example of that kind of realism which is solely occupied in giving a faithful representation of the figure and its surrounding objects. But if you compare the portrait with Velasquez’s picture, you will feel, I think, that the attention is scattered over Holbein’s picture, while in the case of Velasquez’s the eye immediately takes it in us a whole. The little princess is the center of the scene, the light being concentrated on her as it is around the principal figure in Rubens’s picture; but though our attention is centered on the child, it revolves all round her, and immediately embraces the scene as a whole. The picture gives us a single vivid impression of the scene.
If we turn back again to “The Descent from the Cross” and “The Maids of Honor,” do we not realize a much more instantaneous and vivid impression in the Velasquez? The Rubens, also, is a noble example of unity; but it is a unity of effect produced chiefly by the balance of the dark and light parts. Rubens has put the light where he needed it for his composition; Velasquez has taken it as he found it. Streaming through the window, it permeates the whole room, not striking the figures simply on one side and leaving the other dark, but enveloping them and penetrating to the remotest corners of the ceiling. Even im the reproductions, you can see how much more real the light is in the Velasquez; how it is bright on the parts of the figures that lie in its direct path; less bright in the half-lights, where it strikes the figures less directly; reflected back, as, for example, from the dress of the little princess to that of the maid on her left; how it steals round everything and penetrates everywhere. For Velasquez recognized that light is elastic and illuminates the air. Hence he was the first to discover a new kind of perspective. Men long ago had learned to make lines vanish from the eye; to make the figures diminish in size and shape as they recede from the front; and to explain the distance by contrasts of light and shade. But he discovered the perspective of light. By the most delicate rendering of the quantity of light reflected from each and every part of the room and the figures and objects in it, he has given to the latter the reality of form and to the room its hollowness and distance.
Painters distinguish between the color of an object and its color as acted upon by light. Thus, in the case of a white dress, they would say that white was not white like a sheet of paper: it varies in degrees of whiteness, according to the quantity of light reflected from its various parts and from surrounding objects. And these varying quantities of light they call “values.” Velasquez excelled in the rendering of values,
His wonderful management of light introduced an appearance of real atmosphere into his pictures. You have only to compare this Velasquez with this Rubens to be sure that this is so.
Having thus briefly (and therefore imperfectly, I am afraid, for it is a large and difficult subject) glanced at the things that Velasquez tried for, we are in a better position to understand how his realism was a realism of impression. First, he saw his subject at a single glance, eye and hand instantaneously working together; and he confined his impression to what a less keen eye, assisted by him, could also take in as a single impression. Secondly, by his marvelous penetration into the action of light and his skill in rendering it, he set upon the canvas the scene, as he had received the impression of it, with such subtle fidelity that our own observation is stimulated, and we receive the impression vividly.
By this time the picture should no longer appear to be empty, nor the figures crowded at the bottom. We should feel that the background and ceiling are connected by that vertical strip of light up the edge of the canvas with the figures in the foreground, so as to make a unified composition of balanced masses of light and less light. In the wonderful truth to life of the figures—the exquisite daintiness of the little princess, the affectionate reverence of the maids, the grotesqueness of the dwarfs, and the courtly sensitiveness of the artist’s figure,—we should have entered into the intimate human feeling of the whole group and ceased ta be troubled by the curious style of the costumes.
These costumes, more than likely, and the fact that Velasquez lived in the palace, painting courtly scenes and portraits, had much to do with his striking out a new style. How could he introduce those hooped skirts into a picture in the grand manner of Italian painting? His