Velázquez's "Bodegones" and the Art of Emulation

Abstract

This essay explores Golden-Age Spanish approaches to artistic emulation through an analysis of Velázquez's youthful bodegones (genre scenes). Historians of ltalian and French art have long recognized that seventeenth-century invention was based largely on emulation, in which artists competed with masters old and new by selectively appropriating aspects of their works. Building on writings by Velázquez's early biographers, I argue that emulation provides a historical framework for considering the young artist's innovation and engagement with the pictorial traditions of his time. An examination of the bodegones furthermore elucidates Velázquez's challenge to Caravaggio, whose exemplar the Spaniard transformed by painting scenes of daily life with strong chiaroscuro and witty conceits rooted in literary conventions.