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Para mi gemelo psiquico, don Santiago SebastianIn 1964 Jonathan Brown published a paper in which he pointed to Velazquez's employment in The Surrender of Breda (Las Lanzas) 1 of an emblem -"CONCORDIA"which the artist would have taken from Andrea Alciati's then widely read and extremely influential Liber emblemata2 [Figs. 1, 2]. Professor Brown asserted that "even a cursory glance suffices to register the important similarities between the emblem and Velazquez's picture". In 1966 another article was published by Carla Gottlieb in which she, too, pointed to Alciati's CONCORDIA, stating that the painter drew upon this popular source as a prototype to aid him in visualizing what was to be "the first painting to depict warfare as surrender, and surrender as the initial step toward alliance between former adversaries"3. In all the different editions of Alciati's Liber emblemata, the visual essentials of CONCORDIA remain constant. Two armed warriors confront one another in an open field. Behind them there may be seen either an armydivided into two groups, both of which hold spears (las lanzas) aloftor, alternatively, a group of spear-bearers is placed to one side of the two opposing generals, with tents and pavillions on both flanks of the centrally placed protogonists. Regardless of the background accessories, the essential and unchanging central motif of Alciati's CONCORDIA is the proferred, and immediately accepted, symbolic handclasp of reconciliation between victor and vanquished.For some, therefore, this is the emblemetic message of Velazquez's Las Lanzas. As Gottlieb put it, the painter's " intention was to show the end of Civil War in the Spanish Empire, reconciliation, alliance and peace thereafter", or as Brown states, by the use of the CONCORDIA image, "in a touching ceremony, whose nobility and humanity Velazquez unerringly captured, enemies became, if for a moment, comrades-in-arms under a banner of mutual esteem and re-1 Prado cat. no 1172. 307x367 cm. Las Lanzas is customarily dated (Prado Museum catalogue) to before April 1635. Velazquez's magnificent canvas has been the subject of two short monographs: Juan Contreras y L6pez de Ayala (Marques de Lozoya), La Rendicion de Breda ("Obras Maestras del Arte Espahol"), Barcelona, 1953; Werner Hager, Velazquez: Die Obergabe von Breda ("Werkmonographien zur bildenden Kunst", Nr. 12), Stuttgart, 1956. Hager's pamphlet-sized study perhaps overexhausts the possible iconographic sources as the author cites, among others, the Hellenistic mosaic of The Battle of Isus (Naples, unknown until the late 18th-centu...
