WITH AFFECTION AND RESPEC

PERHAPS the most successful court painter of all time was Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez. He had servants and slaves, was a palace chamberlain and a knight of the noble Order of Santiago. His sovereign, King Philip IV of Spain, thought so highly of him that he even consented to pose for him between battles at the front. But royal favorite though he was, Velasquez won greatness by his own unaffected naturalism. "I should prefer," he once said, "to be the leading painter of what are considered common subjects than the second best of the refined.''

For the past two months, the Museo de Reproducciones Artisticas in Madrid has been showing the greatest exhibition of works by Velasquez ever assembled, plus some by his predecessors, his contemporaries and his students. The show commemorates the sooth anniversary of the artist's death, but it is also an attempt on the part of Spain to put Velasquez in proper focus. To the modern eye, his canvases have seemed somewhat static alongside the high drama of El Greco and the agonized intensity of Goya. Yet Velasquez sang a song of life as rich and full as any of his countrymen.

Tipplers & Cooks. It was on Aug. 30, 1623 that the 24-year-old painter from Seville walked through the great galleries of the Royal Palace near Madrid and knelt for the first time before his sovereign, the 17-year-old Philip IV. He won the King's heart right from the start, and from that time until his death at 61, he was a fixture of the court. Such a position might have stifled a man without genius, or tempted him into distortion through an effort to flatter his benefactors. For Velasquez it did neither.

Though the influence of El Greco can be seen in the upward sweep of one of his rare religious paintings, The Virgin Placing the Chasuble on Saint Ildefonso (see color), Velasquez' style, stripped of the mannerism of his predecessors, was essentially his own. In his early years, when he painted scenes of ordinary life around him, his palette was somber; color was less important to him than the play of light and shadow and the arrangement of forms. His paintings rarely told a story, and whatever action there might be seemed almost always suspended. Yet his tipplers, his cooks, his peasant boys and servant girls were treated with a quiet dignity that was almost an act of love.

Dwarfs & Princelings. In Madrid his colors gradually brightened, but the lyric realism remained. While Rubens, who spent nine months at the Spanish court, tried to puff up his noble and royal subjects by surrounding them with allegorical figures, Velasquez painted them exactly as they were. His figures stand out against subdued or neutral backgrounds, but whether dwarf or princeling or court jester, they are full-fledged individuals, painted without adornment and without malice.

As he himself grew older, his canvases seemed to grow younger. In the famous Surrender of Breda, the figures meld in perfect harmony and balance. In the airy paintings of the gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome, he becomes a forerunner of the impressionists; two centuries later French Impressionist Edouard Manet found Velasquez "the greatest painter whoever lived." But above all, Velasquez was a humanist whose brush, however restrained and disciplined, was bathed in charity. Few artists have ever given the humble such nobility, or endowed the mighty with such warmth; high or low, humanity had Velasquez' affection and respect.

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