As the 16th anniversary of the last landing of The Venus of the mirror by Velázquez at the Prado Museum in Madrid on November 9, 2007, the painting, the only surviving female nude by the Sevillian master, was attacked this week at the National Gallery in London. Two environmental activists hit the glass that protected the canvas with hammers on Monday. The London art gallery removed the work from the room where it was exhibited and is studying the damage, which, according to what it announced this Tuesday on There is no scheduled date for its public exhibition. This was not the first attack that the goddess portrayed by Velázquez has suffered. Her story is full of intrigue, violence and mystery.
The first unresolved mystery is the date on which Velázquez painted the work. The National Gallery dates the painting between 1647 and 1651. It is not known whether it was painted on his first or second trip to Italy, and there are also those who venture that he painted it after his return to Madrid. “The first reference to the work is from 1651, the year in which the painter returned to Spain, so this opens the possibility that he did it here or there,” says Javier Portús, head of Conservation of Spanish Painting at the Prado Museum and curator of the exhibition who brought the painting to Spain for the last time in 2007. “Velázquez had an extraordinary plastic intelligence and was capable of many things,” the specialist explains on the phone. He does not venture to affirm that Venus was painted from life as some scholars maintain, because the artist “gave a natural appearance to everything.” This is not the first Venus to be seen in a mirror, but the Sevillian’s spectacular canvas shows her lying down and establishes a wonderful play of curves and arabesques, in a body that is far from “the opulence” of other Venuses by Rubens or Titian. , and which, therefore, marks a different canon, says Portús.
Were those curves inspired by those of his Italian lover, with whom he had an illegitimate son whom he named Antonio? Impossible to know with certainty. Documentation of works from that period is scarce and the theme of a nude complicated things in the Spain of the Inquisition. It was rare to find a female nude that was not a chaste Eva at that time, although there is evidence that in the Alcázar there were three more paintings by Velázquez with mythological themes and a certain erotic nature —Venus and Adonis, Psyche and Cupid, Apollo and Marsyas— who did not survive the palace fire. Regarding the moral control of the time, Portús refers to a writing from 1630 in which professors from Salamanca and Alcalá were asked about the representation of the nude and whose conclusion was that the painter was in mortal sin, although the owner of the painting was not. the work, as long as it was not shown to the public. Velázquez’s sensual Venus has a clear hint of prohibition.
The first owner, a painter friend
The work appears mentioned for the first time in a list of assets of Domingo Guerra Coronel, a painter close to Velázquez who apparently traded in paintings and who died in 1651. The next owner of the Venus was a great collector of the time, the Marquis of Heliche , Gaspar Méndez de Haro, great-nephew of the Count Duke of Olivares and renowned libertine. He placed the Velasqueña Venus in a main hall where there were other paintings and copies of the equestrian portraits of Philip IV and his powerful relative, as well as copies of the Poems that Titian made for Philip II. The painting was inherited by the daughter of Méndez de Haro, married to the Duke of Alba, and it remained in that collection for more than a century until Charles IV forced it to be sold to his valet, Manuel de Godoy.
The politician and aristocrat placed the Velasqueña Venus in a curious cabinet in his palace next to Goya’s two majas (paintings attacked last November in the Prado) and The school of love de Corregio: two Venuses, one from the front and one from the back, and two majas, one dressed and one naked, decorated the room. Godoy left Madrid in 1808 with the Aranjuez mutiny, and already in the midst of the outbreak of the War of Independence against the Napoleonic troops, the rapture of Venus.
A group of art dealers had spread their networks throughout Spain. The market in Italy was already very busy and here they were mainly looking for Flemish and Italian art. Lebrun, Maignain and Quilliet were three of the most prominent Frenchmen who acted in those years, and the sacking of Marshal Soult is famous, but the fate of the goddess portrayed by Velázquez, however, remained in the hands of the Scotsman Buchanan. An English painter, Wallis, had been working for him since 1808 in Spain. “The advance of the French armies brought with it waves of requisitions, looting and plundering by the soldiers,” writes María de los Santos García Felguera in her book Travelers, scholars and artists. Europeans before Spanish painting of the Golden Age.
In that warlike chaos, The Venus of the mirror He arrived in the United Kingdom in 1813. He would not return to Spain until 1960, on the occasion of the exhibition that celebrated the tricentenary of Velázquez in the Casón del Buen Retiro during the Franco era. His next trip to his country would be in 1990 for the massive and legendary exhibition dedicated to Velázquez at the Prado.
By then the Venus had already been in English hands for almost two centuries. In 1814 it was acquired by John Bacon Sawrey Morritt, who placed it in his Yorkshire mansion, Rokeby Hall (hence in the English-speaking world the painting is known as Rokeby Venus). Despite the remote location, the painting gained fame, and almost a century later, in 1907, it was acquired by the National Gallery. The institution launched a campaign of several months to raise funds for its purchase, and managed to raise the money thanks, among others, to King Edward VII.
Barely seven years after arriving at the British museum, The Venus of the mirror He received a violent attack from the Canadian suffragist Mary Richardson, who broke the glass and stabbed himself against the canvas. Richardson does not seem to want to punish Venus for her beauty, but rather to draw attention to the need to give women the vote and protest the arrest of a fellow fighter. This first attack was taken into account by the activists who returned this week to violate the beauty from Velazquez: they went after her to surrender. tribute to the stabbing suffragette and win followers to her cause.
Return of works
Unlike what happened, for example, with Goya’s painting The Marchioness of Santa Cruz, which in the eighties was the protagonist of a long court case and ended up being bought and returned to Spain, with Velázquez’s Venus there is no possible case. Goya’s work had left Spain illegally and was located at an auction. Could the current attacks on works of art end up favoring the return of some pieces? Art lawyer and professor at the London School of Economics Anna O’Connell clarifies that there are 14 national museums in the United Kingdom that are prohibited by law from returning anything. “In addition to this law, museums have been giving different arguments that have changed over time, but the result is the same. There are no returns, just a long-term loan like the Benin bronzes to Nigeria. “Vandalism is not new, and what greater act of violence than the theft that has been discovered from the curator of the British Museum?”
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