By all accounts, the 1650s were a very busy decade for Diego Velázquez. As official painter to the king, Velázquez produced in this single decade what remain his most ambitious and celebrated paintings, paintings whose sophistication would earn him the reputation he still enjoys as one of the greatest painters in the history of Spanish art. But on February 16, 1652, Velázquez was appointed by King Philip IV to a position in the managerial infrastructure of the royal palace that few—if any—painters would enjoy before or after him: that of aposentador mayor de palacio (chamberlain of the royal palace).1 Of the many palatial offices that Velázquez would occupy over the course of his career at the court of Philip IV, none would feature so prominently in Velázquez’s afterlife as that of aposentador mayor. Court biographers and treatise writers Lázaro Díaz del Valle, Jusepe Martínez, and Antonio Palomino would all describe this title as one of the highest honors that Philip IV would bestow on Velázquez over the course of his lifetime. Martínez said that it was a “charge of much importance, and honor.”2 For Díaz del Valle, it was a well-deserved award for the brilliance that Velázquez brought to all his professional pursuits under Philip IV.3 In the now famous biography of the painter in his Museo pictórico y escala óptica, Antonio Palomino echoed the sentiments of these two, saying that it was a great honor for Velázquez to hold this title, but Palomino went on to regret that the very excellence that earned Velázquez this honor—the excellence that he brought to his painting practice—was in fact oppressed by the burden of the many responsibilities that accompanied this title.4 In lengthy prose, Palomino openly lamented that the job of aposentador was so all-consuming as to leave Velázquez with little time to produce paintings in these years, finally concluding that “to suspend the exercise of a skill is more punishment than prize.”5 If the title of aposentador mayor de palacio was at all a great honor, it was one that came to Velázquez, according to Antonio Palomino, at a certain price.
Since the publication of Palomino’s treatise, scholars seem to have accepted this dual characterization of Velázquez’s appointment to aposentador mayor at face value. In his 1885 monograph, Gregorio Cruzada Villaamil cites Palomino directly, saying that “it is not possible to formulate a more correct judgment of this new charge of Velázquez’s than that made by the painter Palomino.”6 “Unfortunately,” Carl Justi writes in his monograph a few years later, “[the job] involved a number of petty duties, which deprived him both of the leisure and disposition for nobler pursuits,” including, one readily imagines, making paintings.7 Jonathan Brown, while acknowledging that this “office carried numerous responsibilities which made use of Velázquez’s capacities as a designer and increased his prestige at court,” nonetheless regretted that “many of [his] duties [as aposentador] put heavy demands on Velázquez’s time and negligible demands on his artistic talents.” “It is no wonder,” he states, “that [in the last eight and a half years of his life] the brushes in Velázquez’s studio were more often wielded by assistants than by the master.”8 Yves Bottineau openly wondered “if a large part of [Velázquez’s] time was not taken up by prosaic problems that one would not imagine would fall … under the jurisdiction of the master [who made] Las Meninas, if archival documents did not make the matter incontestably clear.”9 He ultimately concludes that “Velázquez was exhausted by an activity that kept him away from [artistic] creation.”10 Even Enriqueta Harris, whose account of Velázquez’s appointment to aposentador remains otherwise relatively neutral, subtly echoes Palomino’s caveats: “As Palace Chamberlain as well as Gentleman of the Bedchamber,” she says, “[Velázquez] was fully occupied; yet he still found time to create some of his greatest masterpieces.”11 However each of these scholars phrases it, the overwhelming impression from the historiography is that Palomino was right in saying that whatever the title of aposentador brought to Velázquez in honor and prestige it took away from him in time and energy to devote to the profession for which he is now most famous. In the face of this consensus, however, one is left to wonder if no other approach to Velázquez’s appointment to this post is possible. What, we should ask, might the charge of aposentador mayor de palacio have brought to Velázquez’s painting practice? And, furthermore, what might Velázquez, the painter, have brought to the profession of aposentador mayor?
Whatever demands the job may have made on Velázquez’s time to paint, his appointment to the position of aposentador mayor de palacio put the artist in an unprecedented position in relation to the royal art collection. It is perhaps true that the job of aposentador mayor entailed, more than anything else, the routine maintenance of the appearance of the Alcázar palace interiors. This maintenance work, however, included the oversight of the paintings exhibited on the walls of those interiors, paintings in relation to which Velázquez had sought to make his name since the start of his career at the Spanish court in the 1620s. It was within the parameters of this maintenance work that Velázquez took on the redecoration of the New Room, the large gallery on the first floor of the south façade of the royal palace where Velázquez had witnessed a major installation upon arriving at the Habsburg court three decades prior. Over the course of the 1650s, Velázquez assembled a decorative program for this gallery that would remain virtually unchanged until 1700. It was the most significant curatorial project that the artist executed as aposentador, and quite possibly the most important redecoration made to the Alcázar palace during the reign of Philip IV. In this assignment, more than any other, Velázquez’s simultaneous careers as painter to the king and as curator of his art collection perfectly converged. Velázquez made paintings for this gallery display that further reveal the impact of his curatorial career on his painting practice, demonstrating how the intelligence Velázquez cultivated in his curatorial work could direct his painted output. It was also a project by which Velázquez found the means to pursue the same objectives that Velázquez had pursued over the course of his career as painter to the king, finding in this curatorial project a new medium through which to express his painterly ambitions.
1 Velázquez, aposentador mayor de palacio
The charge of aposentador mayor as Velázquez executed it was defined in the Etiquetas de Palacio (Protocols of the Palace) of Philip IV, published in 1651.12 This text, modeled on the 1545 Etiquetas de Palacio of Charles V, served as a kind of handbook for the many employees of the royal house, detailing the demands of each position and its corresponding salary. As outlined in this text, the aposentador de palacio was at the head of an office with the name of the furriera (the office of the royal house charged with keeping the keys of the royal palace, its cleanliness, the maintenance of its furnishings, and so on). This consisted of a small staff of employees, including ayudas de la furriera, sotoayudas de la furriera, and a mozo de la furriera (assistants to the aposentador de palacio, ordered by decreasing rank).13 They were responsible, on the whole, for ensuring the proper outfitting of the spaces that the king and his court were to inhabit. Much could be made of the apparent privileges that accompanied this title: the possession by the aposentador of keys that opened every door in the royal palace, or his involvement in royal ceremonies. Nevertheless, the job of aposentador de palacio consisted, for the most part, of the mundane, continuous, and occasionally unglamorous upkeep of the royal palace and especially the appearance and furnishing of its interior spaces. The aposentador was required to provide firewood and coal to heat the palace over the course of the year and to ensure the presence and good condition of the furnishings in the king’s apartments, including beds, chairs, tables, and other objects of this kind. In addition, he was required to be present, in person or by proxy, when the king’s apartments were swept clean. When the king traveled to royal sites outside the Alcázar palace, the furriera was required to prepare living quarters for the king and anyone who accompanied him, confirming that there were enough beds for the king and his entire party. And every month, the aposentador de palacio was to prepare reports for the standard (in seventeenth-century parlance, “ordinary”) and any additional (“extraordinary”) expenses required to fund these tasks, including the costs of tools and materials and the salaries of employees who carried them out. These included, among others, locksmiths, carpenters, and floor-sweepers, all of whom answered directly to the aposentador.14 These concerns were, overwhelmingly, what occupied the time and energy of the reigning aposentador de palacio.
Existing records confirm that Velázquez and his aides executed all these tasks during the near decade of his tenure as head of the furriera. Records of monthly expenses exist for every month between March of 1652 and July of 1660 with Velázquez’s name and title visible on the first page. By this time, these documents had become rather lengthy and, in the case of “ordinary” expenses, relatively formulaic: they record the salaries of existing employees and the pensions distributed to the widows of deceased employees, the funds required for raw materials like firewood and coal, and so on. In addition to these official records, hundreds of documents survive recording the expenses required to fund the king’s journeys to other royal sites, as well as individual bills covering the costs of firewood, beds and the changing of linens, the lighting of lamps at night, the production and placement of mats for the floor of the king’s quarters, the supply of curtains for the palace windows, the construction of tables, the gilding of keys, the production of hinges and latches, and so on. These documents bear witness to the close, consistent involvement of the office of the furriera in the day-to-day life of the palace and its basic upkeep.15 Whether or not Velázquez personally authored each of these documents, his name and often his signature make clear his responsibility for their contents and thus his ongoing oversight of the many tasks for which the furriera was responsible. If Palomino was right in suggesting that Velázquez’s time was overwhelmingly taken up by the requirements of his post as aposentador mayor, this documentation stands as the most compelling surviving evidence with which to make the case for it.
But it is less remarkable that Velázquez competently executed the many tasks of the aposentador mayor de palacio than that he was appointed to the position in the first place. When scholars and biographers recognize the great prestige that this title bestowed on Velázquez at the end of a successful career at the court of Philip IV, they implicitly—and rightly—acknowledge this appointment as a kind of professional milestone within the timeline of the painter’s life. What they consistently fail to mention is that within the longer history of the profession of aposentador mayor, Velázquez’s tenure is singular in at least one very noteworthy respect. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the position of aposentador mayor de palacio was occupied by a number of individuals, almost all of whom held the position until death, when a new aposentador was appointed by the reigning king as his replacement. Surviving records dating to before approximately 1598 remain relatively fragmentary. Nevertheless, we can, at the very least, reconstruct a chronology of those who held this profession roughly from this date through the end of the Habsburg dynasty:
1579–1597: Juan de Herrera16
1597–1598: Felipe de Benavides17
1598–1610: Francisco de Mora18
1611–1641: Pedro del Yermo19
1643–1652: Pedro de Torres20
1652–1660: Diego Velázquez21
1660–1664: Francisco de Rojas22
1664: Juan Marban23
1664–1677: Joseph Pacheco24
1677–1698: García Marban25
1701–1706: Juan Francisco de Marañon26
Every one of these was already a long-standing employee of the royal house, having obtained between them a list of titles and positions so varied as to make very clear that there was no fixed path to the post of aposentador. Three of them—Juan de Herrera, Francisco de Mora, and Pedro del Yermo—had worked previously as architects at the court.27 Four of them—Felipe de Benavides, Pedro de Torres, Francisco de Rojas, and Joseph Pacheco—were simultaneously employed as the head of the tapestry workshop. A few of them—Juan Marban, Juan Francisco de Marañon, and, eventually, Diego Velázquez—were knights of the Order of Santiago. In addition to a small number of other positions that the men on this roster had also held at the Habsburg court (mayordomo mayor, ayuda de la furriera, and so on), most of them served as the king’s ayuda de cámara (manservant).28 If there were any prerequisite for obtaining the title of aposentador de palacio, we might see it here, in the post of ayuda de cámara; otherwise, no single trajectory is discernible from the résumés of the figures included in this roster. But what is clear is that of the many positions that Velázquez’s predecessors and successors over the course of the seventeenth century would hold, painter to the king was not one of them. Velázquez was thus the first painter after 1598 to be appointed to the position of aposentador mayor de palacio, and quite possibly the only painter ever to hold this title under the Spanish Habsburgs.
If this is not the date at which the position of aposentador de palacio was first invented, 1598 is nevertheless the most important date in the history of this profession when we consider the special significance of Velázquez’s appointment to the post. At the very start of the reign of Philip III, the organization of the royal house was subject to extensive reforms, and the aposentador de palacio was charged with new responsibilities that would have been of interest to Velázquez when he would obtain the title five decades later.29 A document dated to 1598 and written by Juan Sigoney (the author of the Etiquetas of Charles V) offers a list of the charges and responsibilities of the aposentador de palacio in excess of those recorded in the Etiquetas of Charles V and Philip IV.30 Among other responsibilities, it is stated “that additionally [the aposentador de palacio] is charged with all the paintings and portraits that are hung and placed in the galleries and apartments of his majesty.”31 The paintings in the royal collection were and would remain the jurisdiction of the king’s guardajoyas (treasury), where many of them were stored alongside other precious objects. But the artworks hanging on the palace walls were transferred, as of this reform, to the care of the aposentador de palacio and the office under his control. This begins to explain, for example, why it was Juan Gómez de Mora, then ayuda de la furriera, who delivered the oil paintings, illuminations, and little retablos that were removed from exhibition in the king’s oratory to the guardajoyas in 1623.32 It explains why the 1636 inventory of the contents of the royal palace lists these objects under the care of Simon Rodríguez, by then also an ayuda de la furriera.33 It explains why the team of people that carried out the inventory of 1666 includes, among other figures, Joseph Pacheco (as aposentador de palacio) and Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo and Sebastián de Herrera Barnuevo (both pintores de cámara, court painters, who held the position of ayuda de la furriera at the time of the inventory’s execution).34 The cast of characters responsible for producing much of the documentation that accounts for the display of paintings in the Alcázar palace demonstrates that the 1598 protocol was no honorific certificate but a handbook dictating real behaviors and practices. This remained true into the tenure of Velázquez: marginal annotations to the inventory of 1636 place specific objects directly in Velázquez’s custody. Several of these are dated to 1652, precisely the year he was conferred the title of aposentador.35
The job of aposentador mayor de palacio would thus put Velázquez firmly in charge of the paintings and other objects on view in the royal palace, making of the painter the curator of the royal art collections. Documents recently brought to light by Ángel Aterido Fernández give us a sense of just what this might have meant, in practical terms. The most revealing of these is a document in which Velázquez himself described the specific requirements of his job as follows: In a petition to the king for an extra mozo de la furriera to aid him with the decoration of the many rooms in the palace, Velázquez writes that he requires assistance “to adorn, hang, and clean the paintings,” among other unspecified tasks.36 The cleaning of the paintings had been explicitly included in the furriera’s monthly expense reports since the tenure as aposentador of Pedro de Torres, who listed them among the other furnishings, windows, and doors in the palace to whose cleanliness the furriera diligently attended.37 As for their adornment, we might take this to mean the paintings’ framing, as an inventory consisting entirely of frames in stock in the office of the furriera survives from the period,38 and documentation exists recording an episode in which Alonso Carbonel, ayuda de la furriera, ordered frames from the court woodworker and neglected to ever pay him for them.39 But most interesting, of course, is Velázquez’s assertion that it was his responsibility not only to take care of the paintings on view in the palace but to hang them there. When Gil González Dávila wrote in his 1623 Teatro de las grandezas de la Villa de Madrid Corte de los Reyes Catolicos de España that the aposentador mayor de palacio was responsible for the “composition of the Palace,” this is perhaps what he meant: that the aposentador de palacio had a hand in the arrangement of works exhibited in the palace at any given point in time.40 Velázquez was directly credited, by at least one painter who claimed to have worked with him, with the “composition of the Palace with the decoration of Paintings” that remained on the walls for decades after Velázquez’s death.41 His own descendent Gaspar del Mazo Velázquez asserted that Velázquez undertook “many projects and decorations [for the purpose of] composing and perfecting” the Alcázar while employed as aposentador.42 Employees of the royal house often solicited their desired positions in petitions written to the king; if Velázquez knew that the job of aposentador de palacio would give him a degree of control over the exhibition of artworks, this was certainly part of its appeal.43 As per the document nominating Velázquez to the post, his candidacy was considered on the grounds of a testimony that he himself had authored, in which he stated that already “for many years he [had been] occupied with the decoration and arrangement of the apartment of His Majesty.”44 His appointment to aposentador mayor de palacio would give Velázquez more control over these matters than he had ever exercised.
2 From “New Room” to “Hall of Mirrors”
The redecoration of the New Room in the 1650s was the most significant curatorial project that Velázquez executed in the Alcázar palace while aposentador and easily the most ambitious.45 Although ostensibly begun upon Velázquez’s appointment to aposentador in 1652, this project was eventually given greater urgency thanks to a reception that was scheduled to take place on October 16, 1659, in celebration of the Peace of the Pyrenees that ended a war between Spain and France that had persisted for almost thirty years, and of the wedding between the Spanish Infanta María Teresa and Louis XIV that was its seal.46 Undertaken at a time when the Habsburg monarchy, desperately in want of a viable heir, was at its most fragile, the stakes of the project could not have been higher. The decorative program that Velázquez assembled in this gallery between 1652 and 1659 was appropriately dazzling, including oil paintings, gilded bronze sculptures, furnishings, and a new fresco cycle for the ceiling. The centerpiece of the ensemble was a set of four paintings that had served for three decades as the axis around which the program of the room was continuously reorganized: Titian’s Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg, Titian’s Philip II Offering the Infante Fernando to Victory, Velázquez’s Philip III and the Expulsion of the Moriscos, and Rubens’s Philip IV of Spain on Horseback. Nearly every change that Velázquez made to the decorative program of the New Room might be interpreted as a function of these four works, and of their exhibition together in this room.47 Since their installation in the 1620s, these paintings visualized the lineage of rulers who had governed Spain from the foundation of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, represented by Charles V, to the present day, in the image of Philip IV. Exhibited in this configuration, these portraits of individual kings together visualized the dynasty of which Philip IV acted as the living representative. The subject of the room, to judge by the portrait series, was thus the Spanish monarchy itself.
Matteo Bonuccelli, Lion, 1651, gilt-bronze, 75 × 61 × 107 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, O000453; Lion, 1651, gilt-bronze, 75 × 61 × 107 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, O002939; Lion, 1651, gilt-bronze, 75 × 61 × 107 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, O002940; and Lion, 1651, gilt-bronze, 75 × 61 × 107 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, O002943
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
That Velázquez understood the political stakes of this project is made clear by the many elements he included in the decorative program beyond the oil paintings themselves, all of which reinforced the sovereign majesty of the Habsburg dynasty in different ways. While in Italy, Velázquez had arranged the production and purchase of a set of twelve bronze sculptures of lions modeled on the Medici lions in the Loggia dei Lanzi (fig. 5.1). Cast by Matteo Bonuccelli and gilded by Girolamo Ferrer, the sculptures were sent to Spain in 1652, when all twelve were installed as supports for the six porphyry tables that were already in the gallery.48 In addition, Velázquez had commissioned from Domingo de Rioja and Pedro de la Sota sculptures of eagles (lost), executed in gilded bronze, to frame the eight large mirrors that would give the room its new name, the Hall of Mirrors.49 Lions and eagles both functioned as emblemata of the Habsburgs. In their evocation not of individual rulers but of the dynasty to which those rulers belonged, these lions and eagles effectively reinforced the message communicated not by any one of the royal portraits hanging on the walls of the gallery but by their arrangement all together in a genealogy. If the hang of the portraits in series works as a representation of Habsburg dynasty, it is because their proximity hints at an invisible superstructure that contains them and unites them together—that is, it invokes the absolute monarchic power of which each of the depicted rulers in turn was the living embodiment. This is what makes the portraits sensible as a genealogy, what justifies their exhibition in a chronological series. Rather than capture the visage of any one of the figures in these royal portraits, Velázquez’s additions to the program give visual form to what manifests between them when hung altogether in a single room, and to the invisible structures of power that animate their interrelation. Furthermore, by exhibiting his single-headed eagles in pairs, facing each other across a central axis, Velázquez invokes the existing symbol of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty while simultaneously evoking the memory of its mythic founder, Charles V, and the twin-headed eagle that was his emblem. With the living monarch present in the room, the ensemble assembled around him would have thus served to reinforce the continuity of his power, from the dynasty’s origins to the present day.
The fresco cycle that Velázquez designed for this gallery similarly reiterated the viability of the Spanish monarchy by looking not back to the dynasty’s origins but forward to its posterity. The wedding that occasioned the redecoration of the Hall of Mirrors was a politically significant event that took place at a moment of crisis in the history of the Habsburg dynasty.50 In the decade leading up to the reception, the lack of a male heir to continue the Habsburg line was deeply felt throughout the court.51 A new Habsburg prince was born in 1657. By the time of the reception, the pressing issue of the succession of the most powerful dynasty in Europe was therefore resolved, but just barely. The cycle of frescoes that Velázquez designed for the ceiling of the room depicted a set of subjects entirely suited to this crisis. The cycle included four scenes arranged around a large oval in the center of the ceiling, executed by court painters Francisco Rizi and Juan Carreño de Miranda and especially the Bolognese duo Agostino Mitelli and Angelo Michele Colonna, whom Velázquez brought over from Italy expressly for this purpose after Pietro da Cortona, Philip IV’s preferred candidate, apparently turned down the job.52 According to Palomino, the four frescoes around the central oval depicted scenes from the life of Pandora, including her birth and her wedding to the mythical figure of Epimetheus, a highly unusual iconography appearing seemingly nowhere else at the Spanish court. It cannot be a coincidence that the central scene in the fresco series was not, in fact, the scene of the wedding of Pandora to her suitor, which might have seemed more appropriate for the occasion that was surely looming by the time the fresco cycle was executed in April of 1659.53 Rather, the central scene was that in which the gods of the Roman pantheon assemble to bestow gifts upon Pandora in anticipation of this wedding, an allegory of the Infanta María Teresa’s many admirable virtues and, moreover, a reassertion of the strength of Habsburg progeny.54 The aim here was not—or not only—to celebrate the upcoming wedding of the royal infanta but to stake a claim around the viability of the Habsburg dynasty before a foreign audience. The overwhelming message of the decorative program that Velázquez assembled for this gallery was thus the sovereignty of the Habsburgs, and the sculptures, furnishings, and fresco cycle that Velázquez installed in this gallery all worked in the service of this single message.
As the first painter to stand at the head of such a consequential curatorial project, Velázquez had a unique professional stake in it (and, more specifically, in the final ensemble of paintings chosen for display in this gallery). In the portraits that constructed an image of a political genealogy, Velázquez saw an image of the artistic tradition to which he had diligently worked to lay a claim over the course of his career as a painter. It was not one but two histories that were composed on the walls of the Hall of Mirrors: The first was the lineage of Habsburg kings, the patrons who had made possible the art collection on view in this gallery. The second was that of their painters. Visitors to the gallery universally commented on the visible richness of its furnishings, their enthusiastic responses attesting to the efficacy of the dazzling combination of materials that Velázquez assembled as a whole.55 But they also recognized the paintings for the painters who had made them. Agostino Mitelli, describing the gallery as he saw it in the late 1650s, said that it was “enriched with the paintings of Titian, Paul Rubens, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, [and] Diego Velázquez.”56 On a visit to the court in 1687, the Grand Duke of Moscow wrote that in the paintings on the walls of this gallery, one can enjoy “the dexterity of Titian, the lovely coloring of Rubens, the placement of Velázquez’s figures and of many other excellent painters.”57 Visitors to this gallery were able to recognize the authors of the paintings included in the gallery hang by name, appreciating the paintings as demonstrations of the skills that each of those authors had possessed. The artists who were ultimately included in the redecoration of the Hall of Mirrors would thus be visible to an international public equipped to remember their names. As painter to the king, Velázquez had more to gain from this gallery hang than any other aposentador before him.
Examining the hang of the gallery in terms of the paintings’ authorship, a pattern appears across its four walls. The works of Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez constituted twenty-one of the total thirty-one paintings on view in this gallery by 1659. All of these—with the exception of Velázquez’s four mythological paintings, to be discussed shortly—were already present in the room before Velázquez began.58 The four paintings by Tintoretto (MNP, P000390 and P000399; otherwise lost), one painting by Bassano (MNP, P005263), and Veronese’s Christ among the Doctors in the Temple (MNP, P000491), Finding of Moses,59 and Rebecca and Eliezer60 had all been added to this room between the mid-1630s and 1659.61 The existing documentation of the changes made to the decoration of this room between the mid-1630s and 1659 is so fragmentary as to make it impossible to assign too much significance to any one of these changes because we cannot know under what circumstances each of them was made. Nevertheless, the paintings included in the final hang of the Hall of Mirrors in 1659 form a coherent program, and one that is entirely consistent with the ambitions that Velázquez expressed as a painter over the course of his whole career at the court of Philip IV. If Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez were the protagonists of the hang of this gallery, almost every other painter included in the hang—that is, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Bassano—visualized the tradition of painting to which all three of these painters adhered: a Venetian tradition, the history of which was newly visible in the galleries of the Escorial monastery. The impression of the history of art under the Habsburg kings that visitors to the room would have gotten thus takes the form of another kind of lineage: one spanning Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez, all of whom were patronized by the Spanish monarchy and who thus formed a kind of tradition of painting under the Habsburgs.62
Diego Velázquez, Mercury and Argus, ca. 1659, oil on unlined canvas, 127 × 250 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P001175
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
No change that Velázquez made to the decoration of the Hall of Mirrors during the 1650s was more telling, however, than the production and installation of Velázquez’s four mythological paintings on the south wall of the gallery. Although only one of these has survived to the present day, these were originally a set of four paintings of Venus and Adonis (lost), Cupid and Psyche (lost), Apollo and Marsyas (lost), and Mercury and Argus (fig. 5.2). Of all the contributions that Velázquez could have made as a painter to the hang of paintings in this room, this is an unusual choice: it is the only series of mythological paintings that Velázquez would execute over the course of his career, and the only paintings Velázquez would execute for a gallery that he himself was in the process of redecorating. But if we consider this cycle a response to the very paintings they were meant to join in the hang of this gallery, the reasons behind this unusual choice make themselves clear. Within the hang of this room, Titian and Rubens were both characterized as painters of portraits and mythologies. Even before Velázquez’s involvement in the redecoration of the gallery, Titian was represented on the walls by two royal portraits and four mythological paintings.63 Rubens, similarly, was represented by one royal portrait and nine mythological paintings. Velázquez, by contrast, was only represented by a single royal portrait. If Velázquez sought in the redecoration of this room to position himself as the living member of a tradition of painting represented first and foremost by these two masters, the production and installation of a cycle of mythological paintings would have been the way to do it. In his inclusion of these paintings in the decorative program of the gallery, Velázquez purposefully styles himself, like Rubens and Titian, as a painter both of royal portraits and of mythologies. The decision to make and install a cycle of mythological paintings within the hang of this room is, in this respect, the apotheosis of a career-spanning desire to approximate the success of the two most illustrious painters in the history of art under the Habsburgs.
If the assemblage of paintings all together in a single gallery was an inherently historical project, the cycle of paintings that includes Mercury and Argus was therefore a specifically auto-historicizing gesture.64 They were produced, it would seem, to fulfill a role within a larger narrative that Velázquez, as curator of the gallery in which they were exhibited, would have the occasion to compose. In the Hall of Mirrors, Velázquez thus accomplishes what Maria Loh has coined “autocanonization: the inscription of the self within a larger, linear narrative of a history that he was in the process of writing.”65 One of Velázquez’s great ambitions as a painter to the king was to make history alongside his famous predecessors; here he makes history, by composing its artifacts into a coherent narrative and by using objects of his own design to stage his place in it.
3 Mercury and Argus, Reconsidered
The redecoration of the Hall of Mirrors in the Alcázar palace over the course of the 1650s offered Velázquez a new medium through which to express the very same ambitions expressed in his paintings for King Philip IV. Velázquez’s mythological cycle had a role to play in this, as we already know, but it is worth considering the role that the Hall of Mirrors might have played in the cycle, and the ways that Velázquez’s work curating the contents of this room would determine the form and content of his painting series. The Hall of Mirrors demonstrates how Velázquez’s work as curator of the king’s art collection was informed by his career as painter to the king. The question that logically follows is how the paintings Velázquez made for installation in this gallery, in turn, might demonstrate the ways that Velázquez’s painting practice was informed by his curatorial project.
The best known of these paintings is Velázquez’s Mercury and Argus. Mercury and Argus is often treated in secondary literature on Velázquez’s paintings in isolation and out of context. The painting is rarely interpreted according to the conditions of display that Velázquez might have intended for it: as one of a total of four paintings in a single series, hanging on the walls of the Hall of Mirrors.66 The 1734 fire that burned down the Alcázar palace and destroyed Velázquez’s Apollo and Marsyas, Venus and Adonis, and Cupid and Psyche has made it easier for scholars to treat Mercury and Argus as an autonomous work and to bring it, for better or worse, into dialogue with other images of violence in the history of western European art, or with images of music.67 But period sources suggest that Mercury and Argus cannot be separated from the context for which it was created. The only contemporaneous written text on these paintings takes the form of entries in the 1686 inventory of the contents of the Alcázar palace. These read as follows:
Two other paintings of the same size, [to hang] between windows, three varas wide and one vara tall, of two fables; the one, of Apollo flaying a satyr and the other of Mercury and Argus with a cow: both originals by the hand of Velázquez68
Two other paintings of the same size, a vara tall and a vara and a half wide, the one of Adonis and Venus and the other of Psyche and Cupid: originals by the hand of Velázquez69
However little information about any one of these paintings is provided here, these inventory entries tell us two things about the four paintings all together: The use of the term “entreventana” (between windows) to describe Mercury and Argus and Apollo and Marsyas reminds us that the paintings were designed with an architectural frame in mind, that they were almost certainly intended for installation in this room. The grouping of Apollo and Marsyas and Mercury and Argus in one of these entries and Cupid and Psyche and Venus and Adonis in the other, in addition, tells us that the paintings were conceptualized as a set of pairs. These written descriptions thus give us a sense that the production of this painting in a cycle of four and the hang of the cycle in this gallery were not arbitrary or circumstantial conditions of this particular work. Rather, they constitute integral aspects of a coherent project that includes Mercury and Argus, but whose concept extends far beyond the contents of this single canvas.
Superficially, there are several ways that the form of Velázquez’s mythological cycle registers his awareness of the paintings’ intended exhibition space. It is difficult to evaluate Velázquez’s approach to their design because of the loss of three of the four paintings that comprise this cycle. Mercury and Argus is not a standalone work; it is a single fragment of what has already been suggested was an internally coherent larger project. Nevertheless, Velázquez’s compositional choices at least for Mercury and Argus speak directly to the paintings’ intended viewing site on the south wall of the Hall of Mirrors. That the paintings functioned as entreventanas is specified in the 1686 inventory, and it is a specification with some weight. It indicates, firstly, the precise location that the paintings occupied on the wall and suggests, secondly, that they were to some degree defined by the wall space they were to occupy. The dimensions of the four paintings are readily explained when one considers that the suite was designed to fill a set of particular spaces on the wall, limited on either side by windows and the edge of the wall itself and above and below by the remaining decorative objects in the gallery, be they porphyry tables or other oil paintings. The disposition of the figures of Mercury and Argus horizontally across the picture plane fits well within the rectangularity of the canvas, even drawing attention to the challenge of producing a painting of figures as monumental as those that appeared in Titian’s furias or Rubens’s history paintings within the constraints of the painting’s unusual shape. Cleverer still is Velázquez’s handling of the figures’ faces. Mercury’s eyes are entirely hidden by his winged hat, the rest of his face obscured in shadow. Argus’s expression is barely visible beneath his hair, his features cast down as he sleeps with his chin to his chest. These choices, which are all the more remarkable because they were made by a professional portraitist, would only have been enhanced by the effects of backlighting imposed on them by the painting’s display between windows. There is much that Velázquez’s choices for Mercury and Argus by itself cannot tell us about Velázquez’s pictorial strategy for the cycle as a whole in response to the particular challenges posed by making paintings for the south wall of the Hall of Mirrors. Nevertheless, they demonstrate how the qualities that should have made the space that this cycle eventually occupied disadvantageous as a site of display could be made to work in the service of Velázquez’s demonstration of virtuosity.
Most important is the rigorously symmetrical composition of Mercury and Argus, if not also of the cycle itself (comprised of a set of pairs, displayed symmetrically). The figures of Mercury and Argus, centrifugally positioned along a central axis, echo the symmetrical pairings of lions and eagles in the sculptural decorations that Velázquez purchased in Italy; the symmetrical composition of the cycle as a whole ripples outward in the symmetry of the hang of the paintings within the gallery and the interior architecture of the gallery itself. In his treatise from circa 1675, Jusepe Martínez would define symmetry in art as “the correspondence that there is between parts, and from the parts to the whole.”70 This rule is visible everywhere in this gallery, where east and west walls are symmetrical with each other, where individual walls are symmetrically composed, where single objects are symmetrically designed around central axes. The laws that govern the whole are thus the laws that Velázquez brought to the part. Symmetry is not only the dominating compositional principle of Velázquez’s individual painting: it is the principle by which the curatorial “composition” of the entire gallery is organized.
But for viewers who were capable of reading it, the content of the series reveals the true scope of Velázquez’s ambitions for this project. If Titian and Rubens were characterized in the hang of the gallery as painters of mythologies, this characterization was best exemplified at the Habsburg court in the form of two cycles of mythological paintings that were among the most important contributions to the royal art collection by each master: Titian’s poesie paintings, the cycle of six canvases executed for Habsburg patrons that in turn served as the starting point for the hang of nudes all together in the Alcázar palace; and Rubens’s suite of paintings for the Torre de la Parada. There can be no doubt that Velázquez had these contributions in mind when composing his cycle. Velázquez’s Mercury and Argus undoubtedly takes its subject from Rubens’s Mercury and Argus of the paintings for the Torre de la Parada (fig. 5.3), the red and blue draperies of each figure taking their cues from Rubens’s formulation. Likewise, the most famous painting of the subject of Venus and Adonis at the Habsburg court was Titian’s Venus and Adonis, the second painting in his poesie series and the surest model for Velázquez’s own Venus and Adonis. In the composition of his own painting cycle, Velázquez included subjects derived from other major cycles of mythological paintings produced for Habsburg kings. The same art historical self-awareness that Velázquez brought to the gallery hang thus reappears here, within the cycle itself. By choosing subjects from paintings already on view at the Habsburg court, Velázquez produced a cycle of mythological paintings that is aware of a history of mythological cycles before it, and that folds this history into itself.
Peter Paul Rubens (and workshop), Mercury and Argus, 1636–38, oil on canvas, 180 × 298 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P001673
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Diego Velázquez, The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne, 1655–60, oil on canvas, 220 × 289 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P001173
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Peter Paul Rubens, Pallas and Arachne (sketch), 1636–37, oil on panel, 26.67 × 38.1 cm, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund, 58.18
Image © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, by Travis Fullerton
The most telling paintings in the cycle, from this standpoint, are the paintings whose sources have proven more difficult to locate: Cupid and Psyche and Apollo and Marsyas. For these, we will need to consider more carefully aspects of Velázquez’s reception of the mythological paintings of Rubens and Titian and especially the ways that his reception of either figure could map onto his reception of the other. In particular, we will need to look carefully at Velázquez’s painting The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne (fig. 5.4, henceforth Las Hilanderas, as it is more colloquially known), which he made in the same years in which he was finalizing the decorative program of the Hall of Mirrors. The painting uses a scene of everyday life in the royal tapestry workshop to tell the story of the weaving contest held between Minerva and Arachne originally narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.71 In Ovid’s telling, the tapestry that Arachne weaves illustrates the story of the rape of Europa by Jupiter, who, disguised as a gleaming white bull, carries her across the sea. In her groundbreaking study of the painting, Svetlana Alpers traces Velázquez’s source for each of these stories—the first of which appears to be taking place in the middle ground of Las Hilanderas, the second in the background as a tapestry on the wall behind the figures of Minerva and Arachne—to the mythological cycles of Rubens and Titian. Velázquez’s version of the rape of Europa derives quite clearly from Titian’s painting of the same subject for his poesie series. Alpers also sees in his version of the weaving contest between Minerva and Arachne a reference to Rubens’s painting of this subject for the Torre de la Parada (fig. 5.5).72 The composition thus builds out of images within images, seamlessly merged into a single, coherent narrative. It is, in Alpers’s words, a “complex of copies” that reproduces Titian’s poesie by way of Rubens’s example.73 What Alpers does not point out, however, is that Rubens’s Pallas and Arachne already contains a self-citation to his own Rape of Europa, also executed for the Torre de la Parada (fig. 5.6). By substituting Rubens’s Rape of Europa for that of Titian, Velázquez reimagines the poesie as a point of reference for Rubens’s cycle of mythologies for the Torre de la Parada, willfully seeing in the one mythological cycle the source material for the other. In light of all that Alpers has said about Las Hilanderas, we might consider it a meditation on art historicity, framed as a kind of weaving and interweaving of references to preexisting masters and models. But Velázquez’s insertion of Titian’s Rape of Europa into Rubens’s Pallas and Arachne in Las Hilanderas—especially at the expense of Rubens’s own version of The Rape of Europa—gives a sense of the degree to which the history of art visualized in this work is of Velázquez’s own invention.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of Europa (sketch), 1636–37, oil on panel, 18.9 × 13.7 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P002457
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Peter Paul Rubens, Cupid and Psyche (sketch), 1636–37, oil on panel, 26.6 × 24 cm, Musée Bonnat-Helleu, CM 2
Image © Bayonne, Musée Bonnat-Helleu, by A. Vaquero
It is this inventive take on the mythological paintings of his predecessors, the will- to-historicity at the heart of Las Hilanderas, that begins to explain the choices behind Velázquez’s Cupid and Psyche and Apollo and Marsyas for his own mythological cycle. A source for Velázquez’s Cupid and Psyche has never been identified. As a pair to Venus and Adonis, however, the story of Cupid and Psyche is fitting, as both describe a thwarted love between a deity and a “lesser” being. Moreover, there was a precedent within the mythological canvases of Titian and Rubens for a painting of this subject, albeit not where one might expect. It was not Titian who included a painting of this subject among his poesie, but rather Rubens in his suite for the Torre de la Parada (fig. 5.7). It is a subject of the kind that Titian famously painted from within a cycle executed by Rubens. Insofar as this is the case, this choice of subject suggests that the history of which Velázquez’s mythological cycle is aware is richer than his Mercury and Argus and Venus and Adonis could indicate by themselves. Velázquez’s Cupid and Psyche suggests that he does not view Titian’s poesie and Rubens’s cycle for the Torre de la Parada as isolated events, with no relationship to each other. Alejandro Vergara has convincingly suggested that Titian’s poesie served as an important precedent for the series of mythological paintings that Rubens would make for the Torre de la Parada—in other words, what Titian made for the kings of Spain can account in some way for what Rubens made for the kings of Spain.74 Perhaps this is true; perhaps it is not. It may be the case that Rubens’s Cupid and Psyche, in particular, has no direct relationship to Titian’s poesie at all, given how little Rubens’s painting resembles any one of Titian’s erotic works. What is important here is that by selecting a subject from one cycle that so readily recalls the other, Velázquez imagined—perhaps willfully fabricated—a connection between the masters’ projects. There are many ways that Rubens’s cycle departs from that of Titian: the total number of paintings Rubens made for the Torre de la Parada far exceeds Titian’s six poesie, the scale of the paintings is significantly more varied, and the subjects are much more wide-ranging. Nevertheless, if Velázquez was looking at Rubens’s suite of paintings for the Torre de la Parada for evidence that Rubens painted it with Titian in mind, he would have found it in the small number of paintings of erotic subject matter that Rubens included in this suite, like Rubens’s Cupid and Psyche. In producing a painting of Cupid and Psyche (in reference to Rubens) to serve as a pendant to his Venus and Adonis (a reference to Titian), Velázquez visualized the dialogue between masters in which he sought to participate with his own mythological cycle.
Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, probably 1570s, oil on canvas, 220 × 204 cm, Archbishop’s Palace, Kroměříž, KE 2370, O 107
Image © Arcidiecézní Muzeum Kroměříž (Archdiocesan Museum Kroměříž), by Zdeněk Sodoma
The choice of the subject of Apollo and Marsyas reflects a similar interweaving of the legacies of Rubens and Titian as painters of mythologies reflected in Velázquez’s Cupid and Psyche. To the extent that both can be characterized as paintings of music and violence, the story of Apollo and Marsyas serves as an entirely appropriate pendent to that of Mercury and Argus, and it thus convincingly takes up themes from Rubens’s cycle of paintings for the Torre de la Parada in excess of the erotic adventures of the Greco-Roman gods. Before Velázquez executed this work, there was no single example of a painting of this subject at the Spanish court. Nevertheless, it was not one entirely without precedent in the history of art: one of Titian’s last great mythologies was a painting of precisely this subject (fig. 5.8).75 Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas remains something of a mystery. It is unknown for whom the painting was made or what became of it in the century after Titian finished painting it (assuming, of course, that he did finish painting it).76 The provenance history of this painting is extremely uncertain, and it is unclear that Velázquez ever saw it while in Italy or where he may have heard of it. But if Velázquez did choose the subject of his own Apollo and Marsyas with Titian’s work in mind, then in this painting we see Velázquez bringing his mythological cycle full circle. In Apollo and Marsyas, Velázquez finds a way, through Rubens’s example, to rediscover Titian.
There is an awareness that Velázquez evidences in the cycle, composed out of subjects derived from other cycles, that his own mythological cycle postdates two others; still more importantly, there is a self-conscious positioning of these two cycles as the preconditions for his own. If we are unable to say very much about the pictorial composition of most of the paintings in Velázquez’s cycle, the cycle as a whole is itself a carefully composed work of art. The relationships of the individual paintings to preexisting models and especially their interrelationships work all together to position Velázquez’s cycle as the culmination of a history of mythological cycles that unfolds as a dialogue between Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez himself. If it is the only mythological cycle that Velázquez would produce over the course of his career, it was not the first that had ever been made for Spanish patrons, and this is very much the point. The interventions that Velázquez made to the final hang of the Hall of Mirrors permitted him to stage a history of art under the Habsburgs, one whose protagonists were Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez. This revision to the historical record that is effectuated when Velázquez’s cycle is inserted into the gallery hang is thus thematized within the cycle itself: his mythological cycle is Velázquez’s performance of his place in the history of art under the Habsburgs, by which Velázquez repeats the performance of Titian and Rubens before him, and which takes this performance as its very subject.
There is still another way that Velázquez’s cycle is a performative repetition of the history of art under the Habsburgs. Titian and Rubens did not only produce series of mythological paintings for the kings of Spain; they produced these paintings for installation in royal sites. As has been noted above, Titian’s letter of September 10, 1554, to King Philip II makes clear that the poesie were intended by their author to be hung in a camerino in the palace. Whether or not Velázquez knew this, it was a desire that eventually found its strange realization in the Vaults of Titian, a site with which Velázquez was deeply familiar. And the earliest known documentation of the paintings for the Torre de la Parada describes these as paintings that the king specifically commissioned for this royal site, perhaps even in advance of the selection of Rubens as their painter. While negotiating their commission, Philip IV’s representative in the Netherlands writes to him the following: “[As for] the paintings that Your Excellency orders me to have made for the Torre [de la Parada], Rubens is already in charge of them and tells me that [he] has started some of them.”77 In both cases, whether or not a site is specified by name, the installation of the painting cycle in a royal exhibition space is written into the cycle from the start; in both cases, Titian’s and Rubens’s paintings functioned as the visible centerpieces of a display program of a royal site. When Velázquez inserts his mythological cycle into the decorative program of the Hall of Mirrors, the history spanning Titian and Rubens effectively repeats itself. It is not only their subject matter or the production of these paintings as a cycle that situates these paintings and their maker within a larger history of art production at the Habsburg court: installation, in and of itself, here constitutes a part of Velázquez’s artistic performance. And as quite possibly the first painter in the history of the profession to hold the title of aposentador mayor de palacio, it was an artistic gesture that Velázquez was uniquely in the position to make.
The lament that Antonio Palomino issued in his 1724 biography of Diego Velázquez has reverberated throughout the painter’s historiography. But while it may be true that the total number of great works that Velázquez produced toward the end of his career is very low, a painting like Mercury and Argus would have been impossible except under the circumstances in which Velázquez found himself in the last decade of his life and career. If his work in the palace was an honorable burden, as Palomino would characterize it, this was not a burden that impeded Velázquez’s painting practice at the end of his life. This was, in certain respects, its very foundation.
Velázquez’s nomination to aposentador mayor de palacio on February 16, 1652, is recorded in a now famous document from his personal file at the Archivo General de Palacio (AGP, Personal, Caja 1084, exp. 9; see also Corpus velazqueño 2000, vol. 1, pp. 263–64, doc. 312). The first page of this document is reproduced in Brown 1986b, p. 215; and in Barrios Pintado 1999, p. 5. A transcription is available in Cruzada Villaamil 1885, pp. 182–83. In addition, the text is reproduced and transcribed in its entirety in Cordero and Hernández 2000, pp. 210–15. Javier Cordero and Ricardo Hernández provide an analysis of this text in Cordero and Hernández 2000, pp. 95–97. It is worth mentioning here that the document follows a formula common to nominations under Philip IV: Within the document, individual candidates were proposed by a committee of noblemen with a brief résumé of the virtues that qualified each of them for the position in question and a ranking of their relative suitability according to the opinion of each member of the committee. The king would then write, on the front of the document, the name of his chosen candidate from among those listed. Very often this corresponded to the candidate who ranked most consistently among the first or second choices of the members of the selection committee; as scholars have previously noted, it is especially remarkable that Velázquez was selected despite his ranking among the third and fourth candidates proposed.
Martínez 1673–75, fol. 71r: “cargo de mucha importancia, y honor”; see also Martínez 2017, p. 107.
García López 2008, pp. 255 and 256.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 340–42; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 918–20; Palomino 1987, pp. 163–64; and Palomino 2018, pp. 137–44. In a much gentler reproach than that of Palomino, Martínez mentions in his biography of Velázquez that the charge of aposentador left Velázquez little time to produce paintings, quickly qualifying this statement by saying that the few paintings that Velázquez did manage to produce in these years were very successful (Martínez 1673–75, fol. 71r; see also Martínez 2017, pp. 107–8).
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 340–41: “Suspender el exercicio de una habilidad, mas es castigo que premio”; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 918–19; Palomino 1987, pp. 163–64; and Palomino 2018, pp. 138–43.
Cruzada Villaamil 1885, p. 184: “No puede formarse un juicio más acertado sobre este Nuevo cargo de Velázquez que el hecho por el pintor Palomino.”
Justi 1889, p. 373.
Brown 1986b, pp. 215–17.
Bottineau 1998, p. 250: “On peut se demander, cependant, si une grande partie de son temps ne fut pas absorbée par des problèmes prosaïques, dont on n’imaginerait pas qu’ils aient relevé, dans les détails ou dans la supervision, du maître des Ménines, si les documents d’archives n’apportaient à ce sujet des précisions incontestables.”
Bottineau 1998, p. 250: “Vélasquez s’est usé dans une activité qui l’éloignait de la création.”
Harris 1982a, p. 29.
Copies of these remain extant in various Spanish repositories (see, among others, AGP, Administración General, Caja 49, exp. 2; and Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS 1080). Although the seventeenth-century iteration of the job of aposentador de palacio was modeled on the role described in the Etiquetas of Charles V, Cordero and Hernández situate the origins of this position even earlier, under the reign of the Catholic kings (Cordero and Hernández 2000, p. 99). Theirs is the most thorough treatment of Velázquez’s career as aposentador in secondary literature to date, although major monographs frequently include comparatively abbreviated accounts. The reader should take note that the Etiquetas of both Charles V and Philip IV include other aposentadores, called the aposentadores de casa and the aposentadores de camino, respectively (BNE, MSS 1080, 41r; BNE, MSS 1041, 50v–51r). These were different offices entirely, with their own histories and their own rosters of employees.
The total number of employees included on the roster was subject to change over time depending on the perceived need for a larger or smaller staff to aid the aposentador in the realization of his duties.
Again, copies of these Etiquetas are available for consultation in a number of Spanish repositories (see, among others, AGP, Histórica, Caja 53, exp. 2; and BNE, MSS 1041).
Documents pertaining to these and related issues can be found in AGP, Administración General, Legajo 6735; and AGP, Administración General, Legajo 624. Reproductions and transcriptions of similar documents are provided in Cordero and Hernández 2000, pp. 216–359.
According to surviving documentation, Juan de Herrera held the position of aposentador de palacio as early as 1579, although these documents do not specify that this was the year that Herrera received this appointment (AGP, Registros, T. VI, fol. 283v–284; additional documents from this year are cited in Wilkinson Zerner 1993, p. 175, n. 51). That he held the position until his death is perhaps confirmed by his written will and testament in 1584, in which he describes himself as aposentador mayor de palacio (Llaguno y Amirola 1829, p. 342), and in the notice of his death in 1597, in which Herrera is again described as aposentador mayor (Llaguno y Amirola 1829, p. 357).
The first record in which Felipe de Benavides appears listed as aposentador de palacio dates to the year 1597, which we might take to be the year in which Benavides was appointed to the position (AGP, Registros, T. IX, fol. 227). A record exists of his death in 1598, which we might take to be the probable date that he vacated the position of aposentador (AGP, Registros, T. IX, fol. 317).
We can date the start of Francisco de Mora’s tenure as aposentador mayor de palacio to 1598 thanks to a baptismal record from this year naming him as such (Iglesia Parroquial de Santiago, Madrid, Libro 3.o de Bautismos, fol. 37; cited in Cervera Vera 1984, p. 64, n. 16). Documents in the Archivo General de Palacio and in the Archivo General de Simancas dating to 1601 and 1604 confirm Francisco de Mora as aposentador mayor de palacio among the employees of the royal house (AGP, Adminstración General, Legajo 624; AGP, Administración General, Legajo 710; AGS, Casa y Sitios Reales, Legajo 304, fol. 94; and AGS, Casa y Sitios Reales, Legajo 322, fol. 252). We can date the end of his tenure to 1610 thanks to two documents, one listing salaries for Francisco de Mora’s employees in the royal house between 1605 and 1610 that remained unpaid after his death (AGP, Personal, Caja 2654, exp. 13), and the other the inventory of his possessions taken on August 10, 1610, which explicitly describes him as aposentador mayor de palacio (Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid, Protocolo de Bartolomé Gallo, 1610 to 1612, Protocolo 2698; cited in Cervera Vera 1950, p. 155).
Pedro del Yermo swore in as aposentador de palacio in April of 1611 (AGP, Personal, Caja 1111, exp. 3), and documents from within the records of the furriera confirm his occupation of the post starting as early as July 1, 1611 (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 896). His continued occupation of this position is recorded in documents dating to 1614 and 1615 (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 896). In addition, a “Pedro del Yelmo” is named as the current aposentador mayor de palacio in González Dávila’s 1623 Teatro de las grandezas (González Dávila 1623, p. 334). His death in 1641 (and with it, his evacuation of the post of aposentador) is recorded in two documents, one from Pedro del Yermo’s own personal file (AGP, Personal, Caja 1111, exp. 3) and another from the personal file of Juan Gómez de Mora, who would ask the king to consider his candidacy for this office in Yermo’s place (AGP, Personal, Caja 448, exp. 6).
Pedro de Torres was nominated to aposentador mayor de palacio on January 28, 1643 (AGP, Personal, Caja 1040, exp. 5; his swearing in as such on January 31 of the same year is recorded in AGP, Personal, Caja 40, exp. 10). His promotion to secretario de cámara, which occasioned his evacuation of the position of aposentador, is recorded in a document dating his swearing in as such to February 8, 1652 (AGP, Personal, Caja 1040, exp. 5). The last expense reports that he executed for the furriera date to February of 1652 (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 898). In addition, Antonio Palomino names Pedro de Torres Velázquez’s immediate predecessor in his biography of the painter (Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 340; see also Palomino 1947, p. 918; Palomino 1987, p. 163; Palomino 2018, p. 137).
Documents among the records of the furriera demonstrate Velázquez’s continued exercise of this office from the year of his appointment until his death in 1660 (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 898).
A document from Velázquez’s personal file that confirms his nomination to aposentador on February 16, 1952, and his death in August of 1660 lists the next three aposentadores after him, starting with Francisco de Rojas on August 9, 1660. The document gives the date of Rojas’s death in July of 1664 (AGP, Personal, Caja 1084, exp. 9). Documents from Francisco de Rojas’s personal file describe him as aposentador mayor de palacio as early as September 1660 and confirm the date of his death (AGP, Personal, Caja 912, exp. 35). His vacating this job upon his death is explicitly stated in the document nominating his successor (AGP, Personal, Caja 617, exp. 3). There is, in addition, one document in the archive of the Museo del Prado dated to 1661 regarding the passage of some furnishings to the care of Francisco de Rojas that explicitly names him as Velázquez’s successor (Archivo Museo del Prado, Caja 3635, exp. 18), and Antonio Palomino also names him as such in his biography of Velázquez (Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 340; see also Palomino 1947, p. 918; Palomino 1987, p. 163; Palomino 2018, p. 137).
Juan Marban is included in the above-mentioned list of aposentadores following Velázquez in his personal file, recording his appointment in July 8, 1664, and his death in September 1664 (AGP, Personal, Caja 1084, exp. 9). A document recording Juan Marban’s appointment to aposentador mayor de palacio as Francisco de Rojas’s replacement is also extant (AGP, Personal, Caja 617, exp. 3). His unusually brief tenure is addressed in a document in his personal file written by his widow Maria de Montalvan, who says that she hopes to receive the pension he would have enjoyed as aposentador even though he was not able to exercise the office for very long (AGP, Personal, Caja 617, exp. 1).
Joseph Pacheco, who was previously a candidate for the position in competition with Juan Marban, is the last aposentador to appear in the roster of aposentadores after Velázquez included in his personal file, where Pacheco’s appointment is dated to September 19, 1664 (AGP, Personal, Caja 1084, exp. 9). His occupation of the position is confirmed in a document from Francisco de Rojas’s personal file (AGP, Personal, Caja 912, exp. 35). Unlike many of his predecessors, Pacheco did not vacate the position by dying out of it; he was excused from the post for unspecified reasons in a document dating to January 26, 1677 (AGP, Personal, Caja 777, exp. 35).
A number of documents confirming García Marban’s nomination to aposentador on January 26, 1677, remain extant in his personal file, including his official nomination (AGP, Personal, Caja 617, exp. 3). His death in December 1698 is recorded in a document filed with other documents pertaining to the employees of the royal house, specifically among the papers pertaining to the aposentadores (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 624).
Juan Francisco de Marañon, who originally appeared as a candidate for the position of aposentador when it was given to García Marban, was finally appointed as such in on March 7, 1701, and was officially sworn in on March 9 of the same year (AGP, Personal, Caja 616, exp. 2). Although his official nomination specifies that he succeeded García Marban, who vacated the position upon his death, the document does not account for the brief period between Marban’s death and Marañon’s appointment. Marañon would die out of the position in 1706, at which point Luis de Valdes succeeded him (AGP, Personal, Caja 1311, exp. 5). It is perhaps worth noting, however, that Luis de Valdes had already served since 1702 as a kind of interim aposentador because Marañon was too ill to carry out the duties of this office.
José Manuel Barbeito Díez has previously suggested that Juan Gómez de Mora may have once held the position of aposentador mayor de palacio, but it is unclear what primary source documentation exists to support this claim (Barbeito Díez 1999). Gómez de Mora does credit himself with serving as aposentador de palacio during the visit of a pair of foreign diplomats to the court of Philip IV in a document dating to April 4, 1932 (AGP, Personal, Caja 448, exp. 6). However, if he did so, it is likely because then-aposentador Pedro del Yermo was not in the condition to exercise this office himself.
The practice of appointing an ayuda de cámara to the position of aposentador was so consistent that when Juan Francisco de Marañon received his appointment in 1701, he requested on the very day that he swore in as aposentador that the king appoint him to ayuda de cámara, precisely on the grounds that so many aposentadores before him had enjoyed both honors simultaneously (AGP, Personal, Caja 616, exp. 2).
The organization of the royal house under Philip III is thoroughly studied in Mayoral López 2007. This unpublished thesis includes in its first chapter an overview of the history of the Etiquetas de Palacio from their origins under Charles V through their eventual reform under Philip IV. The remaining chapters include careful analyses of each of the employees of the royal house and the history of his job title, with an extensive bibliography of relevant secondary literature.
AGP, Administración General, Caja 939, exp. 7. For a complete transcription of this document, see appendix.
AGP, Administración General, Caja 939, exp. 7: “que assimismo se le haga cargo de todas las pinturas y retratos que estubieren colgados y puestas en las galerias y aposentos de su mag.d.”
The inventory of these is reproduced in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, pp. 196–201, after an early twentieth-century transcription by F. J. Sánchez Cantón. Although the original document is now lost, Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo offer a brief but helpful summary of the history of this document, its discovery, and eventual disappearance (Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, p. 191).
Documents pertaining to the transfer of these objects from Juan Gómez de Mora’s charge to that of Simon Rodríguez can be found in AGP, Personal, Caja 911, exp. 6. This inventory is transcribed and annotated in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, pp. 71–127. The original and a manuscript copy have both survived (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 768). Toward the end of Pedro del Yermo’s tenure as aposentador, Yermo was excused from many of his assignments, which were then delegated to Simon Rodríguez (AGP, Personal, Caja 911, exp. 6). This included executing the furriera’s monthly expense reports, on which Simon Rodríguez’s name appears and which are conserved in AGP, Administración General, Legajo 897.
A useful overview of the contents of the inventory of 1666 of the Alcázar palace and the circumstances surrounding its production can be found in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 17–21. A full list of the pintores de cámara employed between 1666 and 1700 who also held other titles can be found in the table in Aterido Fernández 2015, pp. 358–61.
These appear on fols. 1 and 11 of the first copy of this document and on fols. 16, 22, and 23 of the second copy of this document, both in AGP, Administración General, Legajo 768, exp. 2; see also Cruzada Villaamil 1885, p. 185. The objects cited included maps, desks, religious paintings, and a portrait.
AGP, Personal, Caja 947, exp. 25: “aderezar, colgar, y limpiar las pinturas.” The relevant paragraph is published in Aterido Fernández 2015, p. 325.
AGP, Administración General, Legajo 898. It is worth mentioning here that the cleaning of the paintings cited in these documents does not apparently correspond to the cleaning of artworks as executed by modern conservators and restoration specialists.
AGP, Administración General, Legajo 768, exp. 12.
AGP, Administración General, Legajo 711.
González Dávila 1623, p. 333: “la composicion de Palacio.” The information about the aposentador mayor de palacio provided in González Dávila’s text would be repeated in later editions of Alfonso Núñez de Castro’s Libro historico politico, solo Madrid es corte, y el cortesano en Madrid (Núñez de Castro 1698, pp. 163–64). Cruzada Villaamil transcribes this part of one edition of this text in Cruzada Villaamil 1885, pp. 184–85.
AGP, Personal, Caja 979, exp. 9: “la composicion de Palacio con el adorno de Pinturas.” Citations from this document pertaining to curatorial matters are published in Aterido Fernández 2015, p. 324. Mentions of Velázquez’s hand in the decoration of the royal palace can be found scattered throughout the testimonials included in Velázquez’s application to the Order of Santiago (Archivo Histórico Nacional, Órdenes Militares, Caballeros de Santiago, exp. 7778; see also, Corpus velazqueño 2000, vol. 1, pp. 344–451, docs. 408–408.17). And in one of the monthly reports of “extraordinary” expenses that Velázquez would execute in the late 1650s for the furriera, he would record a payment made to Carlos de Salazar for “composing the Galería del Cierzo” (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 898: “componer la Galeria del Cierzo”).
AGS, Casa y Reales Sitios, Legajo 316, fol. 334: “muchas obras y adornos para conponer y perficionar.”
Carl Justi explicitly claims that Velázquez solicited the office directly in Justi 1889, p. 375.
AGP, Personal, Caja 1084, exp. 9: “que ha muchos anos que se ocupa en el adorno y compostura de el aposento de VMg.d.” This part of the document is transcribed in Cordero and Hernández 2000, p. 95.
For histories of this room (including, to varying degrees, its construction, use, and decoration), see Bottineau 1956–58, pt. 2, pp. 34–47; Crawford Volk 1980; Orso 1986, pp. 32–117; Barbeito Díez 1992, pp. 129–36; Checa Cremades 1994a, pp. 391–94; Rodríguez Rebollo 2006, pp. 96–109; Pierguidi 2011; Barbeito Díez 2015; and Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 58–70.
Gramont 1717, vol. 2, p. 170. The signing of the peace treaty itself and the handing off of the infanta would occasion another significant project that Velázquez executed as aposentador mayor de palacio, albeit not one that would require the hang or the production of paintings: the construction of the Spanish pavilion on Pheasant Island, between France and Spain (Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 351–54; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 932–35; Palomino 1987, pp. 175–78; Palomino 2018, pp. 178–87). On the role of art in the negotiation of the Peace of the Pyrenees, see Portús Pérez and Ribeton 2016.
The most comprehensive record that survives of the 1659 hang of the New Room is the inventory of the contents of this room in the 1686 inventory of the contents of the Alcázar palace. The original document survives in the Archivo General de Palacio (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 38, exp. 3), but the relevant portion of this inventory is transcribed and analyzed in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 700–724, nos. 76–106 and 1584–603. The New Room was not included in the 1666 inventory of the Alcázar because this inventory was never finished. This is explicitly stated in an inventory of the changes made to the hang of paintings in the Alcázar palace between 1666 and 1686 (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 768, exp. 5; see also Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 901–8). If the 1686 inventory was executed with the 1666 inventory in hand, this suggests that the 1686 inventory might have been executed specifically for the purposes of completing the task left unfinished by the writers of the 1666 inventory.
See Herrero Sanz 2007 and Cruz Yábar 2017. See also Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 719–21, nos. 1584–89. The contracts for their founding and their gilding, respectively, are reproduced in Corpus velazqueño 2000, vol. 1, pp. 216–17, doc. 245a (see also Parisi 2007a, pp. 353–54, doc. 3); and Corpus velazqueño 2000, vol. 1, pp. 255–56, doc. 302a (see also Parisi 2007a, pp. 358–59, doc. 10).
See Barrio Moya 1989 and Cruz Yábar 2016. See also Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 723–24, nos. 1596–603. In his article, Juan María Cruz Yábar proposes that the idea to ornament the frames on the mirrors with eagles was originally that of Alonso Carbonel, the architect who oversaw the remodeling of the Hall of Mirrors between 1639 and 1942, nevertheless ultimately affirming that their final form can be credited to Velázquez (Cruz Yábar 2016). The Spanish salon de los espejos is thought to have inspired a now much more famous counterpart at the French court of Louis XIV; for this galerie des glaces and others within the longer history of the “hall of mirrors” as an exhibition strategy, see Bazin-Henry 2021.
For a particularly compelling account of the ways that this crisis expressed itself in other forms of early modern Spanish art (namely theater), see the third chapter of Bass 2008.
Philip IV voices this in his personal correspondence to his confidantes (see Seco Serrano 1958).
Accounts of the services rendered to Diego Velázquez by Agostino Mitelli and Angelo Michele Colonna are provided in Antonio Palomino’s biography of Diego Velázquez in El museo pictórico y escala óptica (Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 343–47; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 922–26; Palomino 1987, pp. 166–70; Palomino 2018, pp. 150–65) and in Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s biographies of Angelo Michele Colonna and Agostino Mitelli in the Felsina pittrice, vite de pittori bolognesi (Malvasia 1678, pp. 389–420). While Steven Orso is the first to interpret the unusual iconography of the ceiling in relation to the overall program of the Hall of Mirrors (Orso 1986, pp. 104–7), Ángel Aterido Fernández and Felipe Pereda have since provided a more convincing reading (Aterido Fernández and Pereda 2004). The most recent and complete accounts of the work executed by these two painters at the court in Spain, however, remain those of Salvador Salort Pons (Salort Pons 2002, pp. 147–82) and especially David García Cueto (García Cueto 2005). On Velázquez’s efforts to contract Pietro da Cortona’s services for this work, see especially Colomer 1993, in addition to García Cueto 2005, pp. 57–60; and Salort Pons 2002, pp. 105–9.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 344–45; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 923–25; Palomino 1987, pp. 167–69; and Palomino 2018, pp. 154–60.
This is the interpretation provided in García Cueto 2005, pp. 118–46. This interpretation is echoed in the Maréchal de Gramont’s own judgment of the infanta in his memoirs, wherein he comments on the “rare qualities with which [she] is gifted” (Gramont 1717, vol. 2, p. 196: “rares qualitez dont la Serenissime Infante est doüée”) and describes the infanta as “a Princess full of virtues and charming qualities” (Gramont 1717, vol. 2, p. 268: “une Princesse pleine de vertus & de qualitez charmantes”).
For period commentary on the decorative program of this gallery, see, among others, the account of Antonio Palomino in Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 348–439 (see also Palomino 1947, pp. 928–29; Palomino 1987, p. 172; Palomino 2018, pp. 169–70); the account of the Maréchal de Gramont in Gramont 1717, vol. 2, p. 194; the account of Lázaro Díaz del Valle, published as García López 2008, pp. 255 and 257–58; and the account of the ambassador of the Grand Duke of Moscow, cited in Checa Cremades 1994a, p. 502.
Cited in García Cueto 2005, p. 101, n. 290: “arrichitto di quadri di Ticiano, Paulo Rubens, Tintoreti, Paolo Veronese, Diego Velasco.”
Cited in Checa Cremades 1994a, p. 502: “la destreza de Tiziano, lo colorido y hermoso de Rubens, la colocación de las figuras de Velázquez y de otros muchos pintores excelentes.”
All the paintings by Titian included in the 1659 hang of the gallery are already recorded there in the inventory of 1636, as was Velázquez’s portrait of Philip III (Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, p. 84, no. 409). Rubens’s equestrian portrait of Philip IV (lost), Reconciliation of Jacob and Esau (Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, no. inv. 1302), Mucius Scaevola before Lars Porsenna (lost), and Achilles Discovered by Ulysses and Diomedes (MNP, P001661) are also all recorded in this gallery in the inventory of 1636 (Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, pp. 84–85, nos. 411, 408, 414, and 415, respectively). Rubens’s Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia (MNP, P001664) and Satyr and Tigress (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Gal.-Nr. 974) are described in this room in the inventory of 1636 as Diosa Ceres and Un Sátiro, respectively (Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, p. 86, nos. 428 and 427, respectively). The remaining four (The Reconciliation of the Romans and Sabines [lost], The Rape of the Sabine Women [lost], Perseus Freeing Andromeda [MNP, P001663], and Hercules and Antaeus [lost]) were commissioned for this room between 1636 and the painter’s death (Vergara 1999, pp. 134–36).
It is possible that the painting described in the 1686 inventory as Veronese’s Finding of Moses is simply a misattribution of the painting of this subject recorded in this gallery in the 1636 inventory, which, although left unattributed in this inventory, is now thought to be the painting of this subject by Orazio Gentileschi in the Prado (MNP, P000147; Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, p. 85, no. 413). This is first suggested in Bottineau 1956–58, pt. 2, pp. 43–44.
It is possible that Veronese’s Rebecca and Eliezer, presumed lost until now, is in fact the painting of this subject by Battista Zelotti currently in the possession of the Prado, and that the attribution of this painting to Veronese in the 1686 inventory of the Hall of Mirrors is simply incorrect (MNP, P000512; Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 65 and 714, no. 98).
Gloria Martínez Leiva and Ángel Rodríguez Rebollo discuss the provenance of all of these in their recent book on the 1666 inventory of the Alcázar palace. In many cases, it has been suggested that Velázquez might have purchased these works while in Italy between the years of 1648 and 1651, but the the provenance cannot be securely reconstructed for any (Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 711–15, nos. 91–98). Two accounts of the paintings that Velázquez purchased during these years survive to the present day, the first in Marco Boschini’s La carta del navegar pitoresco: dialogo tra vn Senator venetian deletante, e vn professor de Pitura, soto nome d’Ecelenza, e de Compare and the second in Antonio Palomino’s biography of Velázquez. While these two accounts provide contradictory information that make a definitive list of the paintings acquired in Italy uncertain, it is noteworthy that the accounts of both writers suggest that Velázquez purchased more paintings by Veronese and Tintoretto than by any other individual painter (Salort Pons 2002, pp. 130–31). We can be certain, therefore, that the sudden appearance of works by these two painters in the display program of the Hall of Mirrors did not come about by chance.
The latest record of the contents of this room before the year 1659 can be found in the 1636 inventory of the Alcázar palace. The original is in the possession of the Archivo General de Palacio (AGP, Administración General, Legajo 768, exp. 2). The relevant entries from this inventory are reproduced in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, pp. 84–86, nos. 401–38, with corresponding images provided in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, pp. 138–43.
It is worth repeating that the four mythological paintings hanging in this room (namely the furias that factored so importantly in the first chapter of this book) were not, in fact, all executed by Titian. Although all four of them were originally authored by Titian, two of these were lost and replaced by copies executed by Alonso Sánchez, as is faithfully recorded in the 1636 inventory of the contents of royal art collection (Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, p. 84, nos. 402–5). In the inventory of 1686, however, the four paintings are all described as “originals by the hand of Titian,” a designation that allows us to believe that the original authorship of the paintings was not forgotten by their courtly audience (Bottineau 1956–58, pt. 2, p. 40: “originales de mano de Ticiano”). Although the furias appear in much of the general secondary literature on Titian, the most dedicated single study on these works is Falomir Faus 2014a.
This from a painter who, it should be mentioned, was in possession of not only three copies of art historical vite but also Francisco Pacheco’s Arte de la Pintura, which includes the earliest known biography of Diego Velázquez himself (Sánchez Cantón 1925, p. 394, no. 43; Ruiz Pérez 1999, pp. 212–13, cat. 81, pp. 230–31, cat. 89, and pp. 252–53, cat. 100).
Loh 2007, p. 87.
Convincing associations between the four paintings are offered in Portús Pérez 2007, associations that make more plausible the idea that the four paintings were conceived as a series. The painting has been interpreted specifically as a function of its exhibition site only twice before: in an essay by Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualis and in Steven Orso’s book on the decoration of the New Room, both of whose efforts to resituate the painting within the New Room lead them to the conclusion that Mercury and Argus has an allegorical significance in keeping with the larger theme of the Habsburg dynasty as defenders of the Catholic faith. Specifically, Borrás Gualis argues that Mercury and Argus is a political reinterpretation of the story of Mercury and Argus as it appears in Juan Pérez de Moya’s Philosophia Secreta: donde debaxo de historias fabulosas, se contiene mucha doctrina prouechosa a todos estudios, con el origen de los Idolos, o Dioses de la Gentilidad. Borrás Gualis does not say, however, how the subjects of Apollo and Marsyas, Venus and Adonis, or Cupid and Psyche—not all of which appear in Pérez de Moya’s treatise—support this reading (Borrás Gualis 1999). Steven Orso reads all four paintings as cautionary tales about the human behaviors that might elicit reward or punishment, respectively (Orso 1986, pp. 103–4). By contrast, Simon Vosters is the only scholar to write on Mercury and Argus that believes the painting cannot date to the redecoration of the New Room because of what he interprets as a reference to the painting in Manuel de Gallegos’s 1637 ode to the Buen Retiro, Obras varias al real palacio del Bven Retiro (Vosters 1990, p. 365). This author, however, cannot find a clear reference to Mercury and Argus anywhere in this text (Gallegos 1637).
For Mercury and Argus as an image of violence, see Svetlana Alpers’s chapter on the painting in Alpers 2005, pp. 111–32. For Mercury and Argus as an image of music, see Benito Olmos et al. 1997 and Flórez Asensio 2005, pp. 155–68.
AGP, Administración General, Legajo 38, exp. 3, fol. 8: “Otros dos quadros yguales, de entrebentanas, de a tres varas de ancho y vara de alto, de dos fábulas; la una, de Apolo deshollando [un sátiro] y la otra de Mercurio y Argos con una vaca: ambos originales de mano de Velazquez.”
AGP, Administración General, Legajo 38, exp. 3, fol. 8: “Otros dos quadros yguales, de vara de alto y vara y media de ancho, el uno de Adonis y Venus y el otro de Siquis y Cupido: originales de mano de Velazquez.”
Martínez 1673–75, fol. 5r: “la correspondencia q; hai entre las partes, y de ellas al todo”; see also Martínez 2017, p. 43.
The particular iconography of this painting has not always been so certain. On the painting’s subject and meaning, see Angulo Íñiguez 1948 and the related Angulo Íñiguez 1952; Tolnay 1949; Cavallius 1972; Millner Kahr 1980; Burke et al. 1981; Sebastián López 1984 and the related Sebastián López 1986; Moffitt 1985 and Moffitt 1986b; Stapleford and Potter 1987; Sotomayor Román 1990; Bedaux 1992; Pita Andrade 1992; Martín del Burgo 2001 and the related Martín del Burgo 2006; Krieger 2002; Bauer and Bauer 2003; Sanmartín Arce 2003 and the related Sanmartín Arce 2005; Hellwig 2004; Alpers 2005; Portús Pérez 2005; Moreno Amaya 2007; the relevant chapters of Knox 2009; Angelini 2010; and Portús Pérez 2020. On the related issue of Pedro de Arce (the painting’s owner) in particular, see Caturla 1948 and Marías 2003a. All this is in addition to the many monographs on the painter, which reliably include an account of the painting.
Like many of his most interesting paintings for the Torre de la Parada, all that survives of this work is an oil sketch. On Rubens’s oil sketches, see Held 1980; and Lammertse and Vergara 2018.
Alpers 2005, p. 194. Alpers offers a preliminary version of the same argument in Alpers 1999 and further explores the interrelation between these three painters in Alpers 2002.
Vergara 1999, p. 130. We know that Velázquez was present to observe Rubens’s studious production of copies of Titian’s poesie while in residence at the court between 1628 and 1629, copies which entered the royal art collection upon Rubens’s death in 1640 (on these copies, see Cavalli-Björkman et al. 1987; and Vergara 1999, pp. 98–104).
As with many of the paintings by Titian in this book, the bibliography on this painting is substantial, overlapping to no small degree with the books on Titian and his late paintings already cited above. On Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas in particular, however, a select bibliography might include Neumann 1962; Fehl 1968; Wyss 1996, pp. 133–41; Cranston 2007; Held 2008; Carvalho 2010; Rosand 2010; Campbell 2016; Apesos 2018; and Sapir 2018.
In his still essential catalogue of Titian’s mythological paintings, Harold Wethey lists no primary sources that make mention of this work, with the exception of a single inventory dating to 1655 and thus after Velázquez’s final departure from Italy (Wethey 1975, pp. 153–54).
Rooses and Ruelens 1909, p. 170: “Las pinturas que me manda V.M. para la Torre que se hagan, está ya Rubens encargado dellas y me avisa se han comenzado algunas.”