Many of the same questions recur with Mars – once more it is tempting (though unprovable) to think of the god and the fabulist looking at one another across the room. As Thomas Hardy put it: ‘Aspects are within us and who seems/Most kingly is the King.’ Is this a man who has ‘seen through’ anyone? What’s more difficult: seeing through, or deep inside, the people who surround you, or seeing them in a way that stops at the facts of this or that expression – that doesn’t imagine some secrecy informing them? These are questions, no doubt, that come up with a special urgency in a group of sophisticates gathered around a sovereign – a retinue, a court society – in which keeping things superficial, and therefore not subject to malicious misinterpretation, may be a virtue, not to say a survival skill. Doesn’t that question come up with Aesop? Is the extraordinary look he is giving the viewer at all a deep one? Aesop may be wise – if his isn’t the look of wisdom, then where will we ever encounter it? – but poise and acuity don’t seem bound up, necessarily, with an ethics (or metaphysics) of penetration. ‘Depth’ in particular, Velázquez’s painting suggests, could be an illusion – most of all in our dealings with others. No doubt, these Baroque intellectuals say, we all want to get close to other people, to identify with them, to enter their interiors but closeness, entry and identification may only be metaphors in a world of outsides. The word ‘distance’ crops up in early poems and commentary – not much is said about it, but it seems to be claimed as a quality specific to Velázquez, and certainly a strength. Particularly human things particularly faces. Already in Velázquez’s lifetime, writers trying to come to terms with his achievement, and realising that it centred on an approach to portraiture (and even the fact that portraiture was central, to a body of work whose ambitions were so wide-ranging, seemed odd), came up with the idea that his painting was strong because it stayed so relentlessly on the surface of things. Who was the first human being to see the inferring of mental states as a distinct activity, and cast doubt on its premises? Inference as to internal states is difficult – the way it’s done is a mystery – and mistakes can be fatal, especially in a group of hunter-gatherers still working on bonds and allegiances.
But the confidence I put in parenthesis is easily lost. Some say this ability (or the confidence that one has it) is part of what went to make Homo sapiens.
Neuroscientists have accustomed us to the notion that the brain may have a specific circuitry or ‘module’ devoted to reading other people’s faces and inferring from them things as intangible as feelings, intentions, states of mind. But for the moment I want to focus on the quality of the two figures’ expressions. It is striking that there is no trace of a pendant to Mars – the god’s singularity matters. This suggests that they were conceived together some historians have thought they may have hung in the same room the inventory almost says so, but not quite. They are tall – as tall as many a full-dress portrait of the king – and narrow: an inch short of six feet high, and just a little over three feet across. It seems significant that the two paintings are the same size, and that the size is special among Velázquez’s surviving work.
#Let slip the frogs of war full#
(Even Las Meninas is a ghost in the archive.) The earliest trace of Aesop occurs a full sixty years after it was made, in a 1701 inventory of the lodge: ‘Three paintings of the same size from the hand of Velázquez, one representing Mars, another Aesop, and the other Menippus, appraised at 50 doubloons each.’ Let’s leave the Menippus aside (a sequence of ragged Greek philosophers, preferably cynics or sceptics, was a standard feature of court furnishing by the mid 17th century, particularly in places devoted to pleasure) and concentrate on the stranger companionship of Aesop and Mars. It would be good to know something of its original place in the building, or at least be sure that the Torre was its first destination, but as usual with Velázquez the court records are mute. V elázquez’s Aesop was painted most likely in the late 1630s, as part of the decor of the Torre de la Parada, Philip IV’s hunting lodge outside Madrid.
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