Las Meninas

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Las Meninas: Diego Velazquez

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Diego Velazquez Oil Painting - Las Meninas

Keywords: Las, Meninas

Work Overview: Las Meninas
Artist Diego Velázquez
Year 1656
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 318 cm × 276 cm (125.2 in × 108.7 in)
Location Museo del Prado, Madrid

Las Meninas[1] (pronounced [las meˈninas]; Spanish for The Ladies-in-waiting) is a 1656 painting in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Its complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting.

The painting shows a large room in the Royal Alcazar of Madrid during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures, most identifiable from the Spanish court, captured, according to some commentators, in a particular moment as if in a snapshot.[2] Some look out of the canvas towards the viewer, while others interact among themselves. The young Infanta Margaret Theresa is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas. Velázquez looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand.[3] In the background there is a mirror that reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen. They appear to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on.

Las Meninas has long been recognised as one of the most important paintings in Western art history. The Baroque painter Luca Giordano said that it represents the "theology of painting" and in 1827 the president of the Royal Academy of Arts Sir Thomas Lawrence described the work in a letter to his successor David Wilkie as "the true philosophy of the art".[4] More recently, it has been described as "Velázquez's supreme achievement, a highly self-conscious, calculated demonstration of what painting could achieve, and perhaps the most searching comment ever made on the possibilities of the easel painting".

Las Meninas is set in Velázquez's studio in Philip IV's Alcázar palace in Madrid.[23] The high-ceilinged room is presented, in the words of Silvio Gaggi, as "a simple box that could be divided into a perspective grid with a single vanishing point".[24] In the centre of the foreground stands the Infanta Margaret Theresa (1). The five-year-old infanta, who later married Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, was at this point Philip and Mariana's only surviving child.[25] She is attended by two ladies-in-waiting, or meninas: doña Isabel de Velasco (2), who is poised to curtsy to the princess, and doña María Agustina Sarmiento de Sotomayor (3), who kneels before Margaret Theresa, offering her a drink from a red cup, or bucaro, that she holds on a golden tray.[26] To the right of the Infanta are two dwarfs: the achondroplastic German, Maribarbola (4)[26] (Maria Barbola), and the Italian, Nicolas Pertusato (5), who playfully tries to rouse a sleepy mastiff with his foot. The dog is thought to be descended from two mastiffs from Lyme Hall in Cheshire, given to Phillip III in 1604 by James I of England.[27] Behind them stands doña Marcela de Ulloa (6), the princess' chaperone, dressed in mourning and talking to an unidentified bodyguard (or guardadamas)

To the rear and at right stands Don José Nieto Velázquez (8)—the queen's chamberlain during the 1650s, and head of the royal tapestry works—who may have been a relative of the artist. Nieto is shown pausing, with his right knee bent and his feet on different steps. As the art critic Harriet Stone observes, it is uncertain whether he is "coming or going".[28] He is rendered in silhouette and appears to hold open a curtain on a short flight of stairs, with an unclear wall or space behind. Both this backlight and the open doorway reveal space behind: in the words of the art historian Analisa Leppanen, they lure "our eyes inescapably into the depths".[29] The royal couple's reflection pushes in the opposite direction, forward into the picture space. The vanishing point of the perspective is in the doorway, as can be shown by extending the line of the meeting of wall and ceiling on the right. Nieto is seen only by the king and queen, who share the viewer's point of view, and not by the figures in the foreground. In the footnotes of Joel Snyder's article, the author recognizes that Nieto is the queen's attendant and was required to be at hand to open and close doors for her. Snyder suggests that Nieto appears in the doorway so that the king and queen might depart. In the context of the painting, Snyder argues that the scene is the end of the royal couple's sitting for Velázquez and they are preparing to exit, explaining that is "why the menina to the right of the Infanta begins to curtsy".[30]

Velázquez himself (9) is pictured to the left of the scene, looking outward past a large canvas supported by an easel.[31] On his chest is the red cross of the Order of Santiago, which he did not receive until 1659, three years after the painting was completed. According to Palomino, Philip ordered this to be added after Velázquez's death, "and some say that his Majesty himself painted it".[32] From the painter's belt hang the symbolic keys of his court offices.[33]

A mirror on the back wall reflects the upper bodies and heads of two figures identified from other paintings, and by Palomino, as King Philip IV (10) and Queen Mariana (11). The most common assumption is that the reflection shows the couple in the pose they are holding for Velázquez as he paints them, while their daughter watches; and that the painting therefore shows their view of the scene.

Of the nine figures depicted, five are looking directly out at the royal couple or the viewer. Their glances, along with the king and queen's reflection, affirm the royal couple's presence outside the painted space.[28] Alternatively, art historians H. W. Janson and Joel Snyder suggest that the image of the king and queen is a reflection from Velázquez's canvas, the front of which is obscured from the viewer.[34][35] Other writers say the canvas Velázquez is painting is unusually large for a portrait by Velázquez, and is about the same size as Las Meninas. Las Meninas contains the only known double portrait of the royal couple painted by Velázquez.[36]

The point of view of the picture is approximately that of the royal couple, though this has been widely debated. Many critics suppose that the scene is viewed by the king and queen as they pose for a double portrait, while the Infanta and her companions are present only to make the process more enjoyable.[37] Ernst Gombrich suggested that the picture might have been the sitters' idea:

"Perhaps the princess was brought into the royal presence to relieve the boredom of the sitting and the King or the Queen remarked to Velazquez that here was a worthy subject for his brush. The words spoken by the sovereign are always treated as a command and so we may owe this masterpiece to a passing wish which only Velazquez was able to turn into reality." [38]

No single theory, however, has found universal agreement.[39] Leo Steinberg suggests that the King and Queen are to the left of the viewer and the reflection in the mirror is that of the canvas, a portrait of the king and queen.[40] Others speculate that Velázquez represents himself painting the Infanta Margaret Theresa.

The back wall of the room, which is in shadow, is hung with rows of paintings, including one of a series of scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses by Peter Paul Rubens, and copies, by Velázquez's son-in-law and principal assistant Juan del Mazo, of works by Jacob Jordaens.[23] The paintings are shown in the exact positions recorded in an inventory taken around this time.[31] The wall to the right is hung with a grid of eight smaller paintings, visible mainly as frames owing to their angle from the viewer.[28] They can be identified from the inventory as more Mazo copies of paintings from the Rubens Ovid series, though only two of the subjects can be seen.[23]

The paintings on the back wall are recognized as representing Minerva Punishing Arachne and Apollo's Victory Over Marsyas. Both stories involve Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom and patron of the arts. These two legends are both stories of mortals challenging gods and the dreadful consequences. One scholar points out that the legend dealing with two women, Minerva and Arachne, is on the same side of the mirror as the queen's reflection while the male legend is on the side of the king.

The painted surface is divided into quarters horizontally and sevenths vertically; this grid is used to organise the elaborate grouping of characters, and was a common device at the time.[42] Velázquez presents nine figures—eleven if the king and queen's reflected images are included—yet they occupy only the lower half of the canvas.[43]

According to López-Rey, the painting has three focal points: the Infanta Margaret Theresa, the self-portrait and the half-length reflected images of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. In 1960, the art historian Kenneth Clark made the point that the success of the composition is a result first and foremost of the accurate handling of light and shade:

Each focal point involves us in a new set of relations; and to paint a complex group like the Meninas, the painter must carry in his head a single consistent scale of relations which he can apply throughout. He may use all kinds of devices to help him do this—perspective is one of them—but ultimately the truth about a complete visual impression depends on one thing, truth of tone. Drawing may be summary, colours drab, but if the relations of tone are true, the picture will hold.[42]

However, the focal point of the painting is widely debated. Leo Steinberg argues that the orthogonals in the work are intentionally disguised so that the picture's focal center shifts. Similar to Lopez-Rey, he describes three foci. The man in the doorway, however, is the vanishing point. More specifically, the crook of his arm is where the orthogonals of the windows and lights of the ceiling meet.[44]

Depth and dimension are rendered by the use of linear perspective, by the overlapping of the layers of shapes, and in particular, as stated by Clark, through the use of tone. This compositional element operates within the picture in a number of ways. First, there is the appearance of natural light within the painted room and beyond it. The pictorial space in the midground and foreground is lit from two sources: by thin shafts of light from the open door, and by broad streams coming through the window to the right.[31] The 20th-century French philosopher and cultural critic Michel Foucault observed that the light from the window illuminates both the studio foreground and the unrepresented area in front of it, in which the king, the queen, and the viewer are presumed to be situated.[45] For José Ortega y Gasset, light divides the scene into three distinct parts, with foreground and background planes strongly illuminated, between which a darkened intermediate space includes silhouetted figures.[46]

Velázquez uses this light not only to add volume and definition to each form but also to define the focal points of the painting. As the light streams in from the right it brightly glints on the braid and golden hair of the female dwarf, who is nearest the light source. But because her face is turned from the light, and in shadow, its tonality does not make it a point of particular interest. Similarly, the light glances obliquely on the cheek of the lady-in-waiting near her, but not on her facial features. Much of her lightly coloured dress is dimmed by shadow. The Infanta, however, stands in full illumination, and with her face turned towards the light source, even though her gaze is not. Her face is framed by the pale gossamer of her hair, setting her apart from everything else in the picture. The light models the volumetric geometry of her form, defining the conic nature of a small torso bound rigidly into a corset and stiffened bodice, and the panniered skirt extending around her like an oval candy-box, casting its own deep shadow which, by its sharp contrast with the bright brocade, both emphasises and locates the small figure as the main point of attention.

Detail of doña María de Sotomayor, showing Velázquez's free brushwork on her dress
Velázquez further emphasises the Infanta by his positioning and lighting of her maids of honour, whom he sets opposing one another: to left and right, before and behind the Infanta. The maid to the left faces the light, her brightly lit profile and sleeve creating a diagonal. Her opposite number creates a broader but less defined reflection of her attention, making a diagonal space between them, in which their charge stands protected.[47]

A further internal diagonal passes through the space occupied by the Infanta. There is a similar connection between the female dwarf and the figure of Velázquez himself, both of whom look towards the viewer from similar angles, creating a visual tension. The face of Velázquez is dimly lit by light that is reflected, rather than direct. For this reason his features, though not as sharply defined, are more visible than those of the dwarf who is much nearer the light source. This appearance of a total face, full-on to the viewer, draws the attention, and its importance is marked, tonally, by the contrasting frame of dark hair, the light on the hand and brush, and the skilfully placed triangle of light on the artist's sleeve, pointing directly to the face.

From the figure of the artist, the viewer's eye leaps again diagonally into the pictorial space. Another man stands, echoing and opposing the form of the artist, outside rather than inside, made clearly defined and yet barely identifiable by the light and shade. The positioning of such an area of strong tonal contrast right at the rear of the pictorial space is a daring compositional tactic. The shapes of bright light are similar to the irregular light shapes of the foreground Maid of Honour, but the sharply defined door-frame repeats the border of the mirror.

The mirror is a perfectly defined unbroken pale rectangle within a broad black rectangle. A clear geometric shape, like a lit face, draws the attention of the viewer more than a broken geometric shape such as the door, or a shadowed or oblique face such as that of the dwarf in the foreground or that of the man in the background. The viewer cannot distinguish the features of the king and queen, but in the opalescent sheen of the mirror's surface, the glowing ovals are plainly turned directly to the viewer. Jonathan Miller points out that apart from "adding suggestive gleams at the bevelled edges, the most important way the mirror betrays its identity is by disclosing imagery whose brightness is so inconsistent with the dimness of the surrounding wall that it can only have been borrowed, by reflection, from the strongly illuminated figures of the King and Queen".[48]

As the maids of honour are reflected in each other, so too do the king and queen have their doubles within the painting, in the dimly lit forms of the chaperone and guard, the two who serve and care for their daughter. The positioning of these figures sets up a pattern, one man, a couple, one man, a couple, and while the outer figures are nearer the viewer than the others, they all occupy the same horizontal band on the picture's surface.

Adding to the inner complexities of the picture and creating further visual interactions is the male dwarf in the foreground, whose raised hand echoes the gesture of the figure in the background, while his playful demeanour, and distraction from the central action, are in complete contrast with it. The informality of his pose, his shadowed profile, and his dark hair all serve to make him a mirror image to the kneeling attendant of the Infanta. However, the painter has set him forward of the light streaming through the window, and so minimised the contrast of tone on this foreground figure.

Despite certain spatial ambiguities this is the painter's most thoroughly rendered architectural space, and the only one in which a ceiling is shown. According to López-Rey, in no other composition did Velázquez so dramatically lead the eye to areas beyond the viewer's sight: both the canvas he is seen painting, and the space beyond the frame where the king and queen stand can only be imagined.[49] 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.[50] Stone writes:

We cannot take in all the figures of the painting in one glance. Not only do the life-size proportions of the painting preclude such an appreciation, but also the fact that the heads of the figures are turned in different directions means that our gaze is deflected. The painting communicates through images which, in order to be understood, must thus be considered in sequence, one after the other, in the context of a history that is still unfolding. It is a history that is still unframed, even in this painting composed of frames within frames.[51]

According to Kahr, the composition could have been influenced by the traditional Dutch Gallery Pictures such as those by Frans Francken the Younger, Willem van Haecht, or David Teniers the Younger. Teniers' work was owned by Philip IV and would have been known by Velázquez. Like Las Meninas, they often depict formal visits by important collectors or rulers, a common occurrence, and "show a room with a series of windows dominating one side wall and paintings hung between the windows as well as on the other walls". Gallery Portraits were also used to glorify the artist as well as royalty or members of the higher classes, as may have been Velázquez's intention with this work.

In 1692, the Neapolitan painter Luca Giordano became one of the few allowed to view paintings held in Philip IV's private apartments, and was greatly impressed by Las Meninas. Giordano described the work as the "theology of painting",[43] and was inspired to paint A Homage to Velázquez (National Gallery, London).[78] By the early 18th century his oeuvre was gaining international recognition, and later in the century British collectors ventured to Spain in search of acquisitions. Since the popularity of Italian art was then at its height among British connoisseurs, they concentrated on paintings that showed obvious Italian influence, largely ignoring others such as Las Meninas.[79]

An almost immediate influence can be seen in the two portraits by Mazo of subjects depicted in Las Meninas, which in some ways reverse the motif of that painting. Ten years later, in 1666, Mazo painted Infanta Margaret Theresa, who was then 15 and just about to leave Madrid to marry the Holy Roman Emperor. In the background are figures in two further receding doorways, one of which was the new King Charles (Margaret Theresa's brother), and another the dwarf Maribarbola. A Mazo portrait of the widowed Queen Mariana again shows, through a doorway in the Alcázar, the young king with dwarfs, possibly including Maribarbola, and attendants who offer him a drink.[80] Mazo's painting of The Family of the Artist also shows a composition similar to that of Las Meninas.

Francisco Goya etched a print of Las Meninas in 1778,[81] and later used Velázquez's painting as the model for his Charles IV of Spain and His Family. As in Las Meninas, the royal family in Goya's work is apparently visiting the artist's studio. In both paintings the artist is shown working on a canvas, of which only the rear is visible. Goya, however, replaces the atmospheric and warm perspective of Las Meninas with what Pierre Gassier calls a sense of "imminent suffocation". Goya's royal family is presented on a "stage facing the public, while in the shadow of the wings the painter, with a grim smile, points and says: 'Look at them and judge for yourself!' "[77]

John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, oil on canvas, 222.5 x 222.5 cm, Boston Museum of Fine Arts
The 19th-century British art collector William John Bankes travelled to Spain during the Peninsular War (1808–1814) and acquired a copy of Las Meninas painted by Mazo,[82] which he believed to be an original preparatory oil sketch by Velázquez—although Velázquez did not usually paint studies. Bankes described his purchase as "the glory of my collection", noting that he had been "a long while in treaty for it and was obliged to pay a high price".[83] The copy was admired throughout the 19th century in Britain.

The art world developed a new appreciation for Velázquez's less Italianate paintings after 1819, when Ferdinand VII opened the royal collection to the public.[82] In 1879 John Singer Sargent painted a small-scale copy of Las Meninas, and in 1882 painted a homage to the painting in his The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, while the Irish artist Sir John Lavery chose Velázquez's masterpiece as the basis for his portrait The Royal Family at Buckingham Palace, 1913. George V visited Lavery's studio during the execution of the painting, and, perhaps remembering the legend that Philip IV had daubed the cross of the Knights of Santiago on the figure of Velázquez, asked Lavery if he could contribute to the portrait with his own hand. According to Lavery, "Thinking that royal blue might be an appropriate colour, I mixed it on the palette, and taking a brush he [George V] applied it to the Garter ribbon."[82]

Between August and December 1957, Pablo Picasso painted a series of 58 interpretations of Las Meninas, and figures from it, which currently fill the Las Meninas room of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, Spain. Picasso did not vary the characters within the series, but largely retained the naturalness of the scene; according to the museum, his works constitute an "exhaustive study of form, rhythm, colour and movement".[84] A print of 1973 by Richard Hamilton called Picasso's Meninas draws on both Velázquez and Picasso.[85] Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin was commissioned by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to create a work titled Las Meninas, New Mexico (1987) which references Velázquez's painting as well as other works by Spanish artists.[86]

In 2004, the video artist Eve Sussman filmed 89 Seconds at Alcázar, a high-definition video tableau inspired by Las Meninas. The work is a recreation of the moments leading up to and directly following the approximately 89 seconds when the royal family and their courtiers would have come together in the exact configuration of Velázquez's painting. Sussman had assembled a team of 35, including an architect, a set designer, a choreographer, a costume designer, actors, actresses, and a film crew.[87]

A 2008 exhibit at the Museu Picasso titled "Forgetting Velázquez: Las Meninas" included art responding to Velázquez's painting by Fermín Aguayo, Avigdor Arikha, Claudio Bravo, Juan Carreño de Miranda, Michael Craig-Martin, Salvador Dalí, Juan Downey, Goya, Hamilton, Mazo, Vik Muniz, Jorge Oteiza, Picasso, Antonio Saura, Franz von Stuck, Sussman, Manolo Valdés, and Witkin, among others.

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This is one of Velázquez`s largest paintings and among those in which he made most effort to create a complex and credible composition that would convey a sense of life and reality while enclosing a dense network of meanings. The artist achieved his intentions and Las Meninas became the only work to which the writer on art Antonio Palomino devoted a separate section in his history of Spanish painters of 1724, entitling it In which the most illustrious work by Don Diego Velázquez is described. Since then the painting has never lost its status as a masterpiece. From Palomino we know that it was painted in 1656 in the Cuarto del Príncipe in the Alcázar in Madrid, which is the room seen in the work. He also identifies most of the figures of the court servants grouped around the Infanta Margarita, who is attended by two of the Queen`s meninas or maids-ofhonour: María Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco. In addition to that group, we also see the artist himself working on a large canvas, the dwarves Mari Bárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, the latter provoking a mastiff, and the lady-in-waiting Marcela de Ulloa next to a guardadamas (attendant), with the chamberlain José Nieto standing in the doorway in the background. Reflected in the mirror are the faces of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, the Infanta`s parents who are watching the scene taking place. The figures inhabit a space that is modelled not just through the laws of scientific perspective but also through aerial perspective. In the definition of this space the multiplication of the light sources plays an important role.

Las Meninas has one meaning that is immediately obvious to any viewer: it is a group portrait set in a specific location and peopled with identifiable figures undertaking comprehensible actions. The painting`s aesthetic values are also evident: the setting is one of the most credible spaces depicted in western art; the composition combines unity and variety; the remarkably beautiful details are divided across the entire pictorial surface; and finally, the painter has taken a decisive step forward on the path to illusionism, which was one of the goals of European painting in the early modern age, given that he has gone beyond transmitting resemblance in order to successfully achieve the representation of life or animation. However, as is habitual with Velázquez, in this scene in which the Infanta and the court servants pause in their actions on the arrival of the King and Queen, there are numerous underlying meanings that pertain to different fields of experience and which co-exist in one of the masterpieces of western art that has been the subject of the most numerous and most varied interpretations. One study, for example, has focused on the royal status of the Infanta, which thus endows the entire painting with a political content. There are also, however, important references of an art-historical nature that are expressed through the presence of the painter himself and the paintings hanging on the rear wall, while the inclusion of the mirror makes this work a consideration on the act of seeing and ensures that the viewer reflects on the laws of representation, the limits between painting and reality and his or her own role within the painting.

This richness and variety in the content, combined with the complexity of the painting`s composition and the variety of actions depicted, make Las Meninas a portrait in which the artist deploys representational strategies and pursues aims that go beyond the habitual ones in this genre, bringing it closer to history painting. In this sense, it is one of the key works through which Velázquez championed the potential of the pictorial genre to which he had devoted his activities since he arrived at court in 1623 (Text from Portús, J.: Velázquez. Las Meninas and the Late Royal Portraits, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2013, p. 126).

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