午餐

Velazquez painted this around 1617, when he was barely eighteen and still working in Seville, years before he became the king's portraitist in Madrid. It belongs to a kind of picture the Spanish called bodegones, tavern scenes built around a plain table. Here three men share a modest meal, two pomegranates and a piece of bread on a creased white cloth, while a boy in back pours wine. Light rakes in from one side and drops everything else into deep shadow, a manner coming out of Caravaggio's Italy that the young painter had absorbed. The men were clearly worked up from real models, and the grinning young fellow on the right is very likely Velazquez looking at himself. Notice how carefully each object sits apart on the table, bread here, fruit there, glass alone, as if the still life mattered as much as the faces.