DIOSES EN LA TIERRA E EL INGENIOSO HIDALGO DE LA MANCHA : VELÁZQUEZ’S SUBVERSION OF THE HABSBURG MYSTIQUE OF POWER

Sammanfattning: Sometimes the concrete form and skill of a work of art stand in a non-arbitrary or non-contingent relationship with the social circumstances of its facture. I hypothesise that this form and such skill was used by Diego Velázquez for artistically, socially and politically subversive purposes. In particular, I show how Velázquez used painting techniques to undermine the constitutional theory—or fiction—of the reigning monarch as mystically having two bodies: one ʻpublic’, sacred and immortal—even deified—, representing and incarnating the commonwealth, one ʻprivate’ and one mortal, capable of naturalist portraiture. In Hall XII at the Madrid Prado there hangs on your right as you exit a rather small bust portrait of the Iberian Habsburg monarch, Philip IV. It was painted in about 1653, during a pivotal period that saw a general climatic, economic, social, cultural, religious and political crisis and powerful intellectual developments that still characterise Western societies. The picture contains two essentially naturalistic motifs which can be seen from two different vantage points: a bust of a middle-aged man (ʻMotif I’) and, obliquely ʻat a glance’, a skull (ʻMotif II’). Both serve to subvert the constitutional fiction of the King’s Two Bodies: Motif I invites the beholder to approach closer to admire and work out the artist’s already at the time famously ʻloose’ technique, the use of manchas or borrones. The motif will then dissolve and show itself to be artifice which requires the beholder’s cooperation to make it look like the King. It suggests that the Monarchy similarly is an arti-fact that is manu-factured by artists in cooperation with the subjects. Motif II is in effect a vanitas, underlining the mortal and therefore human and transient nature of the monarch, and by implication of the monarchy itself. With the ambition of satisfying the Popperian test of hypothesis falsification, I have proceeded on the basis of the time-hallowed method of the connoisseur of looking closely at works of art in situ and, broadly understood, Wölfflin’s and Panofsky’s theoretical models, together with fundamentals of human psychology and physiology of perception and cognition, assuming an interaction of innate Gestalten and historically and culturally contingent habitus. I interpret my findings in the context of 17C Iberia, including intellectual contributions like that of Pacheco, Carducci, Castiglioni and Gracián. I rely on the rich historical literature on the period and on Philip IV and Velázquez (and their relationship). I make some comparisons between Velázquez, his fellow court-painters Hans Holbein, jr, and Anthony van Dyck, and an artist far from the courts but so close to Velázquez in technique and maybe personal convictions, Frans Hals. My hypothesis relies on three fundamental auxiliary claims—wagered against falsification—to support the claim that Velázquez was a subversive and to give the context for the subversiveness of the portrait of Philip IV: (1) Velázquez did have the practical freedom to produce this subversive royal portrait; (2) it is likely that he used that freedom for this purpose; and (3) he actively manipulated vision and visuality. I at least make likely all three claims. On the basis of Velázquez’s œuvre more generally—especially in his portraits of the marginalised—I show that he had a significant degree of freedom and that he consistently worked towards artistic, social and even political subversion (though not necessarily revolution) using his deep knowledge of vision, visuality and optics—science at the cutting edge in the 17C. As he appears to have suffered from the stain (mancha) of deficient limpieza de sangre, Velázquez’s own person and career—culminating in a knighthood—amounted in itself to social and political subversion. It is appropriate to characterise the technically resourceful Velázquez-the-painter as ingenioso. In fact, as the clever and skilled painter’s hidalguía was almost certainly proved with dissembling and falsified evidence, the mancha of his artisan antecedents—and possibly also of Jewish ancestry—makes him a true ingenioso hidalgo de la mancha.