Democritus

Around 1628 the ancient Greek called the laughing philosopher was suddenly in fashion. Within a year or two Rembrandt, the Dutch painter Ter Brugghen, and the young Velazquez all painted Democritus, the thinker said to laugh at human folly rather than weep at it. Velazquez was in his late twenties, newly installed as a court painter in Madrid, and he gives the philosopher a broad, almost teasing grin, rare in his usually sober portraits. The man points at a globe on the table, the world he finds so absurd, and two closed books in worn parchment sit beside it. Some scholars suspect the face belongs to a real Madrid acquaintance, dressed up for the part rather than imagined from antiquity.