Diego Velázquez place of birth Seville
Early life
Velázquez was born in Seville, Spain, the first child of Juan Rodríguez de Silva, a notary, and Jerónima Velázquez. He was baptized at the church of St. Peter in Seville on Sunday, June 6, 1599. The baptism most likely occurred a few days or weeks after his birth. His paternal grandparents, Diego da Silva and María Rodríguez, were Portuguese and had moved to Seville decades earlier. When Velázquez was offered knighthood in 1658, he claimed descent from the lesser nobility in order to qualify; in fact, however, his grandparents were tradespeople, and possibly Jewish conversos. Rafael Cómez proposes Velázquez may have had Morisco lineage.Raised in modest circumstances, he showed an early gift for art, and was apprenticed to Francisco Pacheco, an artist and teacher in Seville. An early-18th-century biographer, Antonio Palomino, said Velázquez studied for a short time under Francisco de Herrera before beginning his apprenticeship under Pacheco, but this is undocumented. A contract signed on September 17, 1611, formalized a 6-year apprenticeship with Pacheco backdated to December 1610, and it has been suggested that Herrera may have substituted for a traveling Pacheco between December 1610 and September 1611.Though considered a dull and undistinguished painter, Pacheco sometimes expressed a simple, direct realism although his work remained essentially Mannerist.  As a teacher, he was highly learned and encouraged his students' intellectual development. In Pacheco's school, Velázquez studied the classics, was trained in proportion and perspective, and witnessed the trends in the literary and artistic circles of Seville.
birthplace place of origin native place homeland birth city