ルイス・デ・ゴンゴラの肖像

In 1622 Velázquez, barely into his twenties and still working out of Seville, made his first trip to the royal court in Madrid. His teacher and father-in-law, the painter Francisco Pacheco, asked him to bring back a portrait of Luis de Góngora, the most admired and most difficult poet in Spain, by then soured by years of court disappointment. Velázquez caught him plainly, sharp-eyed and unsmiling against a dark ground, and the likeness was talked about all over Madrid. That kind of notice mattered: within a couple of years the young Sevillian was back at court for good as painter to the king. Pacheco later boasted about the picture in his treatise on painting.