VELAZQUEZ

Life is but a dream: The complete works of the visionary painter Manet called him "the greatest painter of all." Picasso was so inspired by hismasterpiece Las Meninas that he painted 44 variations of it. Monet, Renoir, and Degas were heavily influenced by the paintings of Philip IV's grand chamberlain. Francis Bacon famously painted a study of his portrait of Pope Innocent X. Indeed, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez (1599-1660) was more than the most important painter of the Spanish Golden Age-he was considered a precursor to the Impressionists over two centuries before that movement came into being.

This catalog raisonne brings together Velazquez's complete works-jaw-droppingly reproduced in extra-large format with a selection of delicious enlarged details-with insightful commentary on how his paintings give equal attention to all that they contain. To him, an old woman frying eggs or a buffoon was as important as a Pope or a King. For him, form was subservient to light and color; the brushstrokes were markers to help the viewers reconstruct each picture mentally-concepts adopted vehemently by the Impressionists. Velazquez's greatest talent was creating beauty from the grotesque, imbuing each subject with a human liveliness rarely seen on canvas. In its extensive detail and comparisons, Jose Lopez-Rey's book reveals the development of this vision. Things are or are not, they exist or vanish, in the same way that Calderon felt that life was like a dream. In the work of Velazquez, the language is everything.