Everything Is Happening review: enigma in oil

Everything Is Happening: Journey into a Painting

Author: Michael Jacobs and Ed Vulliamy

ISBN-13: 978-1847088079

Publisher: Granta

Guideline Price: £15.99

Certain great works of art attract and fascinate us by a quality of closure. This is especially the case in the art of painting. We return again and again to Vermeer’s milkmaid, to Piero’s madonnas, to Balthus’s innocently shameless young girls, not only for the beauty of their depictions, but for the fact that they are shut off from us, self-absorbed and self-sufficient, unreachable in worlds we may not enter.

One of the effects such rare works have on us is to make us newly aware of our own singularity, out here in this mysterious “real” world we must accept but will never fully comprehend.

At first sight, Diego Velázquez's late masterpiece Las Meninas (1656) seems no more than a scene of court life with a few tricks of perspective added. We will be struck initially by such details as the back of the tall canvas on the left, the painter's cool and oddly forbidding gaze, and, at the other side, the dwarf, the midget and the dog. Our eye will be drawn also to the isolated figure in the open doorway at the back of the room, who seems, the longer we look at him, to carry such weight and significance.

And then, beside the doorway, there is the mirror, in which we see reflected the unmistakable images of King Philip IV, Velázquez’s devoted patron and lifelong friend, and Philip’s young wife, Queen Mariana. Are they standing where we are standing, and is it their portrait that Velázquez is painting?

Some commentators insist that the position and angle of the mirror prove that what is reflected in it is not the pair of sitters, but the portrait of them on which the painter is working – an hypothesis supported by the fuzziness of the reflected images.

These are only some of the obvious questions; the interrogation of Las Meninas will never conclude. As Michael Jacobs writes, the painting is "a mass of connections waiting to be made".

Student of Blunt

Jacobs, who died prematurely of cancer in 2014, was born in Genoa, to an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father. The family moved to London, where Michael attended the exclusive Westminster school. He went on to study art history at the Courtauld Institute under the then Sir Anthony Blunt, who was later to be revealed as a one-time spy for the Soviet Union, and whose reputation Jacobs fiercely defended.

Jacobs would probably have become a professional art historian, but increasingly he found the world of academe narrow and stifling – "sunless" was his word for it – and he turned to writing instead, producing guides to art aimed at the common reader, and then a series of travel books. He was a lover of Spain in particular, where he spent much of his time in his house in the remote village of Frailes in Andalucia. One of his books, Factory of Light: Life in an Andalucian Village (2003) is a magical portrait of Frailes, and is considered by many to be his finest work.

He first visited Spain on a school trip, and later on, as a teenager, he went back, alone, determined to find for himself the "true" Spain. He had been fascinated by Las Meninas "partly because it was so tied up with my developing relationship with Spain and the Hispanic world".

Continuing this theme, Jacobs writes that “as I began returning to Spain with ever greater frequency, and a passion for life subsumed one for art, I came almost to think of the painting as a watchful, background presence, accompanying me as I became progressively caught up with a country moving from a repressive dictatorship to a vibrant democracy, to a disenchanted place on the verge of collapse.”

He first came across the painting when he was a schoolboy, and stumbled on a copy of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, which opens with an extended and, as one would expect from Foucault, wilfully opaque meditation on Las Meninas. It is Foucault's thesis that Velázquez's great painting was a marker of the turning point between the classical world and the modern era, in which "representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form".

Jacobs was excited by this hypothesis, seeing in it a way of “reconciling my passion for the old masters with my championship of today’s avant-garde”.

Everything Is Happening, which illness and death prevented Jacobs from completing, opens with the arrival of an envelope from Madrid, containing the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which when assembled revealed itself to be a postcard reproduction of Las Meninas. "I turned the card over carefully,' he writes, "as if handling evidence from a crime scene."

The card had been sent by an old school friend, Royce, with whom Jacobs had visited the Prado as a teenager, and who now lived in Madrid. This voice from the past reawakened Jacobs’s fascination with the Velázquez painting: “I was reverting to a favourite fantasy, thinking of myself as a detective reopening an investigation into an unresolved mystery.”

He began by returning to one of his old haunts – the library of the Warburg Institute in Bloomsbury, where he set himself to read up on “what had been happening in Velázquez studies over the past three decades”. A great deal, as it turned out, though most of this scholarly work was of the “sunless” variety, and threw little new light on an old mystery.

By now Jacobs had developed an almost occult sense of the “mass of connections waiting to be made”. He noted that he shared a birthday with Foucault, that Foucault had died at the same age Velázquez was when he started work on the painting, that “the word ‘meaning’ was nearly an anagram of Meninas”. But Jacobs soon came to his senses:

“The mystery, if there was one, was that of life itself. The painting, so strange and yet so mesmerisingly lifelike, seemed at times less of an object than a living entity endowed with the secret of eternal life. I knew of few other works of art open to so many interpretations, that have mirrored to such an extent the changing preoccupations of each succeeding era, or that have inspired so many of its viewers to claim that their whole lives revolved around it.”

When Royce’s puzzle arrived, it opened up “a trail of memories and associations I envisaged as leading me ever further back in time, towards the very room where Las Meninas had been painted”. And so he sets off southwards, beginning on the Eurostar to Paris, and recalling the earlier train he had taken, as a teenager, in a mixture of excitement and trepidation, as he embarked on his youthful quest for Spain and all that Spain signified.

The book, then, or the fragment of it that we have, is, aptly, a kind of picaresque, as along his Quixotic way Jacobs makes chance encounters with old friends and colleagues, some of whom he would rather not have met. There are also various Velázquez scholars, museum officials – and Ángel Macarrón (94), who in the midst of the civil war, with bombs falling on Madrid, had helped to evacuate to Geneva most of the masterpieces from the Prado, including Las Meninas.

The chapter devoted to Macarrón and his adventures is funny and exciting, and reads like a thriller by Eric Ambler or the early Graham Greene.

Jacobs had an appointment to meet his friend Royce in Madrid, but a message came to say that Royce was ill and would not be able to see him. Jacobs does not labour the point, but this non-appearance adds another uncanny note to his journey in search of a mystery.

Yet when Jacobs gets to the Prado (which is deserted, thanks to the economic crash), Las Meninas greets him with its usual melancholy warmth. "The figures appeared to be welcoming me back as if I were the prodigal son . . . "

Velázquez painted Las Meninas in 1656, four years before his death. It is the culmination and pinnacle of his work, and one of western civilisation's supreme artistic achievements. It was considered to be a portrait of the Princess Margarita, or of the royal family, although the king and queen are barely in it, and their older daughter, Maria Theresa, is absent.

The picture did not acquire the somewhat peculiar title Las Meninas ("Ladies-in-Waiting") until the 1840s.

Just who, or what, the true subject of the painting is, remains an enigma.

Along with the painter and the king and queen, the figures depicted are, to the princess's right, and offering her a drink, possibly cocoa, from a small jug known as a bácaro, is Doña Maria Agostina Sarmiento. To her left, the other menina, Doña Isabel de Velasco – she could be one of Balthus's stylised, old-young girls – seems to be about to make a curtsey.

To the right is the German dwarf Mari-Bárbola, one of the strongest figures in the composition, dignified and defiantly self-possessed. Note how the painter has given her a pose similar to his own, as if he were marking her out as his counterpart.

Beside Mari-Bárbola is the Italian midget Nicolas Pertusato, who with his foot is waking up the dozing mastiff. In the shadows behind Doña Isabel stands a court lady, Marcella de Ulloa, in a nun’s habit, and with her is an unidentified guardsman, wearing an inexplicably beatific expression.

At the rear, in the open doorway, is the Master of the Queen’s Bedchamber, José Nieto, whose matronymic was, not incidentally, Velázquez. He stands on the steps in what seems a waiting pose: has he come to fetch the king and queen and escort them elsewhere? Or perhaps he has delivered into the studio Princess Margarita and her entourage, and now, departing, has paused for a last, backward glance.

Journalist Ed Vulliamy, nominally the book’s editor but in fact its co-author, tells us that towards the close of his life Jacobs had become obsessed with this figure in the doorway, a doorway that seems to open upon “wondrous worlds beyond”. And indeed, the more closely we examine Nieto’s stance, and the radiance behind him, the more it seems that he – and not Princess Margarita, or the royal couple reflected in the mirror, or the painter himself – is the true focus of the scene. Crucially, the vanishing point of the perspective is in this doorway.

At this stage in our viewing of the picture, we become aware of a certain unease, and perhaps more than unease. In Las Meninas, Velázquez has fashioned a world closed to us, as the painter's stony gaze makes clear. This is a world suspended between two infinities: that of the viewer and the universe behind him – behind us ; and the other of Nieto in his doorway, hovering on the threshold of a radiant void.

Terrible angels

Here, surely, in its captivating and magical depiction of temporal reality itself (the present of the viewer, the past of the painted scene, and the endless future that shimmers in that far-off, open doorway) is the source of the picture’s greatness, and of the vertiginous sense of awe that a prolonged and concentrated meditation on it can inspire in the viewer. Every angel is terrible, says Rilke, and so, in its way, is every great work of art.

Jacobs's fragment ends abruptly, and aptly, as he enters the Royal Palace in Madrid, heading for the very room where Las Meninas was painted. Reading his final sentence – "I made my way towards the doors, and opening the right-hand one, entered the palace" – we imagine him, like the black-clad figure at the back of Las Meninas, poised there forever, both coming and going, immanent and phantasmal, living and dead.

Everything Is Happening is a wonderful book, a sprightly, energetic and sweetly melancholy homage to a great work of art. Ed Vulliamy, who prefaces Jacobs's text with a long introduction and rounds it off with a longer coda, has done a great and faithful service to his late friend. Not the least of the qualities of the book is the sense it gives of a short life lived to the fullest, and of a man whose love of art contributed to and illuminated for him the art of living.

John Banville's most recent novel is The Blue Guitar