Mr. Ricketts justly calls Las Lanzas the unique historic picture. Painted at the very flush of his genius, painted with sympathy for the conquered and the conqueror--Velasquez accompanied the Marquis of Spinola to Italy--this Surrender of Breda has received the homage of many generations. Sir Joshua Reynolds asserted that the greatest picture at Rome was the Velasquez head of Pope Innocent X in the Doria Palace (a variant is in the Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg). What would he have said in the presence of this captivating evocation of a historic event? The battle pieces of Michael Angelo, Da Vinci, and Titian are destroyed; Las Lanzas remains a testimony to the powers of imaginative reconstruction and architectonic of Velasquez. It is the most complete, the most natural picture in the world. The rhythms of the bristling lances are syncopated by a simple device; they are transposed to another plane of perspective, there in company with a lowered battle standard. The acute rhythms of these spears has given to the picture its title of The Lances, and never was title more appropriate. The picture is at once a decorative arabesque, an ensemble of tones, and a slice of history. Spinola receives from the conquered Justin of Nassau the keys of the beleagured Breda. Velasquez creates two armies out of eight figures, a horse and fourteen heads--here is the recipe of Degas for making a multitude carried to the height of the incredible. His own portrait, that of a grave, handsome man, may be seen to the right of the big horse.
The first period of his art found Velasquez a realist heavy in colour and brush-work, and without much hint of the transcendental realism to be noted in his later style. The dwarfs, buffoons, the Æsop and the Menippus are the result of an effortless art. In the last manner the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars, as Dostoïevsky would put it. The Topers, The Forge of Vulcan, are pictures that enthrall because of their robust simplicity and vast technical sweep though they do not possess the creative invention of the Mercury and Argus or The Anchorites. This latter is an amazing performance. Two hermits--St. Antony the Abbot visiting St. Paul the Hermit--are shown. A flying raven, bread in beak, nears them. You could swear that the wafer of flour is pasted on the canvas. This picture breathes peace and sweetness. The Christ of the Spaniard is a man, not a god, crucified. His Madonnas, masterly as they are, do not reach out hands across the frame as do his flower-like royal children and delicate monsters.