) ( 1). ![]() The National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618) Oil on canvas (100.5 cm x 119.5 cm).
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