The Sun Over Breda

Always on the brink of warthey fought, forever grand,in Germany and Flanders, too,in France and upon English land.The very earth bowed down to themtrembling as they passed,and ordinary soldiers, massedin unparalleled campaign,across the world, from East to West,carried the sun of Spain.

It was they, Spaniards with several tongues and lands among them but all united in ambition, pride, and suffering, and not the pretentious figures portrayed in the foreground of the canvas, who were the ones to whom the Dutchman was delivering his precious key. To those nameless, faceless troops barely visible on the slope of a hill that never existed, where, at ten o’clock on the morning of 5 June in the twenty-fifth year of the century, regnant in Spain our king don Philip IV, I, along with Captain Alatriste, Sebastian Copons, Curro Garrote, and the remaining survivors of their decimated squad, witnessed the surrender of Breda. And nine years later, in Madrid, standing before Diego Velázquez’s panorama, it seemed that I could again hear the drum and that I was watching, amid the forts and smoking trenches in the distance, near Breda, the slow advance of the old, implacable squads, the pikes and standards of what was the last and best infantry in the world: despised, cruel, arrogant Spaniards disciplined only when under fire, who suffered everything in any assault but would allow no man to raise his voice to them.

EDITOR’S NOTE CONCERNING THE

PRESENCE OF CAPTAIN ALATRISTE IN

DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ’S PAINTING

THE SURRENDER OF BREDA

The alleged presence of Captain Diego Alatriste y Tenorio in the painting The Surrender of Breda has been debated for many years. On the one hand, we have the testimony of Íñigo Balboa, who was witness to the composition of the painting and who has unhesitatingly stated on two occasions that the captain is represented in Velázquez’s canvas. On the other hand, studies of the heads on the right side have resulted in the positive identification of Spínola and established as probable those of Carlos Coloma, the Marqués de Leganés, the Marqués de Espinar, and the prince of Newburg, these according to analyses by Professors Justi, Allende Salazar, Sánchez Cantón, and Temboury Álvarez, but they reject the idea that any of the anonymous heads corresponds to the physical features Íñigo Balboa attributes to the captain.

The bearer holding the standard on his shoulder cannot be Diego Alatriste, nor can the musketeer in the rear, who has no beard or mustache. Similarly eliminated are the pale, bareheaded caballero standing beneath the standard and beside the horse, and the corpulent, dark-skinned, hatless officer standing beneath the horizontal butt of the harquebus, whom Professor Sergio Zamorano from the University of Seville believes to be Captain Carmelo Bragado. Some scholars have argued the possibility that Alatriste was portrayed in the officer on the extreme right, behind the horse, looking toward the viewer, a person other experts, such as Temboury, judge to be Velázquez himself, who thus balanced the supposed inclusion of his friend Alonso Cano at the extreme left as the Dutch harquebusier.

Professor Zamorano similarly points out in his study of the painting, Breda: Realidad y leyenda, that Diego Alatriste’s physical attributes might correspond to those of the officer situated at the right of the canvas, although that man’s features, he suggests, are softer than those described by Íñigo Balboa when he speaks of Captain Alatriste. In any case, as the translator and scholar Miguel Antón of Barcelona writes in his essay “El Capitán Alatriste y la rendición de Bredá,” the age of that caballero, no more than thirty or so, does not coincide with the age of Alatriste in 1625, much less with his fifty-one or fifty-two years in 1634–1635, the date the painting was completed. Neither does the clothing of the officer correspond with what Alatriste, then a simple soldier with the nominal rank of squad corporal, would be wearing in Flanders. There is still the possibility that Alatriste was not represented in the group on the right but among the Spaniards down the slope, in the center of the painting, behind the extended arm of General Spínola. However, a very careful examination of their features and clothing published in Figaro magazine by the specialist Étienne de Montety seems to negate that theory.