Las Meninas explained: the figures, the mirror and the riddle

Las Meninas is Diego Velázquez's great group portrait of 1656 in the Prado in Madrid. It shows the Spanish infanta Margarita with her ladies-in-waiting, the meninas, in a room in the royal palace. Velázquez himself stands at an enormous canvas and looks out at us, and in a mirror on the back wall King Philip IV and Queen Mariana can be seen. The riddle is what he is painting and where we, the viewers, stand.

Facts

What the painting shows

We stand in a tall, half-dark room with pictures on the walls. In the middle of the image stands the five-year-old infanta Margarita Teresa, the king's daughter, in the strongest light. Two ladies-in-waiting bend towards her. One offers her a small red cup on a gold tray, the other curtsies. On the right stand two people of short stature from the court and a large dog. In the half-shadow behind them the infanta's chaperone and a guard are in conversation.

On the left stands Velázquez himself with brush and palette, in front of a canvas so large that we see only the back of it. He looks out of the picture, towards us. On the back wall hangs a mirror showing two people, and in an open door at the far back a man stands on a step and looks back into the room. No single person is the main figure; everyone turns in different directions, towards something happening where we stand.

Who is who

The figures are known from an early description of the painting. The lady-in-waiting kneeling is María Agustina Sarmiento, and the one curtsying is Isabel de Velasco. The short-statured woman in dark clothes is Mari Bárbola from Germany, and the boy putting his foot on the dog is the Italian Nicolás Pertusato. The woman in widow's dress behind them is Marcela de Ulloa, who looked after the young ladies-in-waiting, and the man in the doorway is José Nieto, the queen's chamberlain.

Velázquez wears keys at his belt, a sign of his office as the person responsible for the palace's rooms. On his chest he has the red cross of the Order of Santiago. He became a knight only in 1659, three years after the picture was painted, so the cross must have been added later, according to an old story at the king's command.

The mirror and the riddle

The mirror on the back wall shows King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. If the mirror reflects the room, the royal couple must stand roughly where the viewer stands. Perhaps it is they whom Velázquez is painting on the large canvas, and the infanta and the court have come in to watch. The painting is then a picture of what the royal couple themselves see.

Others have argued that the mirror shows part of the large canvas, or that Velázquez is painting this very picture. The answer cannot be decided, and that is the point of the painting. The French philosopher Michel Foucault opened his book The Order of Things of 1966 with a long analysis of how the picture plays with the gaze: the painter, the models and the viewer change places with one another. The mirror can also be seen as a salute to an older work. Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding, with a mirror showing people in the room, was in the Spanish kings' collection in Velázquez's time; read the guide to the Arnolfini Portrait.

The light and the room

The room is built up by the light. It falls in from windows on the right that we cannot see and strikes the infanta most strongly. Further in everything becomes darker, until it opens up again in the bright doorway where Nieto stands. The room's vanishing point lies in the doorway, so that the eye is drawn through the whole picture. The distance between the foreground and the back wall is measured out by the figures in the half-shadow.

Close up, the painting is made of loose, rapid brushstrokes. The infanta's dress and the ladies-in-waiting's sleeves are painted with a few strokes that become fabric only at a distance. This is one of the reasons Velázquez became a model for 19th-century painters, from Manet to the Impressionists. Read about the period in the Spanish Golden Age and in the guide What is Baroque?.

The infanta Margarita

The infanta Margarita Teresa was the daughter of Philip IV and his second wife, Mariana of Austria. She was early on destined to marry her maternal uncle, the future emperor Leopold I in Vienna. For this reason Velázquez painted several portraits of her that were sent to the imperial court, so that the future bridegroom could see how she was growing up. Several of them are today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Margarita married Leopold in 1666 and became empress, but she died as early as 1673, only 21 years old. In Las Meninas she is five, in a pale dress with a hooped skirt, and the whole court is arranged around her. She is the only person in the picture who does nothing but be herself; everyone else serves, plays, guards or paints.

The pictures in the background and the legacy

The two large dark paintings on the back wall are copies after Rubens and Jordaens. They show myths in which mortals challenge the gods in art: Pallas and Arachne, and Apollo and Pan. The choice has been read as a statement about the value of painting. In Velázquez's time painting was often counted as a craft, and he worked to have it recognised as a liberal art.

The painting has inspired many. In 1957 Pablo Picasso painted a series of fifty-eight pictures after Las Meninas, now in the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. Goya made an etching after it. In the diagram below you can point to all twelve parts, and in Looking at art it is among the paintings to examine in detail. See also the work's page and the guide How do you read a painting?.

Who is who

Exercise

Who can be seen in the mirror on the back wall in Las Meninas?