Good. craftsmen worked in Madrid for some time under the influence exerted by Velazquez: his son-in-law Mazo (1615-1667), to whom is now attributed the charming little picture the Meet ing of Thirteen Gentlemen (Louvre) and Carrell.° de Miranda (1614-1685), a good portraitist.
To the eyes of his contemporaries Esteban Murillo (1617 168a) perhaps appeared more admirable than Velazquez him self. His sentimental and popular art was certainly better calcu lated to touch the heart than the lucid intelligence, the aristocracy, the apparent insensibility and the infallible mastery of the author of the Meninas. But above all he was legitimately admired, ad mired with enthusiasm and gratitude by the devout of Spain to whom, after the reign of the great court painter, he offered an art capable of expressing in easily comprehensible language the tendernesses, the ecstasies and the adoration of a naive and pro found faith. He began, however, very much as did Velazquez himself, in a realist manner more or less directly derived from Zurbaran. Even a little later he did not give up the picaresque and picturesque subjects offered to him by the life of Seville. The Young Beggar in the Louvre and other pictures of the same genre show clearly the foundation of solid observation of nature on which he built his ideals. His first pious compositions, for ex ample the Miracle of San Diego (Louvre) show that he had found how to associate in an apparently spontaneous harmony a realistic execution with mystic feeling, the faithful depicting of the most humble things with the shimmering vision of miracles and the supernatural. Herein we have one of the greatest merits of Murillo. Perhaps his Immaculate Conception in the Louvre was too highly rated in former times, but we should not pass to the other extreme. Murillo was the smoothest painter of Ma donnas since the time of the Primitives.
After Murillo decadence set in fast. Valdes Leal (163o-1691) deserves mention. By the i8th century there were hardly any painters in Spain save Frenchmen of secondary talent summoned by the Bourbon kings, the German, Raphael Mengs, a good por traitist, and the dazzling decorator Tiepolo, the last of the great Venetians, who came from Italy to decorate the Royal Palace and died in Madrid, which decorations we may believe were not without influence in the development of Goya.
Goya (1746-1828) is in his way Velazquez's heir, and it was in him that the fine tradition of Spanish painting was renewed after nearly a century and a half. He was less perfect, less sovereign, but infinitely more varied. He was ignorant of nothing that could be done by means of painting and, with all his inequalities, was of extreme fertility and excelled in every direction. He had ter rific gifts ; he was equally original as a draughtsman, an etcher, a lithographer and a painter. But we must not believe that, like Velazquez, he arrived easily and from the beginning at mastery. If he had died before he was forty he would not perhaps have left us a single one of the works on which to-day his glory rests. Here then is an unmistakable sign that this man of impulse was also a man of thought; he is one of those who, having invented a new form of art, created a new world, cannot have other mas ters than themselves and their own experiences of life.
Goya is one of the outstanding geniuses who shed glory on Spanish painting. And, even more than the great Velazquez, he reminds us of the most illustrious name in the literature of his country, Cervantes, because of the combination we see in both of lyricism and comic verve, of pathos and satire. Like both Greco and Velazquez he is an admirable portraitist. We may go so far as to say that the portrait is the basis of his art and that, even in his works of pure imagination, the peculiar vision of the portraitist is everywhere manifest. This is also true of the typical masterpieces by Greco and Velazquez, the Burial of Count Orgaz and the Meninas. The Family of Charles IV. belongs to the same order of plastic creation. The lively handling, the iridescent and mysterious colouration are already enough to distinguish this unique example among court portraits and formal pictures. But all the admirable inventions of the colourist and the virtuoso would lose half their beauties if we did not see in them brilliant and subtle variations on a heroic-comic theme of psychology.