January 23, 2008
Some religious paintings by Diego Velázquez
D. Alfonso R. Gutiérrez de Ceballos. "high school Diego Velázquez", CSIC
Velázquez, according to the latest documentary research on his life, was a painter who, because of his family origins and personal circumstances, was a painter who felt sincerely and deeply the religious matters that were entrusted to him. Therefore, Ortega y Gasset's idea that the artist felt uncomfortable making religious paintings is an apriorism. One of these paintings, "Christ Scourged and the Christian Soul", executed with depth and intimate feeling in the personification of the soul in the figure of a child who contemplates the scene with enormous compassion, certifies that its author communed with the topic he was painting. The painting "Christ Crucified", in the Prado Museum, is perhaps the best expression of all Spanish religious painting, among other reasons because Velázquez, being of Portuguese descent through his father's father, felt somehow involved in the occasion that must have given rise to the commission of the painting Portuguese Jews had fiercely scourged a sculpted image of Christ Crucified in Madrid in 1631, which motivated that, as reparation for such a terrible sacrilege, Don Jerónimo de Villanueva, Felipe IV's secretary of state, entrusted him with a painting of that topic for his foundation of the Benedictine Sisters of San Plácido in Madrid. Finally, the "Coronation of Our Lady", in which the painter perfectly combined the religious sense with the packaging of the courtly label , was commissioned by Cardinal Borja for fill in the cycle of the Virgin's life, which long before, when he lived in Rome, he had commissioned Alessandro Turchi and had sent as a gift to Queen Isabella of Bourbon, a cycle that hung on the walls of his chapel in the Alcazar of Madrid, and which only lacked the representation of this last Marian mystery to complete it.
Diego Velázquez, "Christ Crucified" (Museo del Prado)
Diego Velázquez, "Coronation of the Virgin" (Museo del Prado)