Diego Velázquez, Apeles de su siglo: historia y ficción en la obra del pintor de Felipe IV by Héctor Ruiz Soto (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Diego Velázquez, Apeles de su siglo: historia y ficción en la obra del pintor de Felipe IV by Héctor Ruiz Soto
• Jeremy Roe

Héctor Ruiz Soto. Diego Velázquez, Apeles de su siglo: historia y ficción en la obra del pintor de Felipe IV. BELIN ÉDUCATION / HUMENSIS, 2021. 182 PP.

THE PUBLICATION of a new monographic study of the life and work of Diego Velázquez is an event not to be overlooked, and this book is no exception. First, it offers an insightful introduction to the work of Velázquez that engages with a range of recent research on the artist's life, paintings, and cultural context. As such it will undoubtedly provide a valuable teaching aid. Ruiz Soto's prose is well paced, and his succinct discussion of art historical, literary, cultural, and political themes distills for a new generation of students and scholars the major historiographical advances made in Velázquez studies over the last few decades by Jonathan Brown and John Elliott—needless to say—as well as Svetlana Alpers, Julián Gallego, Giles Knox, Felipe Pereda, and Victor Stoichita, among others. I highlight this facet of his book first, as it is seemingly the publisher's intended readership. The generic textbook cover informs the reader that Diego Velázquez, Apeles de su siglo is intended to réussir, and, in this case, put to very good use, the author's agrégation d'espagnol: Ruiz's book forms part of a collaboration between the publisher and France's Centre National d'Enseignement à Distance. Presenting scholarly research for a student readership is by no means an easy task, and Ruiz's work is an excellent example of how successfully this can be done. Nevertheless, one shortcoming of this book is its lack of images. As a volume that analyzes pictorial composition and color, it might have been better off as an exclusively digital publication, which would have permitted a greater budget for image rights, as well as the possibility of adding hyperlinks within the text to the many images discussed.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to judge this book by its cover and pigeonhole it merely as undergraduate reading. Indeed, the second reason to hail the publication of this book is that it is more than a textbook. Despite the academic constraints of the agrégation and those imposed by the publisher, the author presents an approach to the life and work of Velázquez that merits the attention of those already immersed in the current debates and critical minutiae of Velázquez studies and Spanish Golden Age culture more broadly. [End Page 455] For those already acquainted with Ruiz's scholarship on Golden Age theater, Góngora, and other early modern Spanish authors, this will come as no surprise; the footnotes, unlike the book's somewhat cursory bibliography, reveal how a wealth of scholarship is condensed, into this work. Admittedly, his ideas are at times overly condensed, and intriguing concepts are not pursued in the depth required to fully develop them.

The introduction is one example of this. It offers a reflection on "the relationship between history, painting, and fiction," which Ruiz claims he will explore by addressing issues of "style, composition, pictorial genres, the functions of painting, as well as its historicity and metapictorial discourse" (10; translation mine). The scholarship on Golden Age literature and, in particular, the relationships between painting and poetic and theatrical writing are a key facet of this opening discussion, which invokes a range of theoretical questions such as literary and artistic invention, veracity and verisimilitude, stylistic modes such as sobriety and grandeur, as well as the practice of ekphrasis. A fundamental concern of the parallel drawn between word and image is to address what Brown termed Velázquez's "oblique attitude" to narration, to which Ruiz responds by arguing that Velázquez was a "child of his time, who appreciated difficulty in poetry" (24). For Ruiz such difficulty is synonymous with Góngora's verse, and this is above all identified with Velázquez's final two mythological paintings: Mercury and Argus (ca. 1659) and The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne...