Velazquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velauez was a Spanish painter who is considered to have been the country's greatest baroque artist. He, with Francisco de Goya and El Greco, forms the great triumvirate of Spanish painting. Velauez was born in Seville on June 6, 1599, the oldest of six children; both his parents were from the minor nobility. Between 1611 and 1617 the young Velauez worked as an apprentice to Francisco Pacheco, a Sevillian Mannerist painter who was also the author of an important treatise, El arte de la pintura (The Art of Painting, 1649), and who became Velauez's father-in-law. During his student years Velauez absorbed the most popular contemporaneous styles of painting, derived, in part, from both Flemish and Italian realism.
Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez [PDF]
