The Sun Over Breda

And yet, Íñigo Balboa’s affirmation on "Chapter 1: Surprise Attack" of the first volume in this series sounds unequivocal: “…because later, on the bulwarks of Julich…my father was killed by a ball from a harquebus—which was why Diego Velázquez did not include him in his painting Surrender of Breda, as he did his friend and fellow Diego, Alatriste, who is indeed there, behind the horse.” These disconcerting words were for a long time considered by most experts to be less fact than gratuitous affirmation—Balboa’s exaggerated homage to his beloved Captain Alatriste—with no basis in truth. Balboa was a soldier in Flanders and Italy, a standard bearer and lieutenant at Rocroi, lieutenant of the royal mails, and captain of the Guardia Española of King Philip IV before retiring for personal reasons around 1660, at the age of fifty. That was after his marriage to doña Inés Álvarez of Toledo, the widowed Marquesa de Alguazas, and his later disappearance from public life. His memoirs came to light only in 1951, in an auction of books and manuscripts in the Claymore house in London. Arturo Pérez-Reverte used the memoirs as his documented source for The Adventures of Captain Alatriste, and he confesses that for a long time he believed that Íñigo’s assertion that Diego Alatriste did in fact appear in Velázquez’s painting was false.

But chance has finally resolved the mystery, disclosing data that had been overlooked by scholars and by the author of this series of novels based almost entirely on Balboa’s original manuscript.1 In August 1998, when I visited Pérez-Reverte in his home near El Escorial to clear up some editorial matters, he confided to me a discovery he had made accidentally as he was documenting the epilogue of the third volume of the series. Only the day before, while consulting José Camón Aznar’s Velázquez—one of the more definitive works on the author of The Surrender of Breda—Pérez-Reverte had come upon something that had left him stupefied. On pages 508 and 509 of the first volume (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1964), Professor Camón Aznar confirmed that an X-radiographic study of the canvas had validated some of Íñigo Balboa’s affirmations concerning the Velázquez painting that had at first seemed to be contradictory, such as the fact, proved on the X-ray plate, that the artist had originally painted standards instead of lances, not unusual in a painter famous for his pentimentos—modifications made along the way that led him to change outlines, alter compositions, and eliminate objects and persons already painted. In addition to the standards’ being replaced by lances, the horse on the Spaniards’ side was suggested in three different attitudes; in the background, in the correct geographical orientation, toward the Sevenberge dike and the sea, there appears to be an expanse of water and a ship; Spínola was sketched in a more erect position; and, on the Spanish side, it is possible to make out the heads and embroidered collars of additional personages. For reasons we cannot divine, in the definitive version Velázquez overpainted the head of a man who appears to be a noble, and also possibly another. And there is something more: In regard to Diego Alatriste’s presence, which Íñigo Balboa describes as he views the canvas and specifies his exact location—the area beneath the horizontal butt of the harquebus that the soldier without a beard or mustache was carrying over his shoulder—the viewer sees only empty space above the blue doublet of a pikeman whose back is turned.

The true surprise, however—proof that painting, like literature, is but a succession of enigmas and closed envelopes that enclose other closed envelopes—is buried in half a line on page 509 of Camón Aznar’s book and refers to that same very suspicious and empty space where the X-ray revealed that “behind that head one can make out another with an aquiline profile….”

Reality often amuses itself by confirming on its own what seems to us to be fiction. We do not know why Velázquez later decided to eliminate from his masterpiece a head he had already painted. Perhaps later books in this series will clarify that mystery.2 But now, almost four centuries after all that happened, we know that Íñigo Balboa did not lie and that Captain Alatriste was—and still is—on the canvas of The Surrender of Breda.

—The Editor

 

A SELECTION FROM

A POETRY BOUQUET

BY VARIOUS LIVELY MINDS

OF THIS CITY

Printed in the XVIIth century, lacking the printer’s mark, and conserved in the Condado de Guadalmedina section of the Nuevo Extremo Ducal Archive and Library, Seville

DON FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

Inscription to the Marqués Ambrosio Spínola,