nine months to Madrid--these are truths not to be denied. Beruete
claims that the Rubens influence is not to be seen in Velasquez, only
El Greco's. Every object, living or inanimate, that swam through the
eyeballs of the Spaniard--surely the most wonderful pair of eyes in
history--was never forgotten. His powers of assimilation were
unexcelled. He saw and made note of everything, but when he painted
his spectators saw nothing of any other man, living or dead. Was not
the spiritual impulse missing in this man? He couldn't paint angels,
because he only painted what he saw; and as he never saw angels he
only painted mankind. Life, not the "subject," appealed to him. He had
little talent, less taste, for the florid decorative art of Rubens and
the Venetians; but give him a simple, human theme (not pretty or
sentimental) and he recreated it, not merely interpreted the scene; so
that Las Meninas, The Spinners (Las Hilanderas), the hunting pictures,
the various portraits of royalty, buffoons, beggars, outcasts, are the
chronicles of his time, and he its master psychologist.

Beruete says that Ribera more than Zurbaran affected Velasquez; "El
Greco taught him the use of delicate grays in the colouring of the
flesh." Hot, hard, and dry in his first period (Borrachos), he becomes
more fluid and atmospheric in the Breda composition (The Lances), and
in the third period he has attained absolute mastery of his material.
His salary at the court was two and sixpence a day in 1628. Even Haydn
and Mozart did better as menials. Yet some historians speak of the
liberality of Philip IV. An "immortal employee" indeed, as Beruete
names his idol. Luca Giordano called Las Meninas the "theology of
painting." Wilkie declared that the Velasquez landscapes possessed
"the real sun which lights us, the air which we breathe, and the soul
and spirit of nature." "To see the Prado," exclaims Stevenson, "is to
modify one's opinion of the novelty of recent art." To-day the