The man stares at us from across four centuries and, although he’s made of pigment on canvas, you would swear that his skin must be warm to the touch. Wasn’t he riding the No 3 train up Broadway last night? The lace collar’s a bit out of date, but even so, was that him, munching a hamburger at the next table?
Diego Velázquez painted Juan de Pareja in 1650, muting all signs of rank and class so that, despite his dark skin, he became unplaceable in the social order. At the same time he endowed the man, then in his early forties, with personality, dignity and a frank gaze that made him unique. He confronts the viewer with a straightforward assertion of his identity — a striking fact, since for decades few people thought to wonder who he was.
The Metropolitan Museum has finally made Pareja the protagonist of his own portrait, clearing away the accretion of lore and offering a fresh, if patchy, account of his life and career. He was a man of African descent, whom Velázquez held in slavery for decades before persuading — or, more likely, compelling — him to pose. A few years later, he was a free man with a trade: he too became an accomplished professional painter.
The Met has paired his work and Velázquez’s, which, while historically logical, is a little like asking an unseeded player to go up against a defending champion. Velázquez executed Pareja’s portrait in Rome, where it was exhibited in the Pantheon and electrified the city. According to a Flemish visitor, it “received such universal acclaim that in the opinion of all the painters of different nations everything else looked like painting, [and] this alone looked like truth”. Velázquez, though well known in Spain, arrived in Rome as a provincial celebrity and left as a megastar. Pareja arrived as his property and departed the same way, though with a formal promise of freedom.
The exhibition braids the story of those two intertwined lives with the twisty tale of their posthumous reputations, perpetually glittering in Velázquez’s case, flickering and partly shadowed in Pareja’s. The shock of seeing a familiar work transformed by the addition of context offers hope: maybe the old canon is still capable of kicking up surprises.
You do have to look for them, though. When the Met bought Velázquez’s masterpiece in 1971 for a record-breaking $5.5mn, critics fulminated that the museum’s splashy spending was tone-deaf at a time when New York City was careering towards bankruptcy. The British government came in for a drubbing, too, since the work had been securely ensconced in the UK for generations before it slipped out of the country.
But amid all the hubbub over money and prestige, almost everyone forgot about the face that launched a thousand controversies, or who the fellow even was. Few were aware that he had also stood on the other side of the easel. Yet the story has a lot to teach us.
Pareja, born around 1608 in Antequera, Spain, probably to an enslaved woman of African descent and a white Spaniard, came into Velázquez’s legal possession by the mid-1630s through purchase, inheritance or gift. The Met fills in the backdrop. Long after Ferdinand and Isabella’s infamous expulsion of the Jewish community in 1492 and forced conversion of Muslim people a decade later, Spain remained a multiracial if highly stratified society. Zoom in close to an anonymous 17th-century view of Seville and you find yourself in the waterfront neighbourhood of Triana, humming with oarsmen, hawkers and porters of assorted skin tones, interspersed with white gentry.
This interracial bustle invigorated Velázquez, who bestowed his trademark majesty on jesters and dwarfs, as well as on bona fide sovereigns. In 1618, he painted a black kitchen maid pausing briefly in her labours. The gleaming, exquisite pots and pans arrayed around the counter set off her skin and the intense, thoughtful expression on her half-lit face. The scene proved so popular that he repeated it twice.
Velázquez snuck a copy of his “Supper at Emmaus” on to the wall of one version, hinting that the maid, like the humble diners who learn Jesus’s divine identity around the table, has absorbed a jolt of revelation. “The Lord walks even among the kitchen pots,” St Teresa of Avila said, a statement full of pictorial possibilities.
That spiritually awakened young woman might have belonged — literally, it turns out — to the Velázquez family. Documents show that when the artist’s much younger sister was baptised in 1621, so was the infant daughter of a woman enslaved in the household. The show traces the extent to which forced labour fuelled and infiltrated the brisk trade in luxury goods, including woodwork, silverwork, ceramics and even the most elevated forms of art. Slavery sat at the heart of culture, both obvious and invisible.
That Pareja was able to spring from this system ready to practise his trade suggests that, contrary to guild rules, he did more in Velázquez’s studio than simply grind colours. He was freed in 1654; by 1661, he completed “The Calling of Saint Matthew”, a monumental canvas teeming with splendid figures, including — off to one side, modestly dressed, impassively minding his own business — himself.
In the early 20th century, the presence of a black figure in a biblical story painted by a black artist in 17th-century Spain gripped the imagination of Arturo Schomburg, a black Puerto Rican intellectual and collector. Schomburg spent years unearthing hidden histories of black achievement, and when the Carnegie Corporation bought his vast archive for the New York Public Library in 1926, he used the proceeds to fund a trip to Spain. The country had bleached out the record of mingled races and, in Juan de Pareja, he saw an emblem of both success and erasure.
The exhibition opens with a room devoted to Schomburg’s excitement. When he arrived at the Prado, he couldn’t find “The Calling of St Matthew” until the museum director sent him on a guided expedition through a series of closed and dilapidated rooms. “I had journeyed thousands of miles to look upon the work of this coloured slave who had succeeded by courageous persistence in the face of every discouragement,” he reported. “I sat in reverent silence.”
Had he been less purposeful and dogged, Schomburg might well have strolled by with barely a glance at “The Calling of St Matthew”. It’s a perfectly fine example of the period’s most sumptuous style, replete with drapery, ornamental urns, elaborate moustaches and perspectival tricks, but it doesn’t carry much emotional current.
Neither do any of three other Parejas that are gathered for the first time here. His “Baptism of Christ”, teeming with angels, putti and frolicking country folk, sends the eye flitting in a dozen different directions. Or rather, it nudges the viewer into another room altogether to see the other portraits Velázquez produced in Rome: an agent of the Spanish crown, a young peasant woman with sorrowful eyes and a florid face, and a resplendently sly Pope Innocent X, all enshrined in creamy brushstrokes and spectacular understatement.
In the end, this is a show in which greatness is incidental. At its centre are the events that take place in the shadow of genius. It fleshes out our picture of a complicated time, adding bracing messiness to the selective clarity of a painter’s view.
To July 16, metmuseum.org
