Velázquez: Painter and Courtier

Velázquez: Painter and Courtier

Jonathan Brown

#2704 of 3,809 books · #973 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (1986).

This book is a collection of 32 articles about Velázquez which appeared in scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues and newspapers and magazines between 1964 and 2006. Several are published in English for the first time. The text is the record of a lifelong engagement with the life and works of this enigmatic artist and evaluates many of the numerous attempts to solve the mysteries presented by the Spaniard's paintings. These questions are considered in the final essay, "Velázquez, today and tomorrow", which is published here for the first time. Two themes unite the essays. Velázquez was the court painter to Philip IV, and the changing relationship between painter and patron provides the framework for interpreting the artist's career. The centerpiece of this relationship is Velázquez's Las Meninas, which is the subject of two long articles, the now-classic "On the Meaning of Las Meninas" (1978) and "Las Meninas as a masterpiece" (1999). The second theme is the problem of attributions and the related question of Velázquez's innovative technique. Velázquez was not a prolific painter. As the supply of securely-attributed works is now mostly in museums, and as the price of great pictures continues to reach new heights, questions of authenticity become increasingly contentious. In this book, Brown considers the problem in its widest dimensions and participates in the debate about individual attributions.