The truth is, Stevenson, Cortissoz, and Beruete are all three in the right.  That Velasquez, when in Rome, studied the pictures there; that he didn’t care for Raphael; that he had very much admired the Venetians, Titian, Tintoretto; that he had admired Rubens, with whom he associated daily on the occasion of the Flemish master’s visit of nine months to Madrid—­these are truths not to be denied.  Beruete claims that the Rubens influence is not to be seen in Velasquez, only El Greco’s.  Every object, living or inanimate, that swam through the eyeballs of the Spaniard—­surely the most wonderful pair of eyes in history—­was never forgotten.  His powers of assimilation were unexcelled.  He saw and made note of everything, but when he painted his spectators saw nothing of any other man, living or dead.  Was not the spiritual impulse missing in this man?  He couldn’t paint angels, because he only painted what he saw; and as he never saw angels he only painted mankind.  Life, not the “subject,” appealed to him.  He had little talent, less taste, for the florid decorative art of Rubens and the Venetians; but give him a simple, human theme (not pretty or sentimental) and he recreated it, not merely interpreted the scene; so that Las Meninas, The Spinners (Las Hilanderas), the hunting pictures, the various portraits of royalty, buffoons, beggars, outcasts, are the chronicles of his time, and he its master psychologist.

Beruete says that Ribera more than Zurbaran affected Velasquez; “El Greco taught him the use of delicate grays in the colouring of the flesh.”  Hot, hard, and dry in his first period (Borrachos), he becomes more fluid and atmospheric in the Breda composition (The Lances), and in the third period he has attained absolute mastery of his material.  His salary at the court was two and sixpence a day in 1628.  Even Haydn and Mozart did better as menials.  Yet some historians speak of the liberality of Philip IV.  An “immortal employee” indeed, as Beruete names his idol.  Luca Giordano called Las Meninas the “theology of painting.”  Wilkie declared that the Velasquez landscapes possessed “the real sun which lights us, the air which we breathe, and the soul and spirit of nature.”  “To see the Prado,” exclaims Stevenson, “is to modify one’s opinion of the novelty of recent art.”  To-day the impressionists and realists claim Velasquez as their patron saint as well as artistic progenitor.  The profoundest master of harmonies and the possessor of a vision of the real world not second to Leonardo’s, the place of the Spaniard in history will never be taken from him.

Velasquez is more modern than all the moderns; more modern than to-morrow.  That sense of the liberation of the spirit which Mr. Berenson is fond of adducing as the grandest attribute of the Space Composers, Raphael and the rest, may be discovered in Las Meninas, or in The Spinners, space overhead, with mystery superadded.  The brumous North was the home of mysticism, of Gothic architecture.  The note of tragic mystery was seldom sounded by the Italians.  Faith itself seems more real in the North.  It remained for Rembrandt to give it out in his chords of chiaroscuro.  And is there more noble, more virile music in all art than The Surrender of Breda?