Mr. Berenson refers only once to Velasquez and then as an “impersonal” painter.  As a counterblast to his theory of impersonality let us quote a few lines from R.A.M.  Stevenson’s Velasquez (that most inspiring of all art monographs):  “Is it wonderful,” he asks, “that you can apply Morelli’s principles of criticism to the Pre-Raphaelite Italian schools; that you can point to the thumbs, fingers, poses of the head, ovals of the face and schemes of colour that the painters learned by heart, and can even say from whom they learned?  The later Venetians broke away, and when you come to Velasquez the system holds good as little as it can in our own day.”  But this charge holds good for many painters of the Renaissance, painters of patterns.  Velasquez, like the great prose-master of France, Gustave Flaubert, is always in modulation.  No two canvases are rhythmically alike, except in the matter of masterfulness.  He, too, was a master of magnificent prose painting, painting worth a wilderness of makers of frozen mediaeval patterns.  Mr. Henry B. Fuller, the author of the Chevalier di Pensieri-Vani, once spoke of the “cosy sublimity” in Raphael’s Vision of Ezekiel; one might paraphrase the epigram by describing the pictures of Velasquez as boxed-in eternities.  Dostoievsky knew such a sensation when he wrote of “a species of eternity within the space of a square foot.”  But there are many connoisseurs who find evidences of profounder and more naive faith in the angular loveliness of the Flemish Primitives than in all the religious art of Italy or Spain.

GOYA

I

Goya was a Titan among artists.  He once boasted that “Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt are my masters.”  It was an excellent self-criticism.  He not only played the Velasquez gambit in his portraits, the gambit of Rembrandt in his sombre imaginative pieces, but he boldly annexed all Spain for his sinister and turbulent art.  He was more truly Spanish in the range and variety of his performances than any Spanish-born painter since Velasquez.  Without the sanity, solidity, nobility of Velasquez, whose vision and voice he never possessed; without the luscious sweetness of Murillo, whose sweetness he lacked, he had something of El Greco’s fierceness, and much of the vigour of Ribera.  He added to these influences a temperament that was exuberant, fantastic, morose, and pessimistic yet humorous, sarcastic, sometimes melting, and ever masterful.  He reminds one of an overwhelming force.  The man dominates the painter.  A dozen comparisons force themselves upon you when the name of Goya is pronounced:  comets, cataracts, whirlwinds, and wild animals.  Anarch and courtier, atheist and decorator of churches, his “whole art seems like a bullfight,” says Richard Muther.  One might improve on this by calling him a subtle bull, a Hercules who had read Byron.  “Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt!” cries MacColl in a too brief summary.  “How inadequate the list!  Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Legion had a hand in the teaching.”