syncopated by a simple device; they are
transposed to another plane of perspective, there in company with a
lowered battle standard. The acute rhythms of these spears has given
to the picture its title of The Lances, and never was title more
appropriate. The picture is at once a decorative arabesque, an
ensemble of tones, and a slice of history. Spinola receives from the
conquered Justin of Nassau the keys of the beleagured Breda. Velasquez
creates two armies out of eight figures, a horse and fourteen
heads--here is the recipe of Degas for making a multitude carried to
the height of the incredible. His own portrait, that of a grave,
handsome man, may be seen to the right of the big horse.

The first period of his art found Velasquez a realist heavy in colour
and brush-work, and without much hint of the transcendental realism to
be noted in his later style. The dwarfs, buffoons, the AEsop and the
Menippus are the result of an effortless art. In the last manner the
secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars, as
Dostoievsky would put it. The Topers, The Forge of Vulcan, are
pictures that enthrall because of their robust simplicity and vast
technical sweep though they do not possess the creative invention of
the Mercury and Argus or The Anchorites. This latter is an amazing
performance. Two hermits--St. Antony the Abbot visiting St. Paul the
Hermit--are shown. A flying raven, bread in beak, nears them. You
could swear that the wafer of flour is pasted on the canvas. This
picture breathes peace and sweetness. The Christ of the Spaniard is a
man, not a god, crucified. His Madonnas, masterly as they are, do not
reach out hands across the frame as do his flower-like royal children
and delicate monsters.

The crinolined princess, Margarita, with her spangles and furbelows,
is a companion to the Margarita at the Louvre and the one in Vienna.
She is the exquisite and lyric Velasquez. On his key-board of
imbricated tones there are grays that felicitously sing across alien
strawberry tints, thence modulate into fretworks of dim golden fire.
As a landscapist Velasquez is at his best in the Prado. The various
backgrounds and those two views painted at Rome in the garden of the
Villa Medici--a liquid comminglement of Corot and Constable, as has
been pointed out--prove this man of protean gifts to have anticipated
modern discoveries in vibrating atmospheric effects and colour-values.
But, then, Velasquez will always be