Introduction

Portrait of a man (The Metropolitan Museum
http://www.metmuseum.org)

In January 2013, I had the opportunity to examine the Metropolitan Museum’s Portrait of a Man (see above, oil on canvas, 68.6 × 55.2 cm, Accession Number 49.7.42), which in 2009 was re-attributed to the hand of Diego Velázquez, when it was exhibited alongside The Surrender of Breda in the Velázquez rooms of the Prado Museum. The explanatory leaflet available at the Prado was cautious regarding the identity of the sitter, spurring me to further investigate who this might be. This article reports the results of that research, which correlate the re-attributed Velázquez (RV) with a drawing by chance also held at the Metropolitan: the anonymous Portrait of a Man (black and red chalk on beige paper, 18.4 × 13.0 cm, Accession Number 80.3.498, not to be confused with the RV of the same name).

The following lines show how the RV is clearly a self-portrait of Velázquez, and that in all probability corresponds to a work that Velazquez’s father-in-law, Francisco Pacheco, referred to as having been produced in Rome. It is well known that Velázquez was in Rome in 1630, and that he first stayed at the Vatican palace invited by Cardinal Barberini. He therefore almost certainly met Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who it will be shown was the likely sitter in the above-mentioned drawing Portrait of a Man. It will also become clear that the RV and this drawing were produced at the same time. This explains the notable similarities between these works in terms of the garments represented (the RV shows the sitter wearing a Spanish collar while the drawing has a sitter wearing an Italian collar), the hairstyle, the moustache and the goatee. Indeed, it would appear that in the RV, Velázquez painted himself in the image of Bernini. In Italy, painting had long been regarded a noble activity, and many painters, including Bernini and Giovanni Lanfranco (the possible author of the drawing), had been knighted by the Pope. It is also well known that Velázquez’s major goal in life was to become a knight of the Order of Santiago (something that took him over 30 years to achieve), and when he painted himself in the RV, he appears to have been gazing longingly into an ‘Italian mirror’. His time in Rome would seem to have awoken this urge for him – or for his work – to receive noble recognition.

I am of course aware that, as Jonathan Brown recently put it in his essay written for Velázquez Rediscovered, “the identification of sitters in old portraits is fraught with problems” (in Velázquez Rediscovered, with an introduction by Keith Christiansen and essays by Jonathan Brown and Michael Gallagher, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009). It is beyond doubt a delicate business; my research was therefore consciously limited to the comparative study of works owned by public institutions, such as the above-mentioned Metropolitan Museum. It must be underlined that neither the paintings nor the drawing dealt with here have the slightest possibility of ever being sold. This, of course, renders irrelevant the influence that the present results might have on their market value.

* My thanks to Adrian Burton, who greatly improved the draft, and to Bonaventura Bassegoda (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) for his advice on the first version of the manuscript.