AQA History of Art and Velazquez's the Spinners

AQA History of Art and Velazquez's 'The Spinners'

 Just as a follow up to my last post I thought I’d make it nice and explicit just how ‘The Spinners’ could be a useful example to teach under the AQA syllabus:

This is a great one to examine in terms of composition, and technique for Unit 1 because its structure is challenging to describe. But an analysis contributes to an eventual interpretation of the subject, as my essay hopefully outlined.

It’s also highly versatile for teaching Unit 2. It’s a mythological subject, so under “Subjects and Genres” could be judged alongside another representation of mythology … How about Titian’s Europa painting that actually features within the Velazquez? Under “Materials, Techniques and Processes” Velazquez’s skilful manipulation of the viscosity of oil paints could be analysed. The ‘Baroque’ qualities of the painting could be assessed under “Form and Style”, and lastly the representation of women could be a fascinating project for “Gender, Nationality and Ethnicity.” Going against the grain of most other paintings of women from the history of art, here the females are portrayed as creators rather than muses, and active participants rather than passive observers. Thus an interesting comparison to the near-contemporary ‘Art of Painting’ by Vermeer could be made.

And of course it’s a fantastic one to look at in Unit 3 (Seventeenth Century topic). 

Diego Velázquez, The Spinners, 1757

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.