Spanish Painters :: essays research papers

Spanish painter, the countrys bang-upest baroque artist, who, with Francisco de Goya and El Greco, forms the great triumvirate of Spanish painting.Velzquez was born in Seville on June 6, 1599, the oldest of six children two his parents were from the modest nobility. Between 1611 and 1617 the young Velzquez instituteed as an apprentice to Francisco Pacheco, a Sevillian Mannerist painter who became Velzquezs father-in-law. During his savant years Velzquez absorbed the most popular contemporaneous styles of painting, derived, in part, from both Flemish and Italian realism.Many of his earliest paintings show a truehearted naturalist bias, as does The Meal, which may have been his first work as an independent master after passing the examination of the Guild of perfection Luke. This painting belongs to the first of three categoriesthe bodegn, or kitchen piece, along with portraits and religious scenesinto which his new works, executed between about 1617 and 1623, may be placed. I n his kitchen pieces, a few figures are combined with studied still-life objects, as in pee Seller of Seville. The masterly effects of light and shadow, as hygienic as the direct observation of nature, make inevitable a comparison with the work of the Italian painter Caravaggio. Velzquezs religious paintings, images of simple piety, portray models drawn from the streets of Seville, as Pacheco states in his biography of Velzquez. In Adoration of the Magi, for example, the artist painted his give birth family in the guise of biblical figures, including a self-portrait as well.Velzquez was also well acquainted with members of the intellectual circles of Seville. Pacheco was the director of an informal humanist academy at its meetings the young artist was introduced to such people as the great poet Luis de Gngora y Argote, whose portrait he executed in 1622. Such cope with was important for Velzquezs later work on mythological and classical subjects.In 1622 Velzquez made his first t rip to Madrid, to see the royal painting collections, however more likely in an unsuccessful search for a positioning as court painter. In 1623, however, he returned to the capital and, after execution of instrument a portrait of the king, was named official painter to Philip IV. The portrait was the first among some such sober, direct renditions of the king, the royal family, and members of the court. Indeed, throughout the later 1620s, most of his efforts were utilize to portraiture. Mythological subjects would at times occupy his attention, as in Bacchus or The Drinkers.