Velázquez
Richard Verdi
Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) was one of the towering figures of western painting and Baroque art, a technical master renowned for his focus on realism and startling veracity. Everything he painted was ‘treated’ as a portrait, from Spanish royalty and Pope Innocent X, to a mortar and pestle. This comprehensive introduction to Velázquez’s life and art includes a discussion of all his major works, and illustrates most of Velázquez’s surviving output of approximately 110 paintings. The artist’s greatest innovation – his unorthodox and revolutionary technique is explored in relation to the styles of certain of his most celebrated contemporaries both in Spain and beyond, including Titian and Rubens. The book concludes with a final chapter on the influence and importance of Velázquez’s art on later painters from the time of his own death to the art of recent times including Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and the Impressionists.
Richard Verdi is former professor of fine art and director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham, UK. He organized the exhibition ‘Cézanne and Poussin: The Classical Vision of Landscape’ held at the National Gallery of Scotland in 1990, for which he wrote the catalogue and received a National Art Collections Fund Award for an ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Visual Arts’. His many books include Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665, The Parrot in Art: From Durer to Elizabeth Butterworth and Rembrandt’s Themes: Life into Art. He is also the author of Cézanne (2022) in Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series.
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