Diego Velazquez died on 6 August 1660 in Madrid, at 61, of a fever that began on 31 July. Royal doctors called it very dangerous. A few weeks earlier he had come back from the Isle of Pheasants, where he had prepared the meeting that sealed the marriage of the Spanish princess Maria Theresa to Louis XIV.
Velazquez was no longer only the king's painter. As the palace official in charge of royal lodging and ceremony, he had spent the spring of 1660 on the road, setting up castles, furniture and a meeting house for Philip IV.
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The wedding is the usual culprit. The calendar does not agree. The ceremony took place on 7 June. Velazquez fell ill on 31 July, almost two months later, after a morning spent at the king's side.
The link between the two appears in the Latin epitaph printed by his pupil Juan de Alfaro, which says the fever seized him from the labor of the journey. I could not find a bedside record that says the same. What the doctors wrote down was a different thing, and the sources disagree on how well he was when he came home.
What did the doctors call his fever?
A tertian fever, the kind that returns in cycles. Spanish accounts of his last days have the physicians naming it "principio de terciana sincopal minuta sutil" and judging it very dangerous. His constant thirst was the sign they feared most.
It began on Saturday, 31 July, the feast of Saint Ignatius. Velazquez had spent the morning attending the king, then felt tired and burning, with a heavy anguish in his stomach and heart. His family doctor, Vicencio Moles, came first. By the king's order, two royal chamber physicians, Miguel de Alva and Pedro de Chavarri, followed. The Archbishop of Tyre called on him to give comfort.
He received the sacraments and died on Friday, 6 August, the feast of the Transfiguration, at two in the afternoon. Before the end he gave his friend Gaspar de Fuensalida, a royal official, the power to make his will. The sources give the fever a name. None of the doctors wrote down what brought it on.
What You'll Discover
Who blamed the royal wedding.
What he was buried wearing.
What the king supposedly painted.
Where his grave went.