Our review of The Velazquez Enigma: a camera to illuminate the “painter of painters”

This documentary dedicated to the man nicknamed in Spain as elsewhere "the Painter of painters" closes a trilogy. The one on painting started with The Mystery of Hieronymus Bosch (2016) and The Shadow of Goya (2022). The writer Jean-Claude Carrière , who died in 2021, had directed the second opus. Without him, Stéphane Sorlat, until then producer of the whole with José Luis Lopez-Linares, took things in hand, in collaboration with the Prado Museum and the Society of Friends of the Louvre .

By examining the work of Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez (1599-1660) and meeting specialists, such as the French curator Guillaume Kientz, director of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York, author of the most recent biography to date (Cohen & Cohen, 384 p., €95) and who was the curator of the retrospective at the Grand Palais in 2015, he seeks not to solve an enigma, but to shed light on a beauty that is as profound as it is authentic.

Historians, but also antique dealers, directors, craftsmen, contemporary visual artists such as Julian Schnabel or even painting restorers such as Lucia Martinez Valverde all contribute their comments. These are all pieces of the puzzle. Why has this painting touched the greatest? This has been the case since Philip IV of Spain, known as the "Planet King" and a huge patron, who made the artist his aposentador, that is to say his "marshal of the palace" in charge of celebrations and decorations - including those for the marriage of the Infanta Maria Theresa with the young Louis XIV.

Why are these paintings still loved today? At least until the Dubliner who died in Madrid, Francis Bacon , a genius of the ^20th century, famous in particular for having, by atomizing it, revealed the element of vanity in what is perhaps the most splendid portrait ever made in oil: that of Pope Innocent X by the Sevillian (Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome). Before Bacon, Courbet had hailed the realism in the process of being invented. Not without reason: "Troppo vero!" ("too true!") exclaimed Innocent X when he was presented with his miraculous effigy. A Manet also had ambitions in Velazquez des Batignolles. "There are two geniuses in the history of painting, him and me," he said.

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Later, Dali would don the master's moustache and claim the same Spanishness, while another Spaniard, Picasso - this time in exile - author of dozens of variations on Las Meninas, would proclaim himself "the direct heir of Velazquez" . If the author of The Surrender of Breda remains seated on such a throne in the pantheon of ancient and modern painters, it is not only because he surpassed Rubens when, unlike his elder, he had the honour of holding a sovereign pontiff before his easel.

Unlike those in La Folie des Grandeurs , Gérard Oury's comedy freely inspired by Victor Hugo 's Ruy Blas , his portraits of the Grandees of Spain are never laughable. Despite the enormous ruff around the neck and the baggy black damask suit that, these days, would make anyone look like a penguin, the truth of the looks and attitudes is evident. The psychological finesse here is so acute that, in front of such beings, we are immediately sure that they existed; and here they are, moreover, with their intimate as well as social part.

The voiceover murmured by Vincent Lindon continues: it is no longer just a question, as in the compositions of the young Velazquez, of capturing reality precisely from a moral perspective. Works such as The Old Woman Frying Eggs (National Gallery of Scotland) advocate humility, inviting us to give thanks for the beauty of everyday life, starting with the most modest. It is a question of telling life, everything that is and only that. Hence these portraits of jesters considered with as much attention as any other character of the court. Hence again these portraits of the members of the House of Habsburg which never hide the defects and malformations due to consanguinity.

Hence finally this painter painting himself in his life, between palace and studio. Because it is indeed he, Velazquez, the main character of this abysmal capriccio , of this dizzying mise en abyme that is Les Ménines . In Pierrot le fou, Godard has Belmondo read some Élie Faure out loud: "Velazquez after fifty years never painted a definite thing again (...). He no longer grasped in the world anything but the mysterious exchanges that make forms and tones penetrate one into the other by a secret and continuous progress of which no shock, no surge denounces or interrupts the progress...". Everything had already been said.

Figaro rating: 3/4