Luis de Góngora
After 1622. Oil on canvas.Not on display
By 1599, Francisco Pacheco had already begun work on his Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos de ilustres y memorables varones (Book of Descriptions of True Portraits of Illustrious and Memorable Gentlemen), a collection of drawings portraying Spaniards who stood out in the fields of politics, religion, the arts and letters, with a text accompanying each likeness. Pacheco enlisted the help of various people and instruments to carry out this project. His literary friends supplied various poems, and in 1622, aware that his son-in-law Diego Velázquez’s would be visiting the court, he asked him for a portrait of Góngora. We know of this commission through Pacheco’s Arte de la pintura (The Art of Painting, 1609), in which he affirms that this canvas was much admired in Madrid. X-rays of this portrait, which is now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, show that there was originally a laurel crown over the poet’s head, much like the ones appearing in several of the drawings in the Book of Descriptions.
With the publication of Soledades (Solitudes) and Polifemo (Polyphemus) in 1613, Góngora became one of the best-known and most polemical writers in Spain. And it was probably his fame, rather that the quality of the original portrait, that led to the creation of various copies of Velázquez’s likeness. Of these, one is now at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, and another in a private collection. The third is the present work, which was considered the original by Velázquez until Justi and Beruete pointed out its rather formulary technique. Technical analisis suggests it dates from a few years after 1622. Velázquez’s image was also the model for a print by Juan de Courbes that appears in the opening of José Pellicer’s Lecciones solemnes de las obras de don Luis de Góngora (Solemn Lessons from the Works of Luis de Góngora), where the laurel crown reappears.
This portrait of Góngora and the fact that it became widely known are linked to the presence of a new class of illustrious men in this genre around 1600. Writers, other intellectuals and artists were increasingly visible in portraits, often in the ways resembling the present work, that is, with an emphasis on the sitter’s personal appearance and a clear tendency to avoid rhetorical references. Góngora’s transition from writer to famous person explains the presence of his likenesses in private collections. It also explains how those who described such portraits were able to recognize him. His likenesses are identified and listed in the inventory of the property of Pedro Vallejo drawn up in Madrid in 1678 and in that of painter Francisco Palomino Pérez, from 1730. While some of those paintings may have been based on Velázquez’s portrait, others were not, including the Portrait of don Luis de Góngora listed along with portraits of nineteen other illustrious men as part of the legacy of painter Juan Van der Hamen. Among those nineteen were Lope de Vega, Valdivieso, Juan de Alarcón, Quevedo, Lorenzo van der Hamen and Juan Pérez de Montalbán -a veritable Parnassus that contributed to the construction, through images, of the historical memory of Spanish literature (Text from Portús, J.: El retrato español en el Prado. Del Greco a Sorolla, Museo Nacional de Prado, 2010, p. 66).
