would be able to reconstruct an idea of the creatures that once inhabited old Mother Earth; men, women, children, their shapes, attitudes, gestures, and attributes.  The mystery of sentient beings lurks in this canvas, the illusion of atmosphere has never been so contrived.  In the upper part of the picture space is indicated in a manner that recalls both Rembrandt and Raphael.  Velasquez, too, was a space-composer.  Velasquez, too, plucked at the heart of darkness.  But his air is luminous, the logic of his proportion faultless, his synthesis absolute.  Where other painters juxtapose he composes.  Despite the countless nuances of his thin, slippery brush strokes, the picture is always a finely spun whole.

When Fragonard was starting for Rome, Boucher said to him:  “If you take those people over there seriously you are done for.”  Luckily Frago did not, and, despite his two Italian journeys, Velasquez was not seduced into taking “those people” seriously.  His recorded opinion of Raphael is corroborative of his attitude toward Italian art.  Titian was his sole god.  For nearly a year he was in daily intercourse with Rubens, but of Rubens’s influence upon him there is little trace.  Las Meninas is the perfect flowering of the genius of the Spaniard.  It has been called impressionistic; Velasquez has been claimed as the father of impressionism as Stendhal was hailed by Zola as the literary progenitor of naturalism.  But Velasquez is too universal to be labelled in the interests of any school.  His themes are of this earth, his religious paintings are the least credible of his efforts.  They are Italianate as if the artist dared not desert the familiar religious stencil.  His art is not correlated to the other arts.  One does not dream of music or poetry or sculpture or drama in front of his pictures.  One thinks of life and then of the beauty of the paint.  Velasquez is never rhetorical, nor does he paint for the sake of making beautiful surfaces as often does Titian.  His practice is not art for art as much as art for life.  As a portraitist, Titian’s is the only name to be coupled with that of Velasquez.  He neither flattered his sitters, as did Van Dyck, nor mocked them like Goya.  And consider the mediocrities, the dull, ugly, royal persons he was forced to paint!  He has wrung the neck of banal eloquence, and his prose, sober, rich, noble, sonorous, rhythmic, is to my taste preferable to the exalted, versatile volubility and lofty poetic tumblings in the azure of any school of painting.  His palette is ever cool and fastidiously restricted.  It has been said that he lacks imagination, as if creation or evocation of character is not the loftiest attribute of imagination, even though it deals not with the stuff of which mythologies are made.