And this is a painting about anger. Sister Wendy sees “self-controlled power” in Juan’s look, but I think she’s wrong. Juan de Pareja was a slave, and the circumstances of his servitude are clear in his face. He’s looking at us and, of course, at his master, with a gaze of quite genuine sadness, of the knowledge of having been betrayed by an accident of birth and victimized for it all his life. . . perhaps especially by his master. There is more than a hint of solemn rage in his look, an awareness of the irony that this great painter has taken the time to display the depth of his slave’s pain, yet has done nothing – at least to this moment – to relieve the basis of that pain. To me, Juan looks like he would prefer taking Velázquez by the lapels of his coat and shaking him violently for all that’s been done to him. But of course he cannot do that. So instead he looks on with dignity, intensity, and silent disdain.
From a distance, the painting is so fine and so emotionally detailed that it barely looks like a painting. Close up, of course you see paint and brush strokes. You see the quick work of a consummate maestro, the turns of wrist and finger of a man who suffers not one doubt as he daubs a new line of gray in Juan’s sleeve. Velázquez pays as much attention to an extension of a lace collar as he does to the sadness so obvious in the face of his subject, because he realizes that the way that lace is painted is a reflection of the nature of that sadness. A cape painted by such an artist matters, in that it gives hints about the feelings of the man who wears it. Juan’s cape is simple and black (he’s a servant, after all), hanging down his back from beneath the lace collar. The careful rendering of light, that brings the black to a subtle gray, offers the possibility that Juan’s distinct unhappiness may also be an expression of soulful feeling, albeit tempered by the grim understanding of his personal station in life.
Despite their master-slave legal arrangement, we can congratulate Velázquez for what he did. Antonio Palomino said that the portrait of Juan de Pareja "was generally applauded by all the painters from different countries, who said that the other pictures in the show were art but this one alone was 'truth'."
It is truth. I cannot imagine that Velázquez himself did not understand the depth of the story he was telling. The painting is too good, the anguish in Juan’s face too profoundly expressed for it to be anything but an accurate appraisal of the man’s rage. The irony is that it was Velázqez’s ownership of Juan’s fate that surely was the singular, daily cause of that rage.
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