Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas

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0:00:06.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in an enormous gallery in the Prado in Madrid, and we’re surrounded by paintings. But clearly the star of this gallery is Las Meninas.

0:00:16.3 Dr. Beth Harris: This is a painting by Velázquez, the great 17th- century Spanish painter and probably one of the most famous paintings in all of art history.

0:00:25.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: Painting is about revealing. But in this painting, one of the most important elements is unseen and can only be imagined.

0:00:34.7 Dr. Beth Harris: In this painting, Las Meninas, which means the “maids of honor,” we see the artist himself at work.

0:00:42.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: There is a frieze of figures, a line of figures in the foreground. The most brilliantly lit figure is the small girl in the middle who is just beautifully dressed. This is the Infanta Margaret Theresa. That is, this is the princess, the daughter of the king and queen of Spain. And she’s being attended by these two elegantly dressed maids of honor for whom the painting is named.

0:01:06.6 Dr. Beth Harris: On the right side, we see two figures, Mary Bárbola and Nicolás Pertusato. It was common to employ people with dwarfism in the courts of Europe. And that’s what we see here. Behind them, we see two figures a little bit in shadow. The female figure is a chaperone and the male figure is a bodyguard. In the way back, standing in a doorway, we see a male figure who held a very high position within the court.

0:01:36.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: Most of these figures seem to be turning their attention towards us.

0:01:41.2 Dr. Beth Harris: Well, it’s clear that the attention of the figures has been interrupted from what they’re doing. And there’s a sense of the momentary. And so, Velázquez in the act of painting. The Infanta looking in our direction. The maid of honor on the right seems to have just noticed that there’s something going on in the direction of the viewer. The female figure on the right looks directly out at us. The younger male figure on the far right seems to be poking a dog and not aware at all. And then in the middle ground, the female figure is in the middle of a conversation with the male figure. But the male figure has noticed something. And the figure in the doorway in the background does seem to acknowledge whatever is interrupting all the figures in this scene. And it’s this incredible variety of reactions that makes this painting seem so alive.

0:02:33.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: And at first glance, we might think we’re looking at a painting of the king and queen of Spain hanging amongst all of these other paintings on the back wall. But if we look a little bit more close closely, we realize that the surface is much more illuminated and the edges suggest a beveled glass surface. We realize we’re looking at a mirror. What seems to have just taken place is that the king and queen of Spain have just entered this room.

0:03:00.9 Dr. Beth Harris: So it makes sense that upon the entry of the king and queen, those who were gathered here in Velázquez’s studio would stop what they were doing and look up.

0:03:11.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: The rarity of a king and queen walking into the workspace of an artist is an extraordinary declaration of the importance of that artist and of the importance of painting itself.

0:03:23.1 Dr. Beth Harris: And this has a very long tradition. It goes back to classical antiquity, to Pliny, where we hear about how the painter Apelles was favored by Alexander the Great and that Alexander visited Apelles studio. And then later in the Renaissance, Vasari tells the story of how King Francis I regularly visited Leonardo in his studio. Vasari and Pliny both tell these stories because they’re arguing for the acceptance of painting as something which is noble, which is not simply craft, but something which involves an incredible amount of knowledge and disparate kinds of knowledge that need to be brought to bear to make a great painting. Velázquez for years had been in the employ of the king, had risen through the ranks and held various high level positions until he reached essentially the highest position one could hold in the court, with a key, even with access to the king’s chambers.

0:04:30.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And in fact, if you look very closely at the waist of the painter, you can see a ring that would have originally held the key, that would have opened every door in the palace and was it signifier of his high rank and the trust that the king placed in him.

0:04:45.8 Dr. Beth Harris: But Velázquez was more ambitious. Several artists before Velázquez had achieved the rank of knighthood.

0:04:52.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, Titian had, and so had Rubens, painters that Velázquez had enormous respect for. And he wanted also to achieve this rank of knighthood.

0:05:01.9 Dr. Beth Harris: Specifically, he wanted to be a member of the Order of Santiago. And this was no easy feat because being a painter was considered to be essentially a craftsman. You make something with your hands, you sell it for money. Anyone who was a craftsman by trade could never be a member of the Order of Santiago, could never be at that highest level of society. Velázquez nevertheless petitioned the king for entry into the Order of Santiago. The officials who were in charge of this had to research several generations in Velázquez’s family.

0:05:43.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: They interviewed over 100 people. This was a very serious process. And by some accounts, the people who would pass judgment were not inclined to support Velázquez because they saw him as a craftsman. They did not believe he belonged in the noble ranks.

0:06:00.4 Dr. Beth Harris: So Velázquez is turned down twice. The Pope is appealed to twice. And finally, Velázquez is accepted into the Order of Santiago.

0:06:11.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: And that was just a few years after this painting was finished. So we can understand this painting in the context of Velázquez’s ambition, both for his own status, but also for the status of his art. Let’s look at what the artist has done. At first glance, we see these figures within a room that makes complete sense. It uses linear perspective. And in fact, this room is not an invention. It was an actual room in the palace.

0:06:38.5 Dr. Beth Harris: And, like so many Baroque artists, employs light to convince us of the reality of this scene. And so we have this window on the right that lets in the light. We see it fall on the figures, where they’re illuminated on our right, in shadow on the left. And the light is differentiated. It is subtle. It plays across the surfaces of the figures, of their skin, and also of their magnificent clothing.

0:07:05.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: If you look at the princess, for example, look at the way that her dress just picks up the light. But when we look closely, we see that these are continuous strokes of paint.

0:07:14.8 Dr. Beth Harris: My favorite example of this is if we look at what Velázquez is wearing. We see this white shirt underneath this black jacket. And that shirt is indicated by rapid brushstrokes back and forth that signify the light shining on that shirt.

0:07:31.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And that zigzag, that almost lightning bolt, leads our eye down to one of the most interesting parts of the painting, which is the palette of paint that the artist holds. And here he is literally depicting paint in its raw state. It is a finished representation of the stuff out of which the representation itself is made.

0:07:52.0 Dr. Beth Harris: I think it’s also important for us to put this painting in the context of the 17th century, of the Baroque era. And one of the things that artists of the Baroque era are repeatedly interested in, whether we look at Caravaggio or Bernini or Rembrandt or Rubens, is breaking down the space of the painting and the space of the viewer so that the viewer is part of the work of art, part of its space. In that way, Baroque art can be very powerful. It draws us in, and that’s what’s happening here, too. The space of the painting continues into our own space. We know, in fact, that the room was larger than what we see here, that it expanded considerably in our direction. So we seem to be standing in this room. It’s important to remember, though, that we were never meant to be looking at this painting. This is a painting made for the eyes of the king and queen of Spain.

0:08:53.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: So what is now a very public work of art in the 21st century, was in fact a much more private work of art in the 17th century.

0:09:02.0 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s very hard for us, I think, to imagine how important it was for Velázquez to be visited by the king and queen.

0:09:10.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: In fact, so important that Velázquez had to contrive a way of representing the king and queen within his studio without breaching the protocols of his moment. It would not have been appropriate for him to show himself painting the king and queen directly, with them included in the painting. But he’s fudged it by just representing their reflection in the mirror. All of this leaves a big question, which is where we started. I want to walk a little bit further into the painting and turn around so that I can see what’s on the far side of the canvas. I want to know what Velázquez is painting.

0:09:46.3 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s especially interesting because that is a very large canvas that is approximately the same size as the painting of Las Meninas itself.

0:09:55.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: Which is 10 and a half feet tall.

0:09:57.4 Dr. Beth Harris: So we’re looking at figures who are close to life size.

0:10:01.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: There is an argument to be made that the canvas that Velázquez is painting is actually the canvas that we’re looking at that he is in the process of painting Las Meninas.

0:10:11.6 Dr. Beth Harris: The subject of this painting is the elevation of the profession of being a painter.

0:10:18.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: The ennobling of art. And that is a result of the presence of the monarchs in the artist’s studio. And there’s one detail in this painting that makes these issues clear. Soon after the artist died, there seems to have been an order by the king to add the red cross on his breast. That is the insignia of the Order of Santiago. It’s as if the king himself is acknowledging not only the nobility of the artist, but the nobility of art itself.

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This painting at the Museo del Prado

Velázquez on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Jonathan Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Julián Gállego, Velázquez (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989).

Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt, Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,“ part of Masterpieces of Western Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Baroque art, an introduction

Read a Reframing Art History textbook chapter, Secular matters of the global baroque