NEW YORK, NY.- Two artists in Rome: travelers, Spaniards, on a mission to learn from the best and buy for the king. Are they friends? Not that. Colleagues? Only in a very strained manner of speaking. When Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez arrives in Italy in 1649, tasked by Philip IV to bring new artworks and plaster casts back to Spain, the painter brings along his assistant Juan de Pareja, who has been enslaved in Velázquez’s household and studio for nearly 20 years. The two sailed over together, from Málaga to Genoa, as part of a royal flotilla; they visited Milan, Venice, Florence; and now they are setting up a studio in Rome, where Pareja stretches the canvases, grinds pigments into oils, and possibly paints replicas too.
That summer in Italy Velázquez asks his acolyte to sit for a portrait: asks or, more likely, compels. He paints Pareja in three-quarter profile. He has him cross his right arm in front of his chest, like a military commander. Pareja’s dark cape and black hair blend into the background, but a large white collar frames a face painted in quick, free strokes of coppery brown.
The palette is somber, the light is muted, but out of the darkness we see Pareja’s keen gaze. Such nobility. Such preoccupation. As contemporary painter Julie Mehretu has observed, the portrait is an “incredible contradiction.” In those open brushstrokes, she said, Velázquez could somehow “capture the complete humanity of someone” he treated as “not completely human in the same level.”
The portrait of Juan de Pareja astonished Rome in 1650 — a jubilee year, during which Velázquez signed the document that would make Pareja a free man. It’s enjoyed a prime position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1971, when its purchase (for $5.5 million, $40 million-ish in today’s dollars) was trumpeted on the front page of The New York Times. Less trumpeted, then and also now, was Pareja’s own career following his emancipation. He became an artist in his own right, and his style diverged in surprising ways from his former enslaver’s: lighter, in higher spirits, quite his own.
In “Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter,” a show of concentrated insight now on view in the Met’s Lehman wing, we at last come to grips with one of the first European artists of African descent whose works survive today. Pareja’s paintings, hanging alongside Velázquez’s, are fine if not remarkable specimens of the later Spanish Baroque, though I’ve got to be fair: In Velázquez’s company, just about anyone else will look second-tier. (Quietly enough, “Juan de Pareja” is also the largest exhibition of paintings by Velázquez to appear in New York in 20 years, with 10 canvases painted or probably painted by his hand.) But the show is playing for bigger stakes than a simple rediscovery of Pareja as painter. It’s about how things get made, and who gets to make them; about freedom and violence, creative labor and physical labor, the building blocks of culture we miss when we fixate on genius.
In a similar way to “Posing Modernity” / “Le Modèle Noir,” the landmark exhibitions of 2018 and 2019 on Black models in French painting, “Juan de Pareja” does its most radical work by simply unearthing the facts. Who worked for whom. Under what conditions. In what society. Some of its revelations were hidden deep in the archive, such as baptism records of children enslaved by the Velázquez family. Other facts, more embarrassingly for us, hid in plain sight on the walls of the Prado. The museum in Madrid lent two of the five Parejas here: “The Calling of Saint Matthew” (1661), whose bright tones renounce Velázquez’s shadows, and “The Baptism of Christ” (1667), a thronging tableau of saints, angels and lambs. Another 18 paintings, attributed to Pareja with greater or lesser firmness, appear in the catalog.
In a masterstroke of historical framing, the organizers — David Pullins, an associate curator in the Met’s European painting department, and Vanessa K. Valdés, a provost and professor at City College — have interwoven their research with another voice: that of Arturo Schomburg, the Puerto Rican intellectual who sought out Pareja 100 years ago, when other Americans barely bothered. Schomburg’s writings on Afro-Hispanic culture ripple through the wall texts; photographs he took in Seville and Madrid spotlight the multicultural exchanges of Spain’s Golden Age.
Pareja was born sometime around 1608 in Andalusia, where slavery was commonplace. Seville had an enslaved population — mostly of North African and sub-Saharan African origin, but also Jews and other minorities — of 10% or more, as well as a large community of free people of color. It was among the most diverse cities in 17th century Europe, described as a tablero de ajedrez: a “chessboard” on which white and Black residents crisscrossed with an international cast of merchants, sailors and servants. Look at the massive Seville cityscape here, by an unknown painter from around 1660, in which men of lighter and darker skin tones gossip and gallivant on the riverbank as galleons sail by.
Most likely Pareja was the son of an enslaved woman and a white Spaniard father, perhaps her enslaver. In this show’s subtitle Pareja is described as “Afro-Hispanic.” That’s certainly probable, given his appearance in his portraits and the demographics of Andalusian slavery, but there are no surviving documents to prove it, and he may also have been partially Morisco — descended from the Iberian Peninsula’s forcibly converted Muslim population. In the art of Hapsburg Spain, when the trans-Atlantic slave trade was immature and the pseudoscience of racial categories was only starting to take hold, skin tones could be chosen to express religious affiliation rather than capture likeness, with Christians depicted in lighter tones and Muslims in darker ones.
In boomtown Seville, enslaved labor powered the artisanal workshops of goldsmiths, ceramists, carpenters, illustrators — and painters. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, for example, enslaved six people, described in a dowry agreement as “white,” “Berber” and “Black.” And as early as 1617, when the teenage Velázquez painted a kitchen maid with umber skin and a white kerchief, Spain clearly had developed an art market for paintings depicting people of color. (All three surviving versions of this motif are here.)
Documents testify to Velázquez’s ownership of Pareja from at least the early 1630s, when his name appears as part of the painter’s circle at court in Madrid. Early biographers doubted that Pareja would have been allowed to paint in Velázquez’s studio — and concocted fantasy stories that he painted in secret, so well that when King Philip saw his work he ordered him set free. The reality is more prosaic, but those myths were getting at something important. They pointed to a new estimation of painting in European society of the 17th century, elevated from artisanal labor into a fine art. Painting, once a craft like goldsmithing or wood-turning, was being recast as a noble, humanistic enterprise, and a painter like Velázquez could become the confidant of the most powerful king in Europe.
It’s that new humanistic definition of painting that gives Velázquez’s portrait of Pareja such paradoxical force. He has painted a person over whom he had property rights, but with the finesse he usually reserved for princes. The arched eyebrows, the frank gaze. The gently pursed lips, as if about to breathe or to speak. Velázquez has depicted Pareja with the psychological and emotional individuality that ought to be the mark of human equality — and he’s done it under the most unequal conditions imaginable.
Nine months after Velázquez painted his enslaved assistant, he freed him. It’s stunning to see here, in front of Pareja’s portrait, the very document of his liberation: manumission papers, lent from the archives of the city of Rome, guaranteeing in Latin that he would no longer be “bound to any service, servitude or slavery to Mr. Diego himself and his descendants.” (The document specified four more years of enslavement — a standard formula since ancient Roman times — meaning Pareja returned to Spain still in bondage.) On the opposite wall is a version of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X: the ultimate painterly commission, which he’d been gunning for since his arrival in Rome and for which the Pareja portrait functioned as a job application.
When Pareja began his own career as a free man, he had experience rare for any artist outside Italy, and firsthand knowledge of both royal portraiture and classical antecedents. In his “Calling of Saint Matthew,” from 1661, almost 11 feet wide, the composition is blocky and stagy, the spaces awkwardly compressed, but the fabrics are rich with the colors of Venice (and maybe also Flanders, then under Spanish rule). The table is draped with a Turkish carpet, and the jewelry, the furs, the gold ewers and salvers all insinuate a rising global commodities trade — one of those “commodities” being people like the painter himself.
Along with the pointing Jesus and the disbelieving Matthew, Pareja inserted at the picture’s far left a self-portrait, almost in the same three-quarter profile that Velázquez chose a decade before. His hairline receded a bit in the interim, and he painted his own skin with lighter shades than his enslaver used (though again, this may have nothing to do with physiognomy). In his hand is a paper, defiantly thrust toward the picture plane. Juan de Pareja made this in 1661. He made it on his own terms.
“History must restore what slavery took away,” Arturo Schomburg wrote in his 1925 classic “The Negro Digs Up His Past” — a line this show prints above Velázquez’s portrait of Pareja. If that large-letter quotation has a whiff of the classroom, it does at least set a much higher standard for cultural achievement than we’ve accepted in the last few years. Research, rediscovery, facts forgotten, facts never known: this is the enterprise we are embarked on, and I’m afraid it takes longer and costs more than statements of “solidarity” and “centering” you could outsource to ChatGPT. But that’s the commitment we make when we take the lives of others seriously. There is no express lane to see the truth in painting.
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Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter
Through July 16 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., Manhattan, (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
