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Notes
* It has not been possible to include as many illustrations in this article as I would have wished. However, many of these images may be familiar to readers already and they can all be found in the exhibition catalogue, Velázquez in Seville, edited by Michael Clarke (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1996) as well as in Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez (London: Phaidon, 1982) and Jonathan Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 1986).
1. Ronald Cueto, ‘The Great Babylon of Spain and the Devout: Politics, Religion and Piety in the Seville of Velázquez’, in Velázquez in Seville, 29–33 (p. 33).
2. Francisco Pacheco, El arte de la pintura, ed. B. Bassegoda i Hugas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990), 519. For a detailed discussion of the significance of the term ‘imitation of nature’ in treatises on painting see Jeremy Roe, ‘Velázquez's “Imitation” of Nature Seen through “ojos doctos”: A Study of Painting, Classicism and Tridentine Reform in Seville’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 2002).
3. See William Stirling Maxwell, Velázquez (London: J. W. Parker & Son, 1855); Carl Justi, Diego Velázquez and his Times, trans. A. H. Keane (London: H. Grevel & Co., 1889).
4. Lleó Cañal, ‘The Cultivated Elite of Velázquez's Seville’, in Velázquez in Seville, 23–27; Enriqueta Harris, ‘Velázquez, Sevillian Painter of Sacred Subjects’, ibid., 46–47; David Davies, ‘Velázquez's bodegones’, ibid., 51–65; Gridley Mckim-Smith, ‘La técnica Sevillana de Velázquez’, Velázquez y Sevilla, ed. Alfredo J. Morales (Sevilla: Aldeasa, 1999), 109–23.
5. For an introduction to the range of scholars, including Rioja, working in Seville at the time of Velázquez's apprenticeship and early career see Jonathan Brown's seminal study ‘Theory of Art in the Academy of Francisco Pacheco’, in his Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-century Spanish Painting (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1978).
6. Miguel Morán Turina and Javier Portús Pérez, El arte de mirar: la pintura y su público en la España de Velázquez (Madrid: ISTMO, 1997), 8.
7. ‘[…] i pittori, i letterati, gl'idioti e gli spirituali’ (G. Paleotti, ‘Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane’, in Trattati d'arte del cinquecento, ed. P. Barocchi, 3 vols [Bari: G. Laterza, 1960–62], II, 117–509 [p. 497]).
8. L. B. Alberti, On Painting, trans. C. Grayson (London: Penguin, 1991), 88.
9. Pacheco's collections of manuscripts held in Madrid's Biblioteca Nacional and at the Universidad de Sevilla document his iconographical research and his requests for scholars to approve his paintings. The responses to his Last Judgement (1610–14) were later included as two of his three chapters discussing decorum in the Arte de la pintura (El arte de la pintura, ed. Bassegoda i Hugas, 291–340). For further discussion of Pacheco's studies see Brown, Images and Ideas, 60–83.
10. Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). For analysis of this text and David Summers' see Roe, ‘Velázquez's “Imitation” of Nature’.
11. David Summers, The Judgement of Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1987). Summers discussed Rhetoric at various points in this text. In Chapter 7, ‘The Light of the Piazza’, in his section ‘Cicero on the Appeal of Eloquence’, he addressed the effect of rhetoric on both listeners trained in the art and the ‘unskilled crowd’, which offers a paradigm to understand Paleotti's classification of different spectators. He went on to discuss this in relationship to Paleotti's treatise.
12. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
13. Further discussion of this theme is found in: Svetlana Alpers, ‘Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's Lives’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXIII (1960), 190–215; Peinture et rhétorique. Actes du Colloque de l'Académie de France à Rome, ed. O. Bonfait (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994), which includes Marc Fumaroli, ‘Ut pictura rhetorica divina’, 77–104; Alberto Carrere and José Saborit, Retórica de la pintura (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000).
14. ‘perusadere le persone alla pieta et ordinarle a Dio’ (Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini, 215).
15. ‘dilettare, insegnare e movere’ (ibid.). Paleotti's discussion draws on his examination of the causes for Painting's invention: Chapter 12, ‘Delle cause perché s'introducessero le imagini profane’. He described four: the need to communicate, Painting's use as a medium for knowledge, the delight gained from images, and the virtuous effects images can have. On this foundation he addressed the Christian traditions of painting.
16. Gaspar Gutiérrez de los Ríos, Noticia general para la estimación de las artes y de la manera en que conocen las liberales de las que son mecánicas y serviles (Madrid: Pedro Madrigal, 1599); Juan de Butrón, Discursos apologéticos en que se defiende la ingenuidad del arte de la pintura, que es liberal y noble de todos derechos (Madrid: L. Sánchez, 1626).
17. Butrón's most important of discussion spectators is found in his fourth and fourteenth discourses. The former offers an important distinction between the ‘simple’ spectator and more erudite responses. The latter discourse focuses on Painting's evangelizing function.
18. Another important example of painting criticism is Pablo de Céspedes, Discurso de la antigua y moderna pintura y escultura […], written for the scholar Pedro de Valencia in 1604. The manuscript was first published in Volume III of J. A. Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes en España, 3 vols (Madrid: Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1965).
19. Fray José de Sigüenza, Fundación del monasterio de El Escorial por Felipe II (Madrid: Apostolado de la Prensa, 1927).
20. Pacheco, El arte de la pintura, ed. Bassegoda i Hugas, 339. The poem concludes the Arte's discussion of decorum and follows the approvals for the painting discussed above.
21. Pacheco, El arte de la pintura, 340.
22. Marc Fumaroli, L'Âge de l'éloquence: rhétorique et ‘res literaria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique (Paris: Champion, 1980).
23. First published in Lisbon in 1576.
24. Retórica de la pintura, 194. Carrere and Saborit's discussion departs from the structure given in Cicero's Ad Herenium. Cicero listed three qualities a style must have: taste (elegantiam), artistic composition (compositionem) and distinction (dignitatem). Latinitas and perspicuitas are discussed in the section on taste and ornatus in the final section of M. Tulli Cicero, Ad Herenium, trans. H. Caplan (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1954), 268–75.
25. Fumaroli, L'Âge de l'éloquence, 148. Hereafter the English terms perspicuity and ornament are used.
26. Hilary Dansey Smith, Preaching in the Spanish Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1978), 94, n. 6. Smith's study, based on preachers' handbooks as well as theoretical treatises, identified two ‘camps’ of rhetorical theory, one favouring ‘sincerity and plain-speaking’, identified with Granada, and the other ‘eloquence and elegance’. On the basis of her analysis of published sermons, she qualified this by saying that the divisions are not clear and that ‘some preachers are positively inconsistent’.
27. Until his death in 1615 Medina was one of the central figures of Seville's intellectual life that took an active interest in painting. He gave advice to Pacheco on the subject matter of his compositions, including the Last Judgement, and to the renowned patron Fernando Enríquez Afán de Ribera, the third Duke of Alcalá, regarding the commissioning of paintings.
28. Fernando de Herrera, Obras de Garcilaso de la Vega con anotaciones (Seville, 1580).
29. Smith, Preaching in the Spanish Golden Age, 97.
30. ‘Tratados de la erudición’, Biblioteca Nacional, MS.1713 (Madrid), fol. 11v.
31. Ibid., fol. 12v: ‘cualquiera destos estilos podrá tener muchas diferencias porque puede ser más apretado o más remiso, pero así de mirar mucho huir los vicios que tiene cada uno semejantes que alguno suele usar por grande el hinchado i espumoso o el áspero demasiadamente i oscuro, por delgado el ínfimo i por florido el lascivo descompuesto i vano’. Rioja signalled the difficulty of identifying any one style of sacred rhetoric, which indicates his awareness of the debates noted by Smith.
32. Rioja's metaphorical use of the verb ‘to paint’ refers to spoken descriptions, but it indicates the close relationship between rhetoric, ekphrasis and painting.
33. Rioja's awareness of Classical texts on painting criticism may be detected here. Both Gutiérrez and Butrón refer to Xenophon's Memorabilia, which recorded a series of questions on Painting's potential to imitate concerning which Socrates asked the painter Parrhasius. Their conversation addressed the following points. Firstly Painting's ability to ‘represent and reproduce figures high and low, in light and in shadow […] young and old’; then its aesthetic potential through the combination of ‘the most beautiful details of several […] to make the whole figure look beautiful’; followed by the expression of mental states such as: ‘[…] nobility […] servility […] prudence […] and vulgarity […] reflected in the face and in the attitudes of the body’. Parrhasius confirmed that all were achieved by painting. Socrates' fourth and final questions combined an aesthetic and ethical concern asking Parrhasius which he thought ‘most pleasing […] one whose features and bearing reflect a beautiful and good lovable character, or one who is the embodiment of what is ugly and depraved and hateful’. Parrhasius replied, ‘No doubt there is a great difference, Socrates’ (Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. O. J. Todd [London: Loeb Classical Library, 1968], 233–35).
34. Rioja's treatise concluded on the subject of invention and the preacher's training. He emphasized the importance of the use of historical texts, moral philosophy and ‘arts such as sculpture painting and architecture’ for the ‘pertinent speculation they offer’. ‘Tratados de la erudición’, fol. 17v–18r: ‘de algunas artes como escultura, pintura i arquitectura es razón que se tenga noticia si quiera de lo especulativo para tratar las cosas que dellas se ofrecieren atinadamente […]’.
35. Three versions of this painting exist, two full-length portraits and one half-length copy. The copy in the Museo del Prado is signed 1618, but the scroll has been removed. Fortunately it is intact in the Araoz version.
36. See Suzanne Stratton, The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1994).
37. Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: Reaktion, 1995), 113.
38. Ibid., 199.
39. See Juan Miguel Serrera, ‘Velázquez and Sevillian Painting of his Time’, in Velázquez in Seville, 37–43 (p. 38) and Harris, ‘Velázquez, Sevillian Painter of Sacred Subjects’, 45–49 (p. 46)
40. For discussion of these themes see: McKim-Smith, ‘La técnica Sevillana de Velázquez’; Javier Portús Pérez, Pintura y pensamiento en la España de Lope de Vega (Hondarribia-Guipúzcoa: Nerea, 1999); Fumaroli, ‘Ut pictura rhetorica divina’; Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. R. Miller (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989); Roe, ‘Velázquez's “Imitation” of Nature’.
41. Pacheco had travelled there in 1611 as well as to Córdoba, Toledo, Madrid and El Pardo.
42. Antonio Palomino, Lives of the Eminent Spanish Painters and Sculptors, trans. Nina Mallory (New York: Cambridge U. P., 1987), 143.