View of the Garden of the Villa Medici

During his first stay in Rome, Velazquez lodged for a couple of months in the Villa Medici, and this is a corner of its garden. The architecture filling half the canvas is a serliana, an arch between two square openings, and here it stands open, so the light and the sky come straight through. On the ledge at the centre lies an antique marble of Ariadne asleep. A man in a cloak leans at the opening to look out at the cypresses; nearer to us, a servant or gardener has turned to speak to a gentleman. Nobody is doing anything in particular, and that is the point. A landscape with no story to justify it was close to unheard of around 1630, and he seems to have painted it outdoors, in front of the thing itself. In the corner you can still read 713, the number it carried in a royal inventory.