I didn’t really expect a lot from this one – I didn’t know much about Velázquez, and the Kindle is not suited to anything with images – but by the time I was done, The Vanishing Man was cemented up there in my top reads for the year. I still haven’t seen a single Velázquez in person but I’m utterly convinced of his genius.
I love reading about art. Even art I haven’t seen. Maybe especially art I haven’t seen! It’s so subjective, and the writer gives so much of themselves away in their descriptions as well as tipping me off to what to look for, what there is to see. Cumming really knows her stuff, and more importantly, knows how to put it into words. I’ve been blessed with a lot of really good non-fiction writing following my weird little TBR list rules and The Vanishing Man is really up there, its sensitive and intelligent prose telling us not one, but two stories. Velázquez isn’t the only man who’s vanishing.
The Vanishing Man is about the life of Velázquez, what little we know about it, and also about a particular portrait he may or may not have painted, appearing and vanishing between the years and continents, and about the man who found what may have been that portrait, himself fated to slowly fade out of history.
I’m not going to give the story away. You’re going to have to read it yourself.
I’m annoyed at myself for leaving it this long between reading and writing my thoughts on this one, because I can only imagine how much more gushing there would have been in the immediate aftermath. I just really loved it, and though it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, it still somehow feels underrated, an overlooked gem. There’s a passage on the unlikelihood of any piece of art ever surviving at all that was really rather beautiful, and I know it’s going to stay with me for a long time.