Biography Essay on Diego Velazquez

Published: 2021-07-21
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Diego was a Spanish painter and considered as best painters that there ever was during the Spanish Golden Age. Through his paintings and artistic works, he played an important significance in the cultural and historical scenes including painting portraits of the King. His some other works included painting scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family, and by this, he was considered as the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. Before he died on August 6, 1660, he was crowned as a giant of Western art due to his importance in the Spanish painting. Through his artwork and by the first quarter of the nineteenth century, he created a model for the realist and impressionist painters, and since that time most of the famous modern artists have paid tribute to him by recreating several of his most famous works.

Diego had the knowledge and a technique of painting in an idealizing style in the propriety that was linked to the Catholic. He learned most of these techniques when he was beginning to learn and open up on his talent, but as time went by, he thought that what he had learned was an outdated style and decided to paint on how he felt life was. Through following his passion and painting directly from life, Diego was summoned to Madrid to paint a kings portrait, and this saw him being named as the official painter of the king. Since this time, he was connected to the kings palace for all his life especially due to the success of his paints, and that is why he was considered as the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. While in the court of the King, he career was influenced by different cultures such as the Venetian paintings and the contemporary Italian artists. The Venetian style of painting was characterized by having deep colors and strong light effects emphasizing more on surfaces and patterns. Through the Venetian style of painting, Diego learned about the linear perspective which was a technique he decided to adopt in his painting which gradually involved shifting colors and the play of light and shadow. The influence of contemporary Italian artists was evident when he painted large canvases in Rome; one was the Forge of Vulcan and another that was presented to Jacob.

Velazquezs early works were influenced by tradition training of artists in Seville such as theorist Francisco Pacheco who he had joined at his workshop when still a youth. There at the workshop, he learned to use nature to enhance his work, and this enabled him to be more keen on sacred histories and other illustrious contemporaries. Through his paintings, he contributed to the culture of the seventeenth-century Seville as he had adopted of the styles that were used by the Sevillian artists such as Pacheco himself. In his early works, he demonstrated close critical engagement with all the social mores, practices even that included religion towards the native Seville. Most of Velazquez work was mainly for the king, and therefore it had no public access as many had no access to it until the violence and sudden change that were caused by the Napoleons Peninsular War in 1808-1814 leading to the widespread of his work throughout Northern Europe (Justi, 1889). By the nineteenth century, his work had caused a lot of impact on other artists until today when he is considered as the painters painter.

Work Cited

Justi, C. (1889). Diego Velazquez and his times. London: H. Grevel &.

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