Las Meninas by Velazquez (1956): I paid attention to the calm dog in the foreground, on which a dwarf puts his leg. Velazquez, among other things, is a wonderful animalist. The horse head in La Rendicion de Breda is more impressive than many human faces. Seven out of eleven characters in Las Meninas, including the vague silhouettes of Philippe IV and his wife Marianna in a framework on a far wall, are looking at the audience. And Velazquez himself from the self-portrait where he depicted himself with an easel and brushes. That is where the questions begin.
If he’s painting the king and the queen who, according to the traditional opinion, reflect in the mirror, for whom are their daughter Infanta Margarita and the dwarf woman posing in the foreground? Why chamberlain froze far at the door, turned his face to us and put his hand on the door-post? As if he was going to leave, but suddenly was stopped at the door by something important. If we assume that the royal couple is not a reflection, but a picture deep in the room, which is quite possible, whom is Velazquez painting?
LAS MENINAS BY VELAZQUEZ (1656)
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The place of paradise in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1500-10) is defined incorrectly. In the left part of the triptych you should look not at people (Christ, Adam, Eva), but on the animals. The animals are killing and eating each other without remorse. Below, next to the pool a slow frog disappears in a duck’s beak, two more birds are tearing into pieces another small creature, a cat is carrying a mouse in its teeth, and far in the background a lion is getting ready to eat a deer.
The real paradise is in the central part of the picture. No one is eating or torturing anyone (it has been said enough about the right hell part). People and animals stay in harmony. They do together and without fuss some not always understandable, but apparently harmless things. Here a lion is really lying next to a lamb. Love is scattered everywhere. Everyone is caressing and treating everyone, eating huge strawberries. As a side effect of the song by Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever” after a long observation of the picture you have a different perception.
GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS BY HIERONYMUS BOSCH (1500-10)
Bosch depicted free humanity framed by ill religious rules (the “paradise” full of hidden aggression, the hell that is wittily disguised), and, fortunately, the clergy and the kings missed the subversive potential of the picture.
Hardly had the author himself understood that.
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Durer’s Self-Portrait is above all a social gesture, at least it could be one in his time. Durer depicts himself in luxurious clothes, as wealthy young town’s dweller, who has realized himself. He was only 27, but states about his success in the composition of a parade portrait.
DURER’S SELF-PORTRAIT (1498)
The clothes of late Renaissance are depicted here to smallest details – a frame within a frame. The most important thing here is of course the face looking from this double framing. This is a look of a melancholiac, not an upset person, but namely a melancholiac who always looks for something others cannot even think about, as a doubtful privilege of the person who sees prophetical and to a certain point of time unnecessary dreams. Already after I finished the text, I recalled that 16 years later Durer finished his engraving Melancholia.
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However, everyone from aforesaid authors were melancholic, everyone in his own way:
You’ve seen all seas, the entire faraway land
You’ve looked into the Hell – in yourself, and later – in reality
You’ve also seen the apparently light Paradise
In the saddest of all passions framing
You have seen: life is like your island.
You have faced this Ocean:
There is only darkness and howl on all sides.
You have flown around God and rushed back
It doesn’t matter on whose wheel you pour the water
It will grind the same bread
For if we can share life with someone,
Who’s going to share our death with us?
(From Great Elegy to John Donne by Joseph Brodsky)
