These topers have come together to drink, for the love
of the wine,--the fun is secondary. This wonderful reserve of Velazquez
is clearly seen in his conception of the king of the rouse. He is a
young man, with a heavy, dull, somewhat serious face, fat rather than
bloated, rather pale than flushed. He is naked to the waist to show the
plump white arms and shoulders and the satiny skin of the voluptuary;
one of those men whose heads and whose stomachs are too loyal ever to
give them _Katzenjammer_ or remorse. The others are of the commoner type
of haunters of wine-shops,--with red eyes and coarse hides and grizzled
matted hair,--but every man of them inexorably true, and a predestined
sot.
We must break away from Velazquez, passing by his marvellous portraits
of kings and dwarfs, saints and poodles,--among whom there is a dwarf of
two centuries ago, who is too like Tom Thumb to serve for his twin
brother,--and a portrait of Aesop, which is a flash of intuition, an
epitome of all the fables. Before leaving the Spaniards we must look at
the most pleasing of all Ribera's works,--the Ladder-Dream of Jacob.
The patriarch lies stretched on the open plain in the deep sleep of the
weary. To the right in a broad shaft of cloudy gold the angels are
ascending and descending. The picture is remarkable for its mingling the
merits of Ribera's first and second manner. It is a Caravaggio in its
strength and breadth of light and shade, and a Correggio in its delicacy
of sentiment and refined beauty of coloring.
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