VELÁZQUEZ’s Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, painted in Seville in about 1618, is one picture but two images, radically different in subject, style, and scale. Each is completely legible in its own terms, but the connection between the two is hard to decipher: it is left to us, the spectators, to sort out what the link might be, and what that might ultimately mean — for us.
The picture is among Velázquez’s earliest known works. He was not yet 20 years old, but already a master of texture and light — already beguiled by the intellectual and spiritual disquiet an artist can provoke in the viewer by duplicating and dislocating reality. Like the disciples at Emmaus on that first day of the resurrection, we see, but struggle to make sense of what we see — or whom. While our liturgies celebrate the triumph of Jesus rising from the tomb, Velázquez, it seems to me, quietly confronts us here with the challenges that the risen Christ poses every day. This is a tranquil, sober Easter meditation.
THROUGH the open shutter of a hatch at the upper left-hand side, we see, in the room beyond, the climactic moment of Luke 24.30. Jesus is seated at table. The unknowing disciples, who have failed to recognise him, watch, spellbound, as he blesses the bread before the meal. When he breaks it, they will see who he truly is — and he will vanish. It is a story about the gap between seeing and understanding, between sight and insight. Of the disciple on the left, only the hands are now visible (the canvas here has been cut down by a few inches); but Jesus’s halo, bearing the cross of the resurrection, leaves no doubt about what is being shown. The paint is wispy, rapidly applied, a few swift highlights catching the end of the bench and the fall of the tablecloth.
On this side of the hatch, we are in a very different visual world. Laid out, as though for our inspection, are things that are needed to prepare and serve a meal to the men behind. In this gleaming assortment of jugs and bowls, earthenware and brass, each surface is meticulously observed, and rendered with such immediacy that we know exactly what it would feel like to the touch. Top right, as a pendant to the scene in the next room, hangs a virtuoso basket with a napkin, to impress on us that this youthful artist can speak several pictorial languages simultaneously.
There, the disciples glimpse ungraspable transcendence; here, we see shining materiality. And in the centre, presiding over these humdrum, everyday objects, stands the young kitchen maid, clearly of African descent. About to pick up a pitcher, she pauses to think. She — and what she is thinking — are the pivot, the inscrutable focus of the whole composition.
ARE the two scenes happening at the same time? Is the kitchen maid the skivvy at Emmaus, her lower realm of earthly food contrasting with the heavenly nourishment revealed next door: the enduring imbalance of Martha and Mary? We know that both those biblical stories were popular subjects for paintings in Seville’s many convents (there were at the time an astonishing 36 of them for men, and 28 for women). Perhaps, content with her humbler part, she has been listening to what the stranger has been telling his two companions, and is pondering his words; she may even be quietly aware of the miracle taking place behind her — one of those who happily can believe without needing to see.
Alternatively, as the physicality of her presence strongly suggests, she, like Velázquez, is going about her work in 17th-century Seville, but thinking about the gospel story as she goes, with the smaller image acting, as it were, as her thought-bubble: a reminder that the Emmaus miracle is repeated at every meal. That insight would, in the words of her contemporary George Herbert, help make her “drudgery divine”; or, as St Teresa of Ávila (beatified just a few years earlier) had put it, let her find God walking among the pots and pans — rather as Velázquez has transfigured these everyday objects into a sublime still-life.
YET, however elevated her thoughts, in the Seville of her day her legal status was probably little different from the things that surround her. As an African, she, too, is little more than a kitchen utensil; for it is likely — in fact, virtually certain — that she is a slave.
Seville in 1618 was one of the wealthiest cities in Europe, the principal port for the immense riches coming from Spain’s American empire. Its population of 150,000, although cosmopolitan, was uniformly, compulsorily, Roman Catholic. Over the previous century, Spain had expelled its Jews and Muslims on the basis of their beliefs. But that was not enough. Once the true faith had been secured, racial persecution followed. In 1610, the 11-year-old Velázquez would have watched as even the moriscos — Moorish converts to Christianity — were driven out of the city as part of the Inquisition’s nationwide “cleansing” of conversos of Jewish or Muslim heritage.
At the time that this picture was painted, there were still around 6000 Africans in Seville: virtually all were enslaved, mostly in domestic service. Our kitchen maid may even be Velázquez’s own slave — we know that later in life he owned an African slave, whose portrait he painted, and to whom, in 1654, he gave his freedom.
But, whoever her owner, the young woman we see here — the focus of the picture — is an outsider, not part of the society she serves, and essentially without civic rights, in a situation that is perpetually precarious. As Velázquez presents her to us, she doesn’t look up. She has no option but to believe what the Church teaches. But what is she thinking, and who is she — for us, now?
THE first Easter Day is a day of slow understanding and mistaken identity. Mary Magdalene, like the travellers to Emmaus, sees Jesus; but even she, like them, initially fails to recognise him. In preaching about the Acts of Mercy, Jesus had warned of the danger of failing to see him — God — when he is present among us: in the poor and the meek; in the hungry that we neglect to feed; the stranger that we refuse to take in; the prisoner that we do not visit. He reminds us that he is for ever present in those our society overlooks. But, as on that first Easter Day, we are slow to see him.
In this painting, in these two images, is the young Velázquez showing us two faces of the risen Christ?
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the author of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).
