We have spoken of their consummate justness. This represents another result of the high-bred nature of Velasquez’s mind; revealed in a tact of selection, exposition and arrangement. He had an unerring feeling for essentials, his most characteristic works being singularly sparing of detail; a cultivated instinct for the salient gesture and expression, and a rarely economical method of achieving them. His ability to plant a figure on the floor, so that it bears down with its own weight and grows up in its own strength; to give it characteristic action, at once unified and rhythmic; to invest its contour lines with firmness and precision as well as subtlety; to give to the smallest details, such as the modeling of a glove, an individual character and, finally, to adjust all these several qualities into an organized unity and place the ensemble in perfect relation to the open space it occupies--his ability to do all this is the measure of his justness.
To the high distinction of the result we have already alluded in speaking of its dignity and aloofness. It is the product, alike, of elevated mentality and of supreme technical accomplishment. The latter brings us in touch with the cause of its extraordinary beauty.
What does beauty mean to us? If it is beauty of face and form--the easy way to artistic beauty and to lay appreciation thereof--we shall seldom find it in Velasquez’s pictures. The people whom it was his lot to paint were mostly plain-featured, to use no harsher terms; their costumes outrageously extravagant and not in the direction of elegance; the coloring was sombre, only sparingly relieved with gaiety of color. Nor, for the most part, were they people of force of character or with suggestion of experience imprinted on their faces, so that in the interest aroused thereby, one could forget their homeliness. To be frank, they are mostly stupid persons, or at least apathetic. Whence, then, the beauty? Its source is twofold: in the artist’s vision of his subject and in his technical rendering of what he found.
The secret of an artist’s vision, when it is truly artistic, is that it is inspired by a feeling for beauty and is looking for beauty. He is not searching for something to represent, but for a means of expressing what
