Velazquez The Complete Works

For so many champions of art history, the ultimate sounding board was--and remains--Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez. First available as an XXL volume, this accessible edition presents his complete works in beautiful reproductions, including enlarged details and photography of recently restored paintings.

This book is a collection of 32 articles about Velázquez which appeared in scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues and newspapers and magazines between 1964 and 2006. Several are published in English for the first time. The text is the record of a lifelong engagement with the life and works of this enigmatic artist and evaluates many of the numerous attempts to solve the mysteries presented by the Spaniard’s paintings. These questions are considered in the final essay, Velázquez, today and tomorrow’, which is published here for the first time.Two themes unite the essays. Velázquez was the court painter to Philip IV, and the changing relationship between painter and patron provides the framework for interpreting the artist’s career. The centerpiece of this relationship is Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which is the subject of two long articles, the now-classic On the Meaning of Las Meninas’ (1978) and Las Meninas as a masterpiece’ (1999). The second theme is the problem of attributions and the related question of Velázquez’s innovative technique. Velázquez was not a prolific painter. As the supply of securely-attributed works is now mostly in museums, and as the price of great pictures continues to reach new heights, questions of authenticity become increasingly contentious. In this book, Brown considers the problem in its widest dimensions and participates in the debate about individual attributions.Jonathan Brown is regarded as a leading specialist on Spanish painting of the Golden Age and on the Spanish master Diego Velázquez. Among his many books are Velázquez, Painter and Courtier (1986) and Velázquez. The Technique of Genius (1998), with Carmen Garrido. His studies of art at the European courts include A Palace for a King. The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV, with John H. Elliott (rev. ed. 2003). Brown is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

"Explores the early works of seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Velâazquez. Focuses on works from 1617 to 1623, examining the painter's critical engagement with the artistic, religious, and social practices of his native Seville"--Provided by publisher.

Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez (1599-1660) is widely recognized as both the supreme exponent of the Spanish Golden Age and as one of the greatest artists of all time. During his lifetime, he was admired not only at the cosmopolitan court of King Philip IV in Madrid, but also by the imperial court in Vienna and the papal court in Rome. Rediscovered in the 19th century, his work became an essential stimulus to the development of modern painting. Fernando Checa's monograph recasts the traditional critical reception of Velazquez as a Realist master, exploring other avenues of interpretation by examining his relationship with Classicism and with the most progressive trends in painting in his day. At the heart of the book is the color catalogue, which includes Velazquez's entire oeuvre with numerous details.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (June 1599 – August 6 1660), known as Diego Vélasquez, was a painter of the Spanish Golden Age who had considerable influence at the court of King Philip IV. Along with Francisco Goya and Le Greco, he is generally considered to be one of the greatest artists in Spanish history. His style, whilst remaining very personal, belongs firmly in the Baroque movement. Velázquez’s two visits to Italy, evidenced by documents from that time, had a strong effect on the manner in which his work evolved. Besides numerous paintings with historical and cultural value, Diego Vélasquez painted numerous portraits of the Spanish Royal Family, other major European figures, and even of commoners. His artistic talent, according to general opinion, reached its peak in 1656 with the completion of Las Meninas, his great masterpiece. In the first quarter of the 19th century, Velázquez's style was taken as a model by Realist and Impressionist painters, in particular by Édouard Manet. Since then, further contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí have paid homage to their famous compatriot by recreating several of his most famous works.

In 1845, a Reading bookseller named John Snare came across the dirt-blackened portrait of a prince at a country house auction. Suspecting that it might be a long-lost Velazquez, he bought the picture and set out to discover its strange history. When Laura Cumming stumbled on a startling trial involving John Snare, it sent her on a search of her own. At first she was pursuing the picture, and the life and work of the elusive painter, but then she found herself following the bookseller's fortunes too - from London to Edinburgh to nineteenth-century New York, from fame to ruin and exile. An innovative fusion of detection and biography, this book shows how and why great works of art can affect us, even to the point of mania. And on the trail of John Snare, Cumming makes a surprising discovery of her own. But most movingly, The Vanishing Man is an eloquent and passionate homage to the Spanish master Velazquez, bringing us closer to the creation and appreciation of his works than ever before

"This volume--the new standard Vermeer monograph--reproduces all 34 paintings, augmenting each with close-ups that lay bare the loving care Vermeer lavished upon each painstaking work." from publisher's website

The complete Velazquez in one volume. All the paintings are reproduced with detailed explanations. The text contains biographical data, including references to contemporary sources and re-evaluated historical documents. A register of his work with scholarly analysis is also included.

The startling conclusion of The Late Paintings of Vel?uez is that Diego Vel?uez painted two of his most famous works, The Spinners and Las Meninas, as theoretically informed manifestos of painterly brushwork. As a pair, Giles Knox argues, the two paintings form a learned retort to the prevailing critical disdain for the painterly. Knox presents a Vel?uez who was much more aware of the art theory of his era than previously acknowledged, leading him to reinterpret Las Meninas and The Spinners as representing together a polemically charged celebration of the "handedness" of painting. Knox removes Vel?uez from his Iberian isolation and seeks to recover his highly self-conscious attempt to carve out a place for himself within the history of European painting as a whole. The Late Paintings of Vel?uez presents an artist who, like Annibale Carracci, Poussin, Rembrandt, and Vermeer was not only aware of contemporary theoretical writings on art, but also able to translate that knowledge and understanding into a distinctive and personal theory of painting. In Las Meninas and The Spinners, Vel?uez propounded this theory with paint, not words. Knox's rethinking of the dynamic relationship between text and image presents a case, not of writing influencing painting, or vice versa, but of the two realms being inextricably bound together. Painterly brushwork presented a challenge to writers on art not just because it was connected too intimately with the base actions of the hand; it was also devilishly hard to describe. By reading Vel?uez's painterly performance as text, Knox deciphers how Vel?uez was able to craft theoretical arguments more compelling and more vivid than any written counterparts.

Shows and describes all of Velazquez's major works.