In Las Meninas, the most important people are standing where you are.
Velázquez's 1656 masterpiece shows a five-year-old princess, her attendants, a dog and the painter himself at a huge canvas. But the king and queen appear only as a blurry reflection in a mirror at the back. The painting seems to be looking at you, and nobody agrees quite why.
Diego Velázquez was court painter to Philip IV of Spain, and by the 1650s also a senior palace official and curator of the royal collection. Las Meninas, 'the ladies-in-waiting', is set in his studio in Madrid's Alcázar palace. At its centre stands the Infanta Margaret Theresa, attended by two maids of honour, a chaperone, a bodyguard, two dwarfs, Mari Bárbola and Nicolás Pertusato, who nudges a sleepy mastiff with his foot. On the left, Velázquez himself looks out from behind an enormous canvas.
The puzzle is the mirror on the back wall, which reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen. The most common reading is that the royal couple are posing where the viewer stands, and Velázquez is painting them while their daughter looks on. Others argue the mirror reflects the canvas he is working on. Leo Steinberg and Joel Snyder have offered rival geometric accounts of where everyone must be, and the vanishing point falls near a courtier pausing in a bright doorway at the back.
It has also been read as a statement about the status of painting. In 17th-century Spain painting was considered a craft, not a liberal art, and Velázquez placed his only confirmed self-portrait among royalty. On his chest is the red cross of the knightly Order of Santiago, which he received only in 1659, three years after finishing the picture. According to the early biographer Antonio Palomino, the king had it added after the painter's death, and some said Philip painted it himself.
The painting has been cut down on both sides and was damaged in the 1734 fire that destroyed the Alcázar; the infanta's left cheek was largely repainted. It is now in the Prado. Luca Giordano called it the 'theology of painting', Michel Foucault opened a major philosophy book with it, and in 1957 Picasso painted 58 variations on it. Its likely model, with its own mirror, was Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, then in Philip's palace.
Source: Wikipedia — Las Meninas · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
