As LCT3's production of Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced opens, we see an artist completing a portrait of her husband in their Upper East Side apartment. He poses stiffly for her, and she compares him, admirably, to Juan de Pareja, the subject of the magnificent Velazquez portrait at the Met. Both men are defiant, she says, and resist the artist’s gaze to emerge as authoritative personalities.
What’s most remarkable to me about the painting she references is the discordance between the subject and the medium: the presence of a black man in a seventeenth-century oil painting. De Pareja, as depicted here, appears not only defiant but complex, in a way that black men aren't typically depicted in any media, not even today. De Pareja is sometimes described as the artist's servant or apprentice but he was actually a slave Velazques inherited from his aunt. Velazquez taught De Pareja to paint (the Prado has two de Pareja canvases in its collection), brought him along when he visited Italy, and finally freed him in 1650, around the time this painting was completed. Velazquez could be a merciless portraitist, describing individuals with a lacerating optical fidelity that was streaked with contempt. He was particularly critical of royal subjects, whose flesh often seems lifeless and faces often seem witless. But one senses in de Pareja's face alertness, directness, wariness and pride, as if he is a man of the world. The gentle light and soft-as-breath brushstrokes are ennobling. The compassion Velazquez extends to his slave in this portrait is one he extended similarly to many of the commoners, children and dwarves he painted. Perhaps it was simpler for him, somehow, to see humanity in those less powerful than himself.
