Spanish and Italian design patterns: the experience of Diego Velázquez

According to sources Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599-1660) was a tireless draftsman, although today only a dozen drawings of his own hand survive, some of them of controversial attribution. Graphic work, which he began in his youth in the stimulating milieu of Seville under the guidance of his father-in-law and first teacher, Francisco Pacheco, was particularly practiced by him during his travels in Italy (1629-1631 and 1648-1651), during which he was able to hone his technical studying and copying of Italian designs. It was Pacheco, in his Arte de la Pintura (1649), who described his son-in-law’s propensity for design. After convincing an apprentice to model for him, he portrayed him “in various attitudes and poses, crying, laughing, never trying to avoid any difficulty”. The result was the execution of many heads in charcoal and white lead on blue paper, which gave him a sure hand as a portrait artist. Later, the artist also experimented with different techniques, such as the use of watercolour pen, in an ongoing study that led him to master the ways of his predecessors. Head of a young woman (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, 1622 ca., Charcoal on paper) is an extraordinary snapshot that presents the face of his wife Juana Pacheco, the daughter of his teacher Francisco, portrayed almost entirely while she turns spontaneously towards the beholder. A similar drawing, Head of a girl is also at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (1622 ca., Charcoal on paper). The technique used is the same and even the facial features are similar: in fact the girl has been identified with Juana’s younger sister (but it could also be the couple’s daughter, the little Francisca de Silva Velázquez y Pacheco, born in 1619). The watercolour with the Cathedral of Granada (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, pen and watercolour), made by the young artist in 1629 before embarking for Italy, offered a glimpse of the Andalusian town on paper, depicting its light and  atmosphere. Velázquez is capable of grasping the essence of the place, with an extraordinary capacity for synthesis, dotted with a clear play of light and dark. The elegant Portrait of Cardinal Gaspar de Borja y Velasco (1580-1645) (Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, charcoal on paper) refers to the forties of the seventeenth century, in preparation for the painting which portrays half of his figure that is now in Puerto Rico, in which the archbishop of Seville and Toledo, in an official pose, sternly observes the viewer. In the elegance of the charcoal stretch and the capacity to reproduce the inner life of the character Velázquez evinces having learnt from and appreciated the graphic work of the famous Roman portraitist Ottavio Leoni called the Padovanino (the Paduan). The designs that Velázquez derived from magisterial texts in Italy, such as the Sistine Chapel, represent a reservoir of models which he used back in Spain: this was the case of the Fable of Arachne and Minerva (1657 ca., Madrid Prado Museum, image), in which the nudes of the Sistine Chapel are evoked in the two young spinners in the foreground.

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