Diego Velázquez’s 1656 portrayal of a Spanish princess and her entourage is one of the most important paintings in Western art history, if not the most conceptually complex by an old master. A deconstruction of the relationship between viewer and viewed, depiction and depicted, Las Meninas comprises a nesting doll of paradoxes that play with pictorial space to ask, Just what is it you think you’re looking at?
Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), was part of a broader backlash against the perfectionism of Renaissance art, which began with the revival of the classical aesthetics a millennium after the fall of Rome. Renaissance painters exalted truth to nature, even in religious art, using perspective, both in its geometric and atmospheric variants, as well as the modeling of form through gradations of light, to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. They also adopted the use of oil paint, which, along with glazes and varnishes, allowed light to penetrate layers of color, while keeping the evidence of brushwork to a minimum. Together, these tropes heightened the semblance of verisimilitude, opening a metaphorical window that was taken for reality, albeit one created as a Platonic ideal.
This pursuit of quintessence created constraints that began to chafe, compelling artists to react against them as the 16th century wore on. Paintings such as Madonna with the Long Neck (1535–40) by Italian Mannerist Parmigianino were exemplary in this regard, deliberately distorting figure and foreshortening to highlight the artifice of painting. Instead of Renaissance equilibrium, Parmigianino offers a vision of the Virgin Mother with an impossibly extended torso holding a giant Christ child; her own hand, and the eponymous feature supporting her head, are likewise elongated beyond natural proportions. The figure of St. Jerome stands in the background at lower right, but rather than receding according to the dictates of perspective, he’s pushed up against the picture plane, resembling a Hummel figurine dwarfed by Mary.
With the dawn of the 17th century, artists continued to diverge from orthodoxy in a number of different ways. Caravaggio eschewed the naturalistic, ambient illumination typical of the High Renaissance in favor of spotlight-like effects that picked subjects out of shallow, murky settings, giving them a cinematic presence avant la lettre. El Greco anticipated 20th-century Expressionism by rendering attenuated figures with broad and clearly visible brush marks, creating images that were miles away from the sublime sfumato of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.
Las Meninas likewise bucked tradition, though not necessarily at first glance. For example, Velázquez’s facture shared some characteristics with El Greco’s, though he pushed pigment around in his canvases to subtler effect. This was true of Las Meninas, as was its adherence the laws of illusionism. But overall, it subverted the rules by adhering to them, creating spatial tensions that confused the dynamics between subject and object.
Las Meninas presents an ensemble gathered in a high-ceilinged chamber in what’s believed to be the Royal Alcázar, the palace-fortress in Madrid that was the seat of the Spanish Empire. They’re gathered around the doll-like figure of Infanta Margaret Theresa, eldest daughter of King Philip IV—who, besides presiding over Spain’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, was Velázquez’s principal benefactor.
The all-female retinue that surrounds the Infanta includes two little people on the right. (It is an odd aspect of court life at this time that servants with achondroplasia were commonly included as part of the household, apparently to make the monarch look bigger at ceremonies.)
Looking straight at us, the princess serves as the scene’s radiant centerpiece, attired in a silken dress with a voluminous hoop skirt tenting the lower half of her body. One might suppose that Las Meninas is an elaborate portrayal of a child potentate cocooned within the accoutrements of dominion. If so, these might include Velázquez himself, as he’s placed himself to her left, peering around the back of an enormous canvas on which he’s rendering his subject. But considering her position relative to the artist’s, it’s certainly not the Infanta. Who, then, is it?
An answer lies at the rear of the room delineated by the orthogonal progression of the ceiling and the window on the right. There, an image of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, his consort and mother of Margaret Theresa, hangs amid an arrangement of other paintings. It appears to be a double likeness of the couple seen from the waist up, but it’s actually their reflection in a small mirror. What we’ve been seeing all along is their point of view from outside the picture, one that happens to correspond with our own. In essence, Velázquez has removed the fourth wall of Renaissance painting, extending it beyond the realm of imagination into the world of the concrete.
Other conundrums abound as well. A narrow door in the back wall is open to reveal a figure paused at the bottom of a flight of stairs, his body in profile while he turns his gaze outward. The man is Don José Nieto Velázquez, the queen’s chamberlain and head of the royal tapestry works (and perhaps a relative of the artist). He stands on the steps with one foot higher than the other, but whether he’s ascending, or descending, we’ll never know.
More concrete, though, is the position of the artist, who, somewhat astonishingly, privileges his presence above the monarch’s. This gesture speaks to the ambitions man who rose from humble beginnings (his father was a notary) to become the King’s official painter and curator of the royal collection. It also suggests that the soft power of art is greater than the bare-knuckle business of ruling.
Other discussions around Las Meninas have gone deeper into the weeds—that the image of Philip and Mariana wasn’t a reflection of them in the room, but rather of them in the painting Velázquez was working on, or that the composition as a whole exists within a mirror. What can be said for sure is that the painting was larger than it currently is: It was trimmed down on both the left and right sides, after sustaining damage during a fire that destroyed the Alcázar in 1734. The Infanta’s face also needed repainting.
Whatever its current condition, however, Las Meninas remains what it has always been: a triumphant puzzle that resists resolution.
The post “Why Is Velázquez’s Las Meninas So Important?” by Anne Doran was published on 06/20/2025 by www.artnews.com