That quote of Auden's reminded me of the exhibit I saw at the Prado when I visited Madrid last spring. The title was “Velázquez’s Fables.”

My take-away from that exhibit was a note I scribbled down from the placard at the front of one of the rooms. It stated that in the late 1620’s, when Diego Velázquez was in his late 20’s, a married father with a good-paying position as a painter to a duke and in favor with the king, who gave him all sorts of plummy commissions, he decided he needed to go to Rome and borrowed money and permission to do so. Because Velázquez felt he needed to go there, the placard stated, to learn some new tricks. He “sought a formula for depicting convincingly a group of people’s reaction to unexpected news.”

The examples of this put forth by the curator were his The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph’s Bloodied Coat Presented to Jacob. Neither of these paintings did much for me (although I am far from an expert) and in the case of The Forge of Vulcan I thought he failed utterly in his mission statement. I was unfamiliar with the myth and had to look it up. Apparently, the god Apollo appears in, well, the forge of Vulcan, the blacksmith (aka the god of beneficial and hindering fire, creator of volcanic fire and forger of thunderbolts) to alert him to the fact that Vulcan’s wife, Venus, is carrying on with Mars.

Whatevs. Ye gods.

What arrested me was that Velázquez left domesticity, security, prestige and salary to travel to Rome to learn to depict “convincingly a group of people’s reaction to unexpected news.”

What? Why? Home at his well-appointed casa in Madrid, did he wake up in a cold sweat and realize that until then he had only unconvincingly depicted a group of people’s reaction to unexpected news? Or that he had convincingly depicted only one person’s reaction, or a reaction to only expected news? Did he witness such an event – an extended family learning, for example, that the son/ husband/ father they thought drowned at sea was actually okay in Cadiz and limping slowly toward their happy reunion? Did he see that and did he then say “Man! If I only had the talent to depict that!” And why was he so sure that this (questionable) ability of convincingly depicting such a scene could be attained in Rome?

Perhaps you laugh. A painter friend of mine laughed when I asked her. Most likely she was amused at the idea that this sentence on a placard has tormented me for more than seven months. I kept picturing trying to tell my own friends and family that I had to leave all my responsibilities behind to travel to a distant beautiful city so I could to depict (“convincingly”) something most people would never, ever think about or feel was lacking in their lives as consumers of culture.

And then I pictured asking them to give me money to achieve this goal.

And then there’s the question of whether he even succeeded in his goal. To me, no. The Forge of Vulcan (again, no expert) does not demonstrate this ideal. Vulcan and his blacksmith staff do not look like they have received unexpected news, but rather they look the way you or I would look if a clean and rosy half-naked god appeared uninvited in our sweat-drenched workplace. They look, as we would, as though we would rather than he go away -- soon -- so we can bloody well get on with it. His stupid news can wait.

But then a few days ago, I came across Auden's phrase, “artistic problems lovingly worked out for themselves.” And then I saw clearly.

Labels: Auden, The Forge of Venus, Velázquez

posted by Elizabeth at 10:50 PM