I Am Venus

May 1, 2013
Incidents in the life of Diego Velazquez, the most prominent artist in 17th-century Spain, as filtered through the consciousness of his mysterious model for the Rokeby Venus. Velazquez was determined to become a painter at the court of King Philip IV, and to his credit, the king recognized the painter's genius. Still, there was much court intrigue and plotting to get this sinecure. Mujica exposes the personal side of Velazquez by focusing on his ambition and on his relationship with his wife, Juana, and his daughters, two of whom died. As one might intuit, Velazquez's domestic relationship was tempestuous. Juana's father was Francisco Pacheco, an art critic, artist and founder of an art academy, and he recognized the gifts of his son-in-law. Juana was given to fits of jealousy, most of them justified by Velazquez's outrageous behavior and neglect of familial duties and obligations. On the happy occasion of the birth of Francisca, his first daughter, for example, we're told that Velazquez "had more important things...to think about," like getting back to a portrait. We follow Velazquez on his journeys to Italy, during one of which he had an affair and fathered a son. On his return to Spain, he got a commission from an enigmatic patron to paint a nude Venus, a kind of erotic painting proscribed both by custom and by the Inquisition, but Velazquez defied these conventions, using a model with whom he was (again) having an affair. Mujica's prose is vigorous and intense, and the story is paradoxically both dark and illuminating.

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May 15, 2013
This novel follows the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Velzquez's career from his humble beginnings as an apprentice painter to his arrival at the royal court and steady ascension as the king's pet painter. Examination of Velzquez's paintings illuminates the corruption and censorship that surrounded the royal court during the Inquisition. But while the timeline of Velzquez's life drives the plot, it is the everyday players surrounding him who step into the foreground of the story. The exploration of their daily lives, with a particular focus on Velzquez's wife and her ladies-in-waiting, paints a picture that is deliciously contradictory to the perfect representation demanded of Velzquez by the royal court. Mujica continues her realistic representation by loading the text with rich historical detail, which, though sometimes causing the pace to drag, instantly creates a sensory world for her readers to inhabit. Narrated by the mysterious model who posed for Velzquez's risqu' nude portrait, the Rokeby Venus, the revelation of whose identity makes for a satisfying, if not entirely surprising, conclusion to this worthwhile read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)