Velázquez’s Birthplace is a center for the interpretation and dissemination of the life and work of the Sevillian genius Diego de Silva y Velázquez (Seville, 1599 – Madrid, 1660).
The Casa Natal Velázquez aims to highlight the legacy of the Baroque master in the context of the city where he was born.
Velázquez’s birthplace is the only home that the painter lived in that is still standing today, as well as one of the few traces that can be followed in Seville of the popular architecture of the time.
Objetivos fundacionales
Velázquez’s Birthplace is the only center in Spain dedicated to the interpretation and dissemination of the life and work of the Sevillian genius Diego de Silva y Velázquez (Seville, 1599 – Madrid, 1660) and has been built based on three objectives:
Preserve the property
Disseminate the life and work of the master of painting in the context of the city where he was born through events and training activities
Open to the public a space historically closed to citizens and visitors turned into an interpretation center
With the Casa Natal Velázquez, which is located next to the central Plaza del Cristo de Burgos, calle Padre Luis María Llop s / n (formerly, calle de la Gorgoja), Seville follows the model of other large European cities that have dedicated the spaces that his most illustrious children inhabited to disseminate his life and his work.
The exceptionality of this historical recovery lies in the fact that Velázquez’s Birthplace, the only house that the Baroque painter lived in Spain that is still standing, as well as one of the few vestiges of popular Sevillian architecture that remain in the city.
In an attempt to recover the most relevant artistic stage that the city of its birth has lived through, the Casa Natal de Velázquez aims to show the visitor what happened in the first third of the seventeenth century in Seville, when it went from Mannerism to the style of Flanders to the renewing gloom that came from Italy. From there arose a typical Sevillian style known as Naturalism.
And precisely from there came, with their own name, several of the great painting artists of all time: Zurbarán, Alonso Cano and, above all, Diego Velázquez, undisputed genius of universal painting, whose work is present in the most important art centers around the planet. And that now returns to its place of origin.
Velázquez lived in Seville for the first 24 years of his life, until he left for Madrid in 1623, after being appointed painter to King Felipe IV, a period in which he produced great masterpieces such as the Old Woman Frying Eggs (National Gallery of Scotland), El aguaador Seville (Apsley House), La mulata (The National Gallery of Ireland) and Los Musicos (Gernäldegalerie in Berlin).
The Velázquez Birthplace marks a before and after and will be in charge of the historical, artistic and patrimonial preservation of the place where the genius was born.
