Tristan
(1586-1640) was his best follower.
[Illustration: FIG. 71.--RIBERA. ST. AGNES. DRESDEN.]
Velasquez (1599-1660) is the greatest name in the history of Spanish
painting. With him Spanish art took upon itself a decidedly
naturalistic and national stamp. Before his time Italy had been freely
imitated; but though Velasquez himself was in Italy for quite a long
time, and intimately acquainted with great Italian art, he never
seemed to have been led away from his own individual way of seeing and
doing. He was a pupil of Herrera, afterward with Pacheco, and learned
much from Ribera and Tristan, but more from a direct study of nature
than from all the others. He was in a broad sense a realist--a man who
recorded the material and the actual without emendation or
transposition. He has never been surpassed in giving the solidity and
substance of form and the placing of objects in atmosphere. And this,
not in a small, finical way, but with a breadth of view and of
treatment which are to-day the despair of painters.
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