“Brushing that surface is a sense of movement, of breathing impermanence. This is how Nieto looked in mid-thought, in mid-life, at this moment; there is no straining after the definitive. The man is here, supremely conjured in paint, but the picture does not give all of him because there is always more within him. He is allowed his privacy, his secrecy, his full mystery as a man, which is the respect Velazquez gives all of his stitters. Monarchs, chamberlains, watersellers, dwarves: they are all sovereign of themselves.”
~ Laura Cummings - The Vanishing Man
Portrait of Jose Nieto - Diego Velazquez ca. 1630
The Easter weekend last week allowed me the opportunity of building a story of perspective around a favourite painting (The Kitchenmaid at the Inn at Emmaus) by a favourite artist (Diego Velazquez). The groundbreaking temerity in depicting that key New Testament scene from the perspective of a kitchenmaid, broke radically with a tradition of keeping the great unwashed out of the main focus of religious art or even any art unless of course, it was to show them in their wretchedness and/or depravity (viz. Hieronymus Bosch’s representations of Hell). The Kitchenmaid was painted in around 1618 when Velazquez was a precocious 19-year-old and remained one of the very few religiously themed paintings he ever produced. However, the fact that he chose the perspective and the main character of his painting that he did and the gentle, respectful appreciation he establishes with the kitchenmaid and his capturing of her as a real person, was characteristic of all of his works.
“His portraits are not just the living, breathing likeness, but the seeing, feeling being in the very moment of life and thought. Nobody has ever surpassed his way of making pictures that seem to represent the experience - the immediacy - of seeing in themselves.”
~ Laura Cummings - The Vanishing Man
I have been revisiting Velazquez and immersing myself in the deep intimacy of his portraits and art this last week, picking up on a theme that suggested itself to me last week and took on an urgency the more I reflected on the man and his uncompromising dedication to his mission. Velazquez - perhaps more than any other artist - forces us to recognise the dignity of the individual and to see what he sees. By capturing the “living, breathing likeness” of his subjects high and, most especially low, he insists that we confront and acknowledge the indwelling complexity and singularity of each individual and catch ourselves in the act of superficiality and prejudice as he forces the intimacy of that recognition into our consciousness. It is simply not possible to stare into the eyes of a Velazquez subject and not be drawn into a connection, an awe in some cases, of the singular, tangible individual spirit facing us. Stripped of their accouterments - the crowns and feathers and artifacts of dignity - or even with them, the character of the individual subject transcends both costume and props and we are able to experience them in all their humanity - the good, the bad, and the ugly but always the complex.
It is dawning on me that this is exactly what we need to train in ourselves, every day and in every encounter and always. It is the weapon of resistance to the concept that we are a mass, to be herded like cattle or managed like inventory. Our ability to truly see the singularity of each human being - created in God’s image - and to act upon that truth is how we resist the tyranny of dehumanization. It is what I am calling the Velazquez Imperative.
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