Diego Velázquez
Court painter to Philip IV and one of the greatest artists in Western art; author of Las Meninas.
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez
Diego Velázquez was baptised in Seville on 6 June 1599, the first child of Juan Rodríguez de Silva, a notary of Portuguese descent, and Jerónima Velázquez. Apprenticed to the painter and teacher Francisco Pacheco under a six-year contract formalised in 1611, he studied the classics, proportion and perspective in Pacheco's learned circle, and in 1618 married his master's daughter, Juana Pacheco.
He became the leading artist at the court of King Philip IV and of the Spanish Golden Age. Beginning in a precise, tenebrist manner, he developed a freer style of bold brushwork, painting historical and mythological scenes and scores of portraits of the royal family and of commoners, culminating in Las Meninas (1656). Most of his work entered the Spanish royal collection, and by far the best of it hangs today in the Museo del Prado in Madrid; some portraits left Spain as diplomatic gifts to the Austrian Habsburgs.
His paintings became a model for the realists and impressionists of the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon paid him tribute by reinterpreting his most iconic images. He died in Madrid on 6 August 1660, and is generally counted among the greatest painters in the history of Western art.
How the name is written
The most famous bearer of the name did not inherit it from his father. He was born Diego Rodríguez de Silva; Velázquez was his mother's surname, and it is the one the world remembers.
Sources
Facts in this profile are drawn from the Wikipedia article(s) linked below, consulted on 21 September 2026; the text is original. Wikipedia (English) · Wikipedia (Spanish)
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