Las Meninas
The little Infanta Margarita with her maids of honour. Velázquez himself stands at a huge canvas, looking out. Whom is he painting – and who is standing where we stand?
In the mirror on the back wall we see the king and queen. So they are standing where the viewer stands.
Diego Velázquez was court painter to King Philip IV of Spain and also held high office at court. He painted Las Meninas in 1656 in the royal palace, the Alcázar, in Madrid. The picture is large, more than three metres high. For a long time it was called The Family. The name Las Meninas, the maids of honour, only came in the 19th century. He was also responsible for decorating the palace and looking after the king’s art collection.
In the centre stands the Infanta Margarita Teresa, the royal couple’s five-year-old daughter. Two maids of honour, meninas, attend to her. One offers her a small red clay jug of water. On the right are two court dwarfs, Mari Bárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, who rests his foot on a large dog. Behind them a lady-in-waiting and a guard are talking. The Infanta wears a pale dress with wide skirts, and the light makes her the picture’s obvious centre.
On the left stands Velázquez himself, brush and palette in hand, in front of a huge canvas of which we see only the back. He looks out at us. In the mirror on the back wall we see the king and queen. They seem to be standing where we stand. In a bright doorway at the very back is the queen’s chamberlain, José Nieto, on his way up or down a flight of stairs.
The picture has a highly complex spatial structure. Light falls from windows on the right, forming zones of light and shadow that recede into the depth of the room. Velázquez painted with loose, rapid brushstrokes that look like dabs close up but at a distance resolve into fabrics, hair and glass. The walls are covered with paintings, copies of works by Rubens and others. The room’s high ceiling and dark upper half make the figures down at floor level stand out all the more clearly.
What is Velázquez painting on the big canvas? Perhaps the royal couple, perhaps the very picture we are looking at. The painting has prompted countless interpretations concerning vision, representation and the status of the artist. On his chest Velázquez wears the red cross of the Order of Santiago, which he received only in 1659. The cross must therefore have been painted in afterwards. One story has it that the king painted it himself, but there is no evidence for this.
In a great fire at the Alcázar in 1734 the painting was saved, while many other works were destroyed. It later went to the Prado, which opened in 1819, and still hangs there today. The Italian painter Luca Giordano called it “the theology of painting”.
Las Meninas is often counted among the most important paintings in Western art. In 1957 Picasso made a series of fifty-eight variations on it. The philosopher Michel Foucault opened his 1966 book The Order of Things with a long analysis of the picture. It is still used today to discuss what a picture is and whom it addresses.