Joining together the last four chapters of this book is the fact that Velázquez and Rembrandt were both interested in exploring the idea that painting could stimulate a multisensory experience. They did so, however, in ways that were similar, and quite different.

Both Velázquez and Rembrandt embraced the messy materiality of the late Titian. Velázquez knew Titian's work first hand, through the numerous examples present in the royal collection, and through his two trips to Italy. In addition to this, he benefitted enormously from knowing Rubens, who spent much of his time in Madrid in 1628 studying the Titians he found there and encouraging Velázquez to do the same. It is hard to know exactly how much direct experience Rembrandt had with Titian's late work, but we can be confident that he knew some examples, and he very likely perused the writings of Van Mander, largely cribbed from Vasari. Both artists clearly knew that Titian had introduced open, painterly brushwork to the European tradition, and that this shift inaugurated new expressive avenues. I suspect as well that Vasari's disapproval of Titian's late paintings, which for him could only meaningfully be seen at a distance, acted for both artists as a kind of encouragement. I say this because the critical consensus around Rembrandt considers him an artist who defied the norms of classically inspired orthodoxy, even if I did not discuss this aspect of his career in the chapters of this book. I did, however, argue this for Velázquez, whose earlier choice of Caravaggio as a model must have surprised Pacheco, torchbearer in Spain for Vasari's Central Italian classicism. His switch to Titian would have been an improvement for Pacheco, but he would still have shaken his head at Velázquez's choice of the late style as his point of departure.

Velázquez must also have been attracted to Titian's late style because it is a style that seems to reveal and even revel in the process of painting. From an early date, well before his exposure to Titian's late works, Velázquez was intent on thematizing the mechanical means by which paintings were produced, as I argued using Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Plate 3) and The Old Woman Cooking Eggs (Fig. 29). He continued the same theme with The Forge of Vulcan (Plate 4).