Las Meninas

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez

The painter looks at you. You're on. From 2009 you observe a frozen scene: the room of the Prince in the Alcazar in Madrid in 1656. What do you see? Perhaps you don't realise it at first, but as Carl Justi says, your perspective has been elevated a little: your feet aren't actually touching the ground.The painter knows what you see, but speculates on what you think. You stand as if looking through a window, and it is not the sun, but the bright lamp of your attention that illuminates the foreground. The painter controls your gaze.

King Philip and Queen Mariana are reflected in the silvery edged mirror at the back of the hall. Diego sees the monarchs compose themselves. We, the King and Queen, look at our daughter, Margarita. Velazquez sees the Infanta through our eyes and then he portrays Margarita and sees us, the King and Queen, through her eyes. One maid looks at Margarita, who sees us, another looks at us as we admire our daughter.

The courtier, Don José Nieto Velázquez, stands in the doorway, he is the person whose job it is to open the doors for the monarchs. Velazquez demonstrates how royal power feels. We see the distance and the reaction to royalty in the people attendant on us.

The dog is the creature closest to power. It encroaches on the brilliant semicircle, as we may have done. A young dwarf attempts to kick it to attention. And in the next second the quick dabbing movement of Velazquez's brush will awaken the spectators. We are sleeping curs. Everyone else in the picture holds still while Velazquez is about to give us a swift flick.

The light coming from behind the door at the back and the light in the picture is not ordinary light. The proportions of the painting are not ordinary proportions. El Campo suggests that the heads of the people form the constellation Margarita. The people depicted are not ordinary people. The dwarf Maribarbola stares out at us frankly, the Infanta stares out at us innocently. Without the Infanta the painting would lack meaning. And Kenneth Clark suggests that without Maribarbola the painting would lack truth.

Foucault wrote about the painting like an intellectual monkey running up a ladder, using the structuralist tools to discuss Velazquez's portrayal of representation itself. The toss pot found it lacking. The painting is full of false bottoms and secret drawers. At the back are paintings copied of painting which in turn depict scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The back of Velazquez's large canvas is depicted. We've fallen through and are now looking at the back of the painting. We wonder about the picture itself and the work of a painter. Well pay attention, and he will explain.

Even J. R. Searle had a shot at interpreting it: in an unattributed analogy to the Gricean Maxims he talks of the effect of the painting in terms the violation of the norms of representation. Naturally, he is interested, because he is a researcher into mind and language, someone who havers pathetically between materialism and Neo-Cartesianism, and the subject of the painting concerns the properties of mind.

But painters have more hope of fully understanding the rubics cube of Las Meninas than philosophers. Picasso was entangled by las Meninas, though he pretended to try and forget him. Goya painted it 22 times. They painted Las Meninas in different ways on many occasions. Dali, Hamilton, Toral too.