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was Francisco Herrera (1576-1656). Later, he worked under
Pacheco, one of the most cultivated spirits of his day who
interested himself in every kind of intellectual activity, and
who himself had been initiated into somne of the new methods
of oil painting. At the age of nineteen, Velasquez married
Pacheco's daughter. He was already well known at that time,
and he was painting in a painstaking manner, attempting to
reproduce his still-lifes (bodegones) with the utmost
scrupulousness. Each object was painted as if it had been a portrait.
He gave little thought to his composition. What interested
him first and foremost was nature with all the varying effects
of light and shadow. He analyzed the model he was going to
portray with the greatest precision and desired every stroke
of his brush to represent some value or form of his subject.
His eye was almost infallible. The brutal style of his first master, Herrera, is to be found in many of his works of this period. Sometimes, in order to enliven his compositions and to make them more agreeable, he introduced into them some character from the streets. But there was no charm in his renditions to soften the rigidity of his impressions. This appeared to matter little to him. He concentrated on the strict analysis of the object itself; he did not take into account the atmosphere which enveloped it. Unlike his ltalian contemporaries, Velasquez, at this stage, does not appear to have studied either anatomy or the masters of the Renaissance. Furtherrnore, he had no desire to invent. He was uniquely concerned with the appearances of nature and with the means of expression that his palette afforded him. It was for these reasons, no doubt, that he strove to have colors on his palette that would be as pliable as possible. ln general, the Spanish painters had followed the ltalian process of Giorgione which, as we have indicated, might have come to Spain by way of El Greco, although this is not certain. There is mention by Palomino, a contemporary of Velasquez, of the use of verdigris instead of litharge in the cooking of the black oil. This pigment would have given the oil an extreme fineness and flexibility . Palomino wrote, however, that this oil was often danger- |