Diego Velázquez Circle

Circle of DIEGO DE VELAZQUEZ Y SILVA (Seville, 1599 - Madrid, 1660).
"Bust of a lady".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
It presents restorations on the pictorial surface.
It has faults in the frame.
Measurements: 43 x 32 cm; 51 x 41 cm (frame).

In this work we see a scene framed within the costumbrismo of the XVII century, worked with a realistic language where a composition stands out, balanced and well settled. This composition and the theme treated by the author, typical of the scenes of the reality of the Spain of the Golden Century and the picaresque literature of the time, bring the piece closer to the naturalist current. It is a genre in which popular types and attitudes, behaviors, values and habits common to a specific group of the population, region or class are described by means of a satirical, nostalgic or narrative description of the environments, customs, clothes, parties and entertainments, traditions, trades and representative types of a society. The idea of costumbrismo arose from an attempt to understand reality, or more precisely, reality understood in a particular way, from a specific point of view.

Both the subject matter and the technical precision of this portrait gave rise to an artistic attribution linked to the circle of Velázquez. It is canonical to divide Velázquez's career by his two visits to Italy. He rarely signed his paintings, and the royal archives only give the dates of his most important works. Internal evidence and the history of his portraits provide the rest to some extent. Although he knew all the Italian schools and was a friend of the leading painters of his day, Velázquez was strong enough to resist outside influences and to develop for himself his own nature and his own artistic principles. He rejected the pomp that characterized the portraiture of other European courts and instead brought an even greater reserve to the sober formula of Habsburg portraiture established by Titian, Antonio Mor and Alonso Sánchez Coello. He is known for using a rather limited palette, but he mixed the available paints with great skill to achieve varied shades. His pigments did not differ significantly from those of his contemporaries and he mainly used azurite, enamel, vermilion, red lacquer, lead yellow and ochers. His early works were painted on canvases prepared with a reddish-brown ground. During his first trip to Italy, he adopted the use of light gray backgrounds, which he maintained for the rest of his life. The change resulted in paintings with greater luminosity and a generally cool, silvery range of colors.