Bartolomé Esteban Murillo 1617-82. A Brief Comparison with Velázquez and Zurbarán. Murillo’s art is indelibly linked to Seville, the city where he lived and died and which was, with Madrid, the primary centre of artistic activity in the country. Predictably, Murillo’s paintings are often compared with those of contemporaries associated with the city, whether born […]
Category Archives: Spanish Art
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo 1617-82. Of all the painters of Spain’s Golden Age (approx. 1500-1700), Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is the one most closely associated with Seville, Spain’s largest and most dynamic city for much of that period, and gateway to the Americas (commonly known as Las Indias). Murillo was born in Seville in December 1617 and […]
Zurbarán. Christ on the Cross 1627. Temptation of St. Jerome 1657. Although from an agricultural village in Extremadura and of modest means, Zurbarán overcame his provincial background and social inferiority to become the leading painter in Seville, Spain’s most vibrant and wealthiest city for much of the 17th century and –with the capital, Madrid— the […]
Zurbaran’s Life 1598-1664. When asked to name some great Spanish painters, Francisco de Zurbarán may not come immediately to mind to the casual art lover. Nevertheless, he figures prominently in that celebrated group of Spanish Golden Age artists who flowered in the 17th century, including Diego de Velázquez (1598-1660), Jusepe de Ribera (1590-1652), and Bartolomé […]
Velázquez: Las Meninas (1656): Reality and the Viewer. Of the many descriptions of Las Meninas (aka The Ladies in Waiting, Maids of Honour or The Family of King Philip IV), one of the most frequent is that the scene depicted has all the appearance of reality, that it is true to life. A word sometimes […]
Velázquez. Las Meninas. Introduction and Status Symbol. Few paintings have received such critical acclaim or been subject to so many interpretations and analyses as Velázquez’s Las Meninas aka The Ladies in Waiting (1656). Within 50 years (1692), the Italian Baroque artist, Luca Giordano, called it “the theology of painting,” following on the comment of his […]
Velázquez. Las Hilanderas or The Fable of Arachne. Las Hilanderas (1655-60) is one of Velázquez’s last paintings and one of his most complex. For long it was viewed primarily as a genre painting depicting women at work in the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Isabel in Madrid. The genre interpretation changed in 1948 to a […]
Velázquez. Mythology. Bacchus. Vulcan. Mars. Mercury. Velázquez completed nine paintings inspired by Classical mythology. The first, Los borrachos aka Bacchus or The Feast of Bacchus (1628-29), was completed just before he undertook his first trip to Italy (1629-31). It was followed shortly after by his second mythological work, The Forge of Vulcan (1630) done in […]
Velázquez and Classical Mythology. The Rokeby Venus. By and large, Spanish painters of the Golden Age (approx. 1500-1680) were not drawn to classical mythological topics, although there was –paradoxically- no shortage of mythological works in the country owing to the large collections owned by many wealthy Spaniards (notably the royal collection). However, these paintings were […]
Velázquez. Madrid. Italy. 1631-60. [This post follows on Velázquez: From Seville to Madrid (The Court) 1623-31.] After a fruitful first trip to Italy, Velázquez was back in Madrid in January 1631 at the time plans were being made to build the pleasure palace of the Buen Retiro. Its construction, thought up by Olivares, had two […]