Velázquez’s trip to Rome between 1647 and 1651 was extraordinarily productive, resulting in major commissions of bronze and plaster sculptures for the royal art collection and one of the painter’s most beloved works, The Rokeby Venus. Velázquez also brought back with him a more intangible treasure: a knowledge of the recent phenomenon of the picture gallery, which fundamentally reordered the display of art collections in early modern Rome and which was already making itself felt in noble collections across Spain.1 The years after Velázquez’s return to Madrid saw him taking on increasingly ambitious curatorial projects at the Habsburg court, among them the redecoration of the royal monastery San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a task that would occupy him from the mid-1650s until his death. El Escorial was and remains an enormous architectural complex encompassing not only a functional monastery but also a royal palace, burial site, and library, and it is therefore among the most visually imposing sites of representation of the monarchy in early modern Spain. Antonio Palomino wrote of the many paintings that Velázquez brought to this site, some of them purchased at auction, others diplomatic gifts, and still others acquisitions that Velázquez had made while in Italy.2 According to Fray Francisco de los Santos, the monastery’s eventual prior and its unofficial historian, Velázquez made use of them as follows:
By order of his Majesty, may God keep him, he composed the Sacristy, the Hall of Moral Theology, the Prior’s Chapel, and other Rooms with such impressive original Paintings, as we have seen and will continue seeing, some which have been here since Philip II, others which by his diligence were brought from different parts of Europe.3
In San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Velázquez found ample testing ground for the trends in collections display unfolding across Roman picture galleries. Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas has famously described the monastery at El Escorial as “the world’s first museum or picture gallery”; if this is true, what Velázquez learned about the display of art collections in Italy is in no small part what made it so.4
That San Lorenzo de El Escorial would house some part of the Habsburg art collection seems to have been intended from the start. Philip II oversaw the construction of the monastery between 1563 and 1586.5 Under his direction, shipments of hundreds of paintings, prints, and other furnishings were made to the monastery as early as April 15, 1574, with the last of them dating to September 17, 1611. Over 1,300 objects were brought to the Escorial over the course of these decades by artists such as Titian, Hieronymus Bosch, Rogier van der Weyden, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Joachim Patinir. Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas has even said that the furnishing of the monastery at El Escorial with works of art was integral to the great act of patronage that was the monastery’s foundation, construction, and decoration with fresco paintings.6 By the time Cassiano dal Pozzo visited the court in 1626, the decoration of the monastery had remained virtually unchanged.7 Dal Pozzo’s effusive account of his tour of the Escorial made between June 28 and July 1 of this year elaborates a heterogeneous mix of works of art mostly from Italy and the Netherlands crowding its cloisters, hallways, and refectories, to say nothing of the enormous basilica that was the monastery’s architectural centerpiece. He reserved his superlatives for the paintings of Titian in particular, remarking especially on the fame of such works as Madonna and Child in an Evening Landscape (Alte Pinakothek, 464), then on view in the sacristy, and The Glory, in the Hall of Moral Theology (fig. 4.1). Dal Pozzo described the figures in the former as “reputed [to be] of the best manner that Titian ever had” and the latter as “a most accomplished work.”8 By the time Velázquez was tasked with its redecoration, the monastery at El Escorial possessed the most celebrated paintings of religious subjects in the royal art collection, including works by Velázquez’s long-standing exemplar.
Titian, The Glory, 1551–54, oil on canvas, 346 × 240 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P000432
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
According to Francisco Pacheco, Velázquez first visited the monastery at El Escorial in April of 1622, in advance of his appointment at the court of Philip IV.9 According to Palomino, Velázquez went back to El Escorial in 1628, this time in the company of Rubens.10 Rubens is widely credited with encouraging Velázquez’s pursuit of a Venetian style of painting and especially his taking up of Titian as a model, although scholars differ regarding how exactly Velázquez’s painting practice was changed by the senior painter’s lesson.11 Perhaps Rubens was responsible for Velázquez’s shift to the mythological subjects in the painting of which Rubens himself was an expert; his use of the loose brushwork that Rubens, too, had perfected; the pursuit of social rank exemplified by Rubens’s own international diplomacy; and the application of lead white paint as a canvas primer, the best of which, Spanish treatises consistently pointed out, was to be found in Venice. These are just some of the ways that Rubens may have followed Titian’s example and subsequently modeled for Velázquez what it meant to be a student of this particular master. What transpired on Velázquez’s second visit to the Escorial remains a mystery, as Palomino says little more about it than that the painters delighted together in the many works of art on view by artists of renown from across Europe. Nevertheless, the hang that the two of them studied was almost certainly that recorded by Cassiano dal Pozzo, with its exemplary paintings of religious subjects by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and other painters of their school, and we can be certain that it was to these paintings that the conversation eventually turned. Indeed, there can have been no better site for Velázquez’s induction into the Venetian style of painting than the monastery at El Escorial, and no better guide than Rubens. It is little wonder that when Velázquez was given the opportunity to rehang it so many years later, he would deliberately reorient its hang around the school of painting in which by then he himself had a professional stake.
1 Sacristy, Ante-Sacristy, Hall of Moral Theology, and Chapter Room of the Prior
As with so many of the decorative projects in the Alcázar palace that were assigned to Velázquez, the redecoration of the Escorial was occasioned by the completion in the reign of Philip IV of a construction campaign begun by an ancestor. In 1617 Philip III initiated the construction of the Pantheon of the Kings at the monastery at El Escorial, intended as a burial site for the Spanish royal family.12 Construction was definitively completed by March 15, 1654, when the sepulchral chamber of the Pantheon was inaugurated, and the royal remains were transferred there for permanent interment on March 17.13 According to the oft-repeated account of his chaplain, Julio Chifflet, Philip IV was aware that his own remains would one day lie at the Escorial as well and resolved to adorn it with the most beautiful paintings of religious subjects in his collection.14 The challenge that the redecoration of the Escorial posed was to bring some sense of order to a paintings collection that not only included the many works accumulated by rulers before Philip IV but that had also been enriched in recent years by purchases that Velázquez had made in Italy, gifts from viceroys and ambassadors across the European continent, and especially the acquisitions rapaciously made at the sale of the art collection of Charles I of England. The sale began in October 1649, and shortly thereafter Alonso de Cárdenas, the Spanish ambassador in London, began corresponding with and buying on behalf of Luis Méndez de Haro y Guzmán, working as a proxy to Philip IV.15 Paintings began to arrive in Madrid as early as 1651.16 Among the spoils from this sale were Tintoretto’s Washing of the Feet (fig. 4.2); Correggio’s Venus with Mercury and Cupid (“The School of Love”) (fig. 4.3), which Velázquez dismissed as a forgery, now famously; Raphael’s Holy Family, or “The Pearl” (fig. 4.4); and Andrea del Sarto’s Virgin and Child between Saint Matthew and an Angel (fig. 4.5).17 The first records of any intervention on Velázquez’s part in the movement of works of art around the Escorial date to September 21, 1654, when a small number of Flemish paintings on panel and a marble crucifix were brought from the royal treasury to the Pantheon at the artist’s request.18 Thus Velázquez’s work in the Escorial began.19
Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto, The Washing of the Feet, 1548–49, oil on canvas, 210 × 533 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P002824
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Correggio, Venus with Mercury and Cupid (“The School of Love”), ca. 1525, oil on canvas, 155.6 × 91.4 cm, National Gallery, London, NG10
Image © The National Gallery, London
Raphael, The Holy Family, or “The Pearl,” ca. 1518, oil on panel, 147.4 × 116 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P000301
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Andrea del Sarto, Virgin and Child between Saint Matthew and an Angel, 1522, oil on panel, 177 × 135 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P000334
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Between the publications of Carmen García-Frías, Antonio Martínez Ripoll, Rosa Gutiérrez García, María Jesús Muñoz González, and especially Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, Velázquez’s involvement in the redecoration of the Escorial has been as comprehensively reconstructed as the known documentation seems to permit. Therefore, only a relatively bare-bones summary is needed of what was Velázquez’s years-long project to reinstall the picture collection at the Escorial monastery. A group of paintings including the Tintoretto and Raphael named above were already gathered in the king’s apartments at the Escorial by September 26, 1654, when Luis Méndez de Haro y Guzmán wrote to Alonso de Cárdenas to say that they had been received with much enthusiasm by both Velázquez and the king.20 Installation of paintings in the sacristy and the ante-sacristy, both just off the principal lower cloister, is thought to have begun by the start of 1655 and finished by sometime around mid-1656.21 At the very latest, these two spaces must have been fully redecorated by October 17 of this year, when Julio Chifflet documented the yearly visit that the king and his entourage made in these months in search of some respite from the demands of Madrid.22 It is thought that by this point the Hall of Moral Theology, located one story above the ante-sacristy, had also been decorated.23 The most comprehensive account of what was on view in each of these rooms survives in the Descripcion breve del Monasterio de S. Lorenzo el Real del Escorial. Vnica maravilla del mvndo: Fabrica del prvdentissimo Rey Philippo Segvndo: Aora nvevamente coronada por el Catholico Rey Philippo Qvarto el Grande con la magestvosa obra de la capilla insigne del Pantheon, y traslacion à ella de los Cuerpos Reales by Fray Francisco de los Santos (henceforth Descripcion breve).24 Santos authored four versions of this text, the first in 1657, with subsequent editions dating to 1667, 1681, and 1698. Antonio Palomino does make mention of a “description and report”—known throughout the historiography as Velázquez’s Memoria—that Velázquez made to record the subjects, authors, descriptive characteristics, and locations of the paintings that he had installed in the sacristy, ante-sacristy, and other spaces by 1656. Had an entirely undisputed copy of this Memoria survived to the present day, it would be not only more essential as a source on Velázquez’s redecoration of the Escorial monastery than Santos’s Descripcion breve but also the only substantial surviving piece of writing by Velázquez on art.25 The Memoria effectively repeats the list of paintings included in the Escorial and their locations provided by Santos’s writings, however. Therefore, for our purposes, its authorship may remain an unsolved mystery. According to Santos’s account, the ante-sacristy was decorated with nine paintings, among them paintings from the royal collections in addition to gifts from Spanish noblemen and at least one acquisition from the sale of Rubens’s art collection in 1640.26 The sacristy was decorated with thirty-two paintings, which included paintings collected by Philip II and gifts from Spanish ambassadors in addition to paintings from the collection of Charles I of England.27 The Hall of Moral Theology was decorated with twelve paintings, most of them acquired by Philip II.28 These three galleries constitute the first phase of Velázquez’s work in the Escorial.29
Between the king’s visit to the Escorial in 1656 and Velázquez’s death in 1660, plans were made for Velázquez to redecorate to the chapter rooms of the prior and the vicar, also just off of the principal lower cloister. A note accounting for these spaces already appears in the 1657 edition of Santos’s Descripcion breve, where, after briefly listing paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Lavinia Fontana, Hieronymus Bosch, and others, he writes the following:
The remaining paintings that are in these chapter rooms are also by great painters, as they demonstrate by their excellence; but of all of these very few will remain in these chapter rooms, because the Majesty and piety of King Philip IV, has determined that they will be decorated like the Sacristy, with other [paintings] more worthy, which are being looked for at his order.30
Santos does not specify whether the decision was made to redecorate the chapter rooms at the same time as the decision to redecorate the sacristy and ante-sacristy or only after it, but he does make clear that the work on the chapter rooms likely did not begin until around 1657. At the very earliest, it could have begun in late 1656, as the first edition of Santos’s manuscript was already ready for publication by October 15 of this year.31 Whatever the precise start date, correspondence between Prior Francisco de Castillo and the king indicates September 21, 1660, as a terminus ante quem for the prior’s chapter room.32 Although this postdates Velázquez’s death on August 6, 1660, by approximately six weeks, a surviving drawing sketching out a display program for this space that corresponds with what is written out in the 1667 edition of Santos’s Descripcion breve suggests that a finished plan was in place within Velázquez’s lifetime (fig. 4.6).33 As described in the 1667 edition of the Descripcion breve, the prior’s chapter room contained twenty-two paintings, many of them acquired by the same means as those in the sacristy and ante-sacristy.34 All but Daniel Seghers’s four flower paintings appear in the surviving installation plan, seemingly indicating that these four were not part of Velázquez’s final conception for the room’s design. The chapter room of the vicar, by contrast, remained unfinished by the time that Velázquez died and was likely left to court painters Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo and Sebastián de Herrera Barnuevo to complete.35 In the correspondence between Prior Francisco de Castillo and King Philip IV cited above, the prior remarked on the unfinished state of the chapter room of the vicar. The king’s response: “For now, the decoration of the second chapter room will not be easy, as I find myself without paintings of the necessary quality.”36 It is thus unclear how much of the final installation can be responsibly credited to Velázquez, especially in the absence of a drawn plan comparable to that of the chapter room of the prior. While scholarly accounts of Velázquez’s work in the Escorial sometimes include other spaces beyond the five cited above, these five are the only to be universally recognized as unequivocally having been assigned to the artist by the surviving primary sources.37 The last recorded intervention that Velázquez made to the Escorial dates to around July 28, 1659, when a bronze crucifixion whose commission he may have facilitated was finally imported into Spain from Italy.38 It was installed over the altar of the Pantheon toward the end of 1659 or in early 1660.39 As Felipe Pereda has shown, at the heart of this object was a long-standing and ongoing debate about the dynamic intertwining of aesthetic artfulness and sacred truth in the religious artwork; it thus emblematizes the intertwining of art and faith that might be thought to characterize the Escorial as a whole.40
Plan of the Chapter Room of the Prior, 1657–60, drawing on laid paper with brown wash, 45.5 × 75.1 cm, Real Biblioteca de Palacio, Madrid, Patrimonio Nacional, IX/M/242
Image © Patrimonio Nacional
Whether or not the sacristy, ante-sacristy, Hall of Moral Theology, chapter room of the prior, and (unrealized) chapter room of the vicar were the only rooms in the Escorial monastery under his purview, they give a clear set of priorities at work in Velázquez’s rehang of the Escorial. The paintings exhibited in these spaces are united, first and foremost, by their religious subject matter, as befitted the function and symbolic significance of the monastery. There is no question that the subjects depicted resonated with the devotional practices of the monks that inhabited the spaces that these paintings occupied. Francisco de los Santos’s language furthermore gives a sense of some of the art-critical criteria by which these paintings were selected: their “harmony” (armonía), “grace” (gracia), and the “caprice” in their “invention” (capricho en la invención). Across all galleries, however, the hang also overwhelmingly presents as a compendium of the Venetian school of painting from the Renaissance through the seventeenth century. All four of the galleries whose design was completed within Velázquez’s lifetime were hung primarily with paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, the leading lights of this school during the Renaissance, alongside comparatively minor members of the Venetian school like Palma il Giovane and Luca Cambiaso.41 Worth noting is that the hang was not delimited by nationality and that the criterion of style rather than artist’s city of origin made space for foreign-born practitioners across the centuries. The Venetian school, as per Velázquez’s program, could accommodate Flemish painters like Anthony van Dyck and especially Rubens. Velázquez’s program also included a small selection of paintings by Valencian artist and star painter of Spanish Naples José de Ribera, who (although now better known for his Caravaggism) was a student of Venetian colorism, as well as a small number of paintings by the Escorial’s former painter-in-residence Juan Fernández de Navarrete (better known as “El Mudo”), who not only trained in Titian’s workshop but also restored many of his paintings for Philip II.42 In the Escorial, the Venetian school could thus also include native Spaniards.
There are several metrics by which this hang might be evaluated. Very few, however, are to be found in Spanish sources, perhaps because Velázquez’s ordering principles do not derive from Spanish models. María Jesús Muñoz González made the claim that Velázquez’s knowledge of how to hang paintings was acquired in Italy; recent literature on the Italian picture gallery has made it newly possible to understand just what this means.43 The first few decades of the seventeenth century saw the emergence in Rome of the picture gallery, within which paintings and other works of art, newly mobile, could be arranged and rearranged by their collector in a game of display for an educated spectator.44 While in Italy pursuing paintings and sculptures for the royal collection, Velázquez also occupied himself with painting the portraits of popes and noblemen pioneering the new exhibition model. His portraits of Pope Innocent X (Galleria Doria Pamphilij, FC 289) and Cardinal Camillo-Astalli Pamphilij (Hispanic Society Museum & Library, A101) alone establish Velázquez’s connection to a family of active art collectors with substantial palaces in which to house their collections.45 The galleries in palaces such as these were the site for experimentation with new strategies for displaying paintings. According to Christina Strunck, seventeenth-century picture galleries were laboratories for unexpected juxtapositions and serendipitous connections motivated by collectors’ own taste and connoisseurly discernment.46 Indeed, the rules governing the Escorial redecoration are given in the one treatise of the period to offer guidelines for the decoration of Italian palaces, authored not by an artist but, fittingly, by an art collector: Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni sulla pittura, which includes a chapter titled “Rules for buying, placing, and conserving paintings.”47 Although the only text of its kind, Mancini’s treatise exemplifies the ways that collectors in Rome were generating new rules for the display of paintings in their picture galleries, rules that Velázquez observed and put into practice at El Escorial.
Scholars overwhelmingly agree that Velázquez’s hang is a showcase of the Venetian school of painting. The numbers certainly bear this out: Of the seventy-one total paintings that Velázquez put on display in the sacristy, ante-sacristy, Hall of Moral Theology, and the prior’s chapter room, fifty were painted in the Venetian style. Eighteen of these were by Titian, making him the indisputable star of this decorative program and the figure around which the Venetian school, as recreated in these galleries, coalesced. Veronese and Tintoretto, Titian’s close contemporaries and sometimes rivals, were represented by twelve and five paintings each, with next-generation painter Palma il Giovane represented by three. Flemish adherents van Dyck and Rubens followed close behind with six and three paintings each, with Spaniards Ribera and El Mudo given two and one painting each. That Velázquez’s priority was the Venetian school could not have been more obviously stated than by the sheer percentage of paintings in the Venetian style that were on view in the Escorial by the time he was done redecorating it. As for the remaining twenty-one paintings across the four spaces just mentioned, these were executed by artists from artistic centers across the Italian Peninsula: Rome, Florence, Genoa, Bologna, and Parma. Not one of these centers is represented by enough paintings to challenge the primacy of Venice within Velázquez’s program for the Escorial. In fact, Mancini’s treatise provides a rule by which these paintings might serve a gallery hang whose subject is the Venetian school:
But I would not like it if the very same school and manner were put together, as for example with sacred [paintings] all the [paintings] by Raphael and his school, like Giulio Romano, Timoteo Viti, Giovan Francesco Penni, and others already mentioned, but I would like that they alternate with other manners and schools from the same century.48
Mancini goes on to explain that this variety not only makes the paintings more delightful to look at but also permits the comparison of different painting styles. According to the organizing logic of the early modern picture gallery, the distinguishing characteristics of the Venetian school would more fully come into focus by comparison and contrast with paintings from other schools. The paintings included by artists like Raphael, Guido Reni, Annibale Carracci, and Andrea del Sarto could thus be understood as a strategic counterpoint to the paintings by Renaissance Venetian masters who overwhelmingly came to occupy these spaces, wherein the articulation of one school of painting was facilitated by contradistinction to another.
If the numbers present a clear picture of Velázquez’s intentions for the rehang of the Escorial monastery, the order of the hang refines that story further. Using Francisco de los Santos’s records as a starting point, Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas has worked to meticulously reconstruct the layout of paintings within the interior architecture of the sacristy, ante-sacristy, Hall of Moral Theology, and prior’s chapter room. What results is a decorative scheme visibly ordered by the criteria that modern curators might recognize as the means by which to use gallery spaces to structure a group of paintings into a hang. These criteria include which paintings are centrally placed on walls, which above focal points like altarpieces, and which across from main doors and therefore along privileged sightlines. Again, in this regard Giulio Mancini’s treatise provides a baseline with which Velázquez’s choices are consistent:
And because in paintings we make note of the periods “rebirth,” “good,” “perfect,” [and] “in decline,” therefore, having assumed the sites where the particular paintings should be placed, one should hang first the oldest, observing as much as possible the suitable lighting and spaces by the sizes of the paintings.49
Mancini here advocates a procedure for ordering a gallery hang in which paintings are seemingly prioritized by age, beginning with those that are the oldest, then proceeding chronologically toward the present. His breakdown of paintings into discrete periods suggests an awareness not only of age but of corresponding historical significance. This same prioritization of older paintings within an essentially historical narrative is observed in the order in which paintings appear in Velázquez’s decorative scheme. That Titian was the progenitor of the Venetian school is made clear by the location of his paintings within the galleries, which establish him as the primary painter of Venice. Nearly every spot on a wall across from a central door or over a major focal point, such as an altarpiece, is occupied by a painting by this artist. Titian’s paintings appear flanked, more often than not, with paintings by Tintoretto and Veronese, their status as second to Titian in both chronology and artistic accomplishment registered in the location of their paintings on the gallery walls in relation to his. The paintings by Ribera and El Mudo, already few in number, tend to occupy the visually weakest locations within their respective galleries: on the wall with the most prominent door, and therefore at the viewer’s back upon entering the room, or across from the central altar, and therefore out of his field of vision when trained on the gallery’s visual focal point.
The only exception to these rules is Raphael’s Holy Family, the most expensive painting acquired from the collection of Charles I of England and, for Alonso de Cárdenas, his most triumphant purchase.50 “The Pearl,” as it came to be known, was situated across from the largest door of the sacristy and above its central altar and thus given indisputable pride of place within this gallery. The reasons behind this, however, are readily offered by Julio Chifflet: “This painting is there isolated from the rest, as the most exquisite, since it is certain that His Majesty is in the habit of calling it his favorite.”51 As his patron, Philip IV’s personal preferences took precedence over Velázquez’s curatorial imperatives. Nevertheless, the historical unfolding of the Venetian school otherwise appears precisely articulated in the paintings’ relationships to one another within each gallery in the Escorial that fell under Velázquez’s purview.
2 Velázquez’s Frames
Across the ante-sacristy, sacristy, Hall of Moral Theology, and chapter room of the prior in the Escorial, Velázquez used many of the strategies available to modern curators in the elaboration of the Venetian school of painting as it unfolded across the European continent. These included both refining a selection of a group of paintings and ordering those paintings on the gallery walls, both well studied by scholars of Velázquez and the Escorial alike. Less attention has been given, however, to Velázquez’s design of a frame to adorn them. For the Octagonal Room, Velázquez had designed simple black frames like those that would appear in paintings recording Velázquez’s hang for the Hall of Mirrors, to be discussed in the next chapter.52 For the Escorial, Velázquez opted instead for frames gilded and richly carved. In their books on the topic, Lynn Roberts and Paul Mitchell write of the many things that a frame can do for a painting: it can protect a painting from dust and damage; it can enhance a painting’s color, light, or composition; it can harmonize a painting with the interior that it occupies; or, seemingly entirely by contrast, it can isolate the painting from its decorative and architectural surroundings.53 When confronted by individual frames, however, it becomes apparent that while any single frame can do any one of these things, it is unlikely to do all of them at once. The design of a frame—and especially the design of a frame as it fits a specific painting for which it is intended, or a specific site—is a statement of priorities about which of these things it will do and at the expense of which others. The question becomes what functions Velázquez’s frames are fulfilling and how they are fulfilling them.
Titian, Christ on the Cross (framed), ca. 1555, oil on canvas, 208 × 103 cm, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, 10014803
Image © Patrimonio Nacional
Domenico Tintoretto, Penitent Magdalene (framed), ca. 1590, oil on canvas, 158 × 128 cm, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, 10014558
Image © Patrimonio Nacional
Mirror, 1656–60, carved and gilded wood, 139 × 122 × 19 cm, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, 10014796
Image © Patrimonio Nacional
Of all the paintings that Velázquez included in his decorative program for the monastery at El Escorial, only two retain his frame: Titian’s Christ on the Cross (fig. 4.7) and Tintoretto’s Penitent Magdalene (fig. 4.8).54 Although the painting has since been rehoused, one photograph survives of Rubens’s Holy Family with Saint Anne with Velázquez’s original frame (MNP, P001639).55 In addition, two mirrors from the sacristy survive with frames of related design (fig. 4.9).56 Julio Chifflet already makes mention of the frames that Velázquez had designed for the sacristy and ante-sacristy in his record of the king’s visit to the Escorial in October 1656:
Diego Velázquez, painter and valet of His Majesty, has been occupied [for] several months with arranging everything and has arranged to carve gilded frames for the paintings.57
These frames did not escape the attention of Francisco de los Santos, who, while not much more descriptive than Chifflet, is certainly more effusive. As he wrote in the 1657 edition of the Descripcion breve, addressing the sacristy:
These [paintings] and the rest mentioned, beyond the grandeur of their quality, have frames of gilded carving, uniform in their luster and delicacy, which the Mirrors with the same adornment imitate, giving this room beauty and majesty, and everywhere drawing the eye and [commanding] respect, demonstrating [themselves] in their royalty and bearing to be jewels of [one of the] marvel[s of the world] and the tokens of the superior taste and devotion of its patron and owner, who never ceases to show it, [being] so great a monarch as [he is].58
By the time Santos published the 1667 edition of the Descripcion breve, similar improvements had been made to the paintings in the chapter rooms of the prior and the vicar:
Universally, they have frames of gilded carving, wide, proportionate, and with very well-shaped moldings, with which in any case they make for a majestic decoration for these rooms.59
Taken all together, this documentation suggests that Velázquez produced a universal frame design specifically for the paintings in the spaces of San Lorenzo de El Escorial under his purview, and that they were carved, gilded, and suitably beautiful.60 Although executed several decades later, Claudio Coello’s King Charles II of Spain Adoring the Host (Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial), which depicts the sacristy at El Escorial with six of these frames visible in the background, offers a glimpse of the dazzling impression they must have made.61
The surviving documentation surrounding the frames that Velázquez made for the paintings exhibited in the Escorial monastery tells us virtually nothing about the reasoning behind his design, nor about why and how it distinguishes itself from others from the history of frames in Europe. But then again, primary sources on frames generally do very little to explain why frame designs differ so dramatically across historical periods. The inventories that were made of the Habsburg paintings’ collection—which, while not especially verbose on any single work, at least make it possible in many cases to identify which paintings were in the Habsburg art collection and where they were kept at any point in time—offer only cursory descriptors of the frames in which they were kept. In the inventories made in 1636, 1666, and 1686, paintings are usually listed as either “con su marco negro” (with its black frame), “con su marco dorado” (with its gilded frame), or “con su marco negro y dorado” (with its gilded and black frame).62 Qualifying details—such as that a black frame was made out of ebony, that a gilded frame was smooth rather than elaborately carved, or that a gilded and black frame was black with a gilded profile—appear exceedingly rarely. At least one inventory of frames that were removed from their paintings survives in the archives of the royal palace in Madrid. Even here, frames are classified according to only three categories: “Black, Gilded, and in poor condition.”63 Frames are seemingly as nondescript—if not entirely invisible—in treatises as they are in archival records. Francisco Pacheco does not include even a mention of them in Arte de la Pintura, and neither does Vicente Carducho nor Jusepe Martínez in their own treatises. Antonio Palomino’s Museo pictórico y escala óptica offers no extended treatment of the topic, instead limiting his address to an entry in the glossary of terms at the end of the first volume:
Frame [marco], singular, masculine. The Molding, or Adornment that encircles, or adorns a Painting; which tends to be smooth, or carved; gilded, or black. Lat. Ornamentum, Circumscriptio picturae.64
Palomino’s definition confirms what can largely be observed in the inventories already cited above: it does not offer any clues as to what might be indicated in the choice between geometric or floral motifs, for example, or allover or partial gilding. It does not explain why black frames with carved and gilded leaves at the corners and at the centers of each side are thought to have predominated in Spain in this period, and why Velázquez chose something else entirely.65
Seventeenth-century sources from across the European continent are similarly vague as to why a frame might be designed one way as opposed to another, even as artists increasingly took an interest in them. Velázquez’s French counterpart, Nicolas Poussin, openly expressed his opinions regarding how his paintings should be framed in his personal correspondence with patron Paul Fréart de Chantelou.66 In a 1639 letter concerning his forthcoming canvas Manna (Musée du Louvre, INV 7275), Poussin writes that “[the painting] needs [the frame] so that while judging them in all their parts the rays of the eye may be retained and not scattered outside [it] upon receiving the bits of other neighboring objects that coming pell-mell, cause confusion with the things painted.”67 He goes on to suggest for the work a simple frame in matte gold, arguing that such a frame would be harmonious with the painting’s colors without clashing with them. According to his patron, “simple” frames, “without burnished gold,” were the painter’s preference, and frames fitting this description appear in Poussin’s celebrated Self-Portrait (Musée du Louvre, INV 7302), made for Fréart de Chantelou in 1650.68 Poussin’s correspondence offers rare insight into the viewpoint of a painter on the question of framing, a painter whose compositions were carefully ordered within the limits of the canvas and who clearly viewed the frame as an instrument of this order. Aspects of his thinking—that frames exist to distinguish the work of art from its surroundings, that they should harmonize with rather than overwhelm the painting that they adorn— are now standard in the literature on frames.69 In Poussin’s France, however, this was not necessarily yet the case. Court historian André Félibien’s Des Principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture, et des autres ats qui en dependent, avec vn dictionnaire des Termes propres à chacun de ces Arts, published in Paris in 1676, offers little more than this definition of the frame:
Frame [quadre]. We call thus all the square borders [bordures] that enclose some work whether of sculpture or of painting, or other things, of whatever materials they may be … In addition to frames serving as an ornament to paintings, they help still further to make them look to best advantage.70
The dictionary of the French language published by the French Academy, the first edition of which dates to 1694, is even more to the point: “Frame [bordure], s. f. That which borders something, & serves as its ornament.”71 As with Spanish sources, French texts thus say little more about frames than that they exist to beautify their paintings. Ultimately, even Poussin’s letters—for whatever they reveal about his thoughts regarding, for example, whether a gilded frame should be matte or burnished—seem superficially to have a similar assumption at heart.
Seventeenth-century Italy saw the proliferation of new frame designs, including those by artists, with equally little textual justification for any one of them. Salvator Rosa, to whom Bernardo de Dominici eventually credited the design of the “Salvator Rosa” frame, is recorded by Filippo Baldinucci as having stated simply “that the frame [l’adornamento] was a great pimp for paintings.”72 In a letter written to his friend Giovan Battista Ricciardi in 1651, Rosa reports having sent some paintings to one of his patrons “accompanied by gilded frames [cornici] and varnish, both things necessary in order to make [the paintings] more distinguished.”73 In his biography of Carlo Maratta, painter and art theorist Giovanni Pietro Bellori mentions the frames that Maratta had designed, “new models of black frames in pearwood, which imitate ebony, with exquisite gilded carving set against a fine dark background, and which today are in use everywhere, lending much grace to painting.”74 In both cases, the frame functions simply to make its painting more beautiful. Contemporaneous written theory on the frame appears limited to Mancini’s Considerazioni sulla pittura, in which the art collector shares his opinions regarding how paintings should and should not be framed:
As for frames [cornice], there is no doubt that they are suitable, first as a defense to paintings against external hazards, then because they give majesty to paintings, which they cause to be seen as though through a window, or we might say through a horizon thus circumscribed, and they render them ornamented with a certain majesty. I do not like, however, the use of a new kind that makes it so that the frames are so far behind the painting that they almost hold it out and exposed to injury because, beyond not giving them said majesty, it adds damage and, furthermore, that the frame is not seen, such that money is spent to put it in the dark and the painting in danger.
And the ornament, whether it is to be gilded or not gilded, I would think that in [the case of] some small things, [that are] brightly colored and that do not have too much relief, as in the style of Baroccio, [frames] in black would be much better than gilded [ones], because thus they would not dazzle the eye and [act as] an impediment to looking at the painting. But when the painting is old, as those from the centur[ies] of rebirth, the good, and even the perfect, because with time the vigor of color is extinguished, so I would think that it would be better to gild them. As for the manner of coloring of Caravaggio, which touches so much on black, it is much better to gild them. But in small paintings, as with miniatures or others by good masters, and those which are given to princes, then frames are commonly made from ebony, accompanied by joins of silver rosettes and leaves made with filaments of silver and of gold, depending on what is available, but these are made mostly by the High Pope to give to emperors, kings, and great princes.75
There is some richness here, as in Mancini’s reference to a window, which recalls the art theory of Leon Battista Alberti, or in his observation that paintings age. Nevertheless, his first paragraph is a statement of the purposes of frames that is hardly specific to any single design, these purposes consisting of protecting paintings from dust and other sources of harm while conferring to the paintings a degree of beauty and dignity. The second paragraph is an expansion of the kind of advice given by Poussin, the question of which frames should adorn which paintings resolved largely by the paintings’ size, palette, and composition. Underpinning the whole, again, is the idea that frames serve as an adornment to paintings, and the question of which frame is best suited to which painting a function of this idea.
All this is to say that if the specificities of frame designs changed dramatically over the course of the centuries across Europe, these changes cannot be accounted for by what treatises have to say about frames, which in total is very little. Even a cursory glance at the gamut of frame designs across time reveals that frames and their history are richer and more variegated than any description offered in corresponding texts. More importantly, they cannot be pinned to shifting perceptions in the basic function of frames, which remained virtually unchanged from the Renaissance forward. And yet, tracking broadly across history—as one must, with frames—reveals noticeable patterns.
As early as the mid-fifteenth century, Renaissance Tuscany saw the rise of tabernacle frames composed of pediments, columns, volutes, cornices, and other elements observable from contemporaneous innovations in architecture.76 These are the elements out of which Renaissance thinkers like Leon Battista Alberti advocated that frames be made, and he writes in his treatise De pictura the following:
I will certainly not condemn all the other ornaments of artisans, as [are], of course, the [framing] sculpted columns around [the painting], the bases, and the pediments that one adds to a painting, also if they will be in silver and in solid gold or in a very pure gold completely. A perfect and finished historia, in fact, is very worthy also of the ornament of gems.77
This is the same text in which Alberti formulates his now famous theory of painting—referring not to the frame but to painting itself—as a window: “First I trace as large a quadrangle as I wish, with right angles, on the surface to be painted; in this place, it [the rectangular quadrangle] certainly functions for me as an open window through which the historia is observed.”78 Alberti goes on to advocate for a new compositional system by which to order a painting so as to create the convincing representation of three-dimensional space: one-point perspective.79 Pictorial compositions so structured—often with geometric pavements, archways, and loggia to demarcate the orthogonal lines giving them shape—would have been complemented by the architectural elements out of which the frame for such a painting was also composed. This is the same system by which, as Marvin Trachtenberg has demonstrated, the urban space of Florence was redesigned, such that one could look out a Renaissance Florentine window and come to see a scene that increasingly looked like a Renaissance Florentine painting.80 The ground floors of several prominent Renaissance Florentine palazzi dating to the mid- to late fifteenth century—including the Palazzo Pitti and Palazzo Medici—sport windows made up, like Tuscan picture frames, of pediments, columns, and cornices. Whether or not architects, the craftsmen responsible for Tuscan frame design, or thinkers like Alberti were directly in conversation with one another, their theories and practices express a sympathy in Renaissance Tuscany around the concept of painting as a window, with frames designed to match.
Sandro Botticelli, Annunciation (framed), 1489–90, tempera on wood, 150 × 156 cm, Gallerie degli Uffizi, inv. 1890, no. 1608
Image © Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi
Period examples bear this sympathy out: Sandro Botticelli’s Annunciation is one Renaissance Florentine painting that still retains its original frame, thus making it possible to consider how the design of its frame complements the principles of painting expressed by this work (fig. 4.10).81 The painting depicts precisely the kind of istoria that Alberti claimed to be the noblest subject for and purpose of painting: a biblical story consisting of large-scale figures acting out a narrative, in this case the annunciation to the Virgin of the incarnation of Christ by the angel Gabriel. They do this in a rigorously shaped architectural setting delimited by orthogonal lines that meet at a single point in the horizon. The figures appear parallel to the picture plane, as do these lines, visibly worked into the composition of the painting as tiles on the floor. The careful geometric shaping of this space is reinforced by the walls and doorways depicted, framing devices that echo the gesture of sketching out a window, which Alberti considers the first step in making a painting. The frame, composed entirely out of architectural elements like pilasters, cornices, and columnar capitals, repeats these framing devices, coinciding with the orthogonal lines at the lower right- and left-hand corners of the composition. The moldings of the lectern behind which the Virgin moves and running around the room reappear in detailing all over the frame, thus reinforcing the sense that the frame is an architectural opening through which to view the scene unfolding. In their allusion to the Annunciation, the inscriptions at the bottom edge of the frame further reinforce the painting’s purpose in the depiction of an istoria, as does the detail of Christ’s resurrection from his tomb, the end of the story of which the Annunciation was the beginning. Together, painting and frame complement one another in their use of architectural elements to frame the telling of an istoria, supporting the conception of painting as a window broadly underpinning the art theory and architectural practices that so characterized the Florentine Renaissance.
Sympathies elsewhere in time and place could look very different. Eighteenth-century France saw the advent of the Louis XV frame style, characterized by arabesques, shell-like cartouches, and swirling floral and foliate motifs.82 Decorative ornamentation of this sort derived from the moldings that increasingly came to adorn eighteenth-century French interiors.83 The French Rococo interior was characterized by complete sets of furnishings staged within boiserie framing devices and by these means designed to produce a certain kind of bourgeois subject, a consumer of goods that both evinced erudition, wealth, and gentility and created the site for the performance of erudite, wealthy, and gentile subjectivity.84 Out of the same impulse emerged portraits of individual sitters that likewise produced them as such a subject, portraits that were themselves yet another good to be consumed by this type of subject. The frame designs of this period coincided with what Noémie Étienne has demonstrated was a lively debate in eighteenth-century France surrounding the standing of painting within this kind of interior and specifically surrounding the question of whether painting could be counted as a piece of furniture.85 In his widely reprinted Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture, the abbot, historian, and diplomat Jean-Baptiste Dubos in 1719 unfavorably compared contemporary attitudes toward painting to those of the ancients, saying that “ultimately, the works of great Masters were not considered, in the time of which I speak, as ordinary furnishings destined to beautify the apartments of individuals.”86 Writers in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une societé de gens de lettres, completed in 1765, devoted entire pages to painting, restating within a comprehensive history of the art form that there was once a time when painting did not exist to furnish private homes.87 For his part, Benedictine monk and student of history, mythology, and the alchemical sciences Antoine-Joseph Pernety likewise felt compelled to write in his own Dictionnaire portatif de peinture, sculpture et gravure; avec un Traité pratique des differentes manieres de peindre, dont la théorie est développée dans les articles qui en sont susceptibles, published in Paris in 1757, that “the painting is not only an agreeable furnishing, it is useful, it is instructive.”88 Eighteenth-century French frames, designed within the context of the French Rococo interior, thus expressed the broader—if contested—view in the period that painting was itself a kind of furnishing.
Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux (framed), 1739–41, pastel and gouache on blue paper, mounted on canvas, 200.7 × 149.9 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, 94.PC.39
Image © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
As in Renaissance Tuscany, paintings from this period that retain their original frames bear this out: Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s Portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux is unlike many other pastels of its type in that it still bears its original frame (fig. 4.11).89 The painting is a portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux, the son of a wealthy financier and thus a member of the bourgeois class, seated in the kind of Rococo interior befitting a person of this socioeconomic standing. The scene includes no narrative other than de Rieux’s self-presentation through his engagement with the objects that surround him: the large book whose pages he confidently turns while seated at a desk equipped with books, papers, quill and inkstand, and a globe. He appears already framed to a degree by the large armchair on which he sits, as well as the screen behind him, which repeats the patterns of the carpet beneath him and the shapes of the back of the armchair peeking out from behind his shoulders. All the consumer objects within this space signal both the refined taste required to select them and the financial capital required to purchase them, as does the frame, also visibly sophisticated, visibly expensive. With its sinuous forms and rocaille details, the frame repeats the ornamentation of the furniture depicted within the composition, including the screen and armchair, as well as the clock in the upper left-hand corner of the image, itself little more than a set of Rococo shapes with a watch face at center, and the boiseries just beneath it. Like the frame, the office depicted here exists to structure the space for de Rieux’s self-fashioning, seemingly only emphasized by the triumphant trophy element at the top of the frame’s design. The frame thus complements both the portrait and the Rococo interior depicted within the portrait in their production of its sitter as a bourgeois consumer, evoking the conception of painting in this period as one of any number of furnishings that could shape eighteenth-century French subjectivity.
In the case of Botticelli’s Annunciation and of de la Tour’s Portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux, the frames on each work to evoke the two entirely different conceptions of painting belonging to each period: the window of Renaissance Tuscany and the furnishing of Rococo France, respectively. This is not to say that frames in Renaissance Italy were never designed to look like furniture, which we know that they were, nor that eighteenth-century France had wholly abandoned the notion that painting could function as a window, which we know that it did not.90 It is simply to observe that the broader trends in frame design that emerge and predominate in any given historical time and place do not do so by chance, and that they in fact seem to speak to the most fundamental assumptions of that age about the status not of the frame but of painting itself.
If seventeenth-century southern Europe can be said to have produced a frame, it was indisputably what is sometimes called the “gallery frame.” This originated in Italy, perhaps more specifically in Rome, a city so essential to Velázquez’s formation (and, for that matter, to the formation of Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa, and Carlo Maratta, cited above). The first few decades of the seventeenth century saw the rise in Rome of the picture gallery, a designated space within the palace of a wealthy and erudite amateur for the display of art and the performance of its appreciation in the company of colleagues and friends.91 This in turn prompted the rise of a new kind of painting, the “gallery picture,” and, correspondingly, the gallery frame. Among the gallery picture’s defining characteristics was its site-non-specificity, a trait that frame designs from this period often foregrounded. Gallery pictures were pitture amovibili: of a limited size and easily movable, whether from one wall space to another or from collection to collection.92 Essential to the gallery picture was thus its “aesthetic autonomy as a self-sufficient whole,” in the phrasing of Michael Fried, an autonomy predicated on its “severing from its surroundings.”93 Gallery frames like those designed by Rosa and Maratta were made to be consistent not with the contents of the individual paintings that any one of them adorned, nor the furnishings with which they were in company, nor the architectural elements that could be observed in the buildings that housed them. Rather, they were made to be consistent with each other. As scholars often point out, this imposed a uniformity on the works that privileged the expression of their collector’s ownership over them over other, potentially competing qualities.94 It also, however, made of the gallery frame an agent of the autonomy that was among the gallery picture’s defining characteristics. The gallery picture may have occasioned the development of the gallery frame, but the gallery frame was also among the gallery picture’s mechanisms, the smooth and unbroken line of its design demarcating a clear border between the painting and the wall on which it hung.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes (framed), ca. 1599, oil on canvas, 145 × 195 cm, Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica—Palazzo Barberini, 2533
Image © Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Rome (MiC)
In his elaboration of the gallery picture, Michael Fried uses the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio as an interpretive lens through which to explore this essential autonomy, understanding Caravaggio’s oeuvre as among the first to engage the gallery picture as its artistic paradigm.95 Fried observes the severing of the gallery picture from its surroundings effectively illustrated in Caravaggio’s paintings of biblical and mythological stories of beheading, and none more so than his paintings of Judith and Holofernes, which depict the act itself (fig. 4.12).96 Working within this analogy, it is Judith’s weapon in particular that accomplishes within the story of the painting precisely what the gallery frame was designed to do outside it: deliver the severing blow. In Caravaggio’s depiction, Judith wields a curved blade, likely the Assyrian scimitar cited in biblical sources for the story. In later versions by other Roman artists, the weapon more closely resembles early modern Italian short swords and long swords. In both cases, the rhythms of alternating sharp ridges and smooth planes of these weapons recall the design of the standard Salvator Rosa frame, which both functions to cut the picture from its surroundings and, in its blade-like design, dramatizes the cut. It is often repeated that frames exist to separate art from the world around it, to distinguish between what is within and what is without. The comparison of seventeenth-century Roman gallery frames with eighteenth-century French frames—designed to integrate painting in a furnished interior—and sixteenth-century Tuscan frames—designed to mimic architectural superstructures—reveals that some frames do this more intentionally than others. In Renaissance Tuscany and Rococo France, we have observed a sympathy at work between a certain conception of art and the frames that emerged in the service of its circumscription. There is sympathy here, too, in the Roman picture gallery, where a new kind of display space made for a new kind of painting, and so too did a new kind of frame.
Detail of the frame on Domenico Tintoretto, Penitent Magdalene, ca. 1590, oil on canvas, 158 × 128 cm, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, 10014558
Image © Patrimonio Nacional
Detail of the frame on Domenico Tintoretto, Penitent Magdalene, ca. 1590, oil on canvas, 158 × 128 cm, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, 10014558
Image © Patrimonio Nacional
Within this context, how then to make sense of Velázquez’s design? The frames that Velázquez designed for the paintings and mirrors in San Lorenzo de El Escorial correspond only poorly to the examples of frames cited above, seeming not to have been copied from any existing frame designs but instead original to Velázquez. Velázquez’s design for the frame for the paintings turns around a single fleshy leaf, repeated around the frame’s entire perimeter.97 The leaves alternate in their almost imperceptible lean off their central axes, such that light thrown from their gilding will scatter in different directions. The design resolves at the corners of the frame without extra embellishment, the same motif simply turning around the corner so that the pattern that it follows is barely broken (fig. 4.13). At the sight edge is a smooth line of gilded wood from which the leaves seem to originate, lifting at the outer edge away from the frame’s ground and curling over again toward the sight edge (fig. 4.14). For the mirrors in this same space, Velázquez cleverly plays with the conceit of a mirror image by reversing the design such that at the outer edge is a smooth line of gilded wood, the same fleshy leaves instead lifting away from the ground at the sight edge and curling back out toward the outer edge. Sources predating Velázquez’s involvement are unsurprisingly sparing in their descriptions of the frames on the hundreds of canvases that were brought to the Escorial monastery during the reign of Philip II; nevertheless, what little description there is suggests many different frame designs adorning the group and nothing like the coherence of the framing scheme that resulted from Velázquez’s intervention.98 Some are described as gilded and painted black or blue, others only gilded. Some were richly carved with motifs like cords or seraphs, others marbled. A small number came with taffeta curtains, most of them green or red but some purple or blue. However sparse these notations, what emerges from them is the sense of a profusion of designs likely reflecting the diverse provenance of the paintings. This variety of frame profiles is what ultimately gave way to Velázquez’s leafy alternative.
Superficially, Velázquez’s design of a frame for the monastery at El Escorial possesses much of what made Carlo Maratta’s and Salvator Rosa’s designs for gallery frames effective in response to the new demands of picture galleries and gallery pictures in Italy. Overwhelmingly, Roman gallery frames were gold bands ribboned around the canvases displayed in picture galleries; thus, Velázquez’s implementation of an allover gilded frame—a departure from the black frames that appeared at other royal sites—immediately invokes the Roman picture gallery. That Velázquez would impose a universal frame design on the hang at all already recalls the strategies used in picture galleries to bring order not to commissioned suites of paintings, like those that could still be sourced from a single artist or workshop during this period, but rather to the collections of works of disparate origin and diverse authorship that were in part the biproduct of the emergence of the secondary art market, like the sale of the art collection of Charles I of England. Aspects of Velázquez’s design reinforce its function as a universal adornment to just such a collection. Insofar as the design consists of a small, single motif repeated in a regular pattern, the design is modular and thus ostensibly infinitely malleable, easily lengthened or shortened to fit paintings of various length and width, and neither so insubstantial as to disappear around the larger canvases in the group nor so substantial as to overwhelm those of smaller scale. The elegant resolution of the design at the corners of the frame, the resistance against ornamental embellishments on any part of it, and the orientation of its motifs toward the sight edge all the way around its design ensures that the frame has no right side up. Velázquez’s frame can thus accommodate paintings both of horizontal and of vertical format indiscriminately. The glimmer of light across the alternating leaves evokes the one formal characteristic that united the painters of the Venetian school across generations and nationalities: the vibrant brushwork and glittering highlights of their canvases. To consider only those paintings that retain Velázquez’s frame, we might observe this in the dynamic atmospheric effects, most notably the strike of lighting, in Titian’s Christ on the Cross; or the glow around the head of Tintoretto’s Penitent Magdalene, to say nothing of the sheen on the draperies encircling the composition. What might appear under-designed by comparison to the most ornate frames across art history is a frame profile that in fact totally prioritizes those qualities that would have been required of a universal frame intended to bring some regularity to paintings of different sizes, orientations, and authorship, such as simplicity and versatility. The Roman gallery frame functioned to unify paintings of varying provenance; without directly copying any frame in use in early modern Italy, Velázquez’s frame seems oriented toward the same objectives. The paintings included in Velázquez’s hang for the monastery at El Escorial were organized according to the strategies of the picture gallery; the idea of a simple, allover gilded universal frame design was consistent with those strategies.
Alonso Cano, The Martyrdom of Saint John, ca. 1667, pen, brush, and brown ink, 22.38 × 14.29 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Graphic Arts Council, M.77.54.2
Image © Museum Associates/LACMA (www.lacma.org)
And yet, the motifs out of which Velázquez composed his design for the frame for the paintings and mirrors at San Lorenzo de El Escorial are not quite those that appeared on frames coming out of Italy in this period. Rather, the leaves on Velázquez’s frame most closely resemble those in a drawing by Alonso Cano of a martyrdom of Saint John the Evangelist (fig. 4.15). Virtually nothing seems to be known about this drawing, which hardly appears in the secondary literature on this aspect of Cano’s practice.99 But Cano was a successful draftsman and designer as well as painter, sculptor, and architect whose output included large-scale retablos of a distinctly Spanish genus. These include one retablo depicting this iconography, produced in collaboration with Juan Martínez Montanés for the Monastery of Santa Paula in Seville in 1637, a few years before Cano and Velázquez traveled together to Valladolid on the king’s behalf.100 The drawing, while not necessarily preparatory for the Santa Paula retablo, nevertheless includes elements familiar from this and comparable retablos by these two artists: the saint, whose figure casts a shadow on the ground behind him, suggestive of a figure sculpted in the round; the cartouche spanning the space that he occupies and the space just above him; and the cherubs perched overhead. In addition, the drawing features a border of leaves that themselves seem first to curl away from the center of the image and then back toward it and thus bear strong resemblance to Velázquez’s frame design. To suggest that Velázquez had this drawing in mind when designing his frame for the paintings at El Escorial is almost certainly to ascribe too much importance to this single sheet. That said, the similarity between Velázquez’s leafy ribbon and the band of vegetal motifs running around the figure of Saint John the Evangelist in Cano’s drawing proposes another source for Velázquez’s motif: the visual language of the retablo, which in the seventeenth century increasingly came to include baroque components like leafy bands framing the many painted or sculpted panels out of which such objects were traditionally composed.101 In his rehang of its spaces, Velázquez likewise brought the form of the Italian picture gallery to the function of the working monastery that was San Lorenzo de El Escorial, whose largest and most impressive space—the basilica at its architectural center—was itself adorned with a retablo dating to within decades of its foundation. The motif out of which his frame design was composed derived from the visual culture of just such a space.
Thus considered, Velázquez’s frame encapsulates his project as a whole, which was to refashion a Spanish site for the display of paintings (the monastery at El Escorial) according to the rule of an Italian one (an early modern picture gallery). It cuts down a traditionally Spanish devotional framing device (the retablo) to the single element that could most closely correspond to the type of frame newly coming out of Italy (the gallery frame). The addition of a frame to a painting, like any other curatorial gesture, is itself an act of interpretation of that painting. At the monastery at El Escorial, works of art served a dual purpose, on the one hand as devotional instruments and on the other as collector’s items, and their frames correspondingly married the visual vocabulary of one site for the viewing of paintings with that of another. The rehang of the sacristy, ante-sacristy, Hall of Moral Theology, and chapter room of the prior was all together the single most ambitious assignment that Velázquez received from the king of Spain. To understand Velázquez’s approach to the rehang of the paintings at San Lorenzo de El Escorial, we needed to look no further than his frame for them.
The most comprehensive resource on aristocratic collections in Spain remains Burke and Cherry 1997. Indeed, the transcription of the inventory of the collection into which The Rokeby Venus was absorbed shortly after Velázquez’s return to Spain from Rome suggests that the principles of the Roman picture gallery were at play in its display alongside a sixteenth-century Venetian painting depicting a nude female figure reclining in a landscape, insofar as this display strategy would have encouraged the kind of comparison and contrast that the Roman picture gallery was designed to generate (on this “companion” piece, see Bull and Harris 1986 and Bull and Harris 1994).
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 343; see also Palomino 1947, p. 922; Palomino 1987, p. 166; and Palomino 2018, pp. 150–51.
Santos 1667, fol. 81r: “De orden de su Magestad, que Dios aya, compuso la Sacristia, la Aulilla, el Capitulo del Prior, y otras Pieças de tan grãdiosas Pinturas originales, como hemos visto, y iremos viendo, vnas que se estauan aqui desde Filipo Segundo, otras que por su diligencia se truxeron de diuersas partes de Europa.”
Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, p. 375; Bassegoda i Hugas 2004, p. 325: “el primer museo o galería de pinturas del mundo.” Comparable statements appear in Bassegoda i Hugas 1998, p. 133; and Bassegoda i Hugas 2002b, p. 140.
On the architectural composition of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, see Barbeito Díez 2000.
Bassegoda i Hugas 2000, pp. 465–72; and especially Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 17–27. An itemized inventory of objects brought to El Escorial during this period was compiled in Zarco Cuevas 1930 and Zarco Cuevas 1931, which has since been updated as Checa Cremades 2013b.
Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, p. 36. Cassiano dal Pozzo’s account of this visit is published in isolation as Andrés and Harris 1972; since then, it has been republished in dal Pozzo 2004. The latest account of the paintings in the Escorial monastery dating to before Velázquez’s intervention is an anonymous inventory thought to have been taken some time between the 1640s and 1650s and published as Bouza Álvarez 2000; it largely confirms that the hang of the Escorial recorded in 1626 persisted into the following decades (Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, p. 40).
On Titian’s Madonna and Child in an Evening Landscape, see Andrés and Harris 1972, p. 13: “reputata della miglior manera che mai tenesse Titiano.” On Titian’s Glory, see Andrés and Harris 1972, p. 19: “opera compitissima.” The bibliography on the paintings collection at the Escorial is substantial, even broken down by nationality and sometimes artist. On Titian and the Venetian school in particular, see Cloulas 1980; Ruiz Gómez 1991; Suárez Quevedo 2001; and Checa Cremades 2013a, pp. 235–49.
Pacheco 1649, p. 102; see also Pacheco 1990, p. 203; and Pacheco 2018, p. 34.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 299 and 327; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 859 and 899–900; Palomino 1987, pp. 103 and 147; and Palomino 2018, p. 76. Francisco Pacheco confirms that Rubens and Velázquez went together to the Escorial, even claiming that they had corresponded previously, although no correspondence between them survives (Pacheco 1649, p. 100; see also Pacheco 1990, p. 202).
Reference to Rubens is everywhere in the literature on Velázquez; for a particularly self-conscious address to the debate regarding the role that Rubens played in Velázquez’s career, see McKim-Smith 1995.
Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, p. 37.
García-Frías Checa 1999, p. 31; Martínez Ripoll 2001, p. 257; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, p. 17.
Andrés 1964, p. 407.
On the collection of Charles I of England, including a chapter devoted to its sale, see Haskell 2013. On Luis de Haro more specifically, see Burke 2002.
Haskell 2013, p. 153.
While the purchase of all these works is mentioned in Haskell 2013, pp. 151–57, a more thorough account of the movements of each between their sale in England and their reception in Spain can be found in Brown and Elliott 2002. For Correggio’s School of Love, see p. 236; for Tintoretto’s Washing of the Feet, see pp. 238–39; for Raphael’s Holy Family, see p. 244; for Andrea del Sarto’s Virgin and Child between Saint Matthew and an Angel, see p. 248. On the question of Velázquez’s connoisseurship, including his misattribution of Correggio’s School of Love, see especially Harris 1982b.
Corpus velazqueño 2000, vol. 1, pp. 303–4, doc. 362, p. 304, doc. 363, and pp. 304–5, doc. 363a. The paintings and the marble crucifixion in these documents seem to be the works of art requested in correspondence between the king and Nicolás de Madrid, then the prior of the monastery (Andrés 1965, pp. 206–7, doc. 25). On the marble crucifixion, see Tormo y Monzó 1925; Hernández Perera 1960b; and Cruz Yábar 2019.
Carmen García-Frías suggests that Velázquez’s first intervention in the decoration of the Escorial monastery dates instead to the years 1652 and 1653, when the Pantheon was in its final stages of completion (García-Frías Checa 1999, p. 31). She does this on the grounds that one of the witnesses whose testimony was included in Velázquez’s application for admission to the Order of Santiago credited him with “finish[ing] and perfect[ing] the Pantheon of the Escorial” (as per García-Frías, this document appears in Cruzada Villaamil 1885, p. 245: “acabó y perfeccionó el Panteón del Escorial”). However, no other scholar of this period of Velázquez’s life acknowledges this start date, nor are there published primary sources dating to these years that definitively corroborate what is written in this testimony.
Corpus velazqueño 2000, vol. 1, p. 305, doc. 364.
This tentative timeline is offered in Martínez Ripoll 2001, p. 266; it is repeated in Gutiérrez García 2018, p. 65.
Andrés 1964, p. 406.
This is suggested in García-Frías Checa 1999, p. 33.
Santos has a respectable bibliography in his own right. As with all topics concerning the Escorial, Bassegoda i Hugas’s contribution on the Descripcion breve is indispensable (Bassegoda i Hugas 2008a); however, the most thorough recent study of the Descripcion breve and, more specifically, of the ways its scope and contents compare across its many versions is Vega Loechas 2016.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 343: “Descripcion y memoria”; see also Palomino 1947, p. 922; Palomino 1987, p. 166; and Palomino 2018, p. 151. Seemingly every scholar who has worked on this phase of the history of the display of art in the Escorial has been required to render a judgment regarding the open question that is the authenticity of Velázquez’s Memoria. The strongest argument against its authenticity comes from Marías 2004, and the strongest in favor comes from Bassegoda i Hugas 2008b. The person who first discovered the Memoria published a transcription in Castro 1871, pp. 500–520; it has since been included in Corpus velazqueño 2000, vol. 1, pp. 336–44, doc. 407. Scholars have noted the similarities between Velázquez’s Memoria and the writings of Fray Francisco de los Santos; of note in this regard is that Velázquez was in possession of a copy of the 1657 edition of the Descripcion breve (Sánchez Cantón 1925, p. 402, no. 117; Ruiz Pérez 1999, pp. 156–57, cat. 54).
Santos 1657, fols. 41v–43r. See also Bassegoda i Hugas 1998, p. 146; García-Frías Checa 1999, pp. 32–33; Bassegoda i Hugas 2000, p. 474; Martínez Ripoll 2001, pp. 267–69; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 45 and especially 97–107; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002b, pp. 107 and esp. 120–24; Bassegoda i Hugas 2003, p. 36; Bassegoda i Hugas 2004, pp. 317–19; Muñoz González 2006, pp. 399 and 402; and Gutiérrez García 2018, pp. 65–68.
Santos 1657, fols. 43v–51r. See also Bassegoda i Hugas 1998, p. 146; García-Frías Checa 1999, pp. 32–33; Bassegoda i Hugas 2000, p. 474; Martínez Ripoll 2001, pp. 267–69; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 45 and esp. 108–34; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002b, pp. 107 and esp. 124–30; Bassegoda i Hugas 2003, p. 36; Bassegoda i Hugas 2004, pp. 312–16; Muñoz González 2006, pp. 399 and 401–2; and Gutiérrez García 2018, pp. 65–68.
Santos 1657, fols. 70v–73r. See also García-Frías Checa 1999, p. 33; Bassegoda i Hugas 2000, p. 474; Martínez Ripoll 2001, p. 266; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 45 and esp. 135–46; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002b, pp. 107 and esp. 130–32; Bassegoda i Hugas 2003, p. 36; Bassegoda i Hugas 2004, pp. 320–22; Muñoz González 2006, pp. 399 and 402–3; and Gutiérrez García 2018, p. 65.
Scholars sometimes attribute to Velázquez the redecoration of the Old Church at the far end of the chapter rooms across the cloister from the sacristy and ante-sacristy in these same years (see García-Frías Checa 1999, p. 33; Martínez Ripoll 2001, p. 266; Muñoz González 2006, pp. 400 and 404–5; and Gutiérrez García 2018, p. 65). In the 1657 Descripcion breve, Santos records thirty-two paintings in this space, some of them having been moved there from the sacristy and ante-sacristy (Santos 1657, fols. 54v–57r). Bassegoda i Hugas has argued that because some renovation work was being done in that space that was only completed by around February 25, 1661, and a definitive reinstallation of an even larger group of paintings of higher quality itself only done by around March 25, 1661, we can take this first group to be provisional, rather than necessarily representing a finished vision for the space (see Bassegoda i Hugas 2000, pp. 474–75; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 45–46; and Bassegoda i Hugas 2004, p. 312). By the time a second edition of Santos’s Descripcion breve was published in 1667, the group of paintings on view in the Old Church was comparatively unrecognizable (Santos 1667, fols. 58r–61r; see also Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 194–218). Bassegoda i Hugas does assign the sacristy of the pantheon to this phase of Velázquez’s work (see Bassegoda i Hugas 2000, p. 474; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 45–47 and esp. 147–56; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002b, pp. 107 and esp. 132–33; Bassegoda i Hugas 2003, p. 36; Bassegoda i Hugas 2004, pp. 322–23). However, no period sources—neither Chifflet nor Santos, nor any correspondence between friars and king—unequivocally designate this space as among those for which Velázquez was responsible.
Santos 1657, fol. 67r: “Los demas Quadros que ay en estos Capitulos, son tambien de Pintores grandes, como lo muestran en su valentia; mas de todos ellos quedaràn muy pocos en estos Capitulos, porque ha determinado la Magestad, y piedad del Rey Filipo Quarto, que se adornen como la Sacristia, con otros mas estimables, que se estàn buscando por su orden.”
Gutiérrez García 2018, p. 65.
Andrés 1967, pp. 117–18, doc. 1.
This drawing was originally published in López Serrano 1944, p. 23, plate 29, no. 33. Scholars equivocate on the question of the drawing’s authorship, which looks to belong jointly to Velázquez and a court architect, whether Juan Gómez de Mora (see especially Juan Gómez de Mora 1986, p. 362, cat. 203) or Alonso Carbonel (see Martínez Ripoll 2001, p. 270). Either way, Bassegoda i Hugas sees no more likely use for such a drawing than as an installation plan, perhaps so that whoever realized the installation could do so without Velázquez needing to be physically present to oversee it (see Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 47–48, esp. n. 51).
Santos 1667, fols. 70v–86r. See also Bassegoda i Hugas 1998, pp. 146–47; García-Frías Checa 1999, p. 33; Bassegoda i Hugas 2000, p. 475; Martínez Ripoll 2001, pp. 270–73; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 47–49 and 157–70; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002b, pp. 107–8 and esp. 134–37; Bassegoda i Hugas 2003, p. 36; Muñoz González 2006, pp. 399 and 403–4; and Gutiérrez García 2018, p. 65.
Santos 1667, fols. 70v–86r. See also García-Frías Checa 1999, p. 33; Bassegoda i Hugas 2000, pp. 475–76; Martínez Ripoll 2001, p. 274; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 49–50 and 171–86; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002b, p. 108; Bassegoda i Hugas 2003, p. 36; and Muñoz González 2006, pp. 399–400 and 404.
Andrés 1967, p. 118, doc. 1: “El adorno del segundo capítulo no será fácil por ahora, pues me hallo sin pinturas de la calidad necessaria.”
Martínez Ripoll ascribes to Velázquez the decoration of several other spaces, among them the chamber of reliquaries and a choir hung with liturgical vestments, among other rooms on the first and second stories off of the principal cloister (Martínez Ripoll 2001, p. 266). With the exception of the Old Church mentioned above, none is recognized by other scholars as among the spaces for which Velázquez was responsible, and Martínez Ripoll does not provide clear documentation to justify his doing so. Therefore, they will not be included in the present study.
Corpus velazqueño 2000, vol. 1, p. 262, doc. 310.
On the sculpted crucifixions that were installed here in succession over the course of the 1650s, see García-Frías Checa 1999, p. 31; and especially Tormo y Monzó 1925 and Cruz Yábar 2019.
Pereda 2017, pp. 57–63; Pereda 2018, pp. 33–38.
On the relationship between Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese and the unfolding of the Venetian Renaissance, see especially Delieuvin and Habert 2009.
For a recent reconsideration of Ribera’s “neo-Venetianism,” see Dombrowski 2009. On Navarrete at El Escorial, see especially García-Frías Checa 2017.
Muñoz González 2006, pp. 397–98.
Fumaroli 1994 was the foundational essay on this topic. Since then, a comprehensive study on display in the early modern Roman picture gallery has been published as Feigenbaum 2014.
On these and other aristocratic collections in Rome in this period, see Cappelletti 2014.
Strunck 2014.
Mancini 1956, p. 139: “Regole per comprare, collocare e conservare le pitture.” On Giulio Mancini, see especially Gage 2014b and Gage 2016.
Mancini 1956, pp. 144–45: “Ma non vorrei già che fosse messa insieme la medessima schuola e maniera, come per essempio nelle cose sacre tutte le cose di Raffaello e sua scuola, come di Giulio, Timoteo, Buon Fattore et altri già detti, ma vorrei che si tramezzassero con altre maniere / e schuole del medessimo secolo.”
Mancini 1956, p. 144: “Et perchè nelle pitture sono stati notati i secoli rinascente, buono, perfetto, declinante, pertanto, supposti i siti dove si devon collocare le pitture particolari, si dovranno collocare prima le più antiche, osservando al possibile i lumi convenienti e li spatij per le grandezze delle pitture.”
Haskell 2013, pp. 146 and 154.
Andrés 1964, p. 408: “esta pintura está allí aislada de las demás, como la más exquisita, pues, es cierto que Su Majestad acostumbra a llamarla su favorita.” An anonymous record of the paintings in the Escorial dating to 1698 describes it as “the Pearl of King Philip IV” (Andrés 1971, p. 59: “la Perla del Sr. don Felipe IV”), hence the nickname by which it is often referred in secondary literature.
For documentation of the black frames that Velázquez used in the Octagonal Room, see Azcárate 1960b, p. 372; this document also appears cited in a longer treatment of this topic in Aterido Fernández et al. 2004, pp. 370–74. On the paintings recording Velázquez’s hang for the Hall of Mirrors, see chapter 6 of this book. On Velázquez’s use of black frames in the Octagonal Room and the Hall of Mirrors generally, see Aterido Fernández et al. 2004, pp. 370–73.
Mitchell and Roberts 1996b, p. 8. The secondary literature on frames careens between two fascinating extremes. The first of these addresses “the frame” in conceptual, sometimes even metaphorical, terms, with no existing individual frames necessarily in the mind of the author. Exemplary of this approach are texts like Schapiro 1971–73; Derrida 1979; Marin 1982; Derrida 1987; Ortega y Gasset 1990; Simmel 1994; Marin 1996; Stoichita 1997, republished as Stoichita 2015; and Crowther 2009. The second consists of studies of discreet groups of surviving frames, often rich in images, so granular in their breakdown of design styles as to take the form of connoisseurship. Examples of this kind of work include Guggenheim 1897; Brock 1902; Roche 1931; Morazzoni 1951; Bisacca et al. 1990; Pérez-Hita 2006; and Newbery 2007. Most common are general surveys and catalogues covering the whole history of frames in western Europe, century by century, such as Heydenryk 1963; Grimm 1981; Brettell and Starling 1986; Mitchell and Roberts 1996a; Mitchell and Roberts 1996b; Bailey 2002; Lodi and Montanari 2003; Karraker 2009; and Penny 2010, among others. Credit must be given to Lynn Roberts for her extraordinary dedication to the study and publicizing of the history of frames, as exemplified by her establishment and ongoing maintenance of The Frame Blog (https://theframeblog.com/), an ever-expanding repository of articles, interviews, and other resources on frames from all periods of European history, and her illuminating lecture on the topic delivered at the Museo Nacional del Prado on November 28, 2016 (Roberts 2016). Other useful general resources include the bibliographies published on the website of Paul Mitchell Ltd. (https://www.paulmitchell.co.uk/publications/bibliography/) and the website of the National Portrait Gallery, London (https://www.npg.org.uk/research/pro grammes/the-art-of-the-picture-frame/research-bilbiography/). By contrast, close readings of individual frames are comparatively scarce; nevertheless, there is a virtuosic interpretation of the frame on Pisanello’s Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and George (National Gallery, London, NG776) in Wright 2019, pp. 18–19.
Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 372; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002b, p. 138. For the catalogue entry to Tintoretto’s Penitent Magdalene, see Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, p. 131; for Titian’s Christ on the Cross, see Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, p. 132.
This photograph has been published in Cruz Yábar 2019, p. 953, fig. 2.
Bassegoda i Hugas 2002a, pp. 113 and 372; Bassegoda i Hugas 2002b, p. 138.
Andrés 1964, p. 409: “Diego de Velázquez, pintor y ayuda de cámara de Su Majestad, ha estado varios meses ocupado en disponerlo todo y ha dispuesto labrar marcos dorados para los cuadros.” Part of Chifflet’s account, including this mention of Velázquez’s frames, has been included in the Corpus velazqueño 2000, vol. 1, p. 329, doc. 394.
Santos 1657, fol. 47v: “Estos, y todos los demas referidos, despues de la grandeza de su valentia, estàn con Marcos de Talla dorados, vniformes en el lustre, y primor, à quien imitan los Espejos con el mismo adorno, dando à esta Pieça hermosura, y Magestad, y por todas partes lleuandose los ojos, y el respecto, mostrando en su realeza, y porte, ser alhajas de vna Marauilla, y prendas del superior gusto, y deuocion de su Patron, y Dueño, que nunca cessa de ilustrarla, como tan gran Monarca.”
Santos 1667, fol. 83v: “Vniuersalemente estàn con Marcos dorados de talla, anchos, con proporcion, y con molduras de muy buena forma, cõ que de todas maneras hazen magestuoso adorno a estas pieças.”
Cruz Yábar claims that Velázquez put smooth frames on the paintings in the ante-sacristy; he cites no primary source that can support this (Cruz Yábar 2019, p. 952). Among the first visitors to the monastery at El Escorial after Velázquez’s redecoration were Francisco Bertaut, who saw the monastery while in the diplomatic entourage of the Maréchal de Gramont in 1659, on the occasion of the negotiation of the Peace of the Pyrenees, and Antonio de Brunel, who went to El Escorial in 1665 while accompanying the children of Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck, first governor of Suriname, on a grand tour of Europe. While both are appropriately appreciative of the paintings on display there, neither makes any mention of their frames (Bertaut 1959, pp. 617–21; and Brunel 1959, pp. 435–37, respectively). Cosimo de’ Medici visited the monastery in 1668; while surviving versions of his diaries from this trip list painting upon painting by Titian, Raphael, and other artists, he, too, makes no mention of their frames (Mariutti de Sánchez Rivero and Sánchez Rivero 1933, pp. 127–32).
The most complete accounts of this work remain Sullivan 1985 and García Cueto 2016, pp. 195–214. The paintings that can be readily identified in this work are Tintoretto’s Washing of the Feet, visible at far left, and Titian’s Virgin and Child between Saints Anthony of Padua and Roch (MNP, P000288) and van Dyck’s Christ and the Adulteress (Hospital de la Venerable Orden Tercera, Madrid) on the wall at the back of the composition. As per Velázquez’s installation for this space, three vertical-format paintings appear in between them, presumably Titian’s Madonna and Child in an Evening Landscape (Alte Pinakothek, no. 464), Giulio Romano’s Visitation (MNP, P000300), and Titian’s Agony in the Garden (MNP, P000436).
See Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007 and Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015.
AGP, Administración General, Inventarios, Leg. 768, exp. 12, fol. 1: “Negros, Dorados, y maltratados.”
Palomino 1715, unpaginated: “Marco, s, m. La Moldura, ò Guarnicion que circunda, ò guarneze vna Pintura; el qual suele ser liso, ò tallado; dorado, ò negro. Lat. Ornamentum; Circumscriptio Picturae.”
Horacio Pérez-Hita characterizes black frames with carved and gilded foliate motifs at the centers and corners as “a genuinely Spanish contribution to the history of this art, as it was in Spain that they were carried to their ultimate formal consequence” (Pérez-Hita 2006, p. 122). On Spanish frames, see also Timón Tiemblo 1998; Timón Tiemblo 2002; Timón Tiemblo 2010a; and Timón Tiemblo 2010b.
Poussin’s personal correspondence appears to have been first published as Poussin 1824. Omissions of certain letters and discrepancies between the transcriptions published in this book and those more generally accepted in the secondary literature have led this author instead to rely on the transcriptions published in Poussin 1911 and again as Poussin 1968.
Poussin 1911, pp. 20–21; Poussin 1968, p. 20: “il en a besoin, affin que en le considérans en toute ses parties les rayons de l’oeil soient retenus et non point espars au dehors en recepuant les espèses des autres obiects voisins qui venant pesle-mesle, avec les choses dépeintes confondent le jour.” For two especially provocative readings of this letter, see Lebensztejn 1988 and Marin 1999, pp. 5–28.
Poussin 1911, p. 21, n. 2; Poussin 1968, p. 21, n. 2: “bien simples”; “sans or bruni.” Marin addresses the 1650 Self-Portrait in Marin 1999, pp. 183–208. Otherwise, within the enormous literature on Poussin and this painting, Cropper and Dempsey 1996, pp. 177–215, remains standout.
That these are the insights of Poussin’s letter is suggested in Lebensztejn 1988, pp. 37–38.
Félibien 1676, p. 712: “Quadre. On appelle ainsi toutes les bordures quarrées qui enferment quelque ouvrage soit de sculpture soit de peinture, ou autres choses, de quelques matieres qu’ils puissent estre. … Outre que les Quadres servent d’ornement aux tableaux; ils contribuent encore à les faire paroistre davantage.” It is worth noting that Félibien includes an entry for “Bordure, ou Corniche d’un tableau” (Frame [bordure], or frame [corniche] of a painting), which offers no standalone definition but rather simply guides the reader to the entry cited above (Félibien 1676, p. 498).
Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise 1694, p. 113: “Bordure, s. f. Ce qui borde quelque chose, & luy sert d’ornement.”
See de Dominici 1742, p. 256; Baldinucci 1830, p. 123: “che l’adornamento era alle pitture un gran ruffiano.” On the “Salvator Rosa” frame style, see Mitchell and Roberts 1996a, pp. 261–91; Karraker 2009, p. 71; and especially Amendola 2010, Amendola 2012, and Amendola 2014.
Rosa 2003, p. 92, doc. 86: “con l’accompagnamento delle cornici indorate e della vernice, tutte due cose necesarie per renderle più riguardevoli.”
Bellori 2005, p. 414. On the “Carlo Maratta” frame style, see Mitchell and Roberts 1996a, pp. 261–91; Karraker 2009, pp. 27–28; Amendola 2012; and Amendola 2014.
Mancini 1956, pp. 145–46: “Quanto alle cornici non è da dubitare che convengono, prima per essere una difesa alle pitture dai nocumenti esterni, doppo perchè danno maestà alle pitture, che le fanno vedere quasi per una fenestra, o vogliam dire per un orizonte così fattamente circonscritto, e le rendono con una certa maestà ornate. Non mi piace però l’uso d’alcuno introdotto che fanno in tal modo le cornici che sono più in dentro della pittura talmente che quasi la tenghino in fuori et esposta all’ingiurie perchè, oltre che non gli dà quella maestà detta, s’aggiunge l’ingiuria e, quel che è più, il non esser vista la cornice, talchè si fa la spesa per metterla all’oscuro e metter in pericolo la pittura. // E l’ornamento, se deve esser dorato o non dorato, crederei che in alcune cose piccole, di color molto vivace et che non han troppo rilievo, come è la maniera del Baroccio, fossero molto meglio di color nero che dorate, perchè in questo modo non farebbe abbagliar la vista et impedimento nel guardar la pittura. Ma quando la pittura fusse antica, come quelle del secol rinascente e del buono et anco del perfetto, perchè con il tempo già s’è spento il vigor del colore, allhora crederei che fusse meglio il dorarle. Come ancora in questo modo di colorir del Caravaggio che toccano assai di negro, è molto meglio dorarle. Ma nelle pitture piccole, come le miniature o altro di buon maestro, e che si donano a’ prencipi, allhora communimente le cornici si fanno d’ebbano, accompagnato con commettiture di rosette d’argento e fogliami riportati a filetti d’argento e d’oro con metterci appresso, secondo che vien a proposito, ma queste si fanno fare il più dal Sommo Pontefice per donare ad imperatori, re et prencipi grandi.”
On Italian tabernacle frames, see Mitchell and Roberts 1996b, pp. 19–20; and especially Allen and Powell 2010, pp. 32–120.
Alberti 2011, p. 73.
Alberti 2011, p. 39.
On perspective, see Panofsky 1991 and Damisch 1994, among others.
On the design of the Florentine urban landscape according to one-point perspective, see Trachtenberg 1997.
On the frame on this painting, see Roberts 2016, 00:22:30–00:24:18.
On French Rococo frames, see Mitchell and Roberts 1996a, pp. 200–260; Mitchell and Roberts 1996b, pp. 41–43; and especially Pons 1987.
Penny 2010, p. 23.
So characterized in Scott 2005, my reading of which was graciously suggested and guided by Anne Higonnet, who brilliantly expanded upon everything that it had to say in a personal communication, August 22, 2020.
Étienne 2017, pp. 128–29. As Étienne tells it, the view that painting was a simple furnishing lost out to the competing notion that painting should serve as the agent of politics around the time of the French Revolution. Correspondingly, the design of French frames changed to reflect this change in station: The decorative motifs on the frame of Jacques-Louis David’s Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis (J. Paul Getty Museum, 87.PA.27) includes bay leaf garlands like that which Napoleon wore during his coronation (on this frame, see Roberts 2016, 01:10:57–01:14:43). These motifs reinforce the painting’s politico-moral charge, with its veiled message as an allegory of Napoleon in exile and the debt owed him by France.
Dubos 1719, p. 131: “Enfin, les ouvrages des grands Maîtres n’étoient point regardés, dans les temps dont je parle, comme des meubles ordinaires destinés pour embelir les appartemens d’un particulier.”
For the entry on painting (with various subsections devoted to Greek painting, modern painting, and so on), see Diderot 1751–65, pp. 267–80.
Pernety 1757, p. xxj: “Le tableau n’est donc pas seulement un meuble agréable, il est utile, il est instructif.”
On the frame on this painting, see Jeffares 2018.
For some examples of decorative techniques that were used both in the designs of Italian Renaissance frames and in those of contemporaneous furnishings (e.g., cassone), see Mitchell and Roberts 1996a, pp. 28–31 and 41–45; for one especially unexpected approach to the question of painting-as-window in eighteenth-century France, see Étienne 2017, pp. 95–106.
On the picture gallery in particular, see especially Fumaroli 1994. For a more comprehensive approach to the display of art in Roman palaces, see Feigenbaum 2014, the introduction to an entire volume of useful essays on this topic.
Gage 2014b, pp. 204–5.
Fried 2011, p. 107. On the issue of the severing of the gallery picture from its surroundings as a leitmotif in the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, whose oeuvre Fried interprets as a function of the gallery picture and around whose figure he first explores what he will come to call a “Caravaggisti pictorial poetics,” see Fried 2010.
The first collectors to do this were Leopoldo and Giovan Carlo de’ Medici in Florence, who uniformly framed their collections with a highly idiosyncratic auricular style of frame still observable on paintings hanging in the Gallerie degli Uffizi and the Palazzo Pitti (on the “Medici frame,” see especially Mosco 2007).
Fried’s most thorough treatment of this topic remains Fried 2010.
The bibliography on Caravaggio and his followers is substantial. On the iconography of Judith and Holofernes in their work, however, see in particular Terzaghi 2021.
I am grateful to Carmen García-Frías Checa and the staff of the conservation laboratory at the Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, for facilitating access to the frame on Tintoretto’s Penitent Magdalene while it was undergoing restoration.
Bouza Álvarez 2000 makes no mention of the frames on the paintings included in this inventory. That said, Julián Zarco Cuevas compiled a comprehensive inventory of the many objects brought to the Escorial between 1571 and 1598 from several sources, including archival inventories and the essential account of Fray José de Sigüenza (recently republished as Sigüenza 2000). His inventory of the paintings collection—complete with information such as subject, author, dimensions, and, when possible, their frames—can be found in Zarco Cuevas 1930, pp. 655–68; and Zarco Cuevas 1931, pp. 34–94.
Strangely, this drawing does not appear in the catalogue to a major exhibition of Cano’s drawings (Matilla 2001), nor in their catalogue raisonné (Véliz 2011). Nevertheless, the latter includes architectural drawings with an almost identical vegetal pattern to that being compared here to Velázquez’s frame (Véliz 2011, pp. 482–83, cat. 115, and pp. 484–85, cat. 116). That the drawing in question might be meaningfully brought into dialogue with Spanish frames is implied by its inclusion as an illustration in Avila 2019, even though it is not directly commented on in the text. Noteworthy for what follows, this text also makes the claim that retablos can and should be conceived of as large-scale framing devices.
On this retablo, see Wethey 1955, pp. 35–36 and 146–48.
Cruz Yábar suggests that Velázquez chose his frame from a selection of models available from Pedro and José de la Torre (Cruz Yábar 2019, p. 952, n. 19). The text does not offer a source for this, nor a reference to surviving frames by Pedro and José de la Torre with which Velázquez’s design may be compared; nevertheless, insofar as the two sculptors were renowned for their highly baroque retablos, Cruz Yábar’s hypothesis supports the idea that Velázquez’s frame design evokes the decorative ornamentation of a baroque retablo.