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A Gentleman and a Slave
John Haberin New York City
Juan de Pareja and Diego Velázquez
In 1650, a Spanish gentleman brought his slave to Italy on a mission from the king. Spain was a world power, and this was its Golden Age.
It no longer posed a threat to England, not since the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and it had ceded independence to the Dutch. Yet its influence extended everywhere, from Europe to the New World, and that influence depended on slavery. At court as well, black Africans and Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity kept the festivities going as never before. Is it any wonder that Diego Velázquez had a slave to call his own? 
Velázquez, though, had no interest in the slave trade or sugar plantations overseas. He could not so much have styled himself a gentleman had he not changed the rules of the game. He was a painter, whose portraits of Philip IV and the pope show his intimacy with world leaders and an unmatched demand for his work. And his slave changed the rules for himself, too. A free man on his return to Spain, Juan de Pareja became a leading painter in Madrid, perhaps the leading painter, after the death of his master in 1660. With "Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter" the Met teases out two tangled lives and their ascending careers.
The experience has a tour guide, with a mini-exhibition of his own. Arturo Schomburg began the hunt for Pareja a century ago, in the Harlem Renaissance. For Schomburg, the hunt was personal at that, and he called a book The Negro Digs Up His Past. His was a complicated past at that, from a native Puerto Rican with an admirably mixed ancestry I shall leave to you to discover. In Avilla, he took photographs that, with his handwritten legends, evoke the streets that Spanish artists once knew and that even now lay before his eyes. Yet what lies before one's eyes today is more pressing still.
No prouder subject
Forgive Diego Velázquez if he holds center stage. So fine an artist can hardly help it, and his influence is everywhere—most notably on his former slave, workshop assistant, and pupil. With the Hispanic Society in upper Manhattan closed for restoration and the Met's European painting galleries for its "skylight project," a room for Velázquez in its Lehman wing would be no mean show to itself. (The Met's Dutch painting hangs downstairs.) A corridor just outside looks at images of slavery in Spanish art, a second at the Madrid school, including Juan de Pareja. You can easily race past them as mere background music to work at hand.
Yet Pareja shares center stage, too. Velázquez set up a studio in Rome, where he painted Pareja as every inch a gentleman. The Met purchased the portrait for $4.5 million in 1971, well before the art world went crazy, and it made headlines. He has no prouder subject. Pareja's loose dark hair, intense eyes, slightly open lips, and a hand covering his heart speak of freedom, reserve, and an active mind. His lace collar and resplendent flesh catch the light. The curators, David Pullins with Vanessa K. Valdés of City College, quote Julie Mehretu, herself an African American painter worth remembering, who wonders at how Velázquez could convey so much humanity while denying his slave just that.
And every word of that is true, but so is something more. Velázquez and Pareja were reinventing humanity. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo paints Three Boys, nominally equals, with the black boy at top center. Yet there is no denying that he is a servant at work while the others play, which a sickly grin and Murillo's sentiment do nothing to hide. Velázquez goes further—painting a kitchen maid thrice over (counting two disputed copies) with no doubt of her inherent worth or painful status. Her unsmiling face in the darkness attests to dignity and bitter experience.
Velázquez came to Italy to case out art for a king, but also for his own enlightenment. Could he have seen a budding talent by his side that deserved the same? Pareja (whose origins and ancestry no one knows) would have ground pigments and prepared canvas, painting little or nothing, but then so would any assistant. True, he remained a slave until 1654, but he received his walking papers just months after his portrait. He would have faced only exclusions, debt, and enslavers traveling on his own. With Velázquez, every door was open, even where he could not walk through.
But he did walk free, and within a few years he had found his footing. It did not look promising at first. The Met attributes to him a copy of the older artist's portrait of King Philip, but with a sketchy mustache, a face without anatomy or character, and a mushy, uniform background. Still, museums feel the pressure to upgrade attributions, and this one could be no more legit. Pareja was at his best on his own and as something of a showoff, through his death in 1670. It set the tone as well for a shallower, but no less impressive version of the Baroque in its second half century.
Pareja positions himself at far left of The Calling of Saint Matthew, much as Velázquez takes his place among the nobility in The Surrender at Breda. He holds a document as his signature, with a proud F (Latin for fecit, or "he made it"), and paints the same on painted stone in a second painting, as if carved there. He is showing off just as much with the gold that Matthew, the tax collector, holds dear or the apostles who all but overshadow Jesus. John the Baptist gets a few extra episodes from life along with The Baptism of Christ, because there can never be enough. Besides, a baptism is a new beginning. For a black man, it was well overdue.
Juan de Pareja ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 16, 2023.