Las Meninas

Las Hilanderas

El Cristo Crucificado

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Velázquez Archieve

Biography

History and tradition say that the family origins of the celebrated painter Velazquez should be found in Porto, Portugal.

We don't know why, in the year of 1581, a middle class family from Porto, Diogo Rodrigues da Silva, his wife Joana and their son João, moved to Sevilla where they remained definitively. João got married there and his eldest child, born in 1599, would be the future renamed painter Diego Velazquez. Still very young Diego began his learning in the workshop of a well known sevilliane painter named Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married some years later.
As time went by, Velasquez began moving away from the "maneristic" painting style, becoming an admirer of the "realism" of Caravaggio, then considered a revolutionary artist.

Velasquez worked hardly all the genres: religious, profane, scenes of quotidian life with important and common people. Frequently his relatives, wife, daugther and he himself served as models for his paintings. He was a kind, quiet and peaceful person, and only for insistence of his father-in-law he made his appearence in Madrid where he was introduced to the spanish Court. Some years later he became a very appreciated and remarked official painter there.

A trip to Italy left him with Ticiano and Tintoretto, and his own thecnique became more colourful and refined. During another stay in Italy where he was already very appreciated, he executed portraits from detached members of the Pontifical Court, including the Pope Inicencio X. Returning to Madrid, he is going to dedicate himself to portrait the spanish Royal Family. "Las Meninas" first intitled just "The Family", is considered by several experts a masterpiece and the essence of his pictural thought.
With Velasquez portrait reached the limits of perfection.

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