Las Meninas
Diego Velázquez (1599 to 1660) · 1656
A room in the old royal palace of Madrid. The five year old Infanta Margarita stands at the centre in a wide silver dress, attended by two maids of honour, the meninas of the title, one kneeling with a red jug of water. To the right are two court dwarfs and a large dog, behind them a chaperone and a bodyguard, and at the back a chamberlain pauses in a lit doorway. On the left Velázquez himself stands at a huge canvas, brush in hand, looking out at us. In a mirror on the far wall are the faces of the king and queen, Philip the Fourth and Mariana, who seem to be standing where we are. Who is being painted, and who is looking at whom, has been argued about for three and a half centuries.
Stand back and the picture resolves into air and light; come close and it dissolves into flecks and dashes of paint. Velázquez builds the Infanta's hair and the silver embroidery of her dress from loose touches that only work at a distance, and the dim upper half of the room is painted almost as thinly as a sketch. Look at the mirror, whose blurred reflection is treated differently from everything else, and at the red cross of the Order of Santiago on the painter's chest, which was added after he was admitted to the order in 1659, according to legend by the king himself.
The painting hung in the king's private office and was never a public work until it entered the Prado in 1819. Luca Giordano called it the theology of painting, Manet said he did not know why the rest of us bothered, and Picasso painted fifty eight variations on it in 1957. The Prado has hung it alone on a long wall so that you can approach it from the end of the central gallery, the way it was meant to be met.
Did You Know? The painter Luca Giordano, asked what he thought of the picture, called it the theology of painting, meaning that it was to art what theology was to the other sciences.
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