Great Artist, Vol. 1 - Velazquez (Art Documentary)

Television Director: Grabsky, Phil

Television Director: Ray, Ali

Television Director: Saigol, Mehreen

Marlow, Tim

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Catalogue Number: SEV119

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In a Spain dominated by a fervent religiosity, the painter Diego de Silva y Velazquez emerged as a master practitioner of a secular form of art. His masterpiece, Las Meninas, is a painting full of mystery and intrigue, a work of startling intellectual and artistic complexity and the culmination of a unique relationship between Velazquez and his patron, King Philip IV of Spain.

From 1623, Velazquez was employed to paint the family and court of Philip IV. His paintings remain as an enormously insightful record of the development of the royal family and, in many ways, the decline of the most powerful court in Europe. Under the watchful eye of Philip's first minister, Count-Duke Olivares, Velazquez single-handedly redefined the image of the Spanish monarchy, in manner akin to a modern-day public relations campaign. Whilst Velazquez's output was dominated by royal portraiture, he also produced psychologically insightful studies of people at the margins of society, such as the buffoons of the royal court or the poor of Seville. Velazquez's unique painting style, which combined at one time or another dramatic lighting, intense coloring and ever more loose brushstrokes, was dominated by a single preoccupation - to capture a degree of naturalism hitherto unachieved in the history of art.