Villa medici in rome diego velazquez biography
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When Diego Velázquez was appointed a Painter Royal to King Philip IV in October , he became the most junior of a group of artists of varied status and influence. Among the most senior was Vicente Carducho, who had been painting religious and narrative works for the court for over twenty years. Carducho was quite opinionated, and a decade later published what became one of the standard references for Spanish art.
The young Velázquez had very limited experience in religious or narrative works, and initially his court work consisted almost entirely of portraits: a genre which, though lucrative, was despised by the &#;best&#; painters. For Velázquez to rise in status and influence at court, he had to become a superior narrative artist so that his work entered the royal collection on merit, rather than as a mere record of its sitter.
Velázquez moved up the ladder in , after a jury appointed by Philip IV recommended that his portrait of the king was superior in competition against those of Carducho, Caxés, and Angelo Nardi. The king&#;s reward was to appoint Velázquez Usher of the Chamber, a great honour which brought with it a free apartment, free medical care, and coincidentally backpayments which had been due to him. The king also agreed to Velázquez visiting Italy, alt
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View of say publicly Villa House in Riot, by Diego Velázquez
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Villa Medici, Grotto-Loggia Facade, by Diego Velázquez
Although Velázquez enjoyed life in Rome during his first visit to Italy, he feared the summer heat in the city, and consequently in May withdrew for two months to the secluded Villa Medici, which was also an ideal place for him to pursue his studies of classical antiquity. Here he produced two small landscapes of astonishing originality, which represents aspects of the gardens of the Villa Medici.
During the previous decade, a few northern artists in Rome began to draw out of doors, continuing and expanding upon the practice of depicting ancient sites initiated by draftsmen of the sixteenth century. Velázquez's little paintings are derived from the plein air drawings of such artists as Paul Bril and Bartolomeus Breenburgh. However, they appear to have been among the first paintings made on site instead of in the studio. Velázquez appropriates the allusive technique of drawing to create almost palpable effects of light and atmosphere. Curiously, he was never again to paint a pure landscape, and thus these remarkable pictures can be interpreted as another example of experimental practices undertaken in Rome in order to expand his artistic horizons.