Diego Velázquez

Diego Velázquez is a Spanish Baroque painter, absolute master of realism and pictorial technique whose revolutionary work profoundly influences the history of Western painting. Court painter to Philip IV of Spain for nearly forty years, he develops a style of unprecedented sobriety and objectivity, capturing human dignity in all subjects - from the royal family to court dwarfs, from philosophers to servant girls - with equality of treatment that affirms the universality of the human condition. His enigmatic masterpiece Las Meninas (1656) constitutes a complex meditation on art, reality and representation, playing on levels of perception and the viewer's position in a vertiginous mise en abyme that still fascinates today. Virtuoso of pictorial technique, he invents an apparently free and rapid brushstroke that resolves into perfect forms at distance, anticipating Impressionism, and masters like no other atmospheric rendering and chromatic subtleties of grays and blacks. Admired by Manet who calls him the painter of painters, he embodies the perfect synthesis between naturalistic observation, absolute technical mastery and psychological and philosophical depth.