The Buffoon, Pablo de Valladolid

The Buffoon Pablo de Valladolid, painted around 1635 and now in the Prado, is among the most formally experimental of Velázquez's figure paintings. The court jester stands against an undifferentiated background — no floor line, no wall, no context — the figure existing in pure atmospheric space. Manet, who saw the painting in Madrid, was overwhelmed: 'the background disappears; it is air that surrounds the fellow.' The technical achievement — a figure convincingly three-dimensional in an undefined space — anticipates the Impressionist interest in the figure in ambient light by two centuries. Velázquez's radical simplification of the painting's spatial framework transformed the conventional court jester portrait into a meditation on the relationship between figure and void.

The figure stands in a void defined only by the shadows at his feet. This radical elimination of spatial context focuses all attention on the human presence, the dark costume painted with the tonal subtlety that makes Velazquez's blacks among the most remarkable passages in Western painting.