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Knights and Ghosts

When he visited the Prado in 1865, Edouard Manet observed that the Spanish School had made its greatest contribution of all in the field of the portrait, which took on a distinctive naturalism in the hands of painters such as El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Juan Carreño de Miranda. This section of the exhibition explore the shifting terms of portraiture over the past five centuries.

During the 17th century a new class of wealthy citizens emerged across Europe as the continent's imperial powers increased, and for the first time portraiture became popular outside of the nobility. As a result the image of the nobleman or knight became an object of the new gentry's dreams of grandeur, and the exhibition of heraldic insignia and grandiose posturing became the dominant trait of the Spanish portrait. Such outward affectation gave rise to the term fantasma (literally "phantom" or "ghost") to indicate the triumph of appearance over reality. Portraits of men began to manifest a combination of psychological depth and surface affect in order to establish the sitters' social positions. This dualism would reemerge in the work of Pablo Picasso, who not only made explicit formal references to the portrait styles of Velázquez and Francisco de Goya, among other Spanish artists, but also trod the thin line of sarcasm that distinguished the knight from the ghost.

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Above, left to right:
Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), Francisco Pacheco?, ca. 1619–22. Oil on canvas, 40 x 36 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Portrait of Jaime Sabartés, 1939. Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 38 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona, Gift of Jaime Sabartés, 1960