1 00:00:00,180 --> 00:00:07,170 I think we're ready to get started. We have locked the doors. Not it turned out so well done for getting there early. 2 00:00:07,170 --> 00:00:12,080 It gives me great pleasure. It's a real honour to introduce Tim Clark here today. 3 00:00:12,080 --> 00:00:18,200 He is, as you know, obviously in attendance makes clear, one of the giants of art history. 4 00:00:18,200 --> 00:00:22,720 And he is one of those people for would say no introduction was necessary and that really would be true. 5 00:00:22,720 --> 00:00:25,560 But I'm going to say a few words anyway. 6 00:00:25,560 --> 00:00:33,960 He is, as many of you know, the author of some of the seminal texts in the social history of War two, which came out of his pinky. 7 00:00:33,960 --> 00:00:38,070 I think there's right to take out a 150 decision, which is a little scary. 8 00:00:38,070 --> 00:00:47,550 But so that was given to the people caucus of Corbi and the 1848 revolution and the absolute bourgeois artists in politics in France, 9 00:00:47,550 --> 00:00:51,270 1848, 1851 of which came out in 1973. 10 00:00:51,270 --> 00:00:59,340 And these are really disciplines shaping books, as was true of the next book, The Painting of One Life, Paris and the Art of Miami. 11 00:00:59,340 --> 00:01:04,160 And it's in the art of Manny and his followers, which came out in nineteen eighty four. 12 00:01:04,160 --> 00:01:11,100 As I say, discipline shaping as as Kim is teaching at various institutions being including University of Leeds, 13 00:01:11,100 --> 00:01:19,100 which for a while was really one of the great driving forces of absolutely great art history in the UK. 14 00:01:19,100 --> 00:01:26,340 And he on in 1999, he published farewell to an idea episodes from his Roots of Modernism, which, 15 00:01:26,340 --> 00:01:33,920 like the previous books, offered a sustained consideration of how one might think art and politics in the same breath. 16 00:01:33,920 --> 00:01:40,440 So how to weigh carefully the historical evidence, but also how to think very carefully about how to read images and the kind of pressure that can 17 00:01:40,440 --> 00:01:48,960 be put on them to yield to meanings without putting them too neatly in that historical context. 18 00:01:48,960 --> 00:01:57,840 He also writes art history, but also he writes things or is involved in things that might be called more street politics. 19 00:01:57,840 --> 00:02:09,090 He was a member of the Situation is International in the late 60s, I think, and continues to do that kind of openly, directly political work. 20 00:02:09,090 --> 00:02:16,010 For example, in 2005, he published Afflicted Powers, Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War as part of the author. 21 00:02:16,010 --> 00:02:24,430 That is part of a collective and anonymous collective sort of anonymous collective called Retort. 22 00:02:24,430 --> 00:02:34,590 That was an extended consideration of the image economy in the 21st century and in particular in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001. 23 00:02:34,590 --> 00:02:38,280 He also, though, continues to look very closely at paintings and to argue very forcefully for 24 00:02:38,280 --> 00:02:43,980 the value in the broadly political value in attending closely to paintings. 25 00:02:43,980 --> 00:02:48,210 So in 2006, I was at the site of death, an experiment in art writing, 26 00:02:48,210 --> 00:02:56,610 which is in part a counterpoint or critical engagement with the social history of offered his own practise had engendered. 27 00:02:56,610 --> 00:03:05,370 And so it continues in 2013 with an magnetically curated and wrote accompanying catalogue for brilliant 28 00:03:05,370 --> 00:03:12,000 show Alice Lowry's Work in the same year he published Picasso and Truth from Cubism to Gattaca, 29 00:03:12,000 --> 00:03:18,120 which is based on the A.W. Metal lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. 30 00:03:18,120 --> 00:03:24,000 Being asked to give those lectures is, of course, a great honour, and Tim's career is littered with similar honours. 31 00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:32,010 I mentioned just two. One is 2005. He was awarded the Melin Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, 32 00:03:32,010 --> 00:03:38,370 which is really one of the biggest distinctions that one could receive in any field is not an authoritative award. 33 00:03:38,370 --> 00:03:44,680 It's cuts across all sorts of disciplines, hopefully known as the genius, Grant says. 34 00:03:44,680 --> 00:03:53,670 But that sense of the reputation and another one I want you to mention, which is a little closer to home, is in 1969, just 70. 35 00:03:53,670 --> 00:03:57,750 Jim was the Alza Horn Research Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford. 36 00:03:57,750 --> 00:04:06,430 In some ways, with welcoming back to you, we can maybe take a small matter credit. 37 00:04:06,430 --> 00:04:17,310 And lastly, hot off the press. I think just last week is Tim's latest book, which is called Heaven, Earth Painting and the Life to Come. 38 00:04:17,310 --> 00:04:21,600 And today he is going to be talking about something, I think a little different to say something about a project. 39 00:04:21,600 --> 00:04:32,000 So welcome to. Thank you very much, Alastair. 40 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:36,000 And it's a great pleasure to be here, actually. 41 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:42,690 Alistair Horne. Grant Prince princely sum of one thousand pounds. 42 00:04:42,690 --> 00:04:50,460 I think you've kept me for a year. And it was cooked up by horn and Zeldin in a kind of Oxford manner. 43 00:04:50,460 --> 00:04:57,060 And I wouldn't I don't think I'd have written the first book books without it. 44 00:04:57,060 --> 00:05:09,850 So, yeah, I mean, when I pull in the station and look over to the grungy little housel where stocks are where I wrote the book, I feel quite good. 45 00:05:09,850 --> 00:05:22,320 So I when I talked to Hanako first about this, I knew that this new book of mine, Heaven on Earth, was was coming out and it just has come out. 46 00:05:22,320 --> 00:05:29,460 And I even said to her, maybe I'll cook up a lecture directly about it. 47 00:05:29,460 --> 00:05:38,900 But I'm still a bit too close to that book, which really centres on pictures by Joto, very noisy. 48 00:05:38,900 --> 00:05:47,470 Puzzo and Breugel Royals', in a way, the dominant. 49 00:05:47,470 --> 00:06:00,580 Figure a bit too close. But anyway, in January, as part of this kicking off the boat of the endless Ruskin's bicentenary year. 50 00:06:00,580 --> 00:06:06,660 I'm going to be back here actually talking with Ivan Phillips. And he's just told me he wants to christner directly about the book. 51 00:06:06,660 --> 00:06:19,990 So so. So be it. But I, I thought hope instead that what I would do is speak to work that I've been doing. 52 00:06:19,990 --> 00:06:34,090 Very much so over the last months, which came out of a a period that I spent working last year and the year before in Madrid. 53 00:06:34,090 --> 00:06:41,160 And, you know, towards when you get this far on in your life, 54 00:06:41,160 --> 00:06:54,820 it's it's it's it's obvious that you go all round and round in the same circle and the same problems and you'll see that this lectures centres on. 55 00:06:54,820 --> 00:06:57,610 Well, first of all. So what is it? 56 00:06:57,610 --> 00:07:06,490 Can we what is it we can say about paintings that we see in paintings that find it extraordinarily difficult to put into words? 57 00:07:06,490 --> 00:07:12,430 We know we're learning something very directly, very indubitably. 58 00:07:12,430 --> 00:07:17,620 But but putting that over into words. 59 00:07:17,620 --> 00:07:23,530 Sintering, for instance, on. Ethos, expression. 60 00:07:23,530 --> 00:07:28,810 And that that haunts all the chapters in the recent book. 61 00:07:28,810 --> 00:07:43,360 And secondly, the recent book is was begun, you know, in this dreadful new epoch of ours, the well. 62 00:07:43,360 --> 00:07:49,960 I hardly knew what was really in store in 2005. New war. 63 00:07:49,960 --> 00:08:06,820 I didn't know that really we'd be in for a kind of new epoch of wars of religion and in time politics and, you know, apocalyptic violence. 64 00:08:06,820 --> 00:08:14,990 And that's very much the nature of war on the war, like an aggression as part of the human species. 65 00:08:14,990 --> 00:08:18,920 That's that's a thread of the book. 66 00:08:18,920 --> 00:08:25,300 You'll see it here, too. Let me begin then with a map of the territory. 67 00:08:25,300 --> 00:08:30,520 The pieces in the puzzle that I want to explore in this lecture or some of the key pieces 68 00:08:30,520 --> 00:08:37,390 are the following first and primarily the picture of easel up there on the right. 69 00:08:37,390 --> 00:08:46,060 It was painted by Velasquez, most likely in the late 60s and thirties as part of the decor of the King's Hunting Lodge. 70 00:08:46,060 --> 00:08:56,350 A few miles from Madrid, the title that Pelada, the first trace of the commission, crops up 60 years after the event in a 70 No. 71 00:08:56,350 --> 00:09:04,000 One inventory of the tornado that put out three paintings of the same size from the hand of Velasquez, 72 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:12,760 one representing Mars, another Aesop, the other many books appraised at 50 doubloons each. 73 00:09:12,760 --> 00:09:16,470 I'm going reluctantly to leave my necklace aside. 74 00:09:16,470 --> 00:09:24,940 Very, very interesting choice. And we can talk about it if you want to and focus on Aesop and Mars. 75 00:09:24,940 --> 00:09:32,180 These two. Yes, and focus on Aesop Amar's. 76 00:09:32,180 --> 00:09:35,360 It seems important, first of all, that these paintings, 77 00:09:35,360 --> 00:09:43,430 these two paintings are the same size and that the size is special amongst Velasquez's surviving work. 78 00:09:43,430 --> 00:09:56,270 Tall as tall as many, a full dress, portraits of the king and narrow and in short of six feet high and just a little over three feet across. 79 00:09:56,270 --> 00:10:00,110 This may suggest that the Mars and Aesop were conceived together. 80 00:10:00,110 --> 00:10:05,630 Some historians have thought they may have hung in the same room at the Lodge. 81 00:10:05,630 --> 00:10:11,480 It's striking that there's no trace of a pendant to the Mars. 82 00:10:11,480 --> 00:10:14,780 His singularity is something that matters. 83 00:10:14,780 --> 00:10:27,770 But for the time being, what I want to concentrate on and pair with the Aesop is simply the nature of Mars is look his expression. 84 00:10:27,770 --> 00:10:32,840 How is the war, God's face meant to engage with us? 85 00:10:32,840 --> 00:10:44,010 What word or family of words is going to get us even approximately in the realm, the frame of Moses, peculiar way of looking for the time being? 86 00:10:44,010 --> 00:10:56,390 I suspend an answer to that question, of course, suggesting that I think that this this suspension is what Velasquez is intending. 87 00:10:56,390 --> 00:11:07,820 Let me look instead simply at the difference between Laws's expression and Aesop's and insist with the special character of these paintings, 88 00:11:07,820 --> 00:11:18,020 palace destination in mind on what it might have meant to a or what it might have meant to a court society, 89 00:11:18,020 --> 00:11:23,480 to a gathering of warriors to have the God of war look out at them. 90 00:11:23,480 --> 00:11:29,330 In this way, Mars surely has somehow lost face. 91 00:11:29,330 --> 00:11:37,880 The historian Robert Straddling pointed out sometime ago that during the 44 long years of Philip the fourth reign, 92 00:11:37,880 --> 00:11:45,770 there was not a single day of peace and most of the wars fought were very far from triumphs. 93 00:11:45,770 --> 00:11:56,060 This may be relevant. Aesop's coolness, the shadow of a question on his face, may be meant as our guide. 94 00:11:56,060 --> 00:12:03,230 We might compare the lost face of Mars further with that of another Alaskas court warrior. 95 00:12:03,230 --> 00:12:14,030 So I want to compare the lost face of Mars with that of another Alaskas court warrior. 96 00:12:14,030 --> 00:12:19,520 This one painted most likely a few years before Aesop and Mars. 97 00:12:19,520 --> 00:12:23,690 Again, there is no record of a commission in the archives, 98 00:12:23,690 --> 00:12:33,740 but we know that the character portrayed here was given material for a suit of clothes, very like the one he's wearing in 16 32. 99 00:12:33,740 --> 00:12:42,830 Such are the slim pickings of Hap's for court accountancy. This picture makes even Mars seem straightforward here. 100 00:12:42,830 --> 00:12:46,790 The whole mood and tone are baffling. 101 00:12:46,790 --> 00:12:58,790 The painting and its central character could be treading the edge of insulin's or despondency or bewilderment or just plain foolishness. 102 00:12:58,790 --> 00:13:04,670 Which description fits best? Becomes more uncertain in my experience. 103 00:13:04,670 --> 00:13:10,340 The longer we look or the more we fill in historical details. 104 00:13:10,340 --> 00:13:16,370 The man on view here was a fool. He was a court buffoon. 105 00:13:16,370 --> 00:13:23,480 Undoubtedly a jester and mimic, but quite probably some kind of simpleton or local. 106 00:13:23,480 --> 00:13:25,760 That's the word in the archives. Of course, 107 00:13:25,760 --> 00:13:39,770 the language of court records and contemporary memoirs slides constantly between real and pretend idiocy and mental and bodily freakishness. 108 00:13:39,770 --> 00:13:45,470 It was considered Picault at the Hapsburg court if they coexisted. 109 00:13:45,470 --> 00:13:50,840 And the man's name was Don Juan de Ostry. 110 00:13:50,840 --> 00:14:00,730 That is, he was named after or had usurped and was allowed to name all of the noble victor of the Battle of Lepanto. 111 00:14:00,730 --> 00:14:17,220 Not short lived, but eternally symbolic victory of the Spanish fleet over over Islam two generations before he was a fool called Don Juan of Austria. 112 00:14:17,220 --> 00:14:26,190 What did it mean for the court? Is my question that it found room for a lugubrious parody of one of its greatest heroes. 113 00:14:26,190 --> 00:14:37,230 And in what spirit was Velasquez enlisted to immortalise the parody war and buffoonery we know went easily together at the court of the Hapsburgs. 114 00:14:37,230 --> 00:14:44,310 The Dutch ambassador a little later in the century can be found letting slip as if reporting nothing very remarkable. 115 00:14:44,310 --> 00:14:55,530 That quote during the meal at court, two buffoons played at war, the celebrations of the birth of Philip Prosper in 16 58. 116 00:14:55,530 --> 00:14:58,980 He of the heartbreaking Alaskas portrayed with the little dog. 117 00:14:58,980 --> 00:15:07,530 Of course, he didn't survive long this much, much, much anticipated male heir. 118 00:15:07,530 --> 00:15:17,730 The celebrations of his birth gave pride of place to a door of tilting with lances in a tournament. 119 00:15:17,730 --> 00:15:22,890 But is Velasquez's Don Juan acting the fool? 120 00:15:22,890 --> 00:15:29,520 And if he is, does Velasquez show him acting it well? 121 00:15:29,520 --> 00:15:34,890 Does he understand his own script? How is he looking at this? 122 00:15:34,890 --> 00:15:43,650 What different degrees or levels of unreality of pretending or mimicking or projecting an image are intended by 123 00:15:43,650 --> 00:15:56,040 the juxtaposition of donor funds face and the extraordinary phantasmagoria called Lepanto through the doorway. 124 00:15:56,040 --> 00:16:07,180 My subject you'll begin to see is essentially the quality of a look in the last guess, a certain expression. 125 00:16:07,180 --> 00:16:16,300 I'm not saying that Aesop Mars and Don Juan of Austria exactly share a look or that it is exclusive to them, 126 00:16:16,300 --> 00:16:21,520 but I hope you'll agree that their looks have a certain family resemblance. 127 00:16:21,520 --> 00:16:27,910 It's a look of a certain kind of distance. It's a look that looks outward from the illusion. 128 00:16:27,910 --> 00:16:33,380 It is part of a look that doesn't precisely puncture the illusion. 129 00:16:33,380 --> 00:16:38,380 Alaskas is not, I think, a disbeliever in the fictions he's given to work with. 130 00:16:38,380 --> 00:16:42,850 But in some sense, intercepts, intercepts, 131 00:16:42,850 --> 00:16:54,700 the illusion arrest for a moment and seems to be asking what the look is doing to the illusions and therefore what we are doing, 132 00:16:54,700 --> 00:17:02,260 what we have been called on to do. Returning the gaze. 133 00:17:02,260 --> 00:17:07,390 Maybe the adiam we need meeting Aesop's look. 134 00:17:07,390 --> 00:17:20,020 Is that here is someone who is seeing through things a period term that scholars propose may be helpful, is disingenuous. 135 00:17:20,020 --> 00:17:22,600 Which in the literature of disaffection, 136 00:17:22,600 --> 00:17:32,200 characteristic of the time came to mean disillusion in the full sense of the English word, not a shrugging aside of illusion, 137 00:17:32,200 --> 00:17:40,450 not the hope of a realism existing apart from it altogether, but a dis illusion, a partial detachment, 138 00:17:40,450 --> 00:17:48,400 perhaps the hope of living with illusion in full knowledge that that is what living consists of. 139 00:17:48,400 --> 00:17:59,030 Think again of Lepanto beyond the door. This is the look of distance, then, of detachment, of outsiderness. 140 00:17:59,030 --> 00:18:09,560 Of course, it's an out sidedness that knows itself to be provisional, provided for by the powers that be available on powers terms. 141 00:18:09,560 --> 00:18:14,610 Such a look is tied close to courtliness. 142 00:18:14,610 --> 00:18:18,840 To court culture, to being the king's servant. 143 00:18:18,840 --> 00:18:29,910 But it may also be bound up, Mars and Don Juan of Austria suggest as much with a state of permanent war. 144 00:18:29,910 --> 00:18:38,450 It may be the look of war. So here is the final term to my introduction. 145 00:18:38,450 --> 00:18:50,210 I want to connect the looks of Aesop Mars and Don Juan to the one belonging, the famous one belonging to the young Dutch rifleman. 146 00:18:50,210 --> 00:18:59,720 Off to the left in Velasquez's surrender of Braider, the man looking out from the grand illusion, his green jacket and trousers. 147 00:18:59,720 --> 00:19:04,520 There on the left, an irresistible punctuation mark in the pictures. 148 00:19:04,520 --> 00:19:11,660 Great War of Browns and Greys. Two things to be said about The Rifleman. 149 00:19:11,660 --> 00:19:21,590 Firstly, there's a matter of hindsight. We can't avoid knowing that the quality of this rifle man's outsiderness was fundamental, 150 00:19:21,590 --> 00:19:29,690 revelatory for later artists and specifically, of course, for many and modernism. 151 00:19:29,690 --> 00:19:36,950 Manet tried to imitate the figure on the far left margin of his music in the tree, Larry Gardens, 152 00:19:36,950 --> 00:19:47,330 and a little later he tried to honour the fall to disclose the figures effect its peculiar power over the picture as a whole. 153 00:19:47,330 --> 00:19:55,700 In the great canvases from the mid 60s that turned on the look of victory. 154 00:19:55,700 --> 00:20:08,050 He seems to have seen the Rifleman's look, I think likely, as one called, the very contract of illusion into question. 155 00:20:08,050 --> 00:20:16,100 And second, but this is a point that one ought to make who really not thinking it at all a scandal. 156 00:20:16,100 --> 00:20:24,630 What The Rifleman looks away from is an illusion. 157 00:20:24,630 --> 00:20:31,020 It is we know, a piece of courtly drama that never really happened. 158 00:20:31,020 --> 00:20:40,530 There was at the surrender of Braider no such chivalrous face to face encounter like the one in the centre of things here, 159 00:20:40,530 --> 00:20:46,960 no touch of the victor's hand. Only adversaries, such shoulder. 160 00:20:46,960 --> 00:20:51,880 Again, Velasquez's treatment of detachment here is equivocal. 161 00:20:51,880 --> 00:20:56,440 He doesn't speak to the illusion from a position safely superior to it, 162 00:20:56,440 --> 00:21:05,620 and I don't even think he polarises the play of outside and inside around the Rifleman in the way that many did under his spell. 163 00:21:05,620 --> 00:21:11,350 Notice the way the Rifleman's hand on the stock of his gun. 164 00:21:11,350 --> 00:21:16,910 Wonderful thing is taken up by. 165 00:21:16,910 --> 00:21:20,300 And maybe I will use try to use my pointer here. Yes. 166 00:21:20,300 --> 00:21:30,040 Okay. This the right. Obviously that. And also have a look at if you can just about see there's a wonderful dark profile. 167 00:21:30,040 --> 00:21:39,360 And then in between the dark roof and this extraordinary dandies face another face there. 168 00:21:39,360 --> 00:21:39,690 Yes. 169 00:21:39,690 --> 00:21:51,550 Notice the way the Rifleman's on the stock of his gun is taken up by the equally transfixing hand of the dandy in white with red flowers on his tunic. 170 00:21:51,550 --> 00:22:00,520 What exactly the dand his hand is signalling a wonderful invention with a hush of cast shadow falling from it onto the white. 171 00:22:00,520 --> 00:22:10,000 We can't be sure of. But one plausible interpretation is that he's telling the man immediately behind him to the left, 172 00:22:10,000 --> 00:22:21,490 his full face juxtaposed to that darker profile, telling the man to stop talking for a moment and pay attention to the central spectacle. 173 00:22:21,490 --> 00:22:26,410 There is a relay of inclusions and exclusions in Velasquez. 174 00:22:26,410 --> 00:22:31,270 That's to say a to and fro of kinds of spectatorship. 175 00:22:31,270 --> 00:22:37,780 The Rifleman's look is determinant. We can still feel I shall go on considering it. 176 00:22:37,780 --> 00:22:46,590 The look of war that mattered most to Velasquez, the one that anticipated Aesop's and Mars but determinant in Alaska. 177 00:22:46,590 --> 00:22:52,350 It never seems to mean just the whole key to the mystery. 178 00:22:52,350 --> 00:22:53,620 The Rifleman. 179 00:22:53,620 --> 00:23:04,780 I can't help thinking is the kind of representative on the scene of history that Bertolt Brecht imagined so marvellously three centuries later. 180 00:23:04,780 --> 00:23:15,430 He asks the great questions posed by the worker in Bresch poem of 1935, who built the sudden gates of Thebes. 181 00:23:15,430 --> 00:23:22,360 In the books, you find the names of kings. Did the Kings hole up the blocks of stone? 182 00:23:22,360 --> 00:23:26,950 Philip of Spain. What they say when his Ahmad and went down. 183 00:23:26,950 --> 00:23:31,780 Was he the only one weeping? Caesar beat the goals. 184 00:23:31,780 --> 00:23:47,450 Didn't even have a cook with a. So looking at Velasquez's set of expressions and trying to find words for them brings on an epic epidemic of punning. 185 00:23:47,450 --> 00:23:54,300 You've already suffered losing face and seeing through things, et cetera. 186 00:23:54,300 --> 00:24:00,870 Puns are no doubt tiresome, but sometimes they point to the nature of the beast. 187 00:24:00,870 --> 00:24:09,860 They're a sign of embarrassment. Velasquez seems to be asking us to attend to to fix specifically and even pedantically 188 00:24:09,860 --> 00:24:15,800 on an area of visual experience that normally and maybe not necessarily. 189 00:24:15,800 --> 00:24:22,910 We leave as a give them an unthinkable. What is a look? 190 00:24:22,910 --> 00:24:27,830 How do we tell what to look? Intense. How do we know what it's for? 191 00:24:27,830 --> 00:24:33,170 In other words, and if it is meant at all for us. 192 00:24:33,170 --> 00:24:37,310 These are questions as impertinent as Breck's in their way. 193 00:24:37,310 --> 00:24:46,000 So here's one more pun directed in particular at The Rifleman, but also at Mar's. 194 00:24:46,000 --> 00:25:00,490 Could we not say of the two of them that what matters to their expressions is the way that both of them are looking at a loss of the Dutchman? 195 00:25:00,490 --> 00:25:06,880 Of course, we can say that literally, though, the loss of Braider didn't last long. 196 00:25:06,880 --> 00:25:15,370 Velasquez did his painting probably in 16, 34, 35, commemorating a victory, then 10 years old. 197 00:25:15,370 --> 00:25:19,760 And two years later, the Dutch retook the city. 198 00:25:19,760 --> 00:25:30,790 But such as war. The Rifleman is right to ask us to keep our distance from any one act of surrender and Mars. 199 00:25:30,790 --> 00:25:37,240 Well, what is the loss? He's looking a loss of some kind of armour. 200 00:25:37,240 --> 00:25:52,300 It seems I'm going to return to that. But first, let me return to Aesop, the bigger philosopher, if that's what he is. 201 00:25:52,300 --> 00:25:59,270 It is a baroque cliche, but Aesop is. 202 00:25:59,270 --> 00:26:09,200 There is, in other words, nothing at all unsettling for courtly culture, for the culture of 17th century humanists at large, 203 00:26:09,200 --> 00:26:19,870 in the idea of an ancient world that had its licence, outsiders scornful of riches, searching instead for higher wisdom. 204 00:26:19,870 --> 00:26:25,540 But Aesop, has this culture understood him was something a little different from that he was. 205 00:26:25,540 --> 00:26:32,980 Let me establish this straight away. A figure who loomed large for the culture. 206 00:26:32,980 --> 00:26:43,210 The editors of the famed modern edition of The Saragossa Aesop's Fables of fourteen eighty nine lavae, Daddy and Aesop at Construes. 207 00:26:43,210 --> 00:26:48,550 Fabulous. You study at us, say simply that it quote, 208 00:26:48,550 --> 00:26:58,250 it can be stated without fear of contradiction that the romantic life of Aesop and the collection of fables made available to Spaniard's in 14, 209 00:26:58,250 --> 00:27:10,130 Eighty-Nine was the most widely read body of literature across two centuries at cross, at least two centuries in Spain. 210 00:27:10,130 --> 00:27:15,470 And the importance of Aesop and his form of storytelling for the emerging picaresque 211 00:27:15,470 --> 00:27:21,860 novel is indubitable so that Neches later verdict on the novel as a whole, 212 00:27:21,860 --> 00:27:30,620 that it may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable, however exaggerated and typical nature, 213 00:27:30,620 --> 00:27:41,470 fashion certainly speaks to the kind of low life adventure story the Alaskas would have read as a young man in civil. 214 00:27:41,470 --> 00:27:48,410 Aesop, in a word, was the great representative of a kind of emerging realism. 215 00:27:48,410 --> 00:27:54,760 But the question is in Velasquez's hands, what kind? 216 00:27:54,760 --> 00:28:05,950 Let me begin with the look of things I said already, that the Aesop painting is tall and relatively narrow, six feet high, three feet wide. 217 00:28:05,950 --> 00:28:11,770 I suppose that means that Aesop is depicted at roughly LifeSize. 218 00:28:11,770 --> 00:28:20,110 But in reality, in front of the picture in the Prado, he has a height and composure that always seems slightly above us. 219 00:28:20,110 --> 00:28:23,920 That's true. I found, however, low above the floor line. 220 00:28:23,920 --> 00:28:30,590 The canvas is hung. This has to do, I think, with the pictures, actual dimensions, 221 00:28:30,590 --> 00:28:36,980 but also more fundamentally with the way the pictures internal organisation takes advantage of them, 222 00:28:36,980 --> 00:28:44,810 the way it's placing and orientation of Aesop's body and that body's extraordinary address to us. 223 00:28:44,810 --> 00:28:56,990 And the exact measure of space opened and closed around the body and the ground with its enigmatic objects and utterly puzzling gradients, 224 00:28:56,990 --> 00:28:59,300 especially towards the right. 225 00:28:59,300 --> 00:29:13,570 The way all of these things establish ESOPs unique, non dominant height, he is in some way immense, implacable, but he's entirely every. 226 00:29:13,570 --> 00:29:21,080 He is not the least touch of the numinous about him. 227 00:29:21,080 --> 00:29:37,370 The words that come to hand as we tried to get on terms with Aesop are surely physical, maybe physiological words like posture or standing or stance. 228 00:29:37,370 --> 00:29:42,470 All of them understood, again, as primarily matters of actual bodily disposition, 229 00:29:42,470 --> 00:29:55,020 though inevitably carrying with that the signs, the traces of what the world has done to you and how habitually you meet it. 230 00:29:55,020 --> 00:30:00,450 I showed the pic, the painting recently to an expert in skeletal health, 231 00:30:00,450 --> 00:30:09,030 and she was impressed by Aesop's composure but worried about how his body is actually holding itself. 232 00:30:09,030 --> 00:30:20,160 She looked at the line of his shoulders, the slight imbalance between them, and imagined the sway the contra posto of his body under the coat. 233 00:30:20,160 --> 00:30:25,890 Something seems slightly wrong to her. Maybe some curvature of the spine. 234 00:30:25,890 --> 00:30:29,940 The distinct turn outwards of Aesop's right foot. 235 00:30:29,940 --> 00:30:37,140 The one nearest the bucket with its soul on display and its socks and specially bad shape. 236 00:30:37,140 --> 00:30:45,510 Confirmed by experts suspicions. I hadn't revealed to her son. 237 00:30:45,510 --> 00:30:51,930 Of course, you're dealing with my kolaches teacher, right? 238 00:30:51,930 --> 00:31:00,060 I hadn't revealed to her what Velasquez must have known, may have must have known or been told about Aesop, 239 00:31:00,060 --> 00:31:06,230 the historical character, but most likely he would have known a great deal. 240 00:31:06,230 --> 00:31:11,810 The culture had a strange investment in Aesop's physical existence. 241 00:31:11,810 --> 00:31:14,930 What the investment amounted to is suggested, 242 00:31:14,930 --> 00:31:29,040 at least in part by the Frontispiece wonderful thing to The Saragossa Fables the Aesop Velasquez would have had on his shelves. 243 00:31:29,040 --> 00:31:38,790 I think this would cut kept the painter company and the fact that the wood cut was deeply archaic. 244 00:31:38,790 --> 00:31:48,230 The illustrations for The Saragossa volume had been recycled from a German edition published in Autumn and out book sometime around 40, 245 00:31:48,230 --> 00:31:55,830 Naty only added, I suspect, to its appeal. 246 00:31:55,830 --> 00:32:00,720 Aesop was a hunchback before, he tells us. 247 00:32:00,720 --> 00:32:07,530 And so does the life of himself that predicted the fables in The Saragossa collection. 248 00:32:07,530 --> 00:32:14,870 Maybe he was spectacularly deformed. Some accounts have him as a dwarf. 249 00:32:14,870 --> 00:32:27,030 Of course, we're curving back towards the territory of buffoons, locals, court entertainers. 250 00:32:27,030 --> 00:32:30,900 Some accounts have him as a dwarf. 251 00:32:30,900 --> 00:32:41,910 Part of the story in life turns on Aesop's being astonishingly, disgustingly ugly, yet making his way in the world in spite of it. 252 00:32:41,910 --> 00:32:48,840 I quote Francis Barlow from the great English edition of The Life, published in 16 87, 253 00:32:48,840 --> 00:32:57,570 is typical of treatments from the time as to the features and dimensions of Aesop's face and body. 254 00:32:57,570 --> 00:33:03,570 They were so shuffled and huddled up that nature in his production did seem to insinuate 255 00:33:03,570 --> 00:33:11,650 that she often times does set the most refolded gems in the most uneven and rugged colet. 256 00:33:11,650 --> 00:33:20,670 For he was a sharp head, flat nosed is back rolled up in a bunch or excrescence, his lips tumorous and pendent, 257 00:33:20,670 --> 00:33:28,560 his complexion black, large belly, crooked Bolex, but above all his misfortunes. 258 00:33:28,560 --> 00:33:38,720 This was the most eminent that his speech was slow in articulate and very obscure. 259 00:33:38,720 --> 00:33:44,630 Some versions of life have Aesop born altogether mute. 260 00:33:44,630 --> 00:33:55,580 That is close to the condition of an animal at the very start of things and only gaining language later as the result 261 00:33:55,580 --> 00:34:06,860 of a goddess's intervention is animal stories you see are supposed to have come out of that early experience. 262 00:34:06,860 --> 00:34:11,810 Here is Aesop, for instance, in the Frontispiece to Sir Roger. 263 00:34:11,810 --> 00:34:20,870 Less staunch fables from 60 90 to Aesop was often called a Phrygian, 264 00:34:20,870 --> 00:34:27,710 and sometimes he wore the cap of liberty in illustrations, especially in the later 18th century, of course. 265 00:34:27,710 --> 00:34:32,150 But he could have been an easy up. Hence his name. 266 00:34:32,150 --> 00:34:42,020 He was often described as a black man. And crucially, this is a main theme of all the lives. 267 00:34:42,020 --> 00:34:49,310 He was a slave, though eventually he won his manumission. 268 00:34:49,310 --> 00:35:02,810 Scholar Lezzy Kirk points out that the life of Aesop is the only extended slave biography to have come down to us from antiquity. 269 00:35:02,810 --> 00:35:12,110 I have to be somebody we've read lately, been treated to tremendous work from our curve and Annabel Pappas or various others, 270 00:35:12,110 --> 00:35:19,700 which has opened for us the full range of the Aesopian in antiquity and the Renaissance. 271 00:35:19,700 --> 00:35:25,010 Kurt, for instance, makes and others make very strong case for Aesopian. 272 00:35:25,010 --> 00:35:34,340 Strain's being far more important in antiquity than we've understood hitherto. 273 00:35:34,340 --> 00:35:45,050 It's a complex picture and I'm going to just dwell on the parts of it that I think may help with Velasquez. 274 00:35:45,050 --> 00:35:50,820 First, as we know, there is the ugliness of the man, the otherness. 275 00:35:50,820 --> 00:35:56,870 It is fundamental to the myth, partly because it's what ties Aesop to the animals, 276 00:35:56,870 --> 00:36:02,060 but also because it's felt as the sign of the storyteller's enslavement. 277 00:36:02,060 --> 00:36:09,170 And Aesop is a slave. This is an extraordinarily important part of the 17th century. 278 00:36:09,170 --> 00:36:19,400 Investment in slavery, lowness and subservience are there in his body as his very nature. 279 00:36:19,400 --> 00:36:25,460 Ugliness is a difficult subject for art. But Aesop seemed to call for it. 280 00:36:25,460 --> 00:36:31,670 Velasquez's version of Aesop is to be compared with Ribeira US. 281 00:36:31,670 --> 00:36:42,970 There are various versions that have come down to us, including one this one that found its way eventually to the Escorial. 282 00:36:42,970 --> 00:36:52,360 And don't think that the extremity of features in the Ribeira simply derived from this painter's general taste for the extreme. 283 00:36:52,360 --> 00:37:11,860 Wonderful exhibition present on at Dellec about about Rivera's sensitivity to the horror of his own day and willingness to depict it. 284 00:37:11,860 --> 00:37:18,130 Pedal. Don't think that this is just Ribeira. 285 00:37:18,130 --> 00:37:30,610 Ribeira was perfectly capable of intimating ugliness or at least wild unkindness and lending them nobility if he chose his Diogenes, for example. 286 00:37:30,610 --> 00:37:39,820 Great painting is as successful in doing so in its distinctive way as anything by Velasquez, the Ribeira. 287 00:37:39,820 --> 00:37:44,020 Aesop, by contrast, is a man challenging us. 288 00:37:44,020 --> 00:37:47,980 I think not to look, this is deformity. 289 00:37:47,980 --> 00:37:57,430 The thing itself, ugliness matters in Aesop's case because this is the logic that seems to lie behind the fascination, 290 00:37:57,430 --> 00:38:10,170 because ESOPs is a truth that comes out of otherness and melati enslavement subordination. 291 00:38:10,170 --> 00:38:24,720 Second, there's the fact that Aesop wrote in prose Kirks tremendous illness, Aesop's prosaic, this is the key to his power and prosaic, prosaic. 292 00:38:24,720 --> 00:38:31,130 This is really a euphemism. The opening events in The Saragossa life, 293 00:38:31,130 --> 00:38:40,050 the episodes by which Aesop first enforces his authority over the master who is bought him in the slave market, 294 00:38:40,050 --> 00:38:48,040 turn on vomiting, urination and shitting on the run in the public highway. 295 00:38:48,040 --> 00:39:00,540 The Saragossa volume has a good illustration of the last, with Aesop holding the bucket ready to wash his vile over's arse. 296 00:39:00,540 --> 00:39:09,930 And subsequently one realises that the old form of. 297 00:39:09,930 --> 00:39:27,030 Well, this. This one, the odd form immediately to the right of Aesopian, the frontispiece is most probably a turd curling into a bucket. 298 00:39:27,030 --> 00:39:42,770 Hazel in his lectures on the fine arts. Famously, some famously sums up Aesop in a hostile aphorism in the slate of prose begins in Sklaver. 299 00:39:42,770 --> 00:39:51,530 Think Deposal. But in Velasquez's world, the world of Don Quick Don Quicksort and the pick at all. 300 00:39:51,530 --> 00:40:00,170 It isn't at all clear that prose and lowness or prose and the unspeakable are negative values. 301 00:40:00,170 --> 00:40:13,120 The turd in the bucket may point to the truth. And thirdly, again, the question of Aesop's slave status is inescapable. 302 00:40:13,120 --> 00:40:21,640 Aesop was the master of a kind of irony that could be instantly retracted if need be. 303 00:40:21,640 --> 00:40:33,250 The fable is most effective as a literary or oratorical weapon, wrote a wonderful later editor under despotic governments allowing no free speech. 304 00:40:33,250 --> 00:40:39,870 A tyrant cannot take notice of a fable without putting over the cap fits. 305 00:40:39,870 --> 00:40:47,920 So 19th century ed very 19th century fought in the 17th century. 306 00:40:47,920 --> 00:40:55,330 Interpreters regularly fought to the finish over Aesop, especially over stories with a political point. 307 00:40:55,330 --> 00:41:02,710 I mean, exactly because it was dangerous and easily the. 308 00:41:02,710 --> 00:41:12,100 And its possible political charge could be a subordinate in subordinate language. 309 00:41:12,100 --> 00:41:20,170 Here, for example, is Milton himself in the 16th 50s, rounding on a reading of Aesop, 310 00:41:20,170 --> 00:41:28,270 which he found in a book by a royalist cleric, the frogs he's dealing with. 311 00:41:28,270 --> 00:41:34,690 Of course, a very famous Aesop fable, The Frogs and the King. 312 00:41:34,690 --> 00:41:40,690 One of the most political and one of the most disputed. 313 00:41:40,690 --> 00:41:46,070 The frogs. Here's milk, petitioned Jupiter for a king. 314 00:41:46,070 --> 00:41:51,350 He tumbled amongst them a log. They found it insensible. 315 00:41:51,350 --> 00:42:00,770 They contrition then for a king that should be active. He sent them a stalk, which straight fell to picking them up. 316 00:42:00,770 --> 00:42:13,610 This you apply to the reproof of them who desire change, whereas indeed the true moral shows rather the folly of those who being free. 317 00:42:13,610 --> 00:42:22,850 Seek a king, which for the most part either as a log lies heavy on his subjects without doing aught worthy of his dignity, 318 00:42:22,850 --> 00:42:37,190 and the charge to maintain him or as a stalk is ever packing them up and give us the form of the fable then is crucial here. 319 00:42:37,190 --> 00:42:44,210 Maybe this is what Hegel was meaning and most disliked. The fable is slave language. 320 00:42:44,210 --> 00:42:50,180 It nudges and beckons its audience towards a conclusion that they must surely be. 321 00:42:50,180 --> 00:42:55,130 There is not their humble servants, the storytellers. 322 00:42:55,130 --> 00:43:02,750 The moment of pivot in a good Aesop story when suddenly the plot yields up its uncomfortable point. 323 00:43:02,750 --> 00:43:07,160 The moment the reader becomes a mill thinking the unthinkable. 324 00:43:07,160 --> 00:43:12,210 This is the readers or listeners doing so. 325 00:43:12,210 --> 00:43:16,220 That's what you think. My innocent story. Intense. 326 00:43:16,220 --> 00:43:22,030 What a testament to your cleverness. Leslie Kirk puts it nicely. 327 00:43:22,030 --> 00:43:27,680 Aesop, she says, is the master of a kind of martial art of the objected, 328 00:43:27,680 --> 00:43:35,570 whose cunning lies in turning the social weight of the powerful against themselves. 329 00:43:35,570 --> 00:43:43,130 It must be the freedom and sophistication of the slave owner that are responsible for making the slaves. 330 00:43:43,130 --> 00:43:49,380 Clever patter end up calling the gods in question. 331 00:43:49,380 --> 00:43:55,790 Velasquez's Mahrous seems close. 332 00:43:55,790 --> 00:44:10,490 But before I turn to it, let me stay with Aesop a moment, look for I've still to face the question that I began with the question of Aesop's look. 333 00:44:10,490 --> 00:44:18,500 And here I am convinced is the heart of the matter. How is it that Aesop addresses us in the Velasquez? 334 00:44:18,500 --> 00:44:25,200 From what sort of distance? I reach a familiar impasse here. 335 00:44:25,200 --> 00:44:33,360 I have no words for Aesop's expression. But that doesn't mean I don't know what the expression is about. 336 00:44:33,360 --> 00:44:39,690 On the contrary, the word looseness of what Aesop is intending makes his intention all the clearer. 337 00:44:39,690 --> 00:44:46,440 I think I'm sure I know what Aesop has on his mind. 338 00:44:46,440 --> 00:44:51,870 I understand the quality of his distance. He's assessing, not addressing. 339 00:44:51,870 --> 00:44:58,450 We should we could say reaching a judgement, but not preventing. 340 00:44:58,450 --> 00:45:05,930 I know that is what keeps Aesop's words and our words at bay. 341 00:45:05,930 --> 00:45:10,240 And isn't this the character of expressions in general? 342 00:45:10,240 --> 00:45:15,550 Isn't this what expressions are for in the life of the species? 343 00:45:15,550 --> 00:45:19,630 All expressions, but especially ones like this, 344 00:45:19,630 --> 00:45:29,620 are about where words fail us in our doings with the world or where explicitness may indeed be dangerous. 345 00:45:29,620 --> 00:45:35,570 They are a form of known language or even anti language. 346 00:45:35,570 --> 00:45:48,200 This brings us back to Aesop as he appears in the life and the way the life puts its stress on Aesop's special proximity to things, 347 00:45:48,200 --> 00:45:57,320 the slave is a master of objects of whatever ordinary bric-a-brac happens to fall in his way. 348 00:45:57,320 --> 00:46:02,180 Art historians have laboured mightily to make the objects scattered on the ground 349 00:46:02,180 --> 00:46:06,470 in the Velasquez means something or even in the case of the objects at bottom. 350 00:46:06,470 --> 00:46:09,380 Right, be something specific. 351 00:46:09,380 --> 00:46:17,780 None of their efforts seem convincing beyond the simple idea that what we see on the left is probably the slaves household bucket. 352 00:46:17,780 --> 00:46:29,840 The one whose unfortunate duties we encountered earlier, the piece of dark material over the side of the bucket could be leather. 353 00:46:29,840 --> 00:46:36,470 There's an Aesop fable about the stink of tanning, but the fable isn't an important one. 354 00:46:36,470 --> 00:46:42,260 It doesn't get taken up by The Saragossa Frontispiece and the beautiful pattern of 355 00:46:42,260 --> 00:46:49,580 stuffs and implements on the right hand side in Velasquez doesn't seem to continue. 356 00:46:49,580 --> 00:46:59,480 The tanning theme, the pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric with its visceral trace of pale red. 357 00:46:59,480 --> 00:47:06,110 A beautiful rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop's chest. 358 00:47:06,110 --> 00:47:15,560 What are they? These folds is the dark material on top of the white here, another strip of leather. 359 00:47:15,560 --> 00:47:21,180 But what's the shape that seems to be holding it down? A waste of some sort. 360 00:47:21,180 --> 00:47:29,040 An open shackle. One historian thought it might be a pasteboard crowd. 361 00:47:29,040 --> 00:47:39,290 Did he mean as used in some court buffoonery? I don't understand the trace of Bright Red Star. 362 00:47:39,290 --> 00:47:43,650 Everything you just see is unmistakeable. 363 00:47:43,650 --> 00:47:51,390 The thing itself, little little lamb, little stronger than in that reproduction. 364 00:47:51,390 --> 00:47:57,660 I don't understand that trace of bright red in Aesop's ear. 365 00:47:57,660 --> 00:48:03,450 And what seems to be a clump of dark metal attached to the ear is cartilage. 366 00:48:03,450 --> 00:48:07,810 Can you see it? Is it a mark of slave ownership? 367 00:48:07,810 --> 00:48:18,720 Maybe. In other words, I think the object world in the Aesop is pretty much an enigma and meant to be. 368 00:48:18,720 --> 00:48:23,550 It goes with the armour on the floor in Don Juan of Austria. 369 00:48:23,550 --> 00:48:30,360 Aesop may eventually take the objects on the floor and make a story out of them. 370 00:48:30,360 --> 00:48:39,960 But the moment in the picture is infinitely deferred. Goya, in the tremendous drawing he made of the SOP, 371 00:48:39,960 --> 00:48:51,010 notice his strong misreading of the figures expression fell room just just rules for the cast metal. 372 00:48:51,010 --> 00:48:57,410 Wait. Then he left it out with his etching. 373 00:48:57,410 --> 00:49:10,490 The book Aesop holds the face, of course, changing again, much closer in the etching to the Velasquez face, although. 374 00:49:10,490 --> 00:49:22,990 Hard to hold it. The book is Upholds, one assumes it's his book is extraordinarily beautiful. 375 00:49:22,990 --> 00:49:31,150 The play between it's dog eared pages and the wrinkle of Aesop's sash is entirely touching. 376 00:49:31,150 --> 00:49:41,650 Aesop holds the book carefully, but it is an object, amongst others, not the solution to the riddle. 377 00:49:41,650 --> 00:49:45,310 One more word on Aesop's expression. 378 00:49:45,310 --> 00:49:55,600 I knew it would offer us comfort as art historians if we could discover a code for Aesop's way of looking and iconography, 379 00:49:55,600 --> 00:50:00,550 a set of templates coming down to us from Velasquez's time. 380 00:50:00,550 --> 00:50:10,630 But I think the effort to find one misguided first, because it turns out that when we do discover such templates and of course they exist, 381 00:50:10,630 --> 00:50:18,280 they are unfailingly crude and irrelevant to an artist's of Alaska's power of thought. 382 00:50:18,280 --> 00:50:27,700 Some commentators, for instance, have seen a connexion between Darla Porter's pseudo scientific comparisons of men and 383 00:50:27,700 --> 00:50:36,820 animals faces between the bovine physiognomy and the actual cow and Aesop's set of the jaw. 384 00:50:36,820 --> 00:50:43,540 All I can say is that the exercise seems to me about as helpful as trying to understand the 385 00:50:43,540 --> 00:50:51,160 psychology of Shakespeare's Hamlet with the age of out of date handbooks to the humours. 386 00:50:51,160 --> 00:50:59,110 And this is the second point. There are no genuine comprendo in Velasquez's case. 387 00:50:59,110 --> 00:51:04,720 The range and kind of expressions we find in his work are unique. 388 00:51:04,720 --> 00:51:09,880 And yet we know from the record that they were responded to with deep admiration. 389 00:51:09,880 --> 00:51:25,000 The case of innocent. The 10th is a touchstone was always when I when it comes up, you think if this is innocence, then what would happen? 390 00:51:25,000 --> 00:51:30,160 But anyway, the case of Pope innocent. The 10th is a touchdown. 391 00:51:30,160 --> 00:51:41,770 Both the subject's enthusiasm for Velasquez's portrait and the Apocrypha that has him exclaiming at the picture on first sight. 392 00:51:41,770 --> 00:51:47,140 But of course, there could be no first sight trouble there. 393 00:51:47,140 --> 00:51:58,520 It may not be true, of course, the story, but it points to the simple, vital extraordinariness of the face as it emerged. 394 00:51:58,520 --> 00:52:10,420 And that leads to point three, which is basically the reading of expression in a face of love is not a matter of conventions iconographic, 395 00:52:10,420 --> 00:52:17,200 peculiar to specific cultures, but of neurology and the nature of the species. 396 00:52:17,200 --> 00:52:23,170 Neuroscientists tell us that the human brain is hard wired to interpret other minds 397 00:52:23,170 --> 00:52:29,880 from facial features is part of the hominid survival kit we see in an expression, 398 00:52:29,880 --> 00:52:33,910 a intention or a mode of feeling other to us. 399 00:52:33,910 --> 00:52:38,230 Unlike any we have exactly experienced ourselves. 400 00:52:38,230 --> 00:52:42,130 But analogies to them, the ability to do so, 401 00:52:42,130 --> 00:52:52,750 the automatic immediate confidence in performing this strange operation seems to be organised in the brain as a specific function or even area. 402 00:52:52,750 --> 00:52:58,180 It is modular as the jargon has it. 403 00:52:58,180 --> 00:53:09,310 We pick up the implications of an expression in the same way we intuit the purpose and effect of a certain way of saying an intonation. 404 00:53:09,310 --> 00:53:19,390 An irony, though, using a tone, tone and expression are analogies in the Laskas is Aesop. 405 00:53:19,390 --> 00:53:24,430 We feel the man's expression is the key to his tone. 406 00:53:24,430 --> 00:53:31,480 We see his look and hear his voice. The voice of the fables, the special. 407 00:53:31,480 --> 00:53:41,300 Humble, clever, guarded, devastating simplicity of the fake. 408 00:53:41,300 --> 00:53:50,580 Oh, but I've left so little time from Mars. But it may be right to treat him with Aesopian economy. 409 00:53:50,580 --> 00:54:01,610 Not to say irreverence. There is a wonderful throwaway Aesop fable on the subject of war whose sheer speed and shrug of the shoulders, 410 00:54:01,610 --> 00:54:14,490 whose austere distain for the God of battles. I'll be happy to emulate the fable is typical of Aesop's anti mythological mythmaking. 411 00:54:14,490 --> 00:54:17,880 All you need to know where you get it anyway. 412 00:54:17,880 --> 00:54:31,020 But just to add to it, just five lines is the interesting fact that he uses the word polymorphs to describe the God of war. 413 00:54:31,020 --> 00:54:36,960 Very, very old word in Greek, apparently of the oldest Greek word. 414 00:54:36,960 --> 00:54:42,750 We have a war. No, no array's or whatever for him. 415 00:54:42,750 --> 00:54:50,760 Here's the here's the fable. All the gods, having decided to get married, each took a wife. 416 00:54:50,760 --> 00:55:04,080 That fate assigned to him. Pauline was being left last in the drawing of locks, could find only Kouvelis remaining. 417 00:55:04,080 --> 00:55:09,030 He fell madly in love with humorous and married her. 418 00:55:09,030 --> 00:55:14,970 That's why he goes everywhere she goes. Great. 419 00:55:14,970 --> 00:55:27,020 I guess a typical Aesop's Fables. Incidentally, we are told of a festival, this is Robert Parker. 420 00:55:27,020 --> 00:55:36,560 Your great professor in his book on Greek religion at a festival in ancient Argos called The Who briska. 421 00:55:36,560 --> 00:55:51,230 Probably in order. In honour of ARray's the God of War, where women dress up in men's tunics and cloaks and men wear women's dresses and veils. 422 00:55:51,230 --> 00:56:01,400 The Greeks seem to have known that the hubris of war is tied in somehow with the collapse or burlesque of gender distinctions. 423 00:56:01,400 --> 00:56:09,080 War and buffoonery are one. And this leads straight to Velasquez. 424 00:56:09,080 --> 00:56:18,410 I've said that the evidence we have, Slim as it is, suggests that Aesop and Mars were together in the same room at the turret in the parada. 425 00:56:18,410 --> 00:56:27,310 The relation between them does seem to me Aesopian in the sense that Haggles sets out and disapproves of in his lectures. 426 00:56:27,310 --> 00:56:39,380 It is a brilliant enigma, a kind of bright, infinitely clever slave language, because the fabulous, says Hegel dare not speak his teaching openly. 427 00:56:39,380 --> 00:56:49,890 He can only make it intelligible in a kind of riddle which is at the same time always being soft. 428 00:56:49,890 --> 00:56:52,200 There are art historians, believe it or not, 429 00:56:52,200 --> 00:57:00,870 who have argued that no irreverence towards the military could possibly have been intended by the picture we're looking at. 430 00:57:00,870 --> 00:57:06,660 This is the king's painter, after all, at work in a time of war. 431 00:57:06,660 --> 00:57:12,660 I guess these are the kinds of readers that don't find Don quicksort funny. 432 00:57:12,660 --> 00:57:23,760 But let's go along with them a little way. It is true that there's nothing new, nothing outlandish to the picture of bars we're presented with. 433 00:57:23,760 --> 00:57:34,320 It's a version of Mars disarmed by Venus and licence performed previously by all the best Italian masters. 434 00:57:34,320 --> 00:57:43,500 Various prototypes for the Velasquez have been suggested, but I think the most relevant has been oddly left aside. 435 00:57:43,500 --> 00:57:48,150 It is a very uneasy done around 50 Naty. 436 00:57:48,150 --> 00:57:57,360 The painting was in full force collection and then he presented it to the Prince of Wales in sixteen twenty three. 437 00:57:57,360 --> 00:58:02,070 I'm assuming Alaskas saw it before it left for London. 438 00:58:02,070 --> 00:58:11,260 He just could. It was a celebrated thing. In any case, one or two variants and early copies survive. 439 00:58:11,260 --> 00:58:13,730 It's the figure of Mars in the very uneasy. 440 00:58:13,730 --> 00:58:22,960 That matters most clearly, the pink work suggests that it was added to the Venus light almost as an afterthought. 441 00:58:22,960 --> 00:58:26,820 But it seems to me one of their nieces is great inventions. 442 00:58:26,820 --> 00:58:40,090 The link with Velasquez is in Mars's face and address, above all, in the nature of his look out at us, the viewers, as if he's surprised. 443 00:58:40,090 --> 00:58:47,980 As sorry as he's surprised. Making love, not war. 444 00:58:47,980 --> 00:58:56,800 Velasquez has fed on the looks direction in there, and they say it's slight downward tilt. 445 00:58:56,800 --> 00:59:02,500 And the fact of its being in shadow thanks to the UN discarded helmet. 446 00:59:02,500 --> 00:59:13,600 And he's thought further with very uneasy about the God of wars, peculiar expression, what shall we call it in either case, a abashed, crestfallen. 447 00:59:13,600 --> 00:59:16,120 It's not not a bad metaphor here. 448 00:59:16,120 --> 00:59:27,250 In spite of the plumes and go be song helmets caught out unmistakeably but oddly engaging with whoever has done the catching. 449 00:59:27,250 --> 00:59:38,590 Not flinching from the intruders smiled. Velasquez's Mars is Veronese is pushed several stops further. 450 00:59:38,590 --> 00:59:43,540 It's fundamental to its effect that Venus has left the building. 451 00:59:43,540 --> 00:59:52,630 Mars is disarmed. But who or what it was that disarmed him is intimated, not shown. 452 00:59:52,630 --> 00:59:59,440 He still has his helmet and baton and properly the marshal moustache. 453 00:59:59,440 --> 01:00:08,500 But obviously he has been on land, not robbed completely of the raw erotic power, certainly. 454 01:00:08,500 --> 01:00:16,720 But with the power now clearly mixed as such, power mostly is with a strange kind of comedy. 455 01:00:16,720 --> 01:00:27,160 The colours of his garments. If that's what they are, very soon it occurs to us that they could be bedclothes put on to put to hurried, 456 01:00:27,160 --> 01:00:37,150 embarrassed use are utterly feminine here, even if on the battlefield they might be flown on a regiment's flag. 457 01:00:37,150 --> 01:00:41,590 Mars's his body. By far, the Alaskas is most astonishing. 458 01:00:41,590 --> 01:00:49,300 Treatment of the nude is absurd by reason above all of its uncertain age and imperfection. 459 01:00:49,300 --> 01:00:56,220 The incipient wattles at the man's neck, the thinness of flesh over his collarbone. 460 01:00:56,220 --> 01:01:00,240 The two harsh creases of fat across his belly. 461 01:01:00,240 --> 01:01:05,470 The claw like fingers. The oversized thigh and calf. 462 01:01:05,470 --> 01:01:14,800 Is there another body in Western art whose subjection to ageing, to ordinary wear and tear, is treated so relentlessly? 463 01:01:14,800 --> 01:01:22,210 Maybe in Titian may be a tortured Christ, of course, but Velasquez's moss is Antichrist. 464 01:01:22,210 --> 01:01:33,460 And is there another male body in painting whose emasculation is so flagrant the splayed legs and open lap? 465 01:01:33,460 --> 01:01:40,690 Don't they become in due course the stock shot of pornography in the Velasquez? 466 01:01:40,690 --> 01:01:47,900 The subject has covered his nakedness but never has an apron of figley. 467 01:01:47,900 --> 01:01:56,200 That's the twisted and bunched up blue, the pulpy organic flesh pink, the touches of raw red. 468 01:01:56,200 --> 01:02:03,420 Never has a fig leaf. Be more evocative of what might or might not be underneath. 469 01:02:03,420 --> 01:02:07,550 The great smooth baton Mars is holding. 470 01:02:07,550 --> 01:02:13,570 I guess we'll come to that seems like a piece of wish fulfilment. 471 01:02:13,570 --> 01:02:22,460 The risk we strap coming down from the helmet across his collarbone is surely closer to the truth. 472 01:02:22,460 --> 01:02:27,290 Mars is disarmed then deeply, scandalously. 473 01:02:27,290 --> 01:02:32,330 But I don't think we're being invited to take the disarmament too seriously. 474 01:02:32,330 --> 01:02:38,780 The clutter of armour on the ground, the experts tell us, is tournament stuff, mostly for show. 475 01:02:38,780 --> 01:02:45,920 The Shield has a rim with pretty fur trimmings and seems to be made mainly of glass. 476 01:02:45,920 --> 01:02:53,360 Even the armour on the floor in Don Juan of Austria looks more serviceable. 477 01:02:53,360 --> 01:03:04,220 The association, definitely a negative one between war and luxury, is a 17th century trope haunting the critique of absolutism. 478 01:03:04,220 --> 01:03:13,250 Sir Seymour Visi praising the defiance implicit it implicitly at Louie's expense, could say explicitly. 479 01:03:13,250 --> 01:03:19,820 The great and sublime maxim that kings are made for peoples and not peoples for kings was 480 01:03:19,820 --> 01:03:30,020 so deeply imprinted on the prince's soul that it made luxury and war odious to him again. 481 01:03:30,020 --> 01:03:35,080 No need to press home political lessons in the Velasquez too far, 482 01:03:35,080 --> 01:03:49,280 their implicit made possible deniable by the atmosphere of courtly comedy oesophagus speaking not so simple. 483 01:03:49,280 --> 01:03:55,960 I shall draw attention finally to just three aspects of the Alaskas. 484 01:03:55,960 --> 01:04:01,790 His invention. First to Moses Singularity. 485 01:04:01,790 --> 01:04:05,330 Second, once again to his expression. And third. 486 01:04:05,330 --> 01:04:19,790 Well, if they amount to the same thing, to his foolishness, it seems to me fundamental that to Velasquez's picture that Mars is on his own. 487 01:04:19,790 --> 01:04:25,220 He is singular through and through Mars without Venus. 488 01:04:25,220 --> 01:04:34,160 And if the record is to be trusted, always Mars without a pendent God or goddess in a matching painting of the same size. 489 01:04:34,160 --> 01:04:41,060 And this, by the way, puts the mower's in a very special place in the turreted our paraders decorative scheme, 490 01:04:41,060 --> 01:04:48,410 which was built on parings and sets of stories. There is something uncanny to the figures. 491 01:04:48,410 --> 01:04:53,720 Singularity, his expression and his singularity go together. 492 01:04:53,720 --> 01:05:01,280 He looks bewildered. A good 17th century word, meaning lost in populous places. 493 01:05:01,280 --> 01:05:08,840 He looks at a loss. Never has a body been more on its own masculinity in loss. 494 01:05:08,840 --> 01:05:18,980 This seems to me Velasquez's thinking is deeply not a reciprocity, not a form of relationality. 495 01:05:18,980 --> 01:05:28,640 This is the true and canniness in the case. Mars is embarrassed, but also deeply at ease in his isolation. 496 01:05:28,640 --> 01:05:34,970 He's lost his armour and maybe his bearings, but he'll stare any viewer or voyeur down. 497 01:05:34,970 --> 01:05:42,980 He'll not be the first to lower his eyes. Historians, sometimes casting about for their own bearings, 498 01:05:42,980 --> 01:05:52,610 suggests that the hand to the chin in Mars is the pose of the melancholic, maybe conventionally. 499 01:05:52,610 --> 01:05:59,060 But Velasquez, as usual, makes the convention work an extraordinarily strange ways. 500 01:05:59,060 --> 01:06:06,860 The hand holds the head steady and colludes in the gazes outward ness, its lack of inner depth. 501 01:06:06,860 --> 01:06:14,740 The gaze is impenetrable. The helmet keeps things under wraps. 502 01:06:14,740 --> 01:06:20,200 And yet there is still something to Mars's expression that eludes us. 503 01:06:20,200 --> 01:06:26,640 Or at least me, there used to be a strand in the literature on Velasquez, 504 01:06:26,640 --> 01:06:38,170 the propose that Aesop and Manipal and Morris were pictures, all three of court jesters playing at being philosophers and gods. 505 01:06:38,170 --> 01:06:41,200 I see why the Strand was discarded. 506 01:06:41,200 --> 01:06:52,330 It came out of an epoch, a late 19th century epoch, when Velasquez's art was interpreted too much in a realist fashion. 507 01:06:52,330 --> 01:06:56,480 Nonetheless, the idea does speak to something in the pictures. 508 01:06:56,480 --> 01:07:00,610 The look. Mars is giving us, if we focus on that alone, 509 01:07:00,610 --> 01:07:06,700 does seem to be an expression that knows itself to be won and perhaps wants 510 01:07:06,700 --> 01:07:12,460 to signify some kind of distance from the expression even as it assumes it. 511 01:07:12,460 --> 01:07:19,330 Could we even say this would be another solution to the question of Mars being so impenetrable? 512 01:07:19,330 --> 01:07:30,590 Could we say that Mars seems to know that his humiliation is only a roll, a move in an unserious game? 513 01:07:30,590 --> 01:07:36,410 He's look, invites are complicity. This is courtly art. 514 01:07:36,410 --> 01:07:45,350 It expects us Mars expects us to be properly sophisticated and share in the cool days in Gameel. 515 01:07:45,350 --> 01:07:52,420 Readers like Nilton blessin push things too far. 516 01:07:52,420 --> 01:08:01,240 For a moment then, as we first tuned in to the paintings, Mars Desert, armed by Venus iconography, 517 01:08:01,240 --> 01:08:08,810 we assume we are meant to condescend to the warrior wearing woman's clothes. 518 01:08:08,810 --> 01:08:12,350 But are we allowed to condescend? 519 01:08:12,350 --> 01:08:22,700 Isn't the level this of Mars look level here, I mean, literally as well as metaphorically in the end, unnerving, even disarming of us? 520 01:08:22,700 --> 01:08:30,300 Is it the look of a fool? Or someone playing the fool entirely knowingly. 521 01:08:30,300 --> 01:08:38,430 This is what the older historians seem to a suspected Mars is disarmed by Venus. 522 01:08:38,430 --> 01:08:48,390 But that's always just the start of the story. A fool and his phallic armour may soon be parted, but never for law. 523 01:08:48,390 --> 01:08:58,150 Mars returns to the battlefield. His madness only exacerbated. 524 01:08:58,150 --> 01:09:03,580 The look of war, the game of war. 525 01:09:03,580 --> 01:09:19,380 The look of disarmament, the look of disillusion, these seem to me Velasquez's subjects war in its full unfortunate human being. 526 01:09:19,380 --> 01:09:23,220 The Greeks as so often have things to say on this topic. 527 01:09:23,220 --> 01:09:37,410 On the strangeness and extremity of the human capacity for violence, iRace for them was the most uncanny of the Olympians, more so even than Dionysus. 528 01:09:37,410 --> 01:09:47,690 I quote Aeschylus finally in the suppliant, the chorus of desperate women about to die. 529 01:09:47,690 --> 01:09:58,850 Alas, unlucky, indeed, the face of a city captured, I would say that the dead are better off than this murder, fire and rape. 530 01:09:58,850 --> 01:10:03,260 All the city polluted by smoke and the breath of our rays. 531 01:10:03,260 --> 01:10:12,700 God of war opponent Maddin desecrating piety, slaying the people. 532 01:10:12,700 --> 01:10:26,440 War is performance, says Velasquez. And therefore, performance anxiety, war is tomfoolery, madness and pollution are constitutive of it. 533 01:10:26,440 --> 01:10:32,710 Not collateral damage. Polemics. And hubris are partners for life. 534 01:10:32,710 --> 01:10:42,310 Both Don Juans of Austria, the original Victor and the jester who dared claim his name are buffoons. 535 01:10:42,310 --> 01:10:49,330 The warrior is all the more merciless. Were knowing his armour is just for show. 536 01:10:49,330 --> 01:10:54,130 I think the picture of Mars speaks to all these things. 537 01:10:54,130 --> 01:11:12,820 It's endless play-acting, this edge of lunacy, this all to humanness in Aesop's voice.