File:A history of painting... - with a preface by Frank Brangwyn (1911) (14778748104).jpg

Identifier: historyofpainti03macf (find matches)
Title: A history of painting... / with a preface by Frank Brangwyn
Year: 1911 (1910s)
Authors: Macfall, Haldane, 1860-1928
Subjects: Painting Painters
Publisher: Boston : Dana Estes and Co.
Contributing Library: PIMS - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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his be so, thenVelazquez has indeed laboured in vain. It is exactly inthe very power by which he has revealed their idiotcyand their lackings that these things are great art. In Las Meninas—the Maids of Honour^ or Ladies inWaiting, painted in 1655—Velazquez reaches to the heightsof his art. Mark with what genius the very black andwhite of the design is painted, so that the eye takes in asat a stroke the whole desired impression ! And as onegazes upon it, there comes into the senses the realisationof the wondrous employment of the colour-harmonieswhereby the wizard hand has wrought this conquest overus. It all seems so simple. How skilled the massing tocreate the wondrous deeps of it all ; how skilled the lighting188 XVII VELAZQUEZ 1599 - 1660 -REALIST SCHOOL OF SEVILLE OR ANDALUSIATHE MAIDS OF HONOUR OR LAS MENINAS(Prado) The Infanta Margarita attended by her maids of honour. Velazquez isseen painting. Philip IV. and his second wife, Mariana of Austria, arereflected in the mirror.
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OF PAINTING to set the imperious child, little Margarita, into the front WHEREINof the theatre of our vision ! How the line and mass SPAINgive lift to the whole impression and create the sense of BURSTSdignity by that uplifting ! Sullied as is the atmosphere of INTOthe thing by the compulsion into it of the loathsome ^U^1-^1stunted abortion of the dwarf, whom the vile taste of theking made the companion and plaything of his little child,how craftily Velazquez, even whilst this half-woman takesthe foreground, sets the abortion aside by his skill ofarrangement ! Here we have art evolved to a realm ofutterance of which the Renaissance knew nothing—as wideand as high and as deep beyond the Italians as the Italianswere beyond the Byzantines. The imperious child,trussed and stiff in her fantastic hoops, being won to sit tothe painter by the cajoling of the maids of honour, showsin an atmosphere of the stilted gravity and solemn etiquetteof the Court as truly and eloquently as any phrasing

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