Velázquez, The
Spinners, 1657
Once upon a time, a blog was written on a windy
spring day in London ….
I commence this essay with a framing device.
Frames are indispensible to all forms of art. They demarcate the boundary
between the touchable world and the untouchable. A cinema foyer is a frame, so
is the cover of a book and the curtain in front of a stage. Frames ought to
thrill us the way a frontier, or an airport passport control does. The
Spinners (Las Hilanderas), by the
Spanish Baroque artists Velázquez, is – rather brilliantly – all about frames.
Velázquez chose to paint The Spinners in
quite a large format, and to execute the scene (if the evidence of his brushwork
is to go by) quickly, and with a sketchy familiarity that characterized his
later style. It depicts an exclusively female cast of characters in two rooms –
one occupying the foreground and one visible through a doorway beyond. Our eyes
are drawn into the scene with a succession of different frames; the first being
the overall frame that contains the canvas. Next is the red cloth that is being
pulled back by figure on the left. By unveiling the scene like this the eye is
compelled to travel leftwards and across the five women in the foreground room
who are all positioned on the same picture plane, like a classical frieze. Was Velázquez’s
aim for us to admire the art of weaving by letting us see the stages of its
process? One certain aim was to show off the skill of the painter himself -
Velázquez painted the spinner’s wheel in motion, which is a difficult effect to
capture when it could quite easily have been shown at rest. On the floor a cat
plays with a ball of wool.
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was
famous, rich and old when he painted this scene in the Royal Court in Madrid in
1657, most probably as a commission for Pedro de Arce, the Royal Huntsman. Velázquez had been born in 1599 in Seville.
At the age of twelve he was apprenticed to the painter and theorist Francisco
Pacheco, and from this point onwards he was relentlessly successful at every
turn of his career. By the age of nineteen he was painting with far greater
skill than his teacher and became famous in his native city for his palpable
and precise genre scenes and kitchen-sink religious episodes. In 1624 Velázquez
succeeded in his ambition to be the King’s official portrait painter, so he and
his family moved to Madrid where the painter’s career might flourish. Whereas
in Seville Velázquez was required only to paint either religious or genre
scenes, his new job required regular commissions to paint portraits of the
Royal family and courtiers, and in time he would have the opportunity to paint
mythological scenes and episodes from contemporary history and thus emulate the
works of his great artistic heroes, Rubens and Titian. The King allowed him to
take two visits to Italy where he acted as an art buyer and diplomat for the
Spanish crown. Aside from creating oil paintings, Velázquez desired two main
goals in his life, both of which could be endowed by the King: the first was
status accorded to his profession as artist. The second was social rank,
initially by moving upwards through the hierarchy of the court, but ultimately
to attain the coveted Order of Santiago. He eventually gained this decoration
in 1559, only to die a year later. His last works tend to represent real
subjects, but also reflect on the creative process itself, therefore making the
art self-critical which is a very rare quality in visual art.
The foreground of The Spinners, with its
everyday atmosphere and unexalted cast is reminiscent of Velázquez’s earlier
genre paintings. In a quite separate sphere at the back of the scene is another
room where five other women, grouped in a similar composition to the
foreground, stand in front of a tapestry that takes up the entire back wall. A
doorway frames this new setting. You need to zoom into this section now, and
treat it like a separate painting altogether. It is meant to represent the
story of Arachne as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Velázquez has placed Arachne in the dead centre
of the composition, at the very moment that she has unveiled her work of art –
a tapestry – for public display. In fact Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom,
is the person for whom the tapestry has been created. In Ovid’s telling of the
story Minerva had been affronted by Arachne’s incredible skill as a weaver,
which the goddess thought outshined her own talents. A mortal getting the
better of a god was a complete taboo. Arachne was challenged to a weaving
competition so that the goddess could assert her superiority. However Arachne
chose to depict a scene that was guaranteed to enrage the goddess – the lechery
of Minerva’s own father, Zeus. In Velázquez’s painting we are shown the
terrible moment just before Minerva gets revenge by turning Arachne into a
spider.
The last frame that we can see is that of the
tapestry itself. We can vaguely make out the scene it depicts – lustful Zeus,
in the form of a bull, abducting the mortal Europa. This is the most surprising
of Velázquez’s choices in this painting, because the tapestry is a copy of a
painting by Titian, which is now in Boston, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum. It is like a large quote in the dead centre of the painting to announce
the most inspirational figure in Velázquez’s own creative universe. Is it also
a big compliment to Titian, comparing his skill to the superhuman abilities of
Arachne? Or does it brandish the status of every artist? As that later Spanish
master Picasso would say art is a lie, but a lie that tells the truth – and in
the case of Arachne, a truth that can shake the gods.
Once we have retreated backwards out of the
chambers created in this painting, we can see how the framing idea works. They bring
us step-by-step out of the real world, firstly into the prosaic-seeming realm
of production (which may be mistaken for the
real-life Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Isabel) into the more elevated and cerebral realm of mythology and the
greatest attainment of ‘high’ art – to reach an intellectual status that rivals
poetry.
… or maybe that is just another convenient way
to tie up loose ends, create some kind of conclusion, and draw the story to
close.
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