Diego Velázquez was the court painter of King Philip IV of Spain and the author of Las Meninas. The most surprising fact about him is how little of his last decade he spent painting: the king made him a palace official, and one scholar counts only fourteen pictures between 1651 and his death in 1660.
Philip IV kept giving his favorite painter new duties at court, and the strangest episodes of Velázquez's career belong to a man who served a king as much as he painted for him.
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The king's favorite was not left alone with his brushes. Las Meninas shows Velázquez at his easel in the royal palace, and that is how most people picture him, a painter with all the time in the world. The record says otherwise.
A few years before he painted it, Philip IV made him palace chamberlain, a post the king chose personally, and the job left him relatively little time for painting. The art historian José López-Rey counted only fourteen paintings from 1651 until Velázquez died in 1660.
So the greatest painter at the Spanish court was, in his last years, a courtier who painted when the palace allowed it. The stories attached to his name come out of that double life. In Rome he painted a man he owned.
A pope is said to have winced at his portrait. And in Las Meninas he wears the red cross of a knight, a rank that the order's rules closed to painters who took payment for their work. Who put that cross there is still argued over.
Who was Juan de Pareja, and why did Velázquez free him?
Juan de Pareja was enslaved in Velázquez's studio and household for at least two decades, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Velázquez freed him within a few years of painting his portrait…
What You'll Discover
Why a pope winced.
What a painter had to prove.
Who painted the knight's cross.
What a royal wedding demanded.