The spinners
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| The spinners |
|---|
| Diego Velázquez , 1644-1648 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 220 × 289 cm |
| Museo del Prado |
The Spinners ( Las Hilanderas ) or the saga of the Arachne ( La fábula de Aracné ) is a painting by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez . The painting, created between 1644 and 1658, measures 2.89 × 2.20 meters. It can be viewed today in the Museo del Prado in Madrid .
In the 18th century, the image was expanded on all four sides by additions that are masked by a screen in the current presentation, so that it is now roughly back to the dimensions of 1664 when it was in Don Pedro de Arce's inventory with a value of 500 ducats listed are visible. The painting suffered badly as a result of improperly carried out restoration in the 18th century, as a result of cleaning and poor storage. It was restored in Madrid's Prado between 1984 and 1985.
The picture The Spinners , dated around 1658 by the majority of researchers, is, like the Meninas (around 1656), one of the last two large pictures that Velazquez painted. Both were created at a time when the painter was closely involved in his courtly offices and only painted a little. There seems to have been no client for both pictures. Both images pose a number of puzzles to both the unbiased museum visitor and the scientific guild.
description
On the left side of the picture, a young woman pulls a red curtain aside and opens up a view of a stage scene that unfolds on two staggered picture levels. In the foreground, four women are spinning wool in a workshop room. An old woman sits at the spinning wheel, who routinely lets the wheel purr and still finds time to turn to the woman at the curtain and talk to her. Another woman crouches in the middle. She holds a wool comb with one hand and grabs the loose wool flakes on the floor with her right hand. On the right edge of the picture, two young women are busy preparing wool, one is winding the spun threads from a thread winch onto a ball, the other is setting a basket on the floor from which a wool fleece oozes out. Another flaky sheep fleece hangs on the wall behind the two. A black and white cat crouches at the feet of the old woman, clad in white and black, who shows an astonishingly youthful leg.
The rear scene obviously takes place in an upscale sphere. Two steps lead to an alcove-like room, the walls of which are hung with magnificent tapestries and where five female figures have lined up in a loose circle. Next to the lady dressed in blue on the right-hand side of the picture, who has her back to the viewer, there is another young woman who is the only one of the five figures to look at the viewer. On the left, next to an armchair with a viola da gamba placed next to it, is another elegantly dressed woman, like the other two, who are obviously listening to a dialogue between the helmeted woman and the person in the center of the scene. The theatrical effect of the scene is emphasized by the elegant and fashionable clothing of the women as well as by the dramatic threatening gesture of the figure with the Greek helmet and additionally by a glistening bright light that falls in from the left and covers all five people in the same way .
But even the strange architectural arrangement of both rooms indicates that something is hidden behind the work: the legend about the fate of the Arachne .
A key to both scenes is the carpet depicting the robbery of Europa . This scene was the theme that the young weaver Arachne had chosen when she wanted to surpass her weaving art in a competition with the Olympic goddess Pallas Athene , inventor of the art of weaving. Velázquez, a great admirer of Titian , shows here the picture of Titian , which Arachne has reworked into a carpet: The Robbery of Europa , which was in the Royal Palace in Madrid in Velázquez's time and which he must have known. Here Tizian shows Zeus who transformed as a bull woos Europe , which he coveted. When this confidence in the tame bull took hold, he kidnapped her, which must have displeased his wife Hera . In her woven carpet, Arachne not only shows her high level of craftsmanship, but also refers to the immoral (because adulterous and human-robbing) behavior of the gods. In turn, she had to remind Athena that she was an illegitimate daughter from a love affair between Zeus and Metis .
Possible image statement
Velázquez lets the goddess (Athena) triumph in the picture and win in the competition, but he is on the side of Arachne. This is representative of the visual arts (shown here by means of carpet weaving), which during Velázquez's lifetime were not yet part of the liberal arts, the artes liberales . His praise for the Arachnes tapestries is the artist's advocacy of the power of images and for a social recognition of painting as a free art, which he would like to add to the other free arts.
Mythological reference
In the 6th Book of Metamorphoses, the poet Ovid tells : Arachne, a Lydian who is well known for her skill in weaving, praised her own work as being on a par with Athens , the patron saint of the arts. When Athena heard this, she challenged Arachne to a weaving competition. The goddess appeared in the Arachnes workshop disguised as an old woman, only her youthful leg, which happened to peek out from under her cloak, indicated her identity. The goddess won the competition and transformed Arachne into a spider as punishment for her hubris ( hubris ) . Thus the main theme of the picture is the arrogance towards the gods, which usually ends badly for the people.
History of interpretation
Like Velazquez's picture Las Meninas , this picture also belongs to the series of famous pictures in art history that have so far eluded a complete and conclusive interpretation.
The first owner of the picture was the king’s court hunter, Pedro de Arce, in whose inventory from 1664 the picture is mentioned under the name Fable of Arachne . In 1711 it entered the king's collection, was damaged in the palace fire of 1734, and apparently lost its old title as well as some pictorial substance. In the inventory of the Palazzo Reale from 1772, it is listed under the title Carpet Factory with Several Spinning and Weaving Women . The picture was first given the title Las Hilanderas , which is common today, from the Spanish court painter Mengs , and it was still seen as an example of genre painting . In 1872 an art historian's interest was directed for the first time to the - presumed - mythological scene in the background of the picture. Pedro de Madrazo describes the picture as a representation of the royal carpet factory in the Calle de Santa Isabel with a mythological scene in the background. The Bonn art historian and Velazquez biographer Carl Justi is crazy about a story according to which Velazquez accompanied a group of ladies-in-waiting to a royal tapestry workshop and recorded the "picturesque motif in the groups moving in front of him" on the sketch pad. He calls it one of "the oldest workers' and factory pieces", but considers it an "enigmatic" picture to which he has not found a key.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, science has increasingly been concerned with deciphering other levels of interpretation of the painting. In 1903 Charles R. Rickett discovered the model of the tapestry, Titian's Rape of Europe , painted for the Spanish king, and is now in the Isabella-Stewart-Gardner Museum in Boston. However, its discovery had no impact on interpretation.
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In 1927 Aby Warburg described the picture as an allegory of weaving art and identified two people in the picture as Pallas Athene . Warburg was the underlying text reference in the Metamorphoses of Ovid , with the out of the interpretation of the carpet image Rape of Europa can open up because this was after Ovid theme of the first woven by Arachne carpet. Warburg's discovery, which he had only recorded in his diaries, which had not been published until 2002, had no consequences in research until then.
Diego Angulo Iniguez came to the same conclusion in his 1947 book.
In 1949 Charles de Tolnay interpreted the picture as an allegory of the arts and interpreted four figures in front of the carpet as allegories of sculpture, painting, architecture and music, and placed the picture in the context of the artes-liberales debate of the 17th century. Other art historians tried to interpret the figures as the Roman Lucretia with her maids, as the daughters of Minyas or as Penelope , the wife of Odysseus .
With all previous interpretations of this “ polysemous picture” there still seems to be a residue of contradictions and questions that have not yet been clarified.
Individual evidence
- ^ José López-Rey: Velázquez. Cat. Rais. No. 107. Vol 2. Cologne 1996. p. 264.
- ^ Martin Warnke: Velázquez. Cologne 2005. p. 144.
- ↑ Edi Zollinger: Arachne's invisible thread . In: NZZ , March 14, 2015, p. 28
- ^ Anton Dietrich: The Prado of Madrid. Cologne 1992. p. 205.
- ↑ Karin Hellwig: Pallas Athene, Europe and Arachne in the factory. Difficulties with Diego Velázquez, the riddle of the "Hilanderas" and the attempts to solve it . In: NZZ . No. 67, 21./22. March 2009. p. 29
- ^ C. Justi: Diego Velazquez u. his century. Munich o. JS 592. p. 596.
- ↑ see Diego Angulo Iniguez: Estudios completos sobre Vélazquez. Madrid 2007
- ↑ Hellwig 2009.
literature
- Rose-Marie Hagen, Rainer Hagen: picture surveys . Volume 2: Masterpieces in Detail . Taschen, Cologne 1995, ISBN 3-8228-8798-6 .
- Karin Hellwig: Aby Warburg and the weaver picture by Diego Velázquez . In: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 69, 2006, ISSN 0044-2992 , pp. 548-560.
- this: Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl unravel Velázquez. A Spanish interlude to the afterlife of the ancient world . Berlin, Boston Sept. 2015. E-Book (pdf) 978-3-11-042052-4.
- José López-Rey: Velázquez. Painter the painter. All works . Taschen, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-8228-8218-6 .
- Ovidius Naso, Publius: Metamorphoses . Prose translation by August von Rode, newly translated and edited by Gerhard Fink . Winkler, Düsseldorf a. a. 2001, ISBN 3-7608-4097-3 , ( Library of the Old World ).
- Martin Warnke : Velázquez. Form and reform . DuMont, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-8321-7642-X , pp. 143–152.
See also
Web links
- Detailed description in Spanish. [1]
