Tag Archives: Las Meninas

Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656)

The Span­ish Gold­en Age of flour­ish­ing arts and lit­er­a­ture in Spain coin­cid­ed with the Span­ish Empire’s polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary dom­i­nance in the 16th and 17th cen­turies, rough­ly dur­ing the reigns of the Hab­s­burg mon­archs Charles V, and the Philips II, III and IV of Spain. In lit­er­a­ture, Cer­vantes was writ­ing Don Quixote de la Man­cha (1605) and Lope de Vega was knock­ing out about 500 plays and 3000 son­nets between the 1580s and 1630s. In art, El Gre­co, Fran­cis­co de Zur­barán and Bar­tolomé Muril­lo flour­ished, as well as the lead­ing artist of them all, Diego Velázquez, who worked under the patron­age of King Philip IV between the 1620s and 1650s.

Velázquez’s ear­li­est works are bode­gones, kitchen or pantry scenes with promi­nent still-lifes and domes­tic activ­i­ty such as his Woman Fry­ing Eggs (1618) which I remem­ber being tak­en with many years ago dur­ing a vis­it to the Nation­al Gallery of Scot­land in Edin­burgh. How­ev­er, it was when he took to por­trai­ture that he gained the atten­tion of King Philip and was invit­ed to become court painter. Diego was able to thrive under Philip’s wing for the rest of his life. He pro­vid­ed por­traits for the court (he paint­ed Philip him­self over thir­ty times) and for lumi­nar­ies of the time such as Pope Inno­cent X, but was also giv­en the free­dom to paint less promi­nent per­son­al­i­ties such as Juan de Pare­ja, a for­mer slave and fel­low painter in his work­shop.

His mag­num opus, how­ev­er, was Las Meni­nas (The Ladies-in-wait­ing or Maids of Hon­our). Paint­ed in 1656 and now resid­ing in the Museo del Pra­do in Madrid, Las Meni­nas depicts the 5 year old Infan­ta Mar­garet There­sa 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 and look­ing out­wards towards the view­er. In the back­ground there is a mir­ror that reflects the upper bod­ies of the king and queen them­selves. Giv­en the expec­ta­tion that a court paint­ing would be a for­mal affair, Las Meni­nas’ com­plex and enig­mat­ic com­po­si­tion sur­pris­es us and cre­ates an uncer­tain rela­tion­ship between us and the fig­ures depict­ed. Because of its unusu­al nature, Las Meni­nas has been one of the most wide­ly analysed works in West­ern paint­ing, and it’s one of “the greats” that I hope to vis­it one day.

Diego Velázquez, detail from Las Meni­nas