Without those instructions, I cannot get my trip photographs off my camera and onto my hard drive, as would be the first step in publishing the images online. I am even having difficulty viewing exposures, from the Metropolitan Museum, still on the camera.

There is one painting in the Met that has come persistently back to mind since I've been home, just as you'd be captivated by a certain chocolate velvet pie, and long to re-experience it.

I recalled that the portrait that haunted me was of King Philip of Spain. I didn't recall which King Philip, who had painted it, or when. I've had to run all that down online. I narrowed the choices to a Diego Velazquez portrait of a young King Philip IV, done in about 1625. I knew I'd hit it right when I saw Philip IV's unmistakable face online, though it wasn't the portrait I saw in the museum: Velazquez was Philip IV's court painter, he had ample opportunities to capture his subject. Multiple portraits exist of the ruler, from any era of his life.

I never met Velazquez's subject, but I just love him. He practically springs from the full-length museum canvas, somebody you know, or you've met. Maybe Philip IV is the type I've tended to date. He's young, barely out of his teens. His face is very long and bony, elegant in a way, though not handsome. His blondish hair is styled in curls falling to either temple, Hasidic-style. He's dressed mostly in black and I recall satiny fabric tones. In the online image, he's wearing a starched neck-ruff that looks Spanish. If my memory serves, he wears northern-style dress in the piece at the Met, with a soft white blouson collar. The canvas gives the impression of a tall and awkward subject, maybe one with narrow shoulders and a doughy middle. For his fine clothes and stately bearing, in short, Philip is something of a goof.

Looking at the portrait, it's somehow no surprise to read that poor Philip IV's reign was not a particularly fortuitous one. He lacked aptitude or interest in matters of state, a fact he himself recognized. During his years on the throne, he devoted lots of time to his hobbies--which were mental, solitary, and exacting in nature--while letting his cabinet run the state.

The portrait is no less than a window onto Philip's life. You see who he was. His kind would end up in a disastrous arranged marriage and stick it out to sire the requisite progeny, gaffe and mortally offend his mother-in-law, fart at dinner and never be able to look anybody in the face for months.

Velazquez doesn't idealize Philip IV in the slightest, yet his subject is both regal and dignified. Hence, the painting's impact on me.

Looking at the painting, I was reminded that portraiture of leaders in the West has clearly taken a wrong turn since the Renaissance. The official photographs of leaders today, with their 'say cheese' smiles, are silly and irrelevant, compared to what Velazquez was able to do for Philip IV. I wonder when we as a culture lost the knack of lifelike, artful, and intelligent portraits of leaders, and why?

Does the answer have to do with the advent of photography? The widespread use of cameras meant, if you wanted naturalism, you took a picture--while painting veered off into whimsical directions, and didn't concern itself with "real life," much at all, anymore. You wanted official portraits of leaders to be "real" and naturalistic--more like photography--of course. Cameras evolved to where pictures could be taken quickly, without a thought, and even posed official paintings started to resemble 'instant' photography, its idealization, its flatness. Decorum seemed to exclude life.

Besides photography, there are obvious cultural explanations for the decline in the artistic expressiveness of leader portraits. During the European Renaissance, the universal notion that monarchs' power came from God was waning, but it was not yet dead. A king in those days was Godly. A skilled portrait captured his humanity, but also his deity. The assumption of a leader's 'divine right' no longer informs the sensibilities of artists who depict leaders of state, and hasn't in a very long time.

Photography may have played a hand in the decline of portraiture of leaders, so may have the demise of 'divine right,' but I also think it was something else, hinted at in one biography of Philip IV. According to the article, Philip had somewhat of a rowdy court, and may have partied himself, on occasion. But his official manner was unrelentingly stern: In public he maintained a bearing of rigid solemnity, and was seen to laugh only three times in the course of his life.

In Philip IV's day, dignity and comportment in a leader were expected in a way they are not today, were matters of personal pride. The exercise of worldly power was serious; there was pride in grave responsibility, in being grown-up. This is what Velazquez captures on canvas. This is why Philip IV's decorum, and a sense of his liveliness, actually seem to reinforce each other.
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