VELÁZQUEZ’s Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, painted in Seville in about 1618, is one picture but two images, radically different in subject, style, and scale. Each is totally legible in its own terms, however the connection between the 2 is tough to decipher: it’s left to us, the spectators, to sort out what the link may be, and what which may ultimately mean — for us.
The picture is amongst Velázquez’s earliest known works. He was not yet 20 years old, but already a master of texture and light-weight — already beguiled by the mental and spiritual disquiet an artist can provoke within the viewer by duplicating and dislocating reality. Like the disciples at Emmaus on that first day of the resurrection, we see, but struggle to make sense of what we see — or whom. While our liturgies have fun the triumph of Jesus rising from the tomb, Velázquez, it seems to me, quietly confronts us here with the challenges that the risen Christ poses every single day. This is a tranquil, sober Easter meditation.
THROUGH the open shutter of a hatch on the upper left-hand side, we see, within the room beyond, the climactic moment of Luke 24.30. Jesus is seated at table. The unknowing disciples, who’ve did not recognise him, watch, spellbound, as he blesses the bread before the meal. When he breaks it, they’ll see who he truly is — and he’ll vanish. It is a story in regards to the gap between seeing and understanding, between sight and insight. Of the disciple on the left, only the hands at the moment are visible (the canvas here has been cut down by a couple of inches); but Jesus’s halo, bearing the cross of the resurrection, leaves little question about what’s being shown. The paint is wispy, rapidly applied, a couple of swift highlights catching the top of the bench and the autumn of the tablecloth.
On this side of the hatch, we’re in a really different visual world. Laid out, as if for our inspection, are things which are needed to organize and serve a meal to the boys behind. In this gleaming assortment of jugs and bowls, earthenware and brass, each surface is meticulously observed, and rendered with such immediacy that we all know exactly what it will feel wish to the touch. Top right, as a pendant to the scene in the following room, hangs a virtuoso basket with a napkin, to impress on us that this youthful artist can speak several pictorial languages concurrently.
There, the disciples glimpse ungraspable transcendence; here, we see shining materiality. And within the centre, presiding over these humdrum, on a regular basis objects, stands the young kitchen maid, clearly of African descent. About to select up a pitcher, she pauses to think. She — and what she is pondering — are the pivot, the inscrutable focus of the entire composition.
ARE the 2 scenes happening at the identical time? Is the kitchen maid the skivvy at Emmaus, her lower realm of earthly food contrasting with the heavenly nourishment revealed round the corner: the enduring imbalance of Martha and Mary? We know that each those biblical stories were popular subjects for paintings in Seville’s many convents (there have been on the time an astonishing 36 of them for men, and 28 for ladies). Perhaps, content together with her humbler part, she has been listening to what the stranger has been telling his two companions, and is pondering his words; she may even be quietly aware of the miracle going down behind her — one in all those that happily can imagine while not having to see.
Alternatively, because the physicality of her presence strongly suggests, she, like Velázquez, goes about her work in Seventeenth-century Seville, but fascinated about the gospel story as she goes, with the smaller image acting, because it were, as her thought-bubble: a reminder that the Emmaus miracle is repeated at every meal. That insight would, within the words of her contemporary George Herbert, help make her “drudgery divine”; or, as St Teresa of Ávila (beatified just a couple of years earlier) had put it, let her find God walking among the many pots and pans — relatively as Velázquez has transfigured these on a regular basis objects right into a sublime still-life.
YET, nonetheless elevated her thoughts, within the Seville of her day her legal status was probably little different from the things that surround her. As an African, she, too, is little greater than a kitchen utensil; for it is probably going — in actual fact, virtually certain — that she is a slave.
Seville in 1618 was one in all the wealthiest cities in Europe, the principal port for the immense riches coming from Spain’s American empire. Its population of 150,000, although cosmopolitan, was uniformly, compulsorily, Roman Catholic. Over the previous century, Spain had expelled its Jews and Muslims on the premise of their beliefs. But that was not enough. Once the true faith had been secured, racial persecution followed. In 1610, the 11-year-old Velázquez would have watched as even the moriscos — Moorish converts to Christianity — were driven out of town as a part of the Inquisition’s nationwide “cleansing” of conversos of Jewish or Muslim heritage.
At the time that this picture was painted, there have been still around 6000 Africans in Seville: virtually all were enslaved, mostly in domestic service. Our kitchen maid may even be Velázquez’s own slave — we all know that later in life he owned an African slave, whose portrait he painted, and to whom, in 1654, he gave his freedom.
But, whoever her owner, the young woman we see here — the main focus of the image — is an outsider, not a part of the society she serves, and essentially without civic rights, in a situation that’s perpetually precarious. As Velázquez presents her to us, she doesn’t look up. She has no option but to imagine what the Church teaches. But what’s she pondering, and who’s she — for us, now?
THE first Easter Day is a day of slow understanding and mistaken identity. Mary Magdalene, just like the travellers to Emmaus, sees Jesus; but even she, like them, initially fails to recognise him. In preaching in regards to the Acts of Mercy, Jesus had warned of the danger of failing to see him — God — when he’s present amongst us: within the poor and the meek; within the hungry that we neglect to feed; the stranger that we refuse to soak up; the prisoner that we don’t visit. He reminds us that he’s for ever present in those our society overlooks. But, as on that first Easter Day, we’re slow to see him.
In this painting, in these two images, is the young Velázquez showing us two faces of the risen Christ?
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the writer of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).
