I think we're ready to get started. We have locked the doors. Not it turned out so well done for getting there early.
It gives me great pleasure. It's a real honour to introduce Tim Clark here today.
He is, as you know, obviously in attendance makes clear, one of the giants of art history.
And he is one of those people for would say no introduction was necessary and that really would be true.
But I'm going to say a few words anyway.
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.
I think there's right to take out a 150 decision, which is a little scary.
But so that was given to the people caucus of Corbi and the 1848 revolution and the absolute bourgeois artists in politics in France,
1848, 1851 of which came out in 1973.
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.
And it's in the art of Manny and his followers, which came out in nineteen eighty four.
As I say, discipline shaping as as Kim is teaching at various institutions being including University of Leeds,
which for a while was really one of the great driving forces of absolutely great art history in the UK.
And he on in 1999, he published farewell to an idea episodes from his Roots of Modernism, which,
like the previous books, offered a sustained consideration of how one might think art and politics in the same breath.
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
be put on them to yield to meanings without putting them too neatly in that historical context.
He also writes art history, but also he writes things or is involved in things that might be called more street politics.
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.
For example, in 2005, he published Afflicted Powers, Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War as part of the author.
That is part of a collective and anonymous collective sort of anonymous collective called Retort.
That was an extended consideration of the image economy in the 21st century and in particular in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001.
He also, though, continues to look very closely at paintings and to argue very forcefully for
the value in the broadly political value in attending closely to paintings.
So in 2006, I was at the site of death, an experiment in art writing,
which is in part a counterpoint or critical engagement with the social history of offered his own practise had engendered.
And so it continues in 2013 with an magnetically curated and wrote accompanying catalogue for brilliant
show Alice Lowry's Work in the same year he published Picasso and Truth from Cubism to Gattaca,
which is based on the A.W. Metal lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Being asked to give those lectures is, of course, a great honour, and Tim's career is littered with similar honours.
I mentioned just two. One is 2005. He was awarded the Melin Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award,
which is really one of the biggest distinctions that one could receive in any field is not an authoritative award.
It's cuts across all sorts of disciplines, hopefully known as the genius, Grant says.
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.
Jim was the Alza Horn Research Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
In some ways, with welcoming back to you, we can maybe take a small matter credit.
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.
And today he is going to be talking about something, I think a little different to say something about a project.
So welcome to. Thank you very much, Alastair.
And it's a great pleasure to be here, actually.
Alistair Horne. Grant Prince princely sum of one thousand pounds.
I think you've kept me for a year. And it was cooked up by horn and Zeldin in a kind of Oxford manner.
And I wouldn't I don't think I'd have written the first book books without it.
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.
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.
And I even said to her, maybe I'll cook up a lecture directly about it.
But I'm still a bit too close to that book, which really centres on pictures by Joto, very noisy.
Puzzo and Breugel Royals', in a way, the dominant.
Figure a bit too close. But anyway, in January, as part of this kicking off the boat of the endless Ruskin's bicentenary year.
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.
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.
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.
And, you know, towards when you get this far on in your life,
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.
Well, first of all. So what is it?
Can we what is it we can say about paintings that we see in paintings that find it extraordinarily difficult to put into words?
We know we're learning something very directly, very indubitably.
But but putting that over into words.
Sintering, for instance, on. Ethos, expression.
And that that haunts all the chapters in the recent book.
And secondly, the recent book is was begun, you know, in this dreadful new epoch of ours, the well.
I hardly knew what was really in store in 2005. New war.
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.
And that's very much the nature of war on the war, like an aggression as part of the human species.
That's that's a thread of the book.
You'll see it here, too. Let me begin then with a map of the territory.
The pieces in the puzzle that I want to explore in this lecture or some of the key pieces
are the following first and primarily the picture of easel up there on the right.
It was painted by Velasquez, most likely in the late 60s and thirties as part of the decor of the King's Hunting Lodge.
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.
One inventory of the tornado that put out three paintings of the same size from the hand of Velasquez,
one representing Mars, another Aesop, the other many books appraised at 50 doubloons each.
I'm going reluctantly to leave my necklace aside.
Very, very interesting choice. And we can talk about it if you want to and focus on Aesop and Mars.
These two. Yes, and focus on Aesop Amar's.
It seems important, first of all, that these paintings,
these two paintings are the same size and that the size is special amongst Velasquez's surviving work.
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.
This may suggest that the Mars and Aesop were conceived together.
Some historians have thought they may have hung in the same room at the Lodge.
It's striking that there's no trace of a pendant to the Mars.
His singularity is something that matters.
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.
How is the war, God's face meant to engage with us?
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?
I suspend an answer to that question, of course, suggesting that I think that this this suspension is what Velasquez is intending.
Let me look instead simply at the difference between Laws's expression and Aesop's and insist with the special character of these paintings,
palace destination in mind on what it might have meant to a or what it might have meant to a court society,
to a gathering of warriors to have the God of war look out at them.
In this way, Mars surely has somehow lost face.
The historian Robert Straddling pointed out sometime ago that during the 44 long years of Philip the fourth reign,
there was not a single day of peace and most of the wars fought were very far from triumphs.
This may be relevant. Aesop's coolness, the shadow of a question on his face, may be meant as our guide.
We might compare the lost face of Mars further with that of another Alaskas court warrior.
So I want to compare the lost face of Mars with that of another Alaskas court warrior.
This one painted most likely a few years before Aesop and Mars.
Again, there is no record of a commission in the archives,
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.
Such are the slim pickings of Hap's for court accountancy. This picture makes even Mars seem straightforward here.
The whole mood and tone are baffling.
The painting and its central character could be treading the edge of insulin's or despondency or bewilderment or just plain foolishness.
Which description fits best? Becomes more uncertain in my experience.
The longer we look or the more we fill in historical details.
The man on view here was a fool. He was a court buffoon.
Undoubtedly a jester and mimic, but quite probably some kind of simpleton or local.
That's the word in the archives. Of course,
the language of court records and contemporary memoirs slides constantly between real and pretend idiocy and mental and bodily freakishness.
It was considered Picault at the Hapsburg court if they coexisted.
And the man's name was Don Juan de Ostry.
That is, he was named after or had usurped and was allowed to name all of the noble victor of the Battle of Lepanto.
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.
What did it mean for the court? Is my question that it found room for a lugubrious parody of one of its greatest heroes.
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.
The Dutch ambassador a little later in the century can be found letting slip as if reporting nothing very remarkable.
That quote during the meal at court, two buffoons played at war, the celebrations of the birth of Philip Prosper in 16 58.
He of the heartbreaking Alaskas portrayed with the little dog.
Of course, he didn't survive long this much, much, much anticipated male heir.
The celebrations of his birth gave pride of place to a door of tilting with lances in a tournament.
But is Velasquez's Don Juan acting the fool?
And if he is, does Velasquez show him acting it well?
Does he understand his own script? How is he looking at this?
What different degrees or levels of unreality of pretending or mimicking or projecting an image are intended by
the juxtaposition of donor funds face and the extraordinary phantasmagoria called Lepanto through the doorway.
My subject you'll begin to see is essentially the quality of a look in the last guess, a certain expression.
I'm not saying that Aesop Mars and Don Juan of Austria exactly share a look or that it is exclusive to them,
but I hope you'll agree that their looks have a certain family resemblance.
It's a look of a certain kind of distance. It's a look that looks outward from the illusion.
It is part of a look that doesn't precisely puncture the illusion.
Alaskas is not, I think, a disbeliever in the fictions he's given to work with.
But in some sense, intercepts, intercepts,
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,
what we have been called on to do. Returning the gaze.
Maybe the adiam we need meeting Aesop's look.
Is that here is someone who is seeing through things a period term that scholars propose may be helpful, is disingenuous.
Which in the literature of disaffection,
characteristic of the time came to mean disillusion in the full sense of the English word, not a shrugging aside of illusion,
not the hope of a realism existing apart from it altogether, but a dis illusion, a partial detachment,
perhaps the hope of living with illusion in full knowledge that that is what living consists of.
Think again of Lepanto beyond the door. This is the look of distance, then, of detachment, of outsiderness.
Of course, it's an out sidedness that knows itself to be provisional, provided for by the powers that be available on powers terms.
Such a look is tied close to courtliness.
To court culture, to being the king's servant.
But it may also be bound up, Mars and Don Juan of Austria suggest as much with a state of permanent war.
It may be the look of war. So here is the final term to my introduction.
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.
Off to the left in Velasquez's surrender of Braider, the man looking out from the grand illusion, his green jacket and trousers.
There on the left, an irresistible punctuation mark in the pictures.
Great War of Browns and Greys. Two things to be said about The Rifleman.
Firstly, there's a matter of hindsight. We can't avoid knowing that the quality of this rifle man's outsiderness was fundamental,
revelatory for later artists and specifically, of course, for many and modernism.
Manet tried to imitate the figure on the far left margin of his music in the tree, Larry Gardens,
and a little later he tried to honour the fall to disclose the figures effect its peculiar power over the picture as a whole.
In the great canvases from the mid 60s that turned on the look of victory.
He seems to have seen the Rifleman's look, I think likely, as one called, the very contract of illusion into question.
And second, but this is a point that one ought to make who really not thinking it at all a scandal.
What The Rifleman looks away from is an illusion.
It is we know, a piece of courtly drama that never really happened.
There was at the surrender of Braider no such chivalrous face to face encounter like the one in the centre of things here,
no touch of the victor's hand. Only adversaries, such shoulder.
Again, Velasquez's treatment of detachment here is equivocal.
He doesn't speak to the illusion from a position safely superior to it,
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.
Notice the way the Rifleman's hand on the stock of his gun.
Wonderful thing is taken up by.
And maybe I will use try to use my pointer here. Yes.
Okay. This the right. Obviously that. And also have a look at if you can just about see there's a wonderful dark profile.
And then in between the dark roof and this extraordinary dandies face another face there.
Yes.
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.
What exactly the dand his hand is signalling a wonderful invention with a hush of cast shadow falling from it onto the white.
We can't be sure of. But one plausible interpretation is that he's telling the man immediately behind him to the left,
his full face juxtaposed to that darker profile, telling the man to stop talking for a moment and pay attention to the central spectacle.
There is a relay of inclusions and exclusions in Velasquez.
That's to say a to and fro of kinds of spectatorship.
The Rifleman's look is determinant. We can still feel I shall go on considering it.
The look of war that mattered most to Velasquez, the one that anticipated Aesop's and Mars but determinant in Alaska.
It never seems to mean just the whole key to the mystery.
The Rifleman.
I can't help thinking is the kind of representative on the scene of history that Bertolt Brecht imagined so marvellously three centuries later.
He asks the great questions posed by the worker in Bresch poem of 1935, who built the sudden gates of Thebes.
In the books, you find the names of kings. Did the Kings hole up the blocks of stone?
Philip of Spain. What they say when his Ahmad and went down.
Was he the only one weeping? Caesar beat the goals.
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.
You've already suffered losing face and seeing through things, et cetera.
Puns are no doubt tiresome, but sometimes they point to the nature of the beast.
They're a sign of embarrassment. Velasquez seems to be asking us to attend to to fix specifically and even pedantically
on an area of visual experience that normally and maybe not necessarily.
We leave as a give them an unthinkable. What is a look?
How do we tell what to look? Intense. How do we know what it's for?
In other words, and if it is meant at all for us.
These are questions as impertinent as Breck's in their way.
So here's one more pun directed in particular at The Rifleman, but also at Mar's.
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?
Of course, we can say that literally, though, the loss of Braider didn't last long.
Velasquez did his painting probably in 16, 34, 35, commemorating a victory, then 10 years old.
And two years later, the Dutch retook the city.
But such as war. The Rifleman is right to ask us to keep our distance from any one act of surrender and Mars.
Well, what is the loss? He's looking a loss of some kind of armour.
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.
It is a baroque cliche, but Aesop is.
There is, in other words, nothing at all unsettling for courtly culture, for the culture of 17th century humanists at large,
in the idea of an ancient world that had its licence, outsiders scornful of riches, searching instead for higher wisdom.
But Aesop, has this culture understood him was something a little different from that he was.
Let me establish this straight away. A figure who loomed large for the culture.
The editors of the famed modern edition of The Saragossa Aesop's Fables of fourteen eighty nine lavae, Daddy and Aesop at Construes.
Fabulous. You study at us, say simply that it quote,
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,
Eighty-Nine was the most widely read body of literature across two centuries at cross, at least two centuries in Spain.
And the importance of Aesop and his form of storytelling for the emerging picaresque
novel is indubitable so that Neches later verdict on the novel as a whole,
that it may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable, however exaggerated and typical nature,
fashion certainly speaks to the kind of low life adventure story the Alaskas would have read as a young man in civil.
Aesop, in a word, was the great representative of a kind of emerging realism.
But the question is in Velasquez's hands, what kind?
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.
I suppose that means that Aesop is depicted at roughly LifeSize.
But in reality, in front of the picture in the Prado, he has a height and composure that always seems slightly above us.
That's true. I found, however, low above the floor line.
The canvas is hung. This has to do, I think, with the pictures, actual dimensions,
but also more fundamentally with the way the pictures internal organisation takes advantage of them,
the way it's placing and orientation of Aesop's body and that body's extraordinary address to us.
And the exact measure of space opened and closed around the body and the ground with its enigmatic objects and utterly puzzling gradients,
especially towards the right.
The way all of these things establish ESOPs unique, non dominant height, he is in some way immense, implacable, but he's entirely every.
He is not the least touch of the numinous about him.
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.
All of them understood, again, as primarily matters of actual bodily disposition,
though inevitably carrying with that the signs, the traces of what the world has done to you and how habitually you meet it.
I showed the pic, the painting recently to an expert in skeletal health,
and she was impressed by Aesop's composure but worried about how his body is actually holding itself.
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.
Something seems slightly wrong to her. Maybe some curvature of the spine.
The distinct turn outwards of Aesop's right foot.
The one nearest the bucket with its soul on display and its socks and specially bad shape.
Confirmed by experts suspicions. I hadn't revealed to her son.
Of course, you're dealing with my kolaches teacher, right?
I hadn't revealed to her what Velasquez must have known, may have must have known or been told about Aesop,
the historical character, but most likely he would have known a great deal.
The culture had a strange investment in Aesop's physical existence.
What the investment amounted to is suggested,
at least in part by the Frontispiece wonderful thing to The Saragossa Fables the Aesop Velasquez would have had on his shelves.
I think this would cut kept the painter company and the fact that the wood cut was deeply archaic.
The illustrations for The Saragossa volume had been recycled from a German edition published in Autumn and out book sometime around 40,
Naty only added, I suspect, to its appeal.
Aesop was a hunchback before, he tells us.
And so does the life of himself that predicted the fables in The Saragossa collection.
Maybe he was spectacularly deformed. Some accounts have him as a dwarf.
Of course, we're curving back towards the territory of buffoons, locals, court entertainers.
Some accounts have him as a dwarf.
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.
I quote Francis Barlow from the great English edition of The Life, published in 16 87,
is typical of treatments from the time as to the features and dimensions of Aesop's face and body.
They were so shuffled and huddled up that nature in his production did seem to insinuate
that she often times does set the most refolded gems in the most uneven and rugged colet.
For he was a sharp head, flat nosed is back rolled up in a bunch or excrescence, his lips tumorous and pendent,
his complexion black, large belly, crooked Bolex, but above all his misfortunes.
This was the most eminent that his speech was slow in articulate and very obscure.
Some versions of life have Aesop born altogether mute.
That is close to the condition of an animal at the very start of things and only gaining language later as the result
of a goddess's intervention is animal stories you see are supposed to have come out of that early experience.
Here is Aesop, for instance, in the Frontispiece to Sir Roger.
Less staunch fables from 60 90 to Aesop was often called a Phrygian,
and sometimes he wore the cap of liberty in illustrations, especially in the later 18th century, of course.
But he could have been an easy up. Hence his name.
He was often described as a black man. And crucially, this is a main theme of all the lives.
He was a slave, though eventually he won his manumission.
Scholar Lezzy Kirk points out that the life of Aesop is the only extended slave biography to have come down to us from antiquity.
I have to be somebody we've read lately, been treated to tremendous work from our curve and Annabel Pappas or various others,
which has opened for us the full range of the Aesopian in antiquity and the Renaissance.
Kurt, for instance, makes and others make very strong case for Aesopian.
Strain's being far more important in antiquity than we've understood hitherto.
It's a complex picture and I'm going to just dwell on the parts of it that I think may help with Velasquez.
First, as we know, there is the ugliness of the man, the otherness.
It is fundamental to the myth, partly because it's what ties Aesop to the animals,
but also because it's felt as the sign of the storyteller's enslavement.
And Aesop is a slave. This is an extraordinarily important part of the 17th century.
Investment in slavery, lowness and subservience are there in his body as his very nature.
Ugliness is a difficult subject for art. But Aesop seemed to call for it.
Velasquez's version of Aesop is to be compared with Ribeira US.
There are various versions that have come down to us, including one this one that found its way eventually to the Escorial.
And don't think that the extremity of features in the Ribeira simply derived from this painter's general taste for the extreme.
Wonderful exhibition present on at Dellec about about Rivera's sensitivity to the horror of his own day and willingness to depict it.
Pedal. Don't think that this is just Ribeira.
Ribeira was perfectly capable of intimating ugliness or at least wild unkindness and lending them nobility if he chose his Diogenes, for example.
Great painting is as successful in doing so in its distinctive way as anything by Velasquez, the Ribeira.
Aesop, by contrast, is a man challenging us.
I think not to look, this is deformity.
The thing itself, ugliness matters in Aesop's case because this is the logic that seems to lie behind the fascination,
because ESOPs is a truth that comes out of otherness and melati enslavement subordination.
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.
This is really a euphemism. The opening events in The Saragossa life,
the episodes by which Aesop first enforces his authority over the master who is bought him in the slave market,
turn on vomiting, urination and shitting on the run in the public highway.
The Saragossa volume has a good illustration of the last, with Aesop holding the bucket ready to wash his vile over's arse.
And subsequently one realises that the old form of.
Well, this. This one, the odd form immediately to the right of Aesopian, the frontispiece is most probably a turd curling into a bucket.
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.
Think Deposal. But in Velasquez's world, the world of Don Quick Don Quicksort and the pick at all.
It isn't at all clear that prose and lowness or prose and the unspeakable are negative values.
The turd in the bucket may point to the truth. And thirdly, again, the question of Aesop's slave status is inescapable.
Aesop was the master of a kind of irony that could be instantly retracted if need be.
The fable is most effective as a literary or oratorical weapon, wrote a wonderful later editor under despotic governments allowing no free speech.
A tyrant cannot take notice of a fable without putting over the cap fits.
So 19th century ed very 19th century fought in the 17th century.
Interpreters regularly fought to the finish over Aesop, especially over stories with a political point.
I mean, exactly because it was dangerous and easily the.
And its possible political charge could be a subordinate in subordinate language.
Here, for example, is Milton himself in the 16th 50s, rounding on a reading of Aesop,
which he found in a book by a royalist cleric, the frogs he's dealing with.
Of course, a very famous Aesop fable, The Frogs and the King.
One of the most political and one of the most disputed.
The frogs. Here's milk, petitioned Jupiter for a king.
He tumbled amongst them a log. They found it insensible.
They contrition then for a king that should be active. He sent them a stalk, which straight fell to picking them up.
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.
Seek a king, which for the most part either as a log lies heavy on his subjects without doing aught worthy of his dignity,
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.
Maybe this is what Hegel was meaning and most disliked. The fable is slave language.
It nudges and beckons its audience towards a conclusion that they must surely be.
There is not their humble servants, the storytellers.
The moment of pivot in a good Aesop story when suddenly the plot yields up its uncomfortable point.
The moment the reader becomes a mill thinking the unthinkable.
This is the readers or listeners doing so.
That's what you think. My innocent story. Intense.
What a testament to your cleverness. Leslie Kirk puts it nicely.
Aesop, she says, is the master of a kind of martial art of the objected,
whose cunning lies in turning the social weight of the powerful against themselves.
It must be the freedom and sophistication of the slave owner that are responsible for making the slaves.
Clever patter end up calling the gods in question.
Velasquez's Mahrous seems close.
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.
And here I am convinced is the heart of the matter. How is it that Aesop addresses us in the Velasquez?
From what sort of distance? I reach a familiar impasse here.
I have no words for Aesop's expression. But that doesn't mean I don't know what the expression is about.
On the contrary, the word looseness of what Aesop is intending makes his intention all the clearer.
I think I'm sure I know what Aesop has on his mind.
I understand the quality of his distance. He's assessing, not addressing.
We should we could say reaching a judgement, but not preventing.
I know that is what keeps Aesop's words and our words at bay.
And isn't this the character of expressions in general?
Isn't this what expressions are for in the life of the species?
All expressions, but especially ones like this,
are about where words fail us in our doings with the world or where explicitness may indeed be dangerous.
They are a form of known language or even anti language.
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,
the slave is a master of objects of whatever ordinary bric-a-brac happens to fall in his way.
Art historians have laboured mightily to make the objects scattered on the ground
in the Velasquez means something or even in the case of the objects at bottom.
Right, be something specific.
None of their efforts seem convincing beyond the simple idea that what we see on the left is probably the slaves household bucket.
The one whose unfortunate duties we encountered earlier, the piece of dark material over the side of the bucket could be leather.
There's an Aesop fable about the stink of tanning, but the fable isn't an important one.
It doesn't get taken up by The Saragossa Frontispiece and the beautiful pattern of
stuffs and implements on the right hand side in Velasquez doesn't seem to continue.
The tanning theme, the pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric with its visceral trace of pale red.
A beautiful rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop's chest.
What are they? These folds is the dark material on top of the white here, another strip of leather.
But what's the shape that seems to be holding it down? A waste of some sort.
An open shackle. One historian thought it might be a pasteboard crowd.
Did he mean as used in some court buffoonery? I don't understand the trace of Bright Red Star.
Everything you just see is unmistakeable.
The thing itself, little little lamb, little stronger than in that reproduction.
I don't understand that trace of bright red in Aesop's ear.
And what seems to be a clump of dark metal attached to the ear is cartilage.
Can you see it? Is it a mark of slave ownership?
Maybe. In other words, I think the object world in the Aesop is pretty much an enigma and meant to be.
It goes with the armour on the floor in Don Juan of Austria.
Aesop may eventually take the objects on the floor and make a story out of them.
But the moment in the picture is infinitely deferred. Goya, in the tremendous drawing he made of the SOP,
notice his strong misreading of the figures expression fell room just just rules for the cast metal.
Wait. Then he left it out with his etching.
The book Aesop holds the face, of course, changing again, much closer in the etching to the Velasquez face, although.
Hard to hold it. The book is Upholds, one assumes it's his book is extraordinarily beautiful.
The play between it's dog eared pages and the wrinkle of Aesop's sash is entirely touching.
Aesop holds the book carefully, but it is an object, amongst others, not the solution to the riddle.
One more word on Aesop's expression.
I knew it would offer us comfort as art historians if we could discover a code for Aesop's way of looking and iconography,
a set of templates coming down to us from Velasquez's time.
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,
they are unfailingly crude and irrelevant to an artist's of Alaska's power of thought.
Some commentators, for instance, have seen a connexion between Darla Porter's pseudo scientific comparisons of men and
animals faces between the bovine physiognomy and the actual cow and Aesop's set of the jaw.
All I can say is that the exercise seems to me about as helpful as trying to understand the
psychology of Shakespeare's Hamlet with the age of out of date handbooks to the humours.
And this is the second point. There are no genuine comprendo in Velasquez's case.
The range and kind of expressions we find in his work are unique.
And yet we know from the record that they were responded to with deep admiration.
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?
But anyway, the case of Pope innocent. The 10th is a touchdown.
Both the subject's enthusiasm for Velasquez's portrait and the Apocrypha that has him exclaiming at the picture on first sight.
But of course, there could be no first sight trouble there.
It may not be true, of course, the story, but it points to the simple, vital extraordinariness of the face as it emerged.
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,
peculiar to specific cultures, but of neurology and the nature of the species.
Neuroscientists tell us that the human brain is hard wired to interpret other minds
from facial features is part of the hominid survival kit we see in an expression,
a intention or a mode of feeling other to us.
Unlike any we have exactly experienced ourselves.
But analogies to them, the ability to do so,
the automatic immediate confidence in performing this strange operation seems to be organised in the brain as a specific function or even area.
It is modular as the jargon has it.
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.
An irony, though, using a tone, tone and expression are analogies in the Laskas is Aesop.
We feel the man's expression is the key to his tone.
We see his look and hear his voice. The voice of the fables, the special.
Humble, clever, guarded, devastating simplicity of the fake.
Oh, but I've left so little time from Mars. But it may be right to treat him with Aesopian economy.
Not to say irreverence. There is a wonderful throwaway Aesop fable on the subject of war whose sheer speed and shrug of the shoulders,
whose austere distain for the God of battles. I'll be happy to emulate the fable is typical of Aesop's anti mythological mythmaking.
All you need to know where you get it anyway.
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.
Very, very old word in Greek, apparently of the oldest Greek word.
We have a war. No, no array's or whatever for him.
Here's the here's the fable. All the gods, having decided to get married, each took a wife.
That fate assigned to him. Pauline was being left last in the drawing of locks, could find only Kouvelis remaining.
He fell madly in love with humorous and married her.
That's why he goes everywhere she goes. Great.
I guess a typical Aesop's Fables. Incidentally, we are told of a festival, this is Robert Parker.
Your great professor in his book on Greek religion at a festival in ancient Argos called The Who briska.
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.
The Greeks seem to have known that the hubris of war is tied in somehow with the collapse or burlesque of gender distinctions.
War and buffoonery are one. And this leads straight to Velasquez.
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.
The relation between them does seem to me Aesopian in the sense that Haggles sets out and disapproves of in his lectures.
It is a brilliant enigma, a kind of bright, infinitely clever slave language, because the fabulous, says Hegel dare not speak his teaching openly.
He can only make it intelligible in a kind of riddle which is at the same time always being soft.
There are art historians, believe it or not,
who have argued that no irreverence towards the military could possibly have been intended by the picture we're looking at.
This is the king's painter, after all, at work in a time of war.
I guess these are the kinds of readers that don't find Don quicksort funny.
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.
It's a version of Mars disarmed by Venus and licence performed previously by all the best Italian masters.
Various prototypes for the Velasquez have been suggested, but I think the most relevant has been oddly left aside.
It is a very uneasy done around 50 Naty.
The painting was in full force collection and then he presented it to the Prince of Wales in sixteen twenty three.
I'm assuming Alaskas saw it before it left for London.
He just could. It was a celebrated thing. In any case, one or two variants and early copies survive.
It's the figure of Mars in the very uneasy.
That matters most clearly, the pink work suggests that it was added to the Venus light almost as an afterthought.
But it seems to me one of their nieces is great inventions.
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.
As sorry as he's surprised. Making love, not war.
Velasquez has fed on the looks direction in there, and they say it's slight downward tilt.
And the fact of its being in shadow thanks to the UN discarded helmet.
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.
It's not not a bad metaphor here.
In spite of the plumes and go be song helmets caught out unmistakeably but oddly engaging with whoever has done the catching.
Not flinching from the intruders smiled. Velasquez's Mars is Veronese is pushed several stops further.
It's fundamental to its effect that Venus has left the building.
Mars is disarmed. But who or what it was that disarmed him is intimated, not shown.
He still has his helmet and baton and properly the marshal moustache.
But obviously he has been on land, not robbed completely of the raw erotic power, certainly.
But with the power now clearly mixed as such, power mostly is with a strange kind of comedy.
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,
embarrassed use are utterly feminine here, even if on the battlefield they might be flown on a regiment's flag.
Mars's his body. By far, the Alaskas is most astonishing.
Treatment of the nude is absurd by reason above all of its uncertain age and imperfection.
The incipient wattles at the man's neck, the thinness of flesh over his collarbone.
The two harsh creases of fat across his belly.
The claw like fingers. The oversized thigh and calf.
Is there another body in Western art whose subjection to ageing, to ordinary wear and tear, is treated so relentlessly?
Maybe in Titian may be a tortured Christ, of course, but Velasquez's moss is Antichrist.
And is there another male body in painting whose emasculation is so flagrant the splayed legs and open lap?
Don't they become in due course the stock shot of pornography in the Velasquez?
The subject has covered his nakedness but never has an apron of figley.
That's the twisted and bunched up blue, the pulpy organic flesh pink, the touches of raw red.
Never has a fig leaf. Be more evocative of what might or might not be underneath.
The great smooth baton Mars is holding.
I guess we'll come to that seems like a piece of wish fulfilment.
The risk we strap coming down from the helmet across his collarbone is surely closer to the truth.
Mars is disarmed then deeply, scandalously.
But I don't think we're being invited to take the disarmament too seriously.
The clutter of armour on the ground, the experts tell us, is tournament stuff, mostly for show.
The Shield has a rim with pretty fur trimmings and seems to be made mainly of glass.
Even the armour on the floor in Don Juan of Austria looks more serviceable.
The association, definitely a negative one between war and luxury, is a 17th century trope haunting the critique of absolutism.
Sir Seymour Visi praising the defiance implicit it implicitly at Louie's expense, could say explicitly.
The great and sublime maxim that kings are made for peoples and not peoples for kings was
so deeply imprinted on the prince's soul that it made luxury and war odious to him again.
No need to press home political lessons in the Velasquez too far,
their implicit made possible deniable by the atmosphere of courtly comedy oesophagus speaking not so simple.
I shall draw attention finally to just three aspects of the Alaskas.
His invention. First to Moses Singularity.
Second, once again to his expression. And third.
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.
He is singular through and through Mars without Venus.
And if the record is to be trusted, always Mars without a pendent God or goddess in a matching painting of the same size.
And this, by the way, puts the mower's in a very special place in the turreted our paraders decorative scheme,
which was built on parings and sets of stories. There is something uncanny to the figures.
Singularity, his expression and his singularity go together.
He looks bewildered. A good 17th century word, meaning lost in populous places.
He looks at a loss. Never has a body been more on its own masculinity in loss.
This seems to me Velasquez's thinking is deeply not a reciprocity, not a form of relationality.
This is the true and canniness in the case. Mars is embarrassed, but also deeply at ease in his isolation.
He's lost his armour and maybe his bearings, but he'll stare any viewer or voyeur down.
He'll not be the first to lower his eyes. Historians, sometimes casting about for their own bearings,
suggests that the hand to the chin in Mars is the pose of the melancholic, maybe conventionally.
But Velasquez, as usual, makes the convention work an extraordinarily strange ways.
The hand holds the head steady and colludes in the gazes outward ness, its lack of inner depth.
The gaze is impenetrable. The helmet keeps things under wraps.
And yet there is still something to Mars's expression that eludes us.
Or at least me, there used to be a strand in the literature on Velasquez,
the propose that Aesop and Manipal and Morris were pictures, all three of court jesters playing at being philosophers and gods.
I see why the Strand was discarded.
It came out of an epoch, a late 19th century epoch, when Velasquez's art was interpreted too much in a realist fashion.
Nonetheless, the idea does speak to something in the pictures.
The look. Mars is giving us, if we focus on that alone,
does seem to be an expression that knows itself to be won and perhaps wants
to signify some kind of distance from the expression even as it assumes it.
Could we even say this would be another solution to the question of Mars being so impenetrable?
Could we say that Mars seems to know that his humiliation is only a roll, a move in an unserious game?
He's look, invites are complicity. This is courtly art.
It expects us Mars expects us to be properly sophisticated and share in the cool days in Gameel.
Readers like Nilton blessin push things too far.
For a moment then, as we first tuned in to the paintings, Mars Desert, armed by Venus iconography,
we assume we are meant to condescend to the warrior wearing woman's clothes.
But are we allowed to condescend?
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?
Is it the look of a fool? Or someone playing the fool entirely knowingly.
This is what the older historians seem to a suspected Mars is disarmed by Venus.
But that's always just the start of the story. A fool and his phallic armour may soon be parted, but never for law.
Mars returns to the battlefield. His madness only exacerbated.
The look of war, the game of war.
The look of disarmament, the look of disillusion, these seem to me Velasquez's subjects war in its full unfortunate human being.
The Greeks as so often have things to say on this topic.
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.
I quote Aeschylus finally in the suppliant, the chorus of desperate women about to die.
Alas, unlucky, indeed, the face of a city captured, I would say that the dead are better off than this murder, fire and rape.
All the city polluted by smoke and the breath of our rays.
God of war opponent Maddin desecrating piety, slaying the people.
War is performance, says Velasquez. And therefore, performance anxiety, war is tomfoolery, madness and pollution are constitutive of it.
Not collateral damage. Polemics. And hubris are partners for life.
Both Don Juans of Austria, the original Victor and the jester who dared claim his name are buffoons.
The warrior is all the more merciless. Were knowing his armour is just for show.
I think the picture of Mars speaks to all these things.
It's endless play-acting, this edge of lunacy, this all to humanness in Aesop's voice.