The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez: The Secret in the Mirror (c. 1650)
A young woman lies on a bed of grey-blue satin, her back turned to us, her body a long curve of pale, luminous skin against the dark sheets. At the foot of the bed, a winged child kneels and holds up a mirror, and in it we see her face, or rather a blurred shadow of it, looking back at us. Diego Velázquez's The Toilet of Venus, better known as the Rokeby Venus, painted between 1647 and 1651 and now in the National Gallery in London, is the only female nude by the great Spanish painter to survive, and one of the most famous nudes in Western art.
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Artist: Diego Velázquez (1599–1660)
Date: 1647–1651
Medium: Oil on canvas, 122.5 × 177 cm
Collection: National Gallery, London (NG2057), presented by the Art Fund in 1906
Nickname: From Rokeby Park, County Durham, where it hung for much of the nineteenth century
What does the painting show?
Venus, goddess of love and beauty, reclines on a bed covered with dark satin and a white sheet, seen from behind. Her son Cupid, without his bow and arrows, holds a mirror framed in black wood, its pink ribbon looped over the frame. A heavy crimson curtain hangs above them. There is no landscape, no jewellery, no attribute except the mirror and the child's wings. Velázquez reduces the classical subject to three things: a body, a reflection, and the act of looking.
The technique changes across the canvas. Venus's skin is painted in smooth, pearly tones, delicately modelled. The curtains and sheets around her are done with quick, broad, energetic strokes. Cupid's face and leg are almost sketchy. The contrast directs our attention to the goddess, as the National Gallery points out, and makes her body seem to glow.
The secret in the mirror
The mirror is the picture's great puzzle. Optically, it is wrong: from where we stand, the mirror should show Venus's body, not her face, and the face it shows should be smaller. Velázquez does not care. What matters is that the reflection looks out at us, and that it is blurred, its features soft and indistinct. We never see clearly who this woman is. The National Gallery suggests that the painter may have wanted to protect the identity of the model, or to let each viewer complete her features with their own imagination of perfect beauty.
The composition also combines two traditions that were usually kept apart: the goddess at her toilet, seated and looking at herself in a mirror, and the reclining nude in a landscape, from Giorgione to Titian. The result, in the Gallery's words, is an image of astonishing originality.
A rare nude in Catholic Spain
In seventeenth-century Spain, paintings of the nude were rare. The Church and the Inquisition discouraged sensual images, and the few that existed were kept in private rooms of royal and aristocratic collections. Velázquez probably painted the picture during or shortly after his second journey to Italy, in 1649–51. It is first recorded in 1651 in the collection of Gaspar Méndez de Haro, Marquis of Eliche, a young nobleman and passionate collector. After passing through Spanish collections, it was bought in the early nineteenth century by the English collector John Morritt for his house, Rokeby Park, which gave it its nickname.
A century and a half later, Goya would take the risk again with the Naked Maja. In France, the nude became the triumph of the Salon, as in Cabanel's The Birth of Venus, and the provocation of the Realists, as in Courbet's Woman with a Parrot. For Velázquez in a very different mood, see the drinking peasants of The Triumph of Bacchus.
Saved for the nation, then slashed
In 1905–06 the newly founded National Art Collections Fund, now the Art Fund, launched a public appeal to buy the painting for the National Gallery. Despite constant objections about its subject, its condition and even its attribution, the Fund raised £45,000, and the acquisition was announced in January 1906; King Edward VII is said to have contributed the final balance. It was the Fund's first great campaign.
On 10 March 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson walked into the National Gallery and attacked the painting with a meat cleaver, slashing the canvas several times in protest at the arrest of the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst the day before. The damage was repaired, and the painting was later restored by Helmut Ruhemann; the scars can barely be seen today.
Where can you see it?
The Rokeby Venus hangs in the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, London, where admission to the collection is free.
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Sources
The National Gallery, London, collection record, The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) (NG2057); Art Fund, history of the 1906 acquisition; Wikipedia, “Rokeby Venus”.
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