While in Rome, Velázquez was largely preoccupied with the acquisition of works of art for the Habsburg art collection, including the suite of sculptures that he commissioned for the Octagonal Room. Nevertheless, he still found time to make paintings of his own. Sometime around the year 1651 and likely while still in Italy, Velázquez produced the only surviving painting of a nude female figure executed by a Spanish artist in the early modern period.1 While other such paintings have sometimes been supposed for the painter, The Toilet of Venus (“The Rokeby Venus”) is the only to have persisted to the present day, although it very nearly did not (fig. 3.1).2 The only painting in Velázquez’s oeuvre to have inspired iconoclasm, The Rokeby Venus was attacked in the National Gallery in London by suffragette Mary Richardson on March 10, 1914, in protest both of the recent arrest of fellow suffragette Emily Pankhurst and, as she later stated, of what she perceived as the indecent leering of male visitors to the Gallery.3 Using a meat cleaver, Richardson delivered several slashes to the work, largely across the back and hips of the figure depicted (fig. 3.2). As Lynda Nead has pointed out, the media that reported on the event used language suggesting that these wounds were inflicted not on a painterly representation of a woman but on an actual body. Confusing the canvas with the form painted on it, journalists documented a “cruel wound in the neck” and cuts across the “shoulders and back,” as well as “bruising” throughout.4 Nevertheless, with relining and repair, The Rokeby Venus was restored within a year, enduring its attack to become the veritable unicum in the history of Spanish art that it is still considered today.5
Diego Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus (“The Rokeby Venus”), 1647–51, oil on canvas, 122.5 × 177 cm, National Gallery, London, NG2057
Image © The National Gallery, London
“The Actual Damage Done to the Rokeby ‘Venus’ by the Suffragette with a Chopper.” Illustrated London News 54, no. 1401 (March 14, 1914): 407
Image © Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo
The production of this singular canvas coincided with the advent of a new practice in the display of the royal art collection. The stairwell that occasioned the reconstruction of the Octagonal Room led to a series of vaulted rooms on the very ground floor of the palace, giving directly onto the Garden of the Emperors and situated just below the newly remodeled Prince’s Chamber, which served as Velázquez’s studio.6 Beginning sometime in the mid-1630s and therefore in the same years in which Rubens was painting his mythological cycle for the Torre de la Parada, paintings including nude female figures were suddenly exhibited all together in these vaulted rooms, eventually dubbed the “Vaults of Titian.” It was the start of a long history at the Spanish court of the display of paintings of nude figures in such galleries. Many of the paintings that Rubens made for the Torre de la Parada depicted the erotic misadventures and sometimes sexual crimes of the Greco-Roman pantheon. The decade or so leading up to The Rokeby Venus was thus transformative for the nude female figure at the Habsburg court, and not without its consequences: Javier Portús Pérez has convincingly proposed that the exhibition of paintings of nude female figures all together in dedicated galleries in the Alcázar palace classified these works as their own genre of painting within the royal art collection.7 Titian, as we will see, was the central figure in these galleries and the unquestioned inspiration for Velázquez’s attempt at this kind of painting. Yet again, the masterclass that was the corpus of his paintings of this type that survived into the reign of Philip IV was delivered by means of and thus mediated by their hang. In both its content and form, The Rokeby Venus not only registers Velázquez’s understanding of the significance of Titian’s paintings of nude female figures; it registers his awareness of the signification that they were assigned by their display.
In his influential—if controversial—discourse on the nude in Western art, Kenneth Clark begins by very simply asking, “What is the nude?”8 The most long-standing pictorial trope in Western art history, the nude female figure has served artists across the centuries as a source of fascination, if not a ready visual metaphor for the art of painting. By way of response to his own query, Clark proposes that “the nude is not the subject of art, but a form of art.”9 He does little to explain what he means by this. And yet, with a statement like this one, Clark just begins to articulate what is perhaps worth expanding into a more complete thought process. In modern parlance, it has become easy to refer in an uncomplicated way to “the nude.” To do so is not to acknowledge that “the nude” can refer to two things, and sometimes at once: Within the realm of easel painting, “the nude” can refer, on the one hand, to an individual nude figure, a pictorial element included within a composition. On the other, it can refer to an object characterized by the inclusion of such a figure and, by extension, to the genre to which said object belongs. One is merely a part; the other, the whole. On the walls of the Alcázar palace, as in Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, “the nude” would come to function as both.
1 The Vaults of Titian
The 1630s and 1640s saw the creation in the Alcázar palace of the Vaults of Titian, dedicated gallery spaces for the exhibition of paintings of nude female figures.10 Between Portús Pérez’s many publications, the hang of the paintings of nudes in the royal art collection over the course of Velázquez’s career at the Habsburg court has been extremely well documented, and therefore only a summary of the most salient points will be made here. The first record of a gallery exclusively devoted to paintings of nude female figures dates to 1636. The inventory of the contents of the Alcázar palace made in this year includes a description of the paintings hanging in the room in the king’s summer apartments on the northeast ground floor of the palace designated the “last of the vaulted rooms with a window to the east in which his Majesty retires after eating.”11 This hang consisted of the following works: Titian’s Adam and Eve (fig. 3.3), Tarquin and Lucretia (fig. 3.4), and Venus with an Organist and Cupid (fig. 3.5), alongside his Danaë (fig. 3.6), Venus and Adonis (fig. 3.7), The Rape of Europa (fig. 3.8), Diana and Callisto (fig. 3.9), Diana and Actaeon (fig. 3.10), and a copy of his Perseus and Andromeda (fig. 3.11).12 This first installation already establishes some of the organizing principles of the exhibition of paintings of nudes in the Alcázar palace into the following decades. In the first place, the painting of nudes is here inextricably tied to the name of Titian, the author of all these works. In the second, they are bound together by a single subject, or perhaps better phrased, a single pictorial form: the nude female figure. The inclusion of Titian’s Adam and Eve tells us that this is not a collection of mythologies, in the strictest sense; it is an ensemble of paintings brought together under the rubric of the one pictorial element that is common to all of them.
Titian, Adam and Eve, ca. 1550, oil on canvas, 240 × 186 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P000429
Image © Ar chivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia, ca. 1571, oil on canvas, 188.9 × 145.1 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, PDP 914
Image © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
Titian, Venus with an Organist and Cupid, ca. 1555, oil on canvas, 150.2 × 218.2 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P000421
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Titian, Danaë, 1551–53, oil on canvas, 115 × 194 cm, Wellington Collection, Apsley House, 256.B
Image © Stratfield Saye Preservation Trust
Titian, Venus and Adonis, 1554, oil on canvas, 186 × 207 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P000422
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1562, oil on canvas, 178 × 205 cm, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, P26e1
Image © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Titian, Diana and Callisto, 1556–59, oil on canvas, 187 × 204.5 cm, National Gallery, London, and National Galleries of Scotland, NG6616
Image © The National Gallery, London
Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1556–59, oil on canvas, 184.5 × 202.2 cm, National Gallery, London, and National Galleries of Scotland, NG6611
Image © The National Gallery, London
Titian, Perseus and Andromeda, ca. 1554–56, oil on canvas, 183.3 × 199.3 cm, Wallace Collection, P11
Image © Wallace Collection, London/Bridgeman Images
Between 1636 and 1666, the collection of paintings of nude female figures exhibited all together in the Alcázar would expand into what were eventually termed the Vaults of Titian, a series of rooms on the ground floor of the south façade of the royal palace.13 The stairwell that occasioned the reconstruction of the Octagonal Room led to a series of vaulted rooms on the very ground floor of the palace, giving directly onto the Garden of the Emperors and situated just below the newly remodeled Prince’s Chamber.14 The collection of paintings of nude figures had continued to expand into the early 1640s; these vaulted galleries would have provided adequate space for the growing collection, where they were likely installed in the years immediately preceding the production of The Rokeby Venus.15 The inventories of the contents of the Alcázar palace taken in 1666 and 1686 tell us that these rooms eventually included not only paintings by Titian, in addition to all those already listed above (with the exception of Danaë), but also paintings by Veronese and Tintoretto, a copy after Correggio’s Leda, paintings by Rubens, and comparable works.16 Several of the paintings in this decorative program have been lost, and the provenance of others is sometimes uncertain, but we can trace the acquisition of a number of them to the years just before Velázquez’s departure to Italy. Titian’s Worship of Venus (MNP, P000419) and The Andrians (MNP, P000418) were given to Philip IV in 1637 by Niccolò Ludovisi, Prince of Piombino.17 Eugenio Cajés’s copy of Correggio’s The Fable of Leda (MNP, P000120), what was thought to be Rubens’s Love of Cupid and Psyche (MNP, P001548), and Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (fig. 3.12) were added to the Vaults of Titian from other rooms in the palace.18 Rubens’s Three Graces (fig. 3.13) was likely acquired at the 1640 auction of Rubens’s art collection.19 And a number of paintings were brought to the Alcázar from the royal palace in Valladolid by Velázquez and Alonso Cano, who traveled there together to retrieve paintings around 1640.20 These included Veronese’s Rape of Europa (lost), Venus and Adonis (MNP, P005204), and Judgment of Paris (lost).21 We can be reasonably sure that the years preceding The Rokeby Venus saw the assembly of at least eighteen paintings of nude female figures in a single set of galleries. The designation of these spaces as the Vaults of Titian in the inventory of 1666 of the contents of the Alcázar palace tells us that the painting of nudes remained associated with his name (and, to judge by the other authors whose works were included in these galleries, with the school of Venetian painting of which he was the star). More importantly, all the paintings are consistent in one aspect more than any other: their inclusion of one or more nude female figures.22
Titian, Venus with a Mirror, ca. 1555, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 105.5 cm, National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.34
Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Peter Paul Rubens, The Three Graces, 1630–35, oil on panel, 220.5 × 182 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P001670
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
The clear centerpiece of this decorative program is Titian’s series of poesie, so exemplary of Titian’s aptitude for this subject and the foundational monument in the tradition of painting to which The Rokeby Venus makes a claim. A word about method: Seemingly inexhaustible, the poesie have been subject to many competing readings over the course of the history of art.23 The line of inquiry to be pursued here depends on the recent reassessment of Miguel Falomir, who has argued that the relentless overinterpretation of the paintings’ subjects “betrays a wholesale loss of confidence in the aesthetic values of art.”24 Falomir goes on to suggest that insofar as they “were intended as a dimostrazione d’ingegno, … the choice of one theme over another was largely immaterial … as long as they shared a ‘fabulous’ nature, and enabled certain aesthetic ideals to be given visual expression.”25 Following Falomir’s line of thinking, the figures in Titian’s poesie appear less iconographic signifiers than pictorial elements with which Titian was able to engage in a kind of formal experimentation and thereby demonstrate his creative ingenuity. Titian himself gestures toward this line of thinking in an oft-cited letter to Philip II dating to September 10, 1554, wherein he explains the logic structuring the paintings’ interrelationships. In this letter, Titian announces the dispatch of the Venus and Adonis and explains that “because the Danaë that [he] already sent to His Majesty was seen entirely from the front, [he] wanted in this other poesia to change [the viewpoint] and show the opposite side, so that the camerino where they are to be may appear more attractive to the eye.”26 Titian then promised to send shortly a painting of Andromeda and another of Medea and Jason, “which will have another viewpoint different from those” of Danaë and Venus and Adonis.27 However frequently this citation may appear in secondary literature addressing this painting series, the citation is worth revisiting insofar as it demonstrates so clearly the extent to which the paintings were conceptualized as a single series, and one whose internal coherence is essentially formal in nature. It establishes that whatever else Titian’s intentions for it, the poesie were a fundamentally artistic exercise, and one in which the nude female figure operates both as a means and as an artistic end.
The history of the exhibition of this series at the Habsburg court is fragmentary and almost certainly discontinuous.28 At the time that Philip II received the paintings, his court was itinerant, and it is unclear even when the paintings were first united in a single palace. Thanks to Titian’s famous letter, however, it is well known that the poesie were meant to be hung together, in a camerino, or small room, likely meant for private study.29 Although the camerino in question seems never to have existed, Philipp Fehl suggests that when using this word, Titian may have had in mind the camerino d’alabastro that he decorated for Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. Like the imagined camerino for Philip II, this camerino d’alabastro was decorated with a single suite of paintings exploring a similar topic across several canvases.30 Insofar as this is the case, the display of the poesie all together seems written into Titian’s project from the start, forming part of his authorial intention for the series as a whole. In the case of Alfonso d’Este’s camerino d’alabastro, the suite of paintings made for this space—a cycle of exuberant bacchanals, including Titian’s Worship of Venus and The Andrians, both of which were eventually absorbed into the Vaults of Titian—represents variations on a theme. In that of the unrealized camerino of Philip II, the collection of paintings gathered together were variations on a pictorial form. If Titian meant for his poesie to hang in a single space, it is perhaps because the specifically formal variation to which he alludes in his correspondence makes itself most readily apparent when the paintings are considered all together. Titian’s poesie have long seemed to embody a recognized association between artfulness, the painting of nude figures, and the art of painting itself, and these qualities are only enhanced when the paintings are viewed all together. Most importantly, the central conceit of the series—the variegation of a single pictorial form across multiple canvases—is most readily if not exclusively appreciable when the works are shown in view of each other. Nowhere has this been more apparent than when the poesie were reunited in a single gallery, seemingly for the first time in several hundred years, in the landmark exhibition Titian: Love, Desire, Death at the National Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh in 2020, then again in Titian: Women, Myth, and Power at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 2021.31
Unwittingly, Titian’s poesie were not only the centerpiece of the galleries named for their painter; they gave the rule to them. Among the organizing principles of the Vaults of Titian were simply Titian himself and the disciples of his tradition: Veronese, Rubens, and other artists who followed him in their pursuit of both this subject and style. Still more immediately legible would have been the presence of at least one nude female figure in every composition. These paintings, made by chronologically and geographically disparate masters, illustrating narratives from mythological and biblical sources alike, each individually offer any number of conceivable readings, with iconographies and narratives rich for the interpretation. When hung in the company of the others, however, these multiple readings yield to one above the rest: the nude female figure in each of these paintings emerges from their grouping as the privileged pictorial element, so privileged by their grouping and made more readily appreciable by that grouping. Insofar as this is the case, the principles underpinning the interrelationships of the poesie come to overwhelm the remaining works in these galleries. Titian’s paintings were, by their maker’s design, meant to be exhibited all together, but the selection of works that was eventually assembled around them was not. Titian’s series was seemingly made with a rule in mind; the paintings added to its number were subordinated to a rule for which they were never intended. The paintings in these rooms, hung next to one another in a way that permits ready visual comparison, come to appear by means of this hang as variations on a single figural type, over and against any possible iconographic or narrative connection between them. By isolating a group of paintings according to pictorial motif, that pictorial motif is then able to become the defining characteristic of a new category of painting to which that group belongs. The display of this group of paintings all together is what set this reciprocal operation into effect.
How fitting, then, that paintings like Rubens’s Three Graces and Veronese’s Judgment of Paris eventually formed part of the decorative program of these galleries. The first of these depicts goddesses who represented virtues coded as feminine, including charm, elegance, and youth. In Rubens’s composition, they appear with limbs intertwined and their bodies each presented to the viewer at a different angle, a hallmark of this iconography since antiquity and reminiscent of the interrelationships of Titian’s poesie. They appear virtually identical, the same woman refracted into three. Furthermore, their only narrative is to look at each other, just as the viewer is meant to do. So much of what this painting represents exemplifies the appeal of such galleries as the Vaults of Titian for a male audience, from what has sometimes been appraised as the lusciousness of the bodies depicted to their sensuous brushwork. This single work combines female nudity, a concept of beauty, and a willful artfulness, all of them the hallmarks of Titian’s series. We may never know if Veronese’s Judgment of Paris was so indulgent in its approach to the depiction of such a mythology. That said, the iconography of the Judgment of Paris is likewise one of evaluative appreciation of the nude female form: three goddesses—Juno, Venus, and Minerva—are presented before a male arbiter, who is put upon to look at each and decide, impossibly, which is the most beautiful. In both stories, three nude women are gathered together so that a male viewer, whether internal or external to the painting, may compare them and delight in doing so. The paintings in the Vaults of Titian were brought together for this same purpose. Neither artist seems to have made his painting with its display in the Vaults of Titian in mind: Veronese’s death predates the reign of Philip IV by several decades, and Rubens’s Three Graces remained in his personal collection until he died. Nevertheless, as paintings of multiple nude female figures that thematize comparative viewing, they are the very mise-en-scène of the curatorial operation at work in these galleries, rendered, upon installation, its mise en abyme.
At precisely the same moment that the Vaults of Titian were coming into being, texts written by representatives of the Spanish Church took up a long-standing debate surrounding the painting of nudes, and these texts give a sense of the logic that made these galleries possible. The painting of nude figures often made only brief appearances in Spanish art treatises of the period; the most comprehensive treatment of such works and especially the terms by which the paintings of nude figures were constituted as a category would come from a different literary corpus altogether.32 Spain was the heir to a conversation that began at the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century regarding the many ways that painting could be indecent, whether by depicting biblical stories in seemingly heretical ways, in ways that made them illegible to the public, or in ways that inspired inappropriate worship.33 Of the topics on the agenda, the painting of nude figures proved to be among the most controversial in Catholic Spain. Theologians debated not only the production of such works but also their exhibition, considering sites as accessible as plazas and public streets and as private as the interior spaces that were commonly used by collectors for their display. The most direct address to paintings of nude figures came in the form of the 1632 pamphlet titled the Copia de los pareceres y censvras de los reverendissimos padres maestros, y señores catredaticos de las insignes Vniversidades de Salamanca y Alcala y de otras personas doctas sobre el abvso de las figuras y pinturas lasciuas y deshonestas; en que se muestra que es pecado mortal pintarlas, esculpirlas, y tenerlas patentes donde sean vistas (henceforth Copia de los pareceres or simply the Pareceres). Seemingly intended for and read by members of the Spanish royal court, this text consists of the collected—if sometimes contradictory—opinions of clergymen and professors in response to the question of whether it was a sin to display nude paintings and, if so, on what grounds.34 It is remarkable insofar as it designates paintings of “lascivious” and “scandalous” figures for the first time as their own “genre of painting,” however unceremoniously it does this.35 The text nowhere offers a straightforward definition of this genre, which existed in excess of those outlined in treatises.36 But without a fixed term to use when evoking paintings including nude figures, the friars and professors who contributed to this pamphlet would invent less straightforward ways to refer to paintings of nudes and therewith come to characterize the terms of this genre.
The writers of the Copia de los pareceres and related texts invented expressive formulations that confused the contents of the paintings that were the subject of controversy with the paintings themselves. The unnamed author of the introductory text to the Pareceres was careful to discuss which paintings he thought were appropriate to look at and especially where.37 He warns that to exhibit paintings of great devotional content in unseemly places, where they cannot be shown the reverence they warrant, is itself a sin, and he cautions his readers of the abuse it is “that pious eyes should be able to see crosses exiled to filthy places, and the figures of Diana, and Venus, etc. [las figuras de Diana, y Venus, &c.] placed in the galleries of Princes and Lords.”38 Later in his text, this same writer gave one example of such abuse. “Ecclesiastical histories,” he writes, “refer to the impious Jews who, in order to hide the place where the cross of Christ was buried and to obstruct the faithful from going to venerate it, put in the same place a Goddess Venus [una Diosa Venus], so that the Christians, scandalized by her clumsy image, would not dare to go where the cross of Christ was.”39 Another contributor to the Copia de los pareceres agreed “that it is a mortal sin to have (at least in public) lascivious paintings”40 because “if the paintbrush is valiant, there are no shades of Rhetoric that are as persuasive as those of one of these canvases.”41 He goes on to provide an example of one such canvas, saying that “noteworthy is the case … of that Venus [aquella Venus], to which one servant of God saw demons by night infuse in the smoke of incense the fire of lust that she enflamed in those that looked at her by day.”42 The Pareceres inspired a response from the important preacher Fray Hortensio Paravicino in the form of a text that would, paradoxically, condemn paintings of nudes with still more vehemence than the Copia de los pareceres while most openly acknowledging the artistic value of these works. He raises the difficult issue that while nudity in art is always reprehensible, the greatest poets reach the height of their talent not in the writing of devotional stories, but of profane ones. “So too,” he continues, “do those that do not even know how to grind colors always work on images of Saints, and the Masters of most valiant brush do not know how to lift their hands from Venuses, Ledas, Danaës, Andrómedas [Venus, Ledas, Dánaes, Andrómedas].”43 Already in his 1628 “Panegírico Funeral a la Reina Doña Margarita de Austria,” Paravicino had once condemned the public display of what he similarly described as “the Venuses, the Danaës, the Ledas [las Venus, las Danaes, las Ledas].”44
These are not the only terms by which these paintings appear in such written sources, but they are some of the most telling. In other scholarly contexts, the citations collected above would be interesting primarily for what they reveal about attitudes toward indecent paintings in post-Tridentine Spain. But at stake in this argument is not whether paintings of nude figures were condemned in early modern Spain but rather the means by which these paintings were articulated in early modern Spanish sources. With no common term by which to refer to paintings like the poesie and the rest of the works that eventually entered the Vaults of Titian, these writers deferred instead to references to the names of the specific figures within those paintings that made them so objectionable. It is possible that this was simply an easy and convenient way of circumventing the problem posed by a lack of codified terminology for these paintings. Nevertheless, the choice has implications that are worth considering: In referring only to the name of the nude figure, these writers isolate it from the rest of the painting’s possible contents, from its narrative context, from its source material, from a larger pictorial tradition of which it may be a part. They single out the nude figure as the painting’s most important aspect and ask it to stand in, both in their thinking and in the thinking of their audience, for the work as a whole. There is, then, a metonymic operation at work here. The Copia de los Paraceres was the heir to long art-theoretical traditions with their origins in Italy, discursive traditions, as Elizabeth Cropper has compellingly shown, that conflated the depiction of beautiful female figures with the art of painting.45 In the parlance of our Spanish friars, however, this thinking takes a distinctly material turn: to evoke the nude figure of Venus is to evoke a painting of her, the figure of Venus standing in for the very canvas on which said Venus is depicted. If there was an equivalence anywhere in seventeenth-century Spanish thinking between paintings of nude figures and nude figures themselves, we begin to see it here.
Elsewhere in the Copia de los pareceres, the confusion between object and subject matter finds an even clearer formulation. The writers of the Pareceres take direct umbrage with the nudity of figures contained in these paintings, condemning the impropriety of the nudity of painted figures, male and female alike. But throughout their texts, these writers confuse the individual figures that appear in the paintings with the paintings themselves, attributing nudity not to the figures but instead to the paintings. The term “desnudo” (nude) appears in the Copia de los pareceres in two ways. The first is straightforward: the word “desnudo” appears as a modifier for the figures that were the subject of the paintings to which these writers objected. Questioning the Christianity and modesty of those who owned these paintings and displayed them in their homes, the writer of the introduction to the Copia de los pareceres poses the following question:
For what would [the saints] say, if in the house of a Christian man, who professes chastity, modesty, and composure, they saw the indecencies of profane paintings, of lascivious Venuses, of nude Cupids [Cupidos desnudos], of Asclepius, Floras, and other gods of the Gentiles as dishonest as those?46
Another parecer reveals more conflicted sentiments when considering the presence of nudity in religious paintings:
There will be people who, by their natural complexion or by malice, are bothered just by seeing the figure of a man or woman, beautiful [and] nude [desnudos]; for this alone I will not condemn he who would have these paintings, because in that case we would have to banish from all the churches and oratories [every] Adam and Eve, [given] how they are painted in Paradise, and other saints that are painted beautiful and nude, like Saint Sebastian and Saint Lawrence and others.47
When considering the matter of the public exhibition of such works, the author of another parecer determines the following:
Placed on view, [such a painting] makes up for the absence of that which is wanted and awakens the will to one’s desires; all the more will a painting incite [those that see it] to such sentiments [when] placed in public and with a visible nude body [cuerpo desnudo], as a sensual imagination attains its greatest strength when it represents within what these figures offer in plain sight.48
However conflicting these opinions appear in their attitude toward paintings of nude figures and the dangers they pose to their viewers, in every case we see a consistent use of the term “desnudo” to describe these figures.
That said, this term appears in the Copia de los pareceres not only to describe the figures in the paintings in question but as an epithet transferred to the paintings themselves. The anonymous introduction to the Paraceres included in the text, for example, includes a lament phrased as follows:
I don’t know how thanks to our sins so great an abuse as that of nude paintings [pinturas desnudas] of profane men and women came to be in our time, [paintings] full of such indecencies against Christian purity, that there are no chaste eyes that dare to look at them even from a great distance, so as not to be stained by images so obscene that even the pen flees from writing them.49
The writer of another parecer echoes these sentiments in the same terms:
Dishonest nude images [imagenes desnudas] give the opportunity and moral danger approaching great falls into lust, and the greater the skill of the art, the more effective will be the opportunity, and the danger, and thus I hold it a mortal sin of most pernicious scandal to have such paintings of the form which is in question in this text … and it is very just and necessary to prohibit said uses of such images.50
Similar condemnations appear in still other pareceres:
I hold as sure and true the resolution of the Fathers and professors on the issue proposed in this text, and I know that an Ecclesiastical Prince, [and] general Inquisitor, moved by saintly and Christian zeal, tried by means of a very serious minister of his to put an end to and destroy such paintings [that are] nude [pinturas desnudas] in said way a few years ago because he judged them harmful and gravely pernicious to the honesty which professes, and should profess any Christian man.51
The Church has used nude paintings [pinturas desnudas] for martyrdoms and ancient stories wherein either beauty moves us toward the praise of the Creator or torments [move us] to the imitation of his suffering.52
We see this formulation occur everywhere in the Copia de los pareceres, wherein the perception of nudity is transferred from the individual figures observed in the paintings in question to the paintings themselves.53 The metonymic thought process by which paintings came to be identified by the name of the nude figure they contained here finds its most explicit expression. In their ascription of nudity to figures and paintings alike, these writers make no distinction between nude paintings (that is, “nudes,” conceptualized as a painting genre) and paintings that include nude figures (that is, “nudes” in the sense of the painting subject). Perhaps for these writers, there was none to be made. The use of the term “desnudo” to refer both to figures painted and paintings themselves betrays a practical interchangeability between nude figures and paintings of nude figures. In a phrasing like “pintura desnuda,” the conflation between the nude figure and the canvas on which said figure appears is total.54
Across the centuries since the reign of Philip IV, the galleries that have been devoted to the display of paintings of nude figures in Spanish royal sites—and eventually the Museo Nacional del Prado—have expanded and contracted.55 Between the inventory of 1636, which records the first true grouping of such paintings all together and in isolation, and the inventory of 1666, by which the Vaults of Titian had been formally constituted, the space devoted to this display expanded from just one gallery to several. Perhaps the Vaults of Titian are thus best understood not only as a particular site but also as a curatorial strategy, at the heart of which was the metonym expressed everywhere in the discourse around paintings of nude female figures. The genre created by this practice was a function of this metonym, by which a pictorial trope was turned into a painting type and where “the nude” as a subject for art—the “cuerpo desnudo”—gave way to “the nude” as a form of art—the “pintura desnuda.”
2 The Rokeby Venus, Reconsidered
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once characterized Velázquez as a painter of singularities, an artist who seems never to have repeated himself, such that each of his most accomplished paintings appears to be a one-off within his oeuvre.56 The Rokeby Venus has proven to be among the most singular of these, and correspondingly the most enigmatic. Like Titian’s poesie, the painting has been subject to relentless iconographic interpretation and reinterpretation over the course of its historiography, often as an allegory of such themes as love, vanity, and beauty.57 Whatever the painting’s iconography, the Vaults of Titian make possible a new comprehension of The Rokeby Venus as an exercise in the production of paintings of a certain genre, as that genre was itself produced in the most significant galleries in the history of the nude in Spain.
What is extraordinarily striking about The Rokeby Venus, in the context of so many paintings of nude figures with readily legible iconographies with rich contextualizing details and narrative motivations, is how spare Velázquez’s conception appears by comparison. The setting of the painting is totally nondescript; nothing about its construction suggests a recognizable—or even convincingly rendered—three-dimensional space for its central figure to occupy. This figure has no discernible attributes that might identify her with any mythological character, Venus or otherwise; the features revealed in her mirror reflection are indistinct. There is no action taking place anywhere in the painting, no story that it seems to tell. So little of what is usually required to justify the painting of a nude female figure is present here.
The specific circumstances by which the only surviving female nude in the history of early modern Spanish painting came to be remain a mystery.58 That the painting formed part of the collection of Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, seventh Marquis of Carpio and Marquis of Heliche, shortly after its production is universally accepted, but documents recently brought to light confirm the suspicion that it was not commissioned by Haro, even suggesting that it was made for no one in particular. The first mention of the painting appears in the inventory drawn up on November 18, 1651, after the death of little-known painter and sometimes art dealer Domingo Guerra Coronel:
Firstly, a painting of a nude woman [muger desnuda], [measuring] one and a half varas tall and two and a quarter wide with a black frame.59
The same painting appears listed (albeit with erroneous measurements) in an inventory dated to March 7, 1651, of goods seized by Sebastián de Arenas Ruiz, to whom Guerra Coronel was deeply indebted at the time of his death:
A large painting [measuring] two and a half varas tall and two wide of a nude woman [muger desnuda] by the hand of master painter Diego Velázquez.60
Once the debt was settled, the painting was returned to Guerra Coronel’s estate and put up for auction. The notarized copy of the results of this auction includes the following entry in the listings for September 16, 1652:
A painting of a nude woman [muger desnuda] by the hand of Diego Velázquez sold to an employee of the Marquis of Heliche for 700 Reales.61
Once in the possession of Gasper de Haro y Guzmán, it appears in an inventory of the contents of his household as follows:
222 A painting on canvas of a nude woman [muger desnuda] lying on a cloth painted from the back, leaning on her right arm [and] looking at herself in a mirror that is held by a boy, by the hand of Velázquez, [measuring] two and a half varas wide and one and a half high with a black frame.62
Whatever confusions these documents fail to dispel, they are also the only written commentaries on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus that date to his own lifetime. They are therefore our only immediate insight into what a seventeenth-century Spanish audience might have thought of it, however little they seem to tell us. They provide the dimensions of the work, identify its author, and sketch out the visible contents of the painting, focusing on those that appear most prominent: the woman who is the painting’s clear centerpiece, the mirror into which she gazes, and the boy who holds that mirror before her face. What these inventory entries do not do is tell us that this winged boy is Cupid and that she is Venus. They suggest no content for the painting apart from the pictorial form of the nude, thus expanding the possibility that the painting’s content simply is this form and, relatedly, that form itself is this painting’s content.
Upon closer analysis, The Rokeby Venus reveals itself to be a carefully constructed object, one whose composition consists almost entirely of elements that Velázquez would have observed in the Vaults of Titian. Nearly every significant feature of The Rokeby Venus can be traced to one of the paintings by Titian included in these galleries. The fact that his figure is female already indicates that Velázquez was closely studying the works included in the most significant gallery hang that had ever been assembled on the subject, a hang whose paintings contained almost no nude male figures. The subject of the nude reclining on a bed, which Titian himself likely invented, would have been immediately observable to Velázquez in paintings like Danaë and Venus with an Organist and Cupid.63 The pose, as scholars have often noted, is directly lifted from the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Musée du Louvre, Ma 231.1) then in the Borghese collection, a flirtation with the paragone between painting and sculpture undoubtedly inspired by Velázquez’s time in Rome.64 The conceit of flipping the posture of this body from a frontal viewpoint to a viewpoint from the back, however, is entirely in keeping with the compositional ethos of Titian’s poesie series as a whole, motivating his Venus and Adonis in particular.65 Finally, the motif of the mirror, held up by a cupid figure, is likely borrowed from Titian’s Venus with a Mirror.66 Although Velázquez’s combination of them in this painting is totally original, this subject, compositional conceit, and motif, all of which have been learned from examples of Titian’s work in the royal art collection, are recombined in a way that is suggestive of the same kind of formal experimentation that was at the heart of Titian’s foundational series. In its construction out of pictorial tropes and motifs deriving from multiple works, The Rokeby Venus is just as convincingly an inquiry into the painting of nudes as an art form, one that questions how such a work is composed and investigates its constituent parts. Like so many artists of the early modern period, Velázquez consistently used sources in his paintings, whether for single figures or particular motifs or compositional structures. But the practice seemingly finds its apex in this painting, entirely composed of parts borrowed from other paintings, perhaps a dimostrazione d’ingegno of a different sort. The Rokeby Venus thus reads as an exercise in the production of paintings of a certain type, derived from examples of this painting type that Velázquez would have seen in the Vaults of Titian.
At issue here, however, is not only which individual paintings in these galleries account for Velázquez’s output but also how the Vaults of Titian structured Velázquez’s reception of those paintings. Even superficial observations about the painting suggest that the work corresponds to the parameters of the genre of the nude as it was articulated in the Vaults of Titian. It is a genre in which a mythological or biblical gloss is necessary but narrative itself incidental, and in which every other element of the painting is subordinated to the female figure itself, the pretext for which such elements exist.67 Velázquez’s Venus is absolutely central to the composition of his painting. Other representational elements, including the red curtain above her and the blue and white sheets beneath her, converge around her form, imitating the contours of her figure. The cupid figure is present only to support the mirror that he holds in front of her, revealing nothing apart from the otherwise invisible face of the nude figure. What might be read as a wall exposed behind the red curtain is an entirely flat, indeterminate zone, offering the viewer no point of exit from the painting, and repeated in the grey ground of the reflection in the mirror. Most importantly, the mirror and the body of the nude figure are both presented roughly parallel to the picture plane as if themselves two sides of a single plane. Seeming not to expand a space between the figure and her mirror image but instead to compress it, they flatten the image toward the flatness that is the very material condition of the painted object, an impression further underscored by the figure stretched out across the picture plane from end to end, like the canvas itself across its stretcher.68 In all the above respects, The Rokeby Venus visualizes the equivalence between nude female figure and painting canvas itself on which the emergence of the nude as a pictorial category within the Vaults of Titian was fundamentally predicated. There is an immediate identification in this work of what is represented in The Rokeby Venus (the body of the nude female figure) with the material structure of The Rokeby Venus (the object on which that figure was painted).
But there is a still more direct way of observing this analogy in The Rokeby Venus between what the painting represents, on the one hand, and the painted object itself, on the other. The mirror is a device that Velázquez famously used in another painting in his oeuvre: Las Meninas (fig. 6.1), made within the same decade of the painter’s life as The Rokeby Venus. The mirror in Las Meninas has been the subject of tremendous art historical debate, and it would be fruitless to rehearse the many arguments made about it.69 Insofar as it is the most notorious instance of this device in Velázquez’s painted output, however, it serves as an essential point of comparison to the mirror in The Rokeby Venus.70 The literature on the mirror in Las Meninas overwhelmingly concerns the recurring question of exactly what this mirror is reflecting: the royal couple of King Philip IV of Spain and Queen Mariana of Austria, seemingly located in the space just in front of the picture plane, or the image of the royal couple on the canvas on which Velázquez depicts himself at work within Las Meninas.71 Scholars who treat this part of the painting usually argue for one of these readings over the other. A recent reassessment by Diane Bodart has made it possible to accept them both: the mirror in Las Meninas reflects both the king and queen, physically present in front of Las Meninas, and their image on the canvas within it.72 This argumentation will be more closely attended to in a later chapter of this book, more focused on Las Meninas itself and especially on the questions that it poses to royal representation. What is significant for the purposes of this chapter is only the conclusion of this line of thinking, which establishes a triangulated relationship between the mirror, the space immediately in front of Las Meninas, and the canvas depicted within it. The mirror in Las Meninas reveals—both directly, by reflecting the front of the depicted painting canvas, and indirectly, by reflecting the king and queen standing in front of the picture plane—what Velázquez is ostensibly in the process of painting on the canvas whose front is otherwise invisible to the viewer.73 To put the matter a bit more succinctly: the mirror in Las Meninas is the recto to the verso of the canvas depicted within the painting.
It seems that in The Rokeby Venus, we have another kind of recto/verso: with her face visible only as a mirror reflection and her body turned away from the viewer, we are given a viewpoint of the reclining female figure that recalls the turning away of the canvas in Las Meninas.74 We have already observed within The Rokeby Venus an identification between the represented body of the nude female figure and the painting canvas that was its material support; when comparing the use of the mirror image in The Rokeby Venus to that in Las Meninas, this identification finds a still more direct expression, whereby the body of the nude female figure and her mirror reflection correspond to the great canvas on which Velázquez depicts himself painting and the mirror image that tells us precisely what it is he paints. In both paintings, the mirror functions as a device by which to triangulate a relationship between an element within the painting’s composition and another—namely, a viewer—just in front of the picture plane. The mirror within Las Meninas reveals the relationship between the figures of the king and queen standing just in front of it and the canvas depicted within it; the face reflected in the mirror in The Rokeby Venus connects the nude figure contained within the limits of the canvas to the gaze of the (presumed male) viewer otherwise nowhere visible within the painting but likewise standing just in front of it. Departing from this visual analogy, if the mirrors in each painting are correlating elements, then so too are the large canvas represented in Las Meninas and the body of the female nude figure in The Rokeby Venus. The body of this nude figure and the mirror reflection of her face thus become a visual metaphor for a painting canvas, one that is attentive to the fact of such an object’s double-sidedness, and to the relationship between recto and verso. The Vaults of Titian were a site where a pictorial form became equivalent to the object on which that form was painted. In the comparison between Las Meninas and The Rokeby Venus, we see this equivalence between nude figure and “nude painting” find its most literal expression, whereby the body of the figure appears an analogue to nothing other than a canvas.
On several interpretive registers, The Rokeby Venus gives form to the genre of the nude as Velázquez might have observed it in the Vaults of Titian, wherein a total curatorial focus on the body of the nude female figure established an equivalence between such figures and the paintings that contained them. In The Rokeby Venus, Velázquez visualizes the interchangeability of the nude figure that is the subject of the painting and the painting itself by making of the body of his figure a metaphor for the canvas in two distinct but mutually reinforcing ways. The Vaults of Titian were the space from which the subject of the nude female figure was able to reemerge as a painting genre, and thus as an autonomous art form; The Rokeby Venus, in response, takes this art form as its subject.
It must be specified that the claim made above excludes copies made by Spanish artists of paintings of nude figures originally made by foreign practitioners, like those of Velázquez’s son-in-law Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo (who produced smaller-scale copies of Titian’s paintings of nude figures without ever making original paintings with this subject).
Scholars have identified approximately three others that Velázquez likely produced, none of which survive in any form. Two of these are the Venus and Adonis and Cupid and Psyche that Velázquez would execute circa 1659 for the Hall of Mirrors in the Alcázar palace, to be treated in chapter 5 of this book. The last corresponds to an entry appearing in the inventory of Velázquez’s possessions at the time of his death (Mariño 1999, p. 78).
For one especially thoughtful account of this event, see Nead 1992, pp. 34–43. On November 6, 2023, The Rokeby Venus was once again the subject of attack, this time by the climate activist group Just Stop Oil, one of a series of such demonstrations undertaken by this group (on this event, see Marshall 2023, among others).
Cited in Nead 1992, p. 39.
Ruhemann 1968, p. 294, appendix B, 2. Cleaning Report II.
For a brief summary of the construction history of the Vaults of Titian, see Barbeito Díez 2007, pp. 123–24; and Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 109–12.
Although this idea seems to underpin universally Portús Pérez’s thinking on the exhibition of paintings of nudes in Spain, he states this most clearly in Portús Pérez 1997, p. 46; Portús Pérez 2002b, p. 95; and Portús Pérez 2016a, p. 51.
Clark 1956, p. 4. For a feminist critique of Clark, see Nead 1992.
Clark 1956, p. 5.
On the Vaults of Titian, see Bottineau 1956–58, pt. 4, pp. 289–326; Barbeito Díez 1996, p. 61; Checa Cremades 1994a, pp. 405–7; and Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 109–19. On the Vaults of Titian within the larger question of the exhibition of the nude in Spain, see Portús Pérez 1998a, pp. 93–116; Portús Pérez 1998b; Portús Pérez 2002b; and Portús Pérez 2016a, pp. 50–66.
AGP, Administración General, Legajo 768, exp. 2, fols. 49–50: “Pieça Ultima de las bobedas que tiene bentana al Lebante en que su Magd se retira despues de comer.” See also Crawford Volk 1981, p. 520, and especially the transcription of this inventory included in the appendix to this same article; Portús Pérez 1998a, p. 98; Portús Pérez 1998b, pp. 94–98; and Portús Pérez 2002b, pp. 43–46. This portion of the inventory has since been published in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, pp. 119–20 and 181–84, no. 42.
The attribution of the Apsley House Danaë as the original painting of this subject included in Philip II’s poesie series was made in Falomir Faus and Joannides 2014. The conversation surrounding the attribution of this work continued in Hope 2015; Falomir Faus and Joannides 2016; and Hope 2016. The version of Titian’s Danaë (MNP, P000425) that was long considered original to the series was in fact one that Velázquez purchased in Italy in the late 1620s and replaced the version already on view there sometime between 1636 and 1666 (Falomir Faus and Joannides 2014, pp. 26 and esp. 27–31).
The precise reason for the transfer of these paintings from one part of the palace to another are unknown, although it is noteworthy that Giulio Mancini, whose treatise includes a section addressing the display of paintings in palaces, advocates the display of such paintings “in garden galleries and secluded ground-level rooms” (Mancini 1956, p. 143: “nelle gallarie di giardini e camare terrene ritirate”). Although unique in its inclusion of rules for the acquisition and display of paintings in a collection, this seventeenth-century Roman treatise suggests a more comprehensive reevaluation of this problem across early modern Europe.
For a brief summary of the construction history of the Vaults of Titian, see Barbeito Díez 2007, pp. 123–24; and Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 109–12.
Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, p. 109.
The surviving record of these paintings begins in the inventory of 1666 (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 38, exp. 2, fols. 58r–61v; see also Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 589–610 and 614–16, nos. 925–50 and 951–53). We know that this inventory was left unfinished, as is explicitly stated in an inventory of the changes made to the hang of paintings in the Alcázar palace between 1666 and 1686 (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 768, exp. 5; see also Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 901–8). Additionally, the final page is torn in such a way that it is clear that the final pages of the inventory are missing. But we can reasonably complete the decoration of these galleries using the surviving record of these rooms in the inventory of the Alcázar palace taken in 1686 (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 38, exp. 3, fols. 40r–42v; see also Bottineau 1956–58, pt. 4, pp. 318–25, and Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 610–13 and 616–25, nos. 901–3 and 906–17), subtracting the paintings listed in the separate inventory of works added to these galleries between 1666 and 1686 cited just above (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 768, exp. 5; see also Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 901–8).
For Titian’s Worship of Venus, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 597–98, no. 937. For Titian’s Andrians, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 603–4, no. 943.
For Cajés’s The Fable of Leda, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 589–90, no. 925. For what was thought to be Rubens’s Love of Cupid and Psyche, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 592–93, no. 930. This painting is now attributed to Jacob Jordaens. For Titian’s Venus with a Mirror, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 608–9, no. 947. The original painting is now lost; the best surviving version is that in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.34).
Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 593–94, no. 931. The most comprehensive treatment of this painting remains Vergara 2001. On the auction of Rubens’s possessions, see Müller 1989.
Alonso Cano documents this trip in Aterido Fernández 2002, pp. 377–78, doc. 337. For context, see Wethey 1955, p. 18.
For Veronese’s Rape of Europa, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 596–97, no. 936. For his Venus and Adonis, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 604–5, no. 944. For his Judgment of Paris, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 606–8, no. 946.
That Velázquez understood that these were the organizing principles of the galleries is perhaps made apparent by the works he eventually purchased for inclusion in these same galleries: a cycle of seven paintings by Tintoretto, two of which included single female nude figures (Susanna and the Elders [MNP, P000386] and Joseph and the Wife of Putiphar [MNP, P000395]) and whose centerpiece, The Purification of the Midianite Virgins [MNP, P000393], included several (Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 619–25, nos. 911–17).
The bibliography surrounding Titian’s corpus is enormous. On the poesie in particular, see Panofsky 1969, pp. 139–71; Rosand 1982; Wethey 1975, pp. 71–84; Tanner 1976; Padoan 1980; Hope 1980; Ginzburg 1980, republished as Ginzburg 1997; Nash 1985; Goffen 1997; Checa Cremades 2002a; Rosand 2004; Puttfarken 2005, pp. 155–81; Checa Cremades 2008a; Falomir Faus 2014b; and Wivel 2020. All this is to say nothing of the excellent existing literature on the production of replicas of, copies after, and prints after the poesie, studies of Titian’s work for Spanish patrons more broadly considered, or studies of Titian’s late style, so exemplified by his late mythologies; this is too vast to summarize for the purposes of this argument.
Falomir Faus 2014b, p. 57. For more of Falomir on the poesie, see Falomir Faus 2021.
Falomir Faus 2014b, p. 58.
Puppi 2012, p. 213: “E perchè la Danae che io mandai già a Vostra Maestà, si vedeva tutta da la parte dinanzi, ho voluto in quest’altra poesia variare e farle monstrare la contraria parte, acciochè riesca il camerino, dove hanno da stare, più grazioso a la vista.” Other useful starting points for primary sources relevant to Titian’s career under the Habsburgs include Mancini 1998 and Mancini 2000, pp. 513–22.
Puppi 2012, p. 213: “che avrà un’altra vista diversa da queste.”
For a comprehensive history of the paintings’ exhibition in royal palaces leading up to and including Philip IV, see Wethey 1975, pp. 78–84, as well as the catalogue entries for each painting included in the same volume.
One hypothesis regarding Titian’s intentions for the display of the poesie in such a space can be found in Fehl 1980, pp. 139–47; republished as Fehl 1992, pp. 115–29.
For the camerino d’alabastro of Alfonso d’Este, see Hope 1971a; Hope 1971b; Shearman 1987; and Fehl 1992, pp. 46–87.
The directors of all three institutions make reference to how briefly the poesie remained together in the Spanish royal collection in their jointly written foreword to Wivel 2020.
The question of whether it was decent or indecent, noble or ignoble to include nude figures in painting was only briefly touched upon in the treatises of writers like Francisco Pacheco, Vicente Carducho, and Diego de la Vega, within which the consideration of such matters formed part of larger arguments regarding the nobility of painting in a post-Tridentine world (Portús Pérez 1998b, pp. 31–36).
Javier Portús Pérez narrates the course of these ideas from the Council of Trent through the Spanish treatises here in question in Portús Pérez 1998b, pp. 27–69. The controversy surrounding the painting of nudes in early modern Spain is a topic Javier Portús Pérez has examined to varying degrees and for different purposes in the following publications: Portús Pérez 1995; Portús Pérez 1996; Portús Pérez 1998a; Portús Pérez 1998b; Portús Pérez 2002b; and Portús Pérez 2006. On this topic, see also Civil 1990. A useful more general source on the impact of the Council of Trent on the types of paintings under consideration here can be found in Cooper and Hall 2013.
We can be certain that this pamphlet reached the court in Madrid and the artists at work there thanks to the direct reference to the Copia de los pareceres made in Carducho 1633, fols. 122v–124r; see also Carducho 1977, pp. 362–65. On Carducho 1633, see Andrews et al. 2016.
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fols. 2v, 26v, and 27r: “este genero de pinturas.” The first time this turn of phrase appears in the text is in the preface to the many opinions that represent the body of the text. Its writer, Christobal de Torres, does not explain himself when he introduces this term; the preface simply explains the purposes of the text as a whole, which exists not to define this genre of painting but rather to denounce it.
For a useful summary of the reception of the hierarchy of genres in Spanish art literature, see Hellwig 1999, pp. 253–80.
Javier Portús Pérez identifies the author of this text as the Portuguese writer Francisco de Braganza in Portús Pérez 2002b, p. 32; and Portús Pérez 2006, p. 63.
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fols. 4r–v: “q̃ ojos pios podran vèr desterradas las cruzes en lugares inmundos, y colocadas las figuras de Diana, y Venus, &c. en las galerias de los Principes, y Señores.”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 8v: “De los impios Iudios refieren las historias Eclesiasticas, que para encubrir el lugar donde la Cruz de Christo fue enterrada, y estoruar q̃ los Fieles no fuessen a adorarla, pusieron en el mismo lugar vna Diosa Venus, para que escandalizados los Christianos de su torpe retrato, no se atreuiessen a llegar adõde estaua la Cruz de Christo.”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 16v: “que sea culpa mortal el tener (por lo menos en publico) pinturas lasciuas.”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 16v: “si el pincel es valiẽte no ay colores de Retorica, que persuadã como los de vn lienço destos.”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 16v: “Notable es el caso … de aquella Venus, a quien vio cierto sieruo de Dios q̃ pegauã los demonios de noche en humos de incienso el fuego de lasciuia q̃ ella encendia en los que de dia la mirauan.”
Portús Pérez 1996, p. 104: “Así también los que ni moler colores saben, trabajan perpetuamente imágenes de Santos, y los Maestros de más valiente pincel no saben alzar la mano de Venus, Ledas, Dánaes, Andrómedas.” The transcription of this entire text, the original version of which is in the possession of the Hispanic Society of America (B.2472), is provided in Portús Pérez 1996, pp. 101–5.
Paravicino y Arteaga 1994, p. 250: “las Venus, las Danaes, las Ledas.” The relevant paragraph also appears cited in its entirety in Portús Pérez 1996, pp. 91–92, n. 56; and in part in Portús Pérez 2002b, pp. 30–31.
Cropper 1976 and Cropper 1986.
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 8r: “porque q̃ dixeran estos, si en la casa de vn hombre Christiano, cuya profession es de castidad, modestia y compostura, vieran indecencias de pinturas profanas, de Venus lasciuas, de Cupidos desnudos, de Eseulapios, Floras, y otros dioses de los Gentiles, tan deshonestos como ellos?”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 12v: “personas aura, q̃ por complexion natural, o por malicia con solo vèr la figura de vn hombre, o muger hermosos desnudos se irriten; por solo esto no condenara yo a quien tuuiera estas pinturas, porque desta suerte huuieramos de desterrar de las Iglesias, y Oratorios a Adan, y Eua, como se pintan en el Parayso, y a otros Santos que pintan hermosos, y desnudos, como san Sebastian, y san Lorenço, y otros.”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 20r: “puesto a la vista suple la ausencia de lo q̃ bien se quiere, y despierta la voluntad a sus deseos; quanto mas incitarà a semejãtes afectos la pintura puesta en publico, y manifiesto de vn cuerpo desnudo, pues la mayor fuerça q̃ puede llegar a tener vna imaginacion sensual, es quãdo en lo interior representa lo que estas figuras ofrecẽ a la vista.”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 7v: “No se como por nuestros pecados se ha introduzido en estos tiempos vn abuso tan grãde, como son pinturas desnudas de hombres y mugeres profanes, llenas de tantas indecencias cõtra la pureza y modestia Christiana, que no ay ojos castos que aun a larga distancia se atreuan a mirarlas, por no mancharlos con representaciones obscenas, que aun la pluma se corre de escriuirlas.”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 22v: “las imagenes desnudas deshonestas dan ocasion, y peligro moral proximo a caidas graues en luxuria, y quanto mayor fuere el primor del arte, tanto mas eficaz serà la ocasion, y peligro, y assi tengo por pecado mortal de escandalo perniciosissimo tener tales pinturas en la forma que se pregunta en esta duda … y es muy justo, y necessario prohibir los dichos vsos de tales imagenes.”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 23v: “Tengo por cierta, y verdadera la resolucion de los Padres Maestros, y señores Catedraticos al caso propuesto en este papel, y me consta que vn Principe Eclesiastico, Inquisidor general, mouido de santo y Christiano zelo, intentò por medio de vn Ministro graue suyo acabar, y destruir las tales pinturas desnudas en la forma dicha, pocos años ha, por juzgarlas por perjudiciales, y perniciosas grauemente a la honestidad que professa, y deue professar qualquier hombre Christiano.”
Copia de los pareceres 1632, fol. 17v: “Pinturas desnudas ha vsado la Iglesia en los Martires, y historias antiguas, donde, o la hermosura nos mueue a alabança del Criador, o los tormentos a la imitacion del sufrimiento.”
The same terminology appears in textual sources preceding the Copia de los pareceres, suggesting that its appearance in the Pareceres is not specific to this particular text but rather that it was codified over time and by means of an intertextual discourse of which the Copia de los pareceres was the culminating contribution. These sources include Jesús María 1601; Villegas 1625; and Butrón 1626.
It is worth noting here that paintings of nude figures that were not sequestered in private apartments were covered by cloth curtains. This is a practice that takes literally the notion that a painting could be nude (Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, p. 110, n. 314). For a thematic treatment of covering paintings with curtains throughout the history of art, see Elsner 2015, pp. 219–58.
For a brief history of the movements of paintings of nude figures across the centuries as well as a reconstruction of the so-called “Sala Reservada” at the Museo Nacional del Prado between 1827 and 1838, see Portús Pérez 2002b, pp. 67–74.
Ortega y Gasset 1972, p. 95.
See Soria 1953, the relevant portions of which were republished as Soria 1957; Mateo Sauro 1987; Bernal Muñoz 1990; Prater 2002; Carr 2006, p. 214; Cherry 2007, pp. 241–77; Checa Cremades 2008b, pp. 47–48; and Georgievska-Shine 2016, pp. 61–72, among others. It is worth noting that while major monographs on Velázquez unfailingly include an account of The Rokeby Venus—including Justi 1889; Beruete 1906; Gudiol 1973; Harris 1982a; Brown 1986b; López-Rey 1996; and Marías 1999, to name only some of them—these are more concerned with the question of the painting’s date and style than with its interpretation. The painting was also included in two recent exhibitions on Velázquez, with entries for the painting included in the corresponding catalogues (see Haag 2014, pp. 201–7 and 312–15, cat. 31; and Kientz 2015, pp. 222–23, cat. 60).
On the date of the painting, its first owner, and related concerns, see MacLaren 1952, pp. 125–29; Pita Andrade 1952; Harris 1957; and more recently, Bull and Harris 1986; Bull and Harris 1994; and Aterido Fernández 2001, pp. 91–94. An address to the reception of The Rokeby Venus in the collection of Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, likely the first owner of the painting, can be found in Portús Pérez 2006. For a more extensive treatment of the art collection of Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, see López Torrijos 1991; Frutos Sastre 2004; Frutos Sastre 2006; Frutos Sastre 2009; and García Cueto 2014. On the collection of paintings of nudes by Spanish aristocrats, especially those in the orbit of the Habsburg court, see Cherry 1997. On the reception of The Rokeby Venus in collections outside Spain, see Haskell 1999 and Pezzini 2016.
Cited in Aterido Fernández 2001, p. 91: “Primeramte un quadro de una muger desnuda de bara y media de alto y dos baras y quarta de ancho … con su moldura negra.”
Cited in Aterido Fernández 2001, p. 91: “un quadro grande de dos baras y media de alto y dos de ancho de una muger desnuda de mano de Diego Belazquez maestro pintor.”
Cited in Aterido Fernández 2001, p. 92: “Remato un quadro de Pintura de una Muger desnuda de mano de Diego Velazquez en un criado del sr Marqs de lichi en setecientos Rs.”
Cited in Burke and Cherry 1997, p. 476: “222 Una pintura en lienço de Una muger desnuda tendida sobre Un paño pintada de espaldas Recostada s.re El braco derecho mirandose en Un espejo q. le tiene Un niño de la mano de Velazquez de dos baras y media de ancho y Una y media de Cayda con su marco negro.” Aterido Fernández points out that although this inventory appears in a folder dated to June 1, 1651, the inventory itself is left undated, the implication being that the painting was purchased at auction in 1652 and the inventory in question was simply added to a folder that predated the sale (Aterido Fernández 2001, p. 92).
See Poglayen-Neuwall 1934, p. 381; MacLaren 1943, p. 7; Tolnay 1960, p. 339; Brown 1986b, pp. 181–82; Mateo Sauro 1987, p. 9; Bernal Muñoz 1990, p. 116; Bull and Harris 1990, p. 12; Prater 2002, pp. 20–25; Carr 2006, p. 214; Morán Turina 2006c, p. 143; Cherry 2007, p. 258; and Checa Cremades 2008b, pp. 47–48, among others. On the invention of the painting of reclining female nudes in Renaissance Venice, see Anderson 1980.
This citation was brilliantly staged in a retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais in 2015 (see Kientz 2015, pp. 222–25, cats. 60 and 61). Previously, this connection was observed in Justi 1889, p. 462; MacLaren 1943, p. 10; Soria 1953, p. 273; Tolnay 1960, p. 340; Sánchez Cantón 1960, p. 144; Bull and Harris 1986, p. 653; Portús Pérez 2002a, p. 93; and Georgievska-Shine 2016, pp. 62–64, among others. An interpretation of the meaning of this citation has most recently been offered in Knox 2019, pp. 121–39. As mentioned in chapter 2 of this book, Velázquez is known to have commissioned a bronze copy of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite for the royal sculpture collection while still in Italy (MNP, E000223; see Luzón Nogué 2007b, pp. 447–50, cat. 49).
See Justi 1889, p. 462; MacLaren 1943, p. 7; Bull and Harris 1986, p. 653; Bull and Harris 1990, p. 12; Portús Pérez 2002a, p. 88; Morán Turina 2006c, p. 139; and Georgievska-Shine 2016, p. 62, among others.
See Justi 1889, p. 462; Poglayen-Neuwall 1934, p. 378; MacLaren 1943, p. 7; Soria 1957, p. 36; Tolnay 1960, p. 340; Brown 1986b, pp. 181–82; Bernal Muñoz 1990, p. 116; Bull and Harris 1990, p. 12; Checa Cremades 2002b, p. 80; Prater 2002, pp. 20–25; Portús Pérez 2006, p. 65; Carr 2006, p. 214; Morán Turina 2006c, p. 143; Cherry 2007, p. 258; and Georgievska-Shine 2016, p. 63, among others.
For a history of the use of mythology as a pretext for the painting of nude female figures, see Morán Turina 2014a.
For a very different take on the spatial situation between the mirror and the female figure in The Rokeby Venus, see Campo y Francés 1994.
A more thorough treatment of this painting and its historiography can be found in chapter 6 of this book.
Andreas Prater must be acknowledged for having thought to make this comparison previously, although it is difficult to determine from his text precisely to what end he makes it (Prater 2002, pp. 76–77).
The second of these readings can be credited to Antonio Palomino, who claims this in his description of the painting in his 1724 biography of Velázquez (Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 342–43; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 920–22; Palomino 1987, pp. 164–66; Palomino 2018, pp. 144–50). The first has been inextricably associated with the name of Michel Foucault, whose ekphrasis of the painting assumes that the mirror is meant to reflect what is just in front of the picture plane (Foucault 1970, pp. 3–16).
Bodart 2011, pp. 301–6.
This argumentation assumes that the event recorded by the painting is Velázquez’s painting of a double portrait of the king and queen. The other possibility that seems, in the eyes of this writer, less likely is that the king and queen are simply visiting Velázquez to observe him at work in the studio. For the paradigmatic example of an interpretation of the painting that might take such an assumption as its starting point, see Brown 1978, pp. 87–110.
That paintings have a front and a back—that is, a recto and a verso—was first brought to my attention by Foucault 2009, to which the thinking that follows owes a tremendous debt.