The eye of the beholder

The Owl, Summer 2009

The dwarf looks at the painter, the painter looks at the dwarf. The two engage in the reciprocal action of viewing, bound together by the shared experience. Then the painter puts his brushes down, declares himself satisfied with the finished work and departs. The dwarf in the painting still stares out from the canvas, his expression, posture, the light on his face and the shapes of his body all recording that period of communion between observer and observed.

Such is the impression made on the viewer by any one of the three dwarf portraits executed by Diego de Velázquez over the course of his service as painter to the court of Philip IV of Spain. These paintings, striking for the intensity and sympathy with which they treat their diminutive sitters, now hang in the Prado Museum in Madrid, and represent some of the most daring and modern pieces of the Sevillian artist’s magnificent oeuvre. Francisco Lezcano, Diego de Acedo and Sebastián de Morra were little more than decadent playthings in their context, yet here they have been immortalised as dignified, noble human beings. The three portraits are, rightly, overshadowed by the word-famous Las Meninas, ‘the theology of painting’, but they too can be considered examples of the ground-breaking works that heralded the 17th century beginnings of Michel Foucault’s ‘Classial Age’ of epistomology. The figure of the King, and the life of the court that he gathered around him, loom large over the ethos of these paintings, and as a direct product of the marginal status of the dwarves and the eccentric, theatrical aesthetic that characterised the troubled monarchy, we might even consider the portraits as subversive, indirect portraits of the King himself.

But what of the King? The reign of Philip IV, from 1621 to 1665, was marked by decline, decadence and disarray. In 1654, after thirty-three years on the throne, he started to withdraw from public life and took to spending long, solitary periods in the cavernous Habsburg mausoleum in the Escorial, the gloomy Renaissance palace-monastery perched high in the mountains of the Guadarrama. On one occasion, according to the poet Jerónimo de Barrionuevo, the King spent two hours kneeling on the jasper flagstones next to the empty alcove where he was to be buried. When he came out his eyes were bloodshot and swollen with crying.

For Philip had reason to weep. His ascent to the throne had brought with it new hopes for a return to the days of the upwardly mobile Spanish Empire of his great-grandfather Charles V, or at the very least to the pious idealism of his grandfather Philip II. The formidable Count Duke of Olivares, until 1643 the power behind the throne, had initiated a program of image management to turn the sickly, melancholic young man who inherited the crown into an unflinching defender of the faith who would revive the flagging Empire and reassert Spanish power on the European stage. Only four years into the reign he styled the King “Philip the Great” – less an epithet of achievement as one of aspiration. Painters and poets, amongst others Rubens, Quevedo and of course Velázquez, were commissioned to propagate the image of a solemn military genius. By the 1640s and 1650s, however, it was becoming clear that Philip’s reign would be known as a period of financial crisis, dynastic decline and national fragmentation, the era in which European supremacy had slipped from Spain’s grasp. The King’s health was failing, his son and heir died in 1646, and until 1661 he proved incapable of producing another.

In short, historical events broke free of Philip’s control, and as his reign went on he surrounded himself with an increasingly decadent world of show and extravagance. Under the guiding influence of Olivares, he constructed a large pleasure palace on the outskirts of Madrid, built a new hunting lodge in the mountains, lavished money on great parties, operas and the theatre. The purpose of all this was ostensibly to show that Spain still had the power and means to sustain a vast royal entourage and frivolous building works – constructing the accoutrements of success and glory in the hope that these would follow in close succession – yet one gets the impression that as time went on this was as much an attempt to cushion Philip from reality as an exercise in pragmatic politics.

Philip IV as hunter, Diego de Velázquez

Another indication of the slide into ritual and decadence was the growth of the already swollen ranks of ‘hombres de placer’ – musicians, jesters, lunatics, and dwarves. These formed a society unto themselves within the world of the court, included in the etiquette and ceremony of the monarchy but excluded from the social hierarchy. The mentally ill and the physically deformed represented a sub-category, ‘human and zoological specimens’, treated as part of the flamboyant menagerie of parrots, dogs and performing monkeys that bespangled the royal palaces.

The role of these unfortunate characters was multifaceted. Their abnormalities were said to testify to the variety of divine creation, their impeded faculties to render them closer to God. Above all, their presence in the court was designed to accentuate the glory and beauty of the royals; thus Maribárbola, the female dwarf attending to the Infanta Margarita in Las Meninas, should render the princess all the more regal by contrast. But this marginalisation, barbaric though it seems to modern sensibilities, also afforded the dwarves a great deal of freedom to speak their minds, report public opinion, or even act as messengers or spies. It was, to say the least, a strange existence. When Velázquez arrived in the court he too was initially classed as one of the palace servants and as such he shared the life of these entertainers, and over the years, alongside his paintings of royals, nobles and court life, he was commissioned to commit their likenesses to canvas.

Madrid in 1562, Anton van der Wyngaerde

Indeed, the three dwarves on whom Velázquez focuses individually, in portrait, he treats with a respect that lifts them out of their status as living toys, one that seeks to depict their deformities honestly and realistically, whilst imbuing their bodies with a monumentality equal to that with which he portrays the King and their expressions with a sense of personality that gives them immediate human appeal. In contrast, in the works of artists such as Bosch and Jacques Callot, we see mocking, grotesque caricatures of dwarves behind which there is no implication of deeper personality. Velázquez’s paintings constitute a true departure from conventional treatments of the subject.

The fact that Velázquez takes a dwarf as his sole focus in each of these portraits inherently implies an engagement with the physical and human traits of these sidelined characters, an inescapable choice between omission and inclusion of that which stands out. With a portrait the task of the artist is to express the spirit of the sitter’s gaze, to capture the essence of their persona on canvas, and so faced with a subject whose circumstances are defined by the corporeal he is forced to establish a relationship between the physical and the immaterial. He can, as seen in the Callot paintings, chose a perspective on the dwarf conditioned by that of the painter – or the observer – alone, one which asserts a rigorously unidimensional angle. Alternatively he can seek to present us with view of the subject that dares to transcend glaring abnormality and that aspires to a more profound aesthetic engagement. This Velázquez offers us.

Francisco Lezcano, 'el Niño de Vallecas', Diego de Velázquez

In none of his portraits of Francisco Lezcano, Diego de Acedo or Sebastián de Morra does he for one moment attempt to conceal deformity. The sunlight falls across Lezcano’s face at an optimum angle to highlight the dwarf’s bulbous, blotchy features, in the painting of Acedo the ledger quite literally dwarfs the sitter, whilst Sebastián de Morra’s legs protrude forward with a foreshortening effect, making his marionette-like stature all the more conspicuous. Velázquez confronts the abnormalities of his subjects with utter equanimity, neither exaggerating nor downplaying them, and the neutral prominence that he accords them is so unabashed that the viewer senses no urge to concentrate on them as the defining element of the subject. Instead, Velázquez combines this composure towards the deformities of the dwarves with a masterful expression of their individual identities, in a way that was impossible with the royal portraits, where strict convention stipulated that emotion and personality be avoided. Just look at any of his paintings of the Spanish royals and you will see an identical, cold, almost vacant expression on each one. Lezcano, in contrast, manifest though his mental disability is, gazes out of the painting with a playful, curious smile. His posture is informal, with his head tilted slightly, his right leg poking forward and his left hanging loosely, the quick brushwork possibly suggesting a gentle swinging motion. He toys with what looks like a deck of cards; here again Velázquez’s economical style lends a sense of movement as his fingers flicker over them absentmindedly. In this image of Lezcano we are presented with a light-hearted, maybe even mischievous individual, one of diversion and games of chance, living between the world of reality and that of the imagination.

El bufón don Diego de Acedo, 'el Primo', Diego de Velázquez

Diego de Acedo, on the other hand, is known to have had full mental capabilities; in fact he had an official bureaucratic position in the palace, signified by the large book whose pages he is turning. The contrast with the portrait of Lezcano surely proves the contention that Velázquez saw that there was a lot more to the dwarves than their deformities. Acedo’s intelligent, incisive expression stands out like a luminous, marble beacon against the threatening background and is majestically framed by the parallel lines of his hat and collar. Where the size of the book might have risked turning the scene into one of derisive burlesque, the nobility of the dwarf’s statuesque, world-weary expression makes it clear that he is undeterred, almost anxious for the artist to finish the painting so that he can continue with his paperwork.

El bufón don Sebastián de Morra, Diego de Velázquez

Arguably the most powerful sense of personality is visible in the expression and posture of Sebastián de Morra. Even more than Lezcano and Acedo he is imbued with a bust-like quality: his short legs and tightened arms pull his chest, structured by the scarlet folds of his cloak, upwards and forward, giving the viewer an overwhelming impression of the subject’s pride and petulance. The angle of his head throws a strong light over the right-hand side of his face, which picks out the furrows in his forehead, the shadow cast by the frowned arches of his eyebrows and his reddened skin. His fists are clenched and pummeled into the folded fabric of his doublet. Behind this anger through, we detect a hint of sadness in the slight forward tilt of his torso, the almost reproachful upward direction of his glance and above all the downward turn of his mouth behind his beard. The combined effect of these touches is to create an intense impression of the character glaring out of the canvas, a moving portrayal of stoical pride in the face of the world.

Therefore common to these three paintings is the coexistence of unapologetic portrayals of the dwarves’ deformities and a firm sense of the personalities of the subjects themselves. All three have a certain monumentality; created both through the arrangements of the paintings and, in the portraits of Lezcano and Acedo, by their juxtaposition against backgrounds of dark, soaring mountain scenery. These two are both thought to have been painted for the Torre de la Parada, the Habsburg hunting lodge in the Sierra, and so the choice of backdrop seems logical, but it cannot be denied that the wispy blue clouds and mists, and rugged, stony forms of the landscape also serve to increase the statuesque gravitas of the dwarves, particularly in the case of Lezcano, who sits in a raised position on a plinth-like ledge.

Traditionally dwarves have been associated uncontrollable natural forces, the unfathomable and the subconscious, balanced on the threshold between the real and the imaginary. Yet in these three paintings we see an altogether more modern treatment of these outsiders, one that in its respect and sympathy exchanges the sense of the folkloric mystical and unknown for one of profound human complexity. By depicting the dwarfs on their own terms, individually and compassionately, Velázquez’s betrays key elements of his mature, even revolutionary approach to the task of representation.

The hazy, uneven impasto and the economical brushwork of these paintings soften the physical features, whilst the deformities themselves are brought out unabashedly and the personality of the subject permeates every inch of the canvas. In the theatrical world of Baroque Spain the court dwarves had to behave as ‘representations ‘ – characters that acted out roles that were pale, one-dimensional shadows of their true selves - and in this topsy-turvy milieu it takes a piece of imitation to bring their humanity to the surface, to portray the dwarves as they saw themselves. These paintings are less ‘portraits’ than ‘painted mirrors’.

Therefore in each of these works a dwarf looks into the painting and a dwarf looks out, and to a significant extent this can be traced back to the theatrical nature of a world ritualised to the point where each individual had to separate their reality from their ‘character’. So unidimensional was the role of the dwarves, so emasculated and simplified were their characteristics as negative affirmations of strength and beauty, that their court persona was inevitably bound to be a shadow of their true reality as living, breathing, feeling human beings. Therefore to portray them in the world of the court as they really were – as complex, profound people – was to perceive them, for a change, as they perceived themselves. The possibility of this double perspective stems directly from the dichotomy of reality and role, a dichotomy that allows Velázquez to paint a portrait where the subject is both the spectator and the model.Yet there is an additional dimension to this dynamic. The dwarves are, of course not the only ones ‘looking in’ on the portraits. Indeed, the nature of the court being what it was, the ultimate viewer that Velázquez had in mind when he painted these would have been the King. So how does the spectator-model relationship work here?

When Philip looked at these paintings he was supposed to see something that reinforced his own masculinity, power and perfection in contrast to the dwarves, whose entire role was defined relative to the image of the King. The problem here, however, is that in departing from traditional depictions of the dwarves ‘in character’, the paintings make a statement that expresses and draws attention to the double perspective of the spectator-model relationship that conditioned court society, a relationship which was founded on the management of the image of Philip himself.

Once Velázquez has glorified the dwarves with the same artistry that he devotes to glorifying the King, this double perspective blows open the prevailing two-level system of personal identity. Philip’s image management was aimed at concealing the fact that, in a society of violent dichotomised genders, the King’s masculinity left something to be desired – he was weak, sickly, unable to produce a healthy heir and hemorrhaging clout at home and on the European stage. And so, in the deformed, emasculated, powerless humanity of the dwarves, whose position and image in court was ultimately dependent on the image of the King, we see the King himself, alone, feeble and angry. Philip the Eunuch.

In Les Mots et les Choses, Michel Foucoult argues that Las Meninas, the painting-of-the-painter-painting-a-painting, encapsulates the intellectual revolution of the 17th century in that “in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity”. This is very similar to the dynamic that we see in the dwarf portraits. In this conception of representation, one where the subject is elided and resemblance gives way to “representation in its pure form”, the dwarf portraits are as much a depiction of the spectator – the King – as they are of the dwarves. If this proves anything, it is that the theatricalisation of the world in the 17th century, the century that gave us opera, /And all the men and women merely players/ and Le Roi Soleil, was at the root of this new form of representation. Or, in other words: “The dwarf looks at the painter, the painter looks the dwarf. Then the King looks at the painting and sees himself”.

Photos: Flickr, Museo del Prado