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The Velázquez in the Basement
A curator tells how it feels to discover a masterpiece.
September/October 2010
by John Marciari ’00PhD
John Marciari ’00PhD, curator of European art at the San Diego Museum of Art, was formerly the Nina and Lee Griggs Associate Curator of Early European Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.
In late 2004, I came across a dirty and damaged
painting in a storage facility at Yale. A large canvas, more than five feet
tall and four feet wide, the painting had been badly abraded, and its surface
was disfigured by areas of paint loss. It had been cut, so that at upper left
one could see the hands and arms of a now-headless angel. Despite that, the
picture struck me as a powerful work: boldly conceived, impressively painted,
filled with brilliant details, and characterized by a serene power. Depicting
the scene commonly identified as "the Education of the Virgin"—that is, the
young Virgin Mary being taught to read by her mother, Saint Anne, and her father,
Saint Joachim—it had been at Yale for nearly a century but had never been
catalogued as anything other than "Anonymous, Spanish School, seventeenth century.”
This summer, after six years of questioning,
research, and discussions with other art historians, I published an article in
the Madrid-based arts journal Ars, presenting the scholarly arguments for my conviction that the painting is a
previously unknown work by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), one of the greatest
painters of the European tradition. I fully expected academic debate to follow,
but debate that would slowly stretch over years before arriving at any common
consensus.
I was thus unprepared for the front pages. "A New
Velázquez Found in the Basement of Yale University" proclaimed the headlines of
Spain’s El País on July
1. The story was accompanied on the front page by a large photograph and
continued inside the newspaper with a double-page spread. This was just the
beginning. Over the next few days the story came to be covered by virtually
every newspaper in Spain, by the Guardian in Great Britain, and by newspapers from Argentina’s Clarín to Zimbabwe’s NewsDay.
One never anticipates that long, careful, academic
research will become headline news. I'm sure that I’ve worn a rather bemused
expression over the past two months, as I have been overwhelmed with requests
not only for comments about the painting, but also for photographs of myself;
the story of someone finding a Velázquez seems to capture the public imagination
as much as the painting itself. This is my own version of that story: not the
scholarly arguments for the attribution, but rather the more personal tale of
the discovery.
The
Education of the Virgin has never been on public view. Professors, curators,
and conservators are known to have looked at the painting from time to time,
but it seems not to have generated very much curiosity. To be fair, the
basement storerooms of the Old Art Gallery building were a bit dark and
crowded, hardly the best place to study a large, dark, damaged painting. (Some
media accounts have implied that Yale kept the painting in some kind of dark
closet where high humidity caused the paint to fall from the canvas, but this
is pure fabrication. All the damage happened long before the painting arrived
at Yale, and the basement was a proper museum storeroom.) In 1963, the Education had been sent to a
conservator who cleaned off previous restoration work, but either he or the Art
Gallery curators of that time decided not to undertake an extensive restoration
to make the still-anonymous painting suitable for public exhibition. In my
years as a graduate student at Yale, from 1993 to 1999, I never saw the work,
even though early Baroque painting was one of my main interests.
I returned to Yale to work at the Art Gallery in
2002, and soon thereafter, the gallery started preparing for the renovation of
its buildings (still under way). The paintings were moved to a new storage facility,
and the curators began planning a complete reinstallation of the galleries. I
thus came to the Education of the
Virgin. I cannot say that I knew what it was at first glance, but I
knew that it was worth puzzling out. In the parlance of curators and art
dealers, the work was by someone;
it was attributable. Not
only was it a work of great quality, but the painting was so confidently
executed that it seemed to bear the signature style of a particular artist. I
was looking at many paintings at the time, so the Education did not immediately monopolize my
attention, but every few weeks, I would return and stare at it. A few ideas
came to mind—both Spanish artists and artists working in Naples under the influence
of the Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera—but nothing really held up.
Until one day, as I stood in front of the painting,
it all fell into place in an instant. I distinctly remember the moment and my
thoughts: "Wait. No. I know exactly what this is! This is early Velázquez! This is just like the Tavern Scene at the Hermitage,
the picture in Edinburgh, the Saint
Thomas in Orléans, and the group in London. This is just like
everything in the Velázquez in
Seville exhibition catalogue." Everything was familiar: the drapery
arranged in heavy folds, the naturalism of the figures and still-life elements,
the way the figures emerged from the dark, the color palette. Even some of the
faces seemed to be those of the models used for other paintings.
I immediately told myself I was insane. It couldn’t
be. It was too implausible. There was no way that I’d discovered a Velázquez.
How could it have failed to attract notice, given that it had been at the
university for close to a century?
Over the next weeks and months I tried every
alternate hypothesis I could imagine. We brought the painting into the
conservation laboratory and analyzed the materials. (At first, I did not even
let on to the conservator, Patricia Garland, that I had so grand a name in mind
but merely indicated that I thought it might be "from Seville, around
Velázquez’s time.") The technical study nonetheless revealed that the
materials—the colored pigments, ground layer, and canvas—were those found in
other early works by the artist, and an X-ray demonstrated that the painting's
execution, in long, confident strokes, was likewise consistent. I also began
reading everything I could find about early Velázquez and Sevillian painting of
the time. My initial hope of finding some reference to a missing work by the
artist quickly dissipated as I learned that there was virtually no documentary
evidence for any of his
early paintings done in Seville. Yet I grew ever more confident. I found links
to works by other Sevillian painters and further comparisons to Velázquez’s own
first paintings.
In addition to all the small bits of supporting
evidence, moreover, I came to see that the mind behind the painting was the
same that would, decades later, paint Las
Meninas. The young Virgin Mary looks directly out of the Education, and her gaze
signals to us that there is more to the story than immediately meets the eye.
(That "more" involves a complicated theological debate about the Immaculate
Conception then current in Seville.) In making us complicit spectators, the
young Velázquez—only 18 or 19—already here demonstrates the same pictorial
intelligence, the same probing psychology, and the same questions about the
interaction of viewers and paintings that underlie his later masterpieces.
By the spring of 2005, I thought it time to begin
showing the picture to a few more people. I sent an e-mail to a friend and
colleague, Salvador Salort-Pons, a Velázquez specialist and associate curator
of European art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. (He was then a curator at the
Meadows Museum in Dallas.) We had corresponded about a number of
seventeenth-century paintings, and my first e-mail about the Education stated simply that I
was sending a photograph of what I thought was an important painting, but that
I did not want to prejudice his opinion by saying anything more. A few minutes
and his reply arrived: "I am trembling!!!! That’s a very important painting. I
need to see it. No doubt: Spanish, Sevillian … But
I am afraid to say." His two subsequent visits to New Haven, during which we
studied the painting detail by detail, only confirmed his immediate reaction:
this was Velázquez.
Not long after sending the photograph to Salvador, I
deliberately left the photo on my desk when another visiting colleague asked to
use my office to make a call, though I had not mentioned the painting to him up
to that point. I stepped out of the office. I heard him pick up the phone, then
put it down. Then his voice carried through the open door as he said to himself,
thinking out loud: "This is not Giovanni Dò. This is not the Master of the
Annunciation to the Shepherds. THIS is a BIG PROBLEM." Giovanni Dò and the
so-called Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds are two artists whom I
too had considered as candidates for the attribution—but in an instant he had
moved past them and was already sure that he was looking at Velázquez. Yet he
also immediately realized that I was going to spend a lot of time trying to
deal with the picture, and that it would be a controversial addition to the
canon.
He was right. That was five years ago, and there was
still much more work to do. One of the first problems was to establish the
work’s provenance. Its identification number at Yale, 1900.43, would normally
have indicated that it came to the university in 1900, but I quickly discovered
that that number had been assigned in 1959, when the picture turned up in an
inventory and its donor was unknown. Around the same time that I learned this,
I found documents indicating that in 1970–71 a graduate student, Humberto
Rodriguez-Camilloni '67, '71MArch, '81PhD, had studied the painting. He sent
photographs to one or two scholars and suggested that the work was not unlike
the early Velázquez, but he received rather curt responses and appears to have
pursued his ideas no further.
After further research, I
discovered that in 1925, the School of Art had recorded a gift from Henry
Hotchkiss Townshend, Class of 1897, '01LLB, and his brother Raynham, Class of
1900S, of "two paintings, oil on canvas, framed, Spanish, style of Murillo,
religious subjects." There are no other paintings in Yale’s collection that
could fit this description, so the Education must have been one of them. Later board minutes and photographs confirm this
provenance and document the work’s transfer into the Art Gallery’s permanent
collection.
In 1925, the Townshend brothers had come into
possession of the large house built by their grandfather and started renovating
it. The Education of the Virgin, a large and damaged picture, and one that must have been at odds with the décor
of the Gothic Revival house, was apparently given to Yale as that renovation
proceeded. There is no record of how the painting had come into the possession
of the Townshend family, but Henry and Raynham were the sons of Captain Charles
Hervey Townshend (1833–1904). He was one of the great American merchant sailors
of the nineteenth century and sailed repeatedly from New Haven to the
Mediterranean; the most reasonable assumption is that the painting came from
Europe aboard one of his ships.
The provenance, however, is just one piece of the
puzzle, and it does nothing to prove the attribution. Similarly, technical
study of the painting can confirm that the materials are those used by
Sevillian artists of the early seventeenth century, and that it was painted in
the same way that Velázquez is known to have worked, but material evidence
cannot prove the case.
Research adds support to the hypothesis that the work is by Velázquez, but
there is not—nor should we expect there to be—a paper trail that connects the
Yale canvas to a contract signed by the painter. The final judgment about the
Yale painting requires a leap of connoisseurial faith. Five years of research
simply confirmed what I felt that I already knew in a moment back in late 2004.
At the end of the day, what really matters is that the work just is, in every
stroke and every detail, comparable to the other early paintings by the artist.
When the journal Ars, which had run a series of articles on works reattributed to
Velázquez, decided to publish my study this year, I expected that its
appearance would begin the long process of academic debate. At 11 p.m. on June
30, however, the day before my article was to be published, I received the
following e-mail from the news desk at El
Mundo, one of the main Spanish newspapers: "We are hearing from
another newspaper here in Spain that Yale University has just found an unknown
piece of Velázquez at a basement. We will be really grateful if you can assure
the info and give us further details on the discovery.”
I still did not grasp that this was major news. I
sent a short polite reply explaining that yes, I had been a curator at Yale,
that I had found a Velázquez, and that my article on the painting was due out
in Ars that week. I
offered to answer further questions the next day. I then went to bed, with no
clue of what was erupting in Spain. By the time I woke the next morning, my
inbox was full. One of the editors at Ars sent me the front-page story in El
País from her personal e-mail, because the Ars server had crashed.
The front-page attention seems finally to have
passed, but the story is far from over. There have been calls for some sort of
international symposium to evaluate the attribution, but these miss the point:
the attribution will only be decided over time, as scholars have a chance to
study the painting and give it their own long consideration. One major scholar
in the field, for example, was initially convinced that the Education was an early work by
Velázquez’s slightly younger contemporary, Francisco Zurbarán; some months
after telling me this, however, he called to say that after much more thought
he had decided that Velázquez was the only possible attribution. These things
take time.
Moreover, the painting still remains to be restored,
and this too will be a process carried out in consultation with experts from
around the world. There are some elements of the work that can never be
repaired. There is no way to reconstruct, for example, the angel originally at
the top of the canvas. Yet many other parts—the horizontal line of damage from
the old stretcher bar, or the areas of lost paint in the faces and draperies of
the figures—can be pulled back together, in the way that they are in so many
other paintings of this date. Unfortunately, this conservation will move
slowly, and the painting will not be on public view for at least two years.
Eventually, though, the Education of the Virgin will take a permanent
place in the Art Gallery’s installation. While it will never be possible to
re-create the thrilling moment of first recognizing the artist responsible for
the work, the first glimpse and long study of the painting’s serene power are
still experiences that await future visitors to Yale.  |
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