Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel, Count-Duke of Olivares. A relatively youthful Olivares in 1624, three years into his time in power. By Velazquez.
I know it’s a bit late, but I was thinking in the bath today of ideas for the British election campaign. Everyone — well, really, it’s just John Lanchester of the LRB, but I trust him — thinks there will have to be massive public spending cuts in Britain by whoever wins, and it’s going to be horrible all round. Well, I had an idea: why not scale back British defence spending to the level of Norway? Britain spends ₤36 billion a year on defence, while Norway uses a mere ₤3.6 billion. What does Britain get for the extra money ? Nothing at all. All they really need is the changing of the guard for the tourists and a couple of butch young men with assault rifles at the airports. Britain could save ₤32 billion a year! They could funnel the former soldiers into teaching, gardening and major public works. If nobody likes that idea (I’m betting the Tory party will be against it), Britain could always just privatise the military: sell it off, like Mrs Thatcher & co. did with the railways and the water supply.
The Count-Duke Of Olivares. Velázquez, 1634.
A Bad Guide 
Reading you now, made me think immediately of the Spanish Golden Age “arbitristas”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrista
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrismo
36 billion ain’t remotely enough, but it’s a start. We’d want to keep a few nukes for deterrence, but they’re dead cheap.
P.S What makes you think that Mrs T privatised the railways?
That’s right, she privatised the train companies but kept the railway lines. Jolly clever. We could do that. Keep the aircraft carriers, but rent them out to pirates.
Thank you, Julia. I see myself as the Count-Duke. I see that, as he aged, his head got bigger and his feet smaller.
Nope, AJP. Try again.
John Major, then. But she thought of it first. (How did they get those carriages up there?)
:-D
Now you have pictures here!
Well chosen…
Yes, you can’t beat a couple of Velazquez portraits if you need to illustrate a point.
Why is Olivares wearing that enormous key in the earlier picture?
Apparently he was always locking himself out. His wife made him wear it at all times.
Okay, this is what it says in the Spanish Wikipedia article on the portrait:
Google translates la llave de mayordomo en la cintura as “butler key at the waist”, but I’m assuming he wasn’t really that kind of majordomo. Maybe it means chamberlain, or prime minister.
This is what they want us to believe, but the truth is that he kept his goats for himself. So that’s the key of the noble goat’s house he had built them. And Velázquez knew it…
From Julia’s first link:
Arbitristas, a Spanish word meaning “projectors.”
That sounds like complete nonsense, but I don’t want to delete/replace it without knowing what’s going on. Can anyone explain it?
The second link (in Spanish) is more complete. There you can find a definition “Medio extraordinario que se propone para el logro de algún fin” (from the DRAE).
Sorry, but I must continue in Spanish: LH, no sé si el término en inglés “projectors” es adecuado, pero sí que los arbitrios, por más que suene extraño en castellano actual, eran en la época propuestas enviadas a la corona sobre temas muy variados. Lo curioso del asunto, ya no lingüístico sino socio-literario, es que hubo muchos arbitristas que tuvieron una visión clara de los problemas del reino en esas épocas y daban consejos inteligentes, pero la mayoría de las veces no fueron atendidos, manteniendo siempre los caminos más convencionales que finalmente llevaron a España a la ruina. Pero además en la literatura, los arbitristas eran caricaturizados como locos que hacían propuestas extravagantes y así ha quedado inmortalizado el personaje. Verás que no sin malicia, entonces, le recordé esos personajes a AJP.
The museum says the enormous key is because he was camarero mayor. But that can’t be right, since Philip acceded to reviving that post in 1636. Maybe the privado / valido was already ayudas de cámara or something like that, so it’s the same idea.
Being serious, I think the symbolic value of that big key should be taken into account: as the “privado /valido ” he was the keeper of his king’s secrets. That’s what a “camarero mayor” does.
Language: (Arbitristas) Can anyone explain it?
According to one dictionary, it’s either Persona que propone planes disparatados para aliviar la hacienda pública o el país en general. (“Person proposing crazy schemes to alleviate public finances or the country in general”) or it’s Persona que trata de resolver los problemas económicos de un estado con planes utópicos o disparatados. (“Person who tries to solve the economic problems of one state or disparate utopian plans”).
So Perhaps it’s an arbitrator, although google translates that back as árbitro(s).
The Real Academica Espanola defines it as Persona que inventa planes o proyectos disparatados para aliviar la Hacienda pública o remediar males políticos, or “A person who invents nonsensical plans or projects to relieve the Treasury or remedy political evils.” It seems that’s the current meaning of the word, whatever its literal translation.
Having checked around in the RAE, I can report that arbitrista seems to mean advisor with crazy ideas detrimental to the nation, something like “arbitraitor”. Today we say “consultant” or “expert” for this phenomenon.
Also, disparatado (adj.) and disparate (noun) apparently have the sole meaning “batty [thing]”. Your two definitions “Persona que propone …” and “Persona que trata de resolver” thus amount to one. Google has mislead you by translating disparatado as English “disparate” in the second definition. That would be dispar in Spanish.
The RAE has for arbitrista a definition with a hint of militant feminism:
“To remedy male politicians” !? Castrate them, I don’t doubt.
Who’s the projector now?
That has a dusty answer.
In Denmark, at least, the key is the insignia of the kammerherre.
That must be “chamberlain”, in England.
AJP, yes, like “chambellan” in French. Originally this person looked after the king’s “bed chamber”, but later his responsibilities were much more extensive.
Julia: I had never heard of the Arbitristas, but they sound like a very interesting bunch. I guess the reason their ideas were considered crazy were mostly that they were way ahead of their time.
And I suppose Mesopotamia is just going to bmb the fuck out of itself when the Americans say so?
Oh.
Meanwhile, Nasty Geert Wilders has said he will neglect to buy the Netherlands any JSF aeroplanes, which is surely the most endearing thing he will ever say.
Good old Nasty. In the future, Britain will rent its old bombs to smaller countries. Des, have you renounced blogging for the duration?
AJP: I see myself as the Count-Duke. I see that, as he aged, his head got bigger and his feet smaller.
Funny, I think that he looks younger in the later picture (the equestrian one).
The first picture seems to be a realistic portrait of the man, his actual clothing, bearing, etc, and it gives a hint of his personality. I can well believe that the entire picture was painted by Velazquez. The second one looks generic – it was probably done in a workshop where some painters specialized in horses, others in clothing, background landscapes, etc, and the only thing differentiating this painting from dozens of similar ones is the face of the rider (painted by the workshop master), which even if one abstracts the moustache and beard, does not look much like the face in the first portrait. I am surprised to see the name of Velazquez indicated for both these paintings.
There’s certainly no mystery about their attribution. Velazquez did other equestrian portraits the same year: there’s one of the king and one of Prince Baltasar Carlos, and two more of the king & queen that he had started earlier and finished in 1634-5 but seem to have been screwed up by someone else while he was away in Italy. He knew Rubens and his work and had been to Italy and so the change to a more baroque style is understandable.
My daughter pointed out that the horse is in terrible shape, having enormous hind quarters. I was interested in the horizon on the left, where it looks as if the clouds are being sucked into a vacuum cleaner, but in fact it’s supposed to be smoke from a battle scene that Olivares is surveying. One other thing that’s interesting about this portrait is to compare it to the most famous picture he did in 1634, The Surrender of Breda, which has a really extraordinary distant landscape & sky, laid out horizontally, that are broken up by lots of vertical lines of soldiers’ pikes. A good part of that painting, too, is taken up by a horse’s arse.
There’s another smaller version of this painting, in the Met in NY. It has a much better horse, in my opinion, I wonder why it was changed? Perhaps Oliveres thought the first one looked too ceremonial and decorative, not appropriate for a proper soldier (which he indeed wasn’t, though he was a very good horseman, apparently). The horses are in a dressage position known as levade. I wondered if Velazquez might have seen Bernini’s equestrian sculpture of Louis XIV, while he was in Italy, the one that Louis hated, but of course that was made a few years later (166-something).
As to the first portrait, it’s very stiff compared to the next one he did, but I still prefer it; there’s no grace to the portrayal, but it looks much more like a Velazquez to me.
None of these pictures is anything like Las Meninas (1656), or even his Pope Innocent portrait (1650), but he was a good deal older by the time he got to paint those.
Whether he painted every square inch of every picture himself is a red herring (imo); anyway, I never heard he has a huge setup, like Raphael or one of the others. He himself was a great craftsman and a Velazquez is not a Raphael, nor a Titian nor a Rubens.
Marie-Lucie, yes the “arbitristas” were interesting people, their portrait in literatures is unfair many times. And it’s true what you said, some of their ideas weren’t understood at that time.
I looked at the Velazquez article on Wikipedia, which has a lot of paintings, and the horses all look unnatural to me, as in frozen in an unnatural position (but I don’t spend much time around horses or riders). I guess that the painter was much more interested in people than in horses.
Horses — especially moving ones — were always a bit problematical, nobody was even sure they had all four feet off the ground, or where their legs were while they galloped, until Muybridge photographed one. Stubbs did some good ones about a hundred years after Velazquez, but by then they weren’t used symbolically in portraits. Here’s one by Gainsborough that’s rather better of the horse than the rider.
Another proposal – de arbitristas, sin duda – concerning the necessary post-election public spending cuts in Britain.
Why did art stop? I mean, there have been no more composers to compare with Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven but there were decent composers through to Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and there were fine popular composers from Scott Joplin, through the Tin Pan Alley and jazz men, all the way to Lennon and McCartney. But art – in the sense of painting – just collapsed. Was it photography wot done it in?
Certainly Paul Delaroche is supposed to have claimed something like that in 1839. («A partir d’aujourd’hui la peinture est morte.»)
Others have seen it as an essentially historical / political development, like Malevich’s 1920 claim, “Живопись давно изжита.” Pre-pop Clem Greenberg saw it teleologically, of course: easel or cabinet painting was a Western development, which then led to abstraction, which logically superseded it. Post-pop Danto goes one further and supposes that art (painting) has run its course; it’s finished because it has done everything it can.
But really, what is it that collapsed? Back when all these claims were made, people hadn’t stopped painting or buying / visiting museums full of paintings. Art schools still crank out MFAs today and a few years later galleries and museums will buy some of their work, too. People like the Art Renewal Center, with their quest for 21st century Bouguereaus, seem like crackpots to art historians, but must have some popular following. (And they tend to blame Hume and Kant, not Daguerre.)
Studiolum, I’m very sorry WordPress decided you were spam. I cannot figure out how they make this decision, it obviously has nothing to do with whether your comments have been accepted in the past.
I have a bit of a problem with poor old Königsburg being moved closer to Russia; after the election possibly Britain could send its remaining platoon of troops to fight WW3? I don’t know. Otherwise, it’s all fine. But whither Hungary?
And they tend to blame Hume and Kant, not Daguerre.
dearie,
The other thing that happened was the Frankfurt School became very influential. Walter Benjamin (The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction is his most important piece, it’s quite short) & Theodore Adorno (who wrote absolutely unreadable pieces on music, including Beethoven’s Late String Quartets & late piano works) caused a new industry to start: it’s called Critical Theory and you find it in schools of the visual arts and literature. Since that happened, philosophy and stuff like that became quite important in mainstream art. That means to artists, critics, curators of museums, and gallery owners. Thanks to Critical Theory (for both better & worse), a lot of artists would now say that there was no such subject as “art” before Kant wrote his Critique Of Judgment, whereas when I went to art school, in the mid ‘seventies, a lot of artists just said there was no art if you couldn’t draw. That last idea went out the window in the ‘eighties, Marcel Duchamp having created the precedent in about 1914. I’d say Duchamp is responsible (again, for both better & worse, but these are the times we live in) for art being about ideas and commentary rather than about paint surface. After 100 years of impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism (analytical & synthetic), expressionism, abstraction and abstract expressionism EVERYONE was really SICK of paint.
As a complete non expert, I think of music differently. I have no time for atonal things, having never become tired of the former stuff. I stop after Shostakovitch. To a much greater extent than the visual arts, I think music moved on through being a popular art: jazz, rock & rap etc.
marie-lucie,
I suddenly remembered (but unfortunately I was driving the car) that the world’s very best horse drawings are the native American ones. They really understood what they were drawing and their superiority to Western/European horse drawing becomes very obvious when you see them. I’ve got a fantastic book that my mother sent me, called Plains Indian Drawings 1865-1935, Pages From A Visual History; Janet Catherine Berlo, Editor. Published 1996, by Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-3742-5. Unfortunately, unbelievably, it seems to be out of print, but maybe you have access to it somewhere. It’s one of my favourite books.
Wonderful “arbitrio”, Studiolum! I’ll add Buenos Aires next to Spain and Italy… :-)
Lascaux beasties are pretty fine: they include horses, don’t they?
Sorry, “I would add…”
(no soy tan poderosa como para creer que es una acción efectiva que pueda hacer… It’s just my bad English!)
I’m sure you’re as effective as The Economist, Julia.
:-) (ask my husband…)
But whither Hungary?
Although Hungary, for reasons very similar to those of Poland, would like to go a bit further to the West (her bottom would for example marvellously fit into the Bay of Marseille), she as a good hen cannot leave alone her chicken, the Hungarian ethnic minorities in the neighbouring countries. The arbitristas knew this well and so not only they have left all the countries with Hungarian minorities on their place and in direct touch with her, but they also moved into the neighborhood Belgium with a large Hungarian community, and even created for her a new neighbour, Vulgaria whose name perfectly characterizes the general tone and political climate of the country nowadays.
AJP, couldn’t you scan and put up here some good drawings from the Plains Indian Drawings? As the book is out of print, I don’t think anyone could object this, the more so as the copyright holders of the drawings themselves are most probably dead for more than 70 years.
Okay.
“Vulgaria” characterises the tone & political climate of most countries in a cyclical way, I’d say.
Who plays centre-forward for Vulgaria?
Rebarbatov, I suspect.
dearie, the other thing I thought about doing art is to compare it to being a scientist: if people were constantly telling you that someone else did your most recent experiment 5 years ago, you might want to try twisting what you’re doing around a bit, try something slightly different. You’d never get an academic position, say, by churning out the same work that other people completed ten or fifty or a hundred years ago.
Crown, true, but Turner didn’t do Caravaggios, Beethoven didn’t copy Bach. George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter , Fats Waller, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers didn’t just imitate Scott Joplin. I suppose I do wonder why painting, and other parts of Western high culture, ran out of puff roughly a hundred years ago. It’s not just painting. Consider Einstein: he decorated his wall with portraits of Newton, Faraday and Clerk Maxwell. There’s been no scientist since of the calibre of those three and their admirer. Maybe it was the First World War, maybe it was the rise of the USA, maybe it was just that to everything there is a season, but whatever it was it seemed to hit painting rather hard.
Wikipedia’s page on Ledger art isn’t all that great and doesn’t have many illustrations or external links. But the books it lists are still in print. Plains Indian Art from Fort Marion isn’t, either, but can be had used for cheap.
Is there a “kids now-a-days” aspect to this? Like what Félibien has Poussin say of Caravaggio?
Is there a “kids now-a-days” aspect to this?
I’m pretty sure that’s almost entirely what’s involved here.