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Las Meninas

Diego Velázquez, 1656

Oil on canvas

318 × 276 cm, 125.2 × 108.7 in

Museo del Prado, Madrid

Las Meninas (also known as The Maids of Honour) is a painting by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez. Completed in 1656, and housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain, the work is one of the world's most famous paintings. Luca Giordano said of Las Meninas that it represented the "theology of painting", while Sir Thomas Lawrence wrote that the work incarnates the philosophy of art.^[1]

[edit] Description

The picture was inventoried at Palacio Real de Madrid under the title "The family picture". In 1843, Pedro de Madrazo catalogued it for El Museo Del Prado as Las Meninas, following the description of Acisclo Antonio Palomino de Velasco (1655-1726), in his Museo pictórico.^[1] Menina ("girl" in Portuguese) came to mean "maid of honour" in the Spanish court.

Las Meninas depicts the Infanta Margarita, the daughter of King Philip IV of Spain and the eldest daughter of his second wife, Mariana of Austria, surrounded by two ladies-in-waiting, a dwarf, a fool, a mastiff, and Velázquez himself standing at an easel. According to Palomino, the King, Queen, and the Infantas María Teresa and Margarita often visited Velázquez to watch him at work.^[2]

[edit] Composition and meaning

This is a composition of enormous representational impact. The Infanta Margarita stands proudly. Although she is the smallest, she is clearly the central figure; one of the maids is kneeling before her, and the other leaning towards her, so that the standing Infanta, with her broad hooped skirt, becomes the fulcrum of the movement. The dwarf, Maribarbola, is about the same size as the Infanta; by comparison Margarita seems very delicate.

On the left in the painting, dark and calm, the painter can be seen standing at a vast canvas - it is one of the best self-portraits of Velázquez.

Above the head of the Infanta, the ruling couple is reflected in the mirror, possibly sitting for the painting Velázquez is creating in Las Meninas. A courtier and chamberlain to the queen, José Nieto de Velázquez, stands in the doorway at the back of the room.^[3]

The point of view of the picture is at least approximately that of the royal couple. The spatial structure and positioning of the figures is such that the group of maids around the Infanta appears to be standing on "our" side, opposite Philip and his wife. Not only is the "performance" for their benefit, but the attention of the painter is also concentrated on them, for he appears to be working on their portrait. Although they can only be seen in the mirror reflection, the distant images of the king and queen occupy a central position, both in terms of composition and content.

As spectators, our position in relation to the painting is uncertain. Are we excluded from the scene, with the ruling couple in our place? In this interpretation, the painting is completely hermetic, a hermeticism further intensified by the fact that the painting in front of Velázquez is completely hidden from our view. Or are we standing beside the royal couple, to the real king's (not the reflected one's) right? This would explain the spectator's not appearing in the mirror at the back, but also raises the possibility that the spectator is intimate, at least spatially, with royalty. In 17th century Spain, this would have been a provocative suggestion. The fact that three of the figures - Velázquez, the Infanta and the dwarf - appear to be looking directly at the spectator rather than to our left where, presumably, the royal couple is standing, lends weight to this interpretation.

In recent years attempts have been made to view the composition in allegorical terms, based upon the portraits and mythological pictures occupying the background wall. Yet it seems most valid to accept at face value, in Michel Foucault's words, "the working painter in all his objective realism".

The painting has three focal points: the luminous Infanta Margarita, the self-portrait by Velázquez, and the half-length reflected images of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. Amidst them may be discerned contrasts between the child's charm and her regal bearing, the disparity between the artifice of painting and the nature of reality, and the distance between the ethereal images of a king and queen and their dispirited court.^[4]

X-rays have shown that Velázquez made minor alterations in the figures as he worked; at first his head inclined to his right, rather than his left.^[5] The painting on which the artist is working is not shown, and has thus invited speculation that he represented himself painting, variously, the Infanta Margarita, Las Meninas itself, or a portrait of the King and Queen. None of these theories is conclusive.^[6]

Perspective has been suggested through contrasts of light and shadow and overlapping shapes, and despite certain spatial ambiguities, this is the painter's most thoroughly rendered architectural space, and the only one in which a ceiling is included. In no other composition did Velázquez so dramatically lead the eye to areas beyond the viewer's sight: the canvas he is seen painting, and the space beyond the frame where the King and Queen stand can only be imagined.^[7] Within the composition, the bareness of the dark ceiling, the back of Velázquez's canvas, and the strict geometry of framed paintings contrast with the animated, brilliantly lit and sumptuously painted foreground entourage.^[8]

[edit] Interpretation

Picasso's 1957 recreation of Las Meninas

Las Meninas was the picture which Luca Giordano called the "theology of painting," another way of expressing the opinion of Sir Thomas Lawrence, that this work is the philosophy of art, so true is it in rendering the desired effect. The story is told that the king painted the red cross of Santiago on the breast of the painter, as it appears today on the canvas. The painting may have been influenced by another very famous painting, the Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 by Jan van Eyck. At the time it was in the Spanish royal collection, and Velázquez would have been familiar with it.^[9] This also has a mirror at the back, reflecting figures who would have the same angle of vision as does the viewer of the painting.

Pablo Picasso, painted a series of 58 interpretations of Las Meninas between August and December 1957. The paintings fill the Las Meninas gallery of the Picasso Museo in Barcelona, Spain. ^[10]

The philosopher Michel Foucault made an interpretation of this painting in the introduction of his book The Order of Things, primarily focusing on it as exhibiting the first signs of a new episteme in European art, as it attempted to allow the audience of the painting to become the sovereign figure — the true focus of the art of representation is hardly represented: "the necessary disappearance of… the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance."

[edit] Notes

[edit] Reference

• López-Rey, José, Velázquez: Catalogue Raisonné, Taschen, 1999.

[edit] External links

• Velázquez — La Kabala y Las Meninas (Spanish)
• Joel-Peter Witkin "Las Meninas (Self Portrait)"
• Museo Picasso "Las Meninas"

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