Portrait of Pope Innocent X

Perhaps the most famous portrait ever to be executed in the history of art, Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a fascinating and profound revelation of the personality and psychology of one of the bitterest Popes ever to haunt the Vatican.

Pope Innocent X, also known as Jambattista Panfili, was born in Rome on May 6, 1574 to parents Camillo Panfili and Flaminia de Bubalis. The Pamphilis were historically one of the most powerful families in Europe, and little Jambattista was groomed from birth to assume his role as the most powerful man in Christendom.

After studying jurisprudence at the Collegio Romano and serving as a member of the Council of Trent, the Inquisition, Jurisdiction, and Immunity, Jambattista was elected as the successor to Urban VIII on September 15, 1644, when he officially became Pope Innocent X.

His papal reign was marred by violence and suspicions of impropriety: he legally attacked the Barberini (the major rivals of the Pamphilis in Rome) for "misappropriation of public moneys," offended France to the point that the country invaded the Ecclesiastical States, helped Venice (with whom the papacy had held a rocky relationship at best) to fight the Turks, and refused to acknowledge the succession of Portugal in 1640.

Making matters even worse, Innocent X was accused of immoral relations with the wife of his late brother, one Olimpia Maidalchini. Contemporary accounts relate how this woman held the Pope completely under her sway, manipulating him in his political decisions. In short, Innocent X was a suspicious, crotchety and relatively ineffective leader.

The Commission:
Velázquez executed this enormously influential portrait around 1650, during his second trip to Italy. By painting the Pope, Velázquez entered a prestigious lineage of papal painters, including two of the principal inspirations for this painting, those masters of the Italian Renaissance Raphael and Titian.

Perhaps most importantly, however, Velázquez was also courting papal favor as part of his efforts to gain admission into the most prestigious of Spanish societies, the Order of Santiago.

This portrait not only won him the Pope's favor in this pursuit, but in 1650 also gained Velázquez entry into the most prestigious arts organizations in Rome: the Accademia di San Luca, and the Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon.

Portrait of Pope Innocent X is directly descended from Italianate models, although the finished product is pure Velázquez. Undoubted sources of inspiration for Velázquez's portrait include the following;

Raphael:
Raphael's Portrait of Pope Julius II is innovative in several ways. First of all, papal portraits typically depicted the sitter frontally, or kneeling in profile; here, Raphael shows Pope Julius from an unusual, oblique angle.

The portrait is even more remarkable for its unusual psychological depth. Painted the year before the Pope's death, Raphael portrays his sitter lost in thought, seemingly melancholy and contemplative. His once powerful, jewel-bedecked left hand angrily grips the arm of his chair, while his right hand limply clasps his handkerchief, symbolizing his ebbing strength.

Renaissance biographer Vasari described Raphael's painting as "so animated and true to life that it was frightening to behold, as though it were actually alive. " Portrait of Pope Julius II became the standard model for all succeeding papal portraits, and Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X continues in the same tradition.

Titian:
Titian was one of the first artists to pick up on Raphael's model. In fact, Titian's portraits (papal or otherwise) constituted one of the greatest influences on the development of Velázquez's style, and set the tone for Spanish portrait painting in general. Titian's Portrait of Pope Paul III is the other decisive influence on Velázquez's papal portrait.

Titian's portraits are stunning for their psychological profundity. A group portrait with the same sitter, Pope Paul III with his Grandsons Allessandro and Ottavio Farnese, is perhaps one of the most fascinating psychological portraits in the history of art.

Observe the complex interactions between the various figures and their telltale facial expressions and body language, all of which communicates volumes about their interpersonal relationships and personalities. The oppressive shadows and heavy brushstrokes add to the strained, claustrophobic atmosphere: rarely has any artist been so brutally honest in his depiction of so powerful a sitter.

This marvelously orchestrated profusion of crimson tints - sometimes, as in the cape, with cold reflections as if "lit by neon" - undoubtedly derives from the example of Titian, while the representation of the contrasting white gown certainly harks back to Veronese, the only sixteenth-century Venetian painter who knew how to handle this difficult "non-color."

Velázquez learned well from the lesson of these past masters and created a papal portrait uniquely his own. Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X is notable for the following qualities;

Composition:
Just like Titian and Raphael before him, Velázquez did not flinch from the truth in his portrayal of this unlikeable man. By all contemporary accounts, Innocent X was far from an attractive man; in fact, his face was described as "satirical, saturnine, coarse, and hideous," reflective of the Pope's "contumacious spirit. "

Velázquez did not attempt to idealize his sitter, but instead painted Pope Innocent exactly as he saw him: a suspicious, wary old man ready to pounce.

Velázquez's amazing depiction of the fabrics and surfaces (including silk, linen, velvet and gold) and play with light was also inspired by Titian, and further emphasizes the realism of the painting. In fact, upon seeing his portrait, Innocent X declared that it was "troppo vero," or too true. Surprisingly, the Pope was not insulted by this less than flattering portrait, and became one of Velázquez's most ardent supporters.

Color palette:
In Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Velázquez abandons the browns and blacks of his earlier paintings and submerges his composition in various tones of red, allowing the Pope's traditional costume to dominate the scene. Beyond emphasizing the identity and status of the Pope, however, this tonal choice infuses the painting with an atmosphere of oppressive power and potential danger.

Brush work:
Like in Velázquez's earlier paintings, the execution of the Portrait of Pope Innocent X is characterized by the free, loose brushstrokes that would inspire the Impressionists.

This free brushstroke allows the artist to create incredibly subtle modulations of light and color, emphasizing the different textures and surfaces in the painting and adding a dynamic atmosphere to the composition.

Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a masterpiece of seventeenth century portraiture and perhaps one of the most admired portraits of all time. Sir Joshua Reynold's described it as "the finest picture in Rome".

In 1655 Giacinto Gigli said: He was tall in stature, thin, choleric, splenetic, with a red face, bald in front with thick eyebrows bent above the nose, that revealed his severity and harshness... . He also said that his face was the most deformed ever born among men. ( Kren and Marx,1)

Despite originally thinking the portrait was too realistic, the Pope eventually approved and gave Velazquez an expensive gold chain in return. Velázquez himself was seemingly very pleased with the portrait as he took a replica back to Spain with him. Many of his art colleagues went on to make copies of the work.

Velázquez wasn't the only famous Baroque artist to portray Innocent X.

Works by other artists:
Francis Bacon - Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953:
This Irish twentieth-century artist was seemingly obsessed with Velázquez's portrait. Although he scrupulously avoided seeing the original, Bacon collected reproduction after reproduction of Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, becoming intimately familiar with the painting.

In Bacon's own words, "I think it is one of the greatest portraits that has ever been made and I became obsessed by it. I buy book after book with this illustration in it of the Velazquez Pope, because it haunts me."

Around 1950, Bacon began a series of paintings inspired by the Baroque masterpiece, which are recognized today as some of the most chilling, eerily haunting works of art ever to grace a museum.

Drawing from diverse sources of inspiration including Einstein's film The Battleship Potmekin and Edvard Munch's The Scream, Bacon created images that take the implicit anxiety of Velázquez's original and explode them into terrifying, tortured images of pure fear and hysteria.

Yue Minjun, The Pope 1997:
This contemporary Chinese artist has made a huge name for himself as the highest-selling Chinese painter at auction. Minjun's paintings often deal with Chinese racial stereotypes, as he depicts grotesquely grinning figures with slanted, squeezed-shut eyes in a variety of situations.

His take on the papal portrait has obvious compositional roots in Velázquez, but the contemporary artist has completely appropriated the subject for his own style and themes, creating yet another haunting and uncomfortable image.

Religious pictures are few and far between in Velázquez's oeuvre, especially when compared to other painters of the Spanish Baroque, like Zurbarán or Ribera. Velázquez executed the majority of his religious works during his early career.

After entering the court, Velázquez's principal job was to paint portraits of the royal family and other important nobles and dignitaries. In fact, Velázquez spent thirty years of his career painting portraits for the court, including forty just of King Philip IV.

As dull as the task may seem, Velázquez's portraits, such as Portrait of Pope Innocent X constitute veritable masterpieces of visual realism and technical mastery. With his fluid brushstroke and exquisite mastery of color and light, Velázquez always manages to convey each sitter's unique personality, and instill even the lowliest or least attractive sitters with an innate dignity.

Velázquez has not ceased to be a remarkably fecund source of inspiration for art critics and art historians up until the present day, nor has his reputation as one of the greatest painters of all time been dimmed.

Velázquez paved the way for early nineteenth century realist and impressionist painters, especially Édouard Manet. Since then, he has gone on to influence artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon. Such artists have demonstrated their love for the works of Velázquez by recreating some of his most noted paintings.

Diego Velázquez was hailed a father of the Spanish school of art and is one of the greatest artists that ever lived.

Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez was born into a society of paradox: Spain was simultaneously undergoing one of the most dramatic economic and political declines of any nation in European history, and unprecedentedly fertile, creative bursts of artistic activity.

In Velázquez's hometown of Seville in particular, circles of Humanist learning, arts and letters and philosophy all flourished, constituting a particularly fecund environment for a young artist.

On the other hand, Velázquez's chosen profession would become a significant obstacle in the artist's personal agenda. Spanish society was obsessed with nobility, and unlike in Italy, the visual arts were emphatically not equated with noble pursuits like literature or philosophy.

Artists were seen as essentially vulgar craftsman who worked for a living with their hands, just like blacksmiths or tailors. Making matters even more complicated, the Catholic church exercised almost total power over the arts in Spain, dictating everything from subject to composition, meaning that artists had very little room to experiment or grow. Velázquez was thus fated to struggle from the very incipience of his career.

While most artists of the Baroque period suffered from a serious drop in critical opinion during the 18th century, eventually fading into oblivion until being rediscovered in the 1950s, Velázquez took an alternate route. Because of Spain's political situation, the nation was more or less isolated from the rest of Europe during the heights of Neoclassicism, meaning that Velázquez's reputation was safe from the hands of Baroque-haters like Wincklemann, who managed to destroy the reputation of such artists as Caravaggio, Carracci and Bernini.

By the time Spain opened up to the rest of Europe in the beginning of the 19th century, the world was ready for Velázquez, and critics and artists alike haven't ceased singing the master painter's praises.

The following list offers some of the best sources of further reading on Velázquez and his works.

• Brown, Dale. The World of Velázquez: 1599-1660. Time-Life Books, 1969
• Brown, Jonathan. Velázquez, Painter and Courtier. Yale University Press, 1986
• Carr, Dawson, et al. Velázquez. Yale University Press, 2006
• Davies, David, et al. Velázquez in Seville. National Galleries of Scotland, 1996
• Harris, Enriqueta. Velázquez. Phaidon, 1982
• Kahr, Madlyn Millner. Velázquez: the art of painting. Harper and Row, 1976
• López-Rey, José. Velázquez: A catalogue raisonné of his œuvre. Faber and Faber, 1963
• Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso, et al. Velázquez. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989
• Wolf, Norbert. Diego Velázquez, 1599-1660: the face of Spain. Taschen, 1998
• Wind, Barry. Velázquez's Bodegones: A study in 17th century Spanish genre painting. Fairfax: George Mason University Press, 1987