Of course, the face is familiar. Like the pink convexities of Rubens' child-wife Hélène Fourment, it is one of the obsessive human presences of 17th century painting: Philip IV of Spain, growing older in the long succession of Diego Velásquez's court portraits. This one was painted late in the monarch's life, around 1653. The King's features—the bulbed Habsburg lip, the forehead's waxy promontory, the thick ball of a chin, the upswept mustache that Salvador Dali would appropriate and vulgarize—must have been more familiar to Velásquez than the map of Spain itself (see color overleaf).
Yet there is not a trace of formula in the painting. Every millimeter of the royal face, rendered with baffling illusionistic skill, has been studied afresh.
Philip's head remains the object of thoughtful, disinterested scrutiny, like Cezanne's apple, but much more mysterious. There are the signs of age and stress: an eyelid droops, the gaze is not quite focused. There is the vast dignity: no real head, seen in isolation, could possibly envelop itself in such distances as Velásquez's painted fiction.
"When I saw it, this commanded such deep respect and reverence in me that, since it already possessed so much spirit and living flesh, all the portrait lacked was the voice." So wrote Velásquez's protector, Lázaro Diaz del Valle, when he saw the portrait in 1656. It was, and remains, a "speaking likeness," but it also has the eloquence that only great art possesses. It defeats imagination by leaving nothing to imagine: imagination is replaced by consciousness.
There are no gaps to fill in, no interpretations to be made.
The very notion of "creativity" seems, in Velasquez's presence, a sentimental impertinence. He was unquestionably the deepest painter of matter who ever lived.
It would be pleasant but wildly optimistic to hope that every other picture in the exhibition in which this portrait of Philip IV may be seen—"The Golden Age of Spanish Painting," organized by the Prado's director, Xavier de Salas, at London's Royal Academy, through March 14—were at this august level.
Quite a few are: there are five other Velásquezes and five major El Grecos, including that overwhelming trumpet voluntary, the Prado's huge Annunciation of 1600. There are works by Francisco Ribalta and his great junior Jose de Ribera, a group of paintings by Zurbarán—including an exquisite still-life of cream and ocher pots drawn up like liturgical vessels on a table.
There are also first-rate representative pieces by Murillo, Sanchez Coello and Antonio Pereda.
Lardy Cherubs. But the exhibition includes whole roomfuls of provinciality, grading down to junk. No 17th century European painter could possibly have produced a sillier work than José Antolinez's trio of lardy, simpering cherubs posing as The Christian Soul Torn Between Vice and Virtue. No matter.
This is not a "masterpiece" show, but it does accord with Spanish reality in the 17th century and is required seeing for anyone interested in that singular efflorescence.