Diego Velázquez

He was an individualistic artist of the Baroque period (c. 1600–1750). He began to paint in a precise tenebrist style, later developing a freer manner characterized by bold brushwork. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family and commoners, culminating in his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).


Velázquez's paintings became a model for 19th-century realist and impressionist painters. In the 20th century, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Francis Bacon paid tribute to Velázquez by re-interpreting some of his most iconic images.


Most of his work entered the Spanish royal collection, and by far the best collection is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, though some portraits were sent abroad as diplomatic gifts, especially to the Austrian Habsburgs.

Style and technique[edit]

It is canonical to divide Velázquez's career by his two visits to Italy. He rarely signed his pictures, and the royal archives give the dates of only his most important works. Internal evidence and history pertaining to his portraits supply the rest to a certain extent.


Although acquainted with all the Italian schools and a friend of the foremost painters of his day, Velázquez was strong enough to withstand external influences and work out for himself the development of his own nature and his own principles of art. He rejected the pomp that characterized the portraiture of other European courts, and instead brought an even greater reserve to the understated formula for Habsburg portraiture established by Titian, Antonio Mor, and Alonso Sánchez Coello.^[66] He is known for using a rather limited palette, but he mixed the available paints with great skill to achieve varying hues.^[67] His pigments were not significantly different from those of his contemporaries and he mainly employed azurite, smalt, vermilion, red lake, lead-tin-yellow and ochres.^[68] His early works were painted on canvases prepared with a red-brown ground. He adopted the use of light-gray grounds during his first trip to Italy, and continued using them for the rest of his life.^[69] The change resulted in paintings with greater luminosity and a generally cool, silvery range of color.^[70]


Few drawings are securely attributed to Velázquez.^[71] Although preparatory drawings for some of his paintings exist, his method was to paint directly from life, and x-rays of his paintings reveal that he frequently made changes in his composition as a painting progressed.^[71]