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VELAZQUEZ When visiting ‘The National Gallery’ in Edinburgh many paintings captured my attention but none more so than Velazquez’ painting ‘old women cooking eggs’. Diego Velazquez was born in Seville in 1599.At this time this Spanish city had much wealth and vitality. Velazquez’ paintings were in the pantheon of Baroque art along with great artists such as Rubens, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Bernini and Poussin. Baroque style was a radical change in Spanish painting which took place in the second half of seventeenth-century. Before hand the style was naturalism, where as Baroque was colourful and decorative. Velazquez’ paintings had great realism and inventive iconography, he understood his vocation as a painter, and it is said he was the greatest painter of seventeenth-century Spain. His career began first of all with Francisco Herrera at aged ten thereafter he joined leading theorist and aesthetician Francisco Pacheco. His was a school which housed the greatest minds in Seville Velazquez served a six year apprenticeship here. During his time there still life paintings were very popular, these bodegüns often came with symbolic meaning within a domestic subject matter, some also contain