[On Painting] On "Las Meninas" by Diego Velazquez

[Duane]

After many years of studying Las Meninas from afar, I finally got a chance to see it in person. In January of this year I went to the Prado in Madrid with my teacher, Ray Berry, who introduced me to the work of Velazquez in undergraduate school. This was his second time seeing Las Meninas, the first time being a couple of decades ago. I suppose this was a pilgrimage of sorts-- in addition to seeing the painting I think we wanted to pay our respects to a painter who had an enormous influence on how Ray and I think about paint and painting. Velazquez is a painter's painter and most every painter I know reveres him regardless of their pedigree or style of painting. Las Meninas is, by all accounts, Velazquez's masterpiece. Visits to the painting are often described in sacred terms-- apparently you don't just look at Las Meninas, you experience it. Since its completion in 1656, Las Meninas has maintained an almost mythic status, and enthusiasm for the painting has come from an unusually broad swath of disciplines-- Leo Steinberg wrote, "the literature on Las Meninas is an epitome of recent thinking about illusionism and the status of art...a cherished crux for modern investigators, for geometricians, metaphysicians, artist-photographers, semioticians, political and social historians and even rare lovers of art." On the flight to Madrid, I wondered whether the Las Meninas in the Prado would live up to the Las Meninas in my mind. It did.

So after a long and predictably miserable airline experience, we settled into our hotel rooms. We walked down the narrow streets of Las Cortes district to the Prado and to the large Velazquez room which has Las Meninas as its centerpiece. We made our way to the front of the small crowd gathered around it and got our first look.

I've included a couple of visual aids so that you can easily refer to the various passages of Las Meninas that I discuss. One is a Flash slide show which contains several detail images, and the other is a single large image of Las Meninas. I recommend opening each link in a separate window so that you don't have to switch back and forth between my writing and the images:

FLASH SLIDE SHOW (click on the thumbnails at the bottom of the slide show screen to advance images according to the ones referenced throughout the text.) You probably already have a flash player installed on your computer but if you don't, you can download one here.

If for some reason the flash slide show doesn't work, then just go to this page to view a static listing of the slides

HIGH RES IMAGE of Las Meninas (click on the image to enlarge)

At this point I thought it might be helpful to include a brief primer on the painting:

A menina is a "maid of honor."

The painting is about ten feet high and we know the name of every person depicted in it. We see Velazquez on the left working on a similarly-sized canvas with brush and palette in hand, looking in our direction. A menina (Maria Agustina Sarmiento) crouches down to offer a refreshment to the Infanta Margarita who reaches for the small jug as she looks toward us. To the right of Margarita is another menina (Isabel de Velasco) and behind her is a senior-lady-in-waiting (Marcela de Ulloa) dressed in mourning clothes (she was recently widowed) and talking to a guardadamas (a chaperone.) Further right is a dwarf (Mari-Barbola) and to the right of her is a male midget (Nicolasito Pertusato) who nudges Philip's mastiff with his foot (the dog was, apparently, an excellent sitter for portraits.) In the back we see the Queen's chamberlaine (Jose Nieto) looking on and in the mirror we see the image of Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Austria. A window to our right lights the scene.

On the face of it, this is a behind-the-scenes view of a family portrait in the making, but as you look more deeply some fundamental questions arise which in turn raise further questions: Is Velazquez, as seen in the painting, making a portrait of the King and Queen, of the Infanta Margarita, or all three (maybe the Infanta is taking a break from posing with the royal couple?) It has been theorized that the dog was Phillip's personal Spanish mastiff (who use to follow him around the palace) so perhaps the King has just finished watching Velazquez work on his daughter's portrait and is now about to leave-- thus Nicolasito nudges the dog to wake up. Who is everyone looking at-- us (the viewer) or the King? Are we looking through the King's eyes? Is the image in the mirror of the King and Queen (see slide 1) a direct reflection of them or is it a reflection of their painted image on the canvas that Velazquez is working on? And just what is on the canvas that Velazquez is working on-- is it an different portrait of the royal couple or is it Las Meninas? It is a wonderful mystery; a visual riddle that never quite resolves itself-- a reflection of a reflection of a reflection and down you go down the rabbit hole. Leo Steinberg equated Las Meninas to an encounter, "... the picture conducts itself the way a vital presence behaves. It creates an encounter. And, as in any living encounter, any vital exchange, the work of art becomes the opposite pole in a situation of reciprocal self-recognition. If the picture were speaking instead of flashing, it would be saying: I see you seeing me--I in you see myself seen-- see you seeing yourself being seen--and so on beyond the reaches of grammar."

When I first saw it I didn't think about the paint, or the composition, or the narrative. The "art" disappeared and in place of it there was, as Steinberg wrote, an odd sense of being seen and in turn seeing back. Really. I'm not exaggerating. It is a strangely visceral experience. My initial impression was that I was looking through the King's eyes (seen reflected in the mirror on the back wall) at the scene before me and thus making me a participant and a bystander at the same time (like in the movie Being John Malkovich.) It is almost startling in the same way watching a play from the front row of a small theater can be startling when an actor happens to look directly at us as he speaks a line-- for a brief moment we believe the actor is conversing with us. You might assume this odd sensation comes from the simple fact that the subjects are looking toward us as though we had interrupted the portrait session and the mirror, in essence, includes us in the composition. But there is something more happening here, a shock of reality; a hyper-representation that can't be explained by compositional devices alone. Velazquez creates a palpable air that surrounds the subjects, the room they inhabit, and even us. This is where reproductions fail miserably because much of this gets lost in translation. When you stand before all ten feet of Las Meninas there is a sense of ones eyes being "activated" to react as they do when seeing something in real life rather than in a painting. It is difficult to isolate what, exactly, is causing this but I have a few ideas.

In Las Meninas I believe Velazquez exaggerated or "goosed" the natural inclination of our eyes to view things conically. We have a cone of vision that is clearest toward the center and softer toward the outside (our peripheral vision.) There is a cone of vision that surrounds the infanta and extends out to include the menina kneeling down to her, as well as the standing menina to the her immediate right and left. Outside of that cone of sharpness the figures are painted differently-- the forms are slightly softer. I should point out that when I say the forms are softer I do not mean they are blurred in the photographic sense. Our peripheral vision is not blurred. Blurring is really just a symbol or stand-in for peripheral vision, though it is a close enough approximation of it (and depth of field) that we interpret it as such. Part of this softness is because Velazquez is representing figures in shadow, yet the dwarf and the midget are well into the light and their features are clearly less defined (see slide 2.) The effect is subtle-- obviously if he simply sharpened the Infanta and smeared everything else in some formulaic manner, the peripheral forms would fall apart when looked at directly. This is clearly not the case.

There is movement in Las Meninas too. Not prolonged, animated movement but flickers of movement-- the dwarf nudging the Phillip's mastiff as his hands rise up slightly for balance. The menina dropping down, her left hand bending up slightly as she asks or pleads with a slightly defiant (or perhaps distracted) Infanta Margarita whether she wants the red vase; the man in the back pulling back the curtain, the senior lady-in-waiting talking with her hands, the midget looking up as she brings her thumb and forefinger together, and Velazquez with his brush as he bends to see around the canvas. Heads turn and eyes glance toward us. The only person completely still is the chaperone in the shadow and the King and Queen in the mirror. I sense that even the dog is moving slightly as he is being awakened with the nudge. Part of the sensation of movement comes from the characters being precisely posed, but it is enhanced by the paint application. We are strangely adept at interpreting paint, even in the abstract, so a quick flick of paint can imply movement and a slow mark can imply stillness. We know fast paint when we see it and we instinctively associate it with movement. Lively paint in other words, can be a kind of animation because its looseness conveys change and impermanence -- because the paint breathes the subjects breath. There are no passages in Las Meninas where the paint is precious or static-- there are no heavy glazes or overly-caressed chirascura (see slide 3) and he never seems to lose touch with the texture of the canvas surface (see slide 4.) A lesser painter would have polished and smoothed and glazed Las Meninas to make it fashionably finished and would have unknowingly killed it in the process. Las Meninas feels like an improvisation-- but a perfect improvisation, a preparatory oil sketch that required no finished version. Indeed, the evidence indicates that Velazquez just dived in, probably starting with a quick sketch made with thinned paint. X-rays reveal several small pentimenti he made along the way-- you can see one of them if you look at the standing leg of the Nicloasito. There is a shadow of a previously painted leg. A nice example of how Velazquez works can be seen in one of his unfinished painting (see slide 5.) Notice how quickly he gets to the heart of the matter in her right hand. Her pinky finger is a single dash or two of paint. To Velazquez, painting and drawing happen at the same time.

An important aspect of the painting that also gets lost in reproductions is the texture of the paint and the canvas underneath, and the role they both play in creating a sense of air around the subjects. In general, if you place a thin patch of paint on a canvas and then add a thick stroke of paint on top of it, the thick paint will seem to come forward while the thin paint will recede (the same goes for sharp and soft edges-- sharp comes forward, soft recedes) and thus we cannot help but sense space between the two marks, a distance that sinks into the canvas. Look, for instance, at the edge of Margarita's dress and the slightly thinner paint behind it (slide 6.) In effect, air is created between the two. There are many passages in Las Meninas where there is this subtle pushing and pulling of paint-- "half-gram poems of paint" to paraphrase Louis Finkelstein in one of his essays on painting. In reproductions the ceiling area and shadowed background space often seems muddy and dead, but there is a slight sheen to the paint/varnish and, when the texture of the canvas (which is revealed because the paint is thin) is scraped by the museum lighting, it reads as almost smoky or atmospheric. One of Ray's observations was that there seems to be a box of air that extends out in front of the canvas which envelopes the viewer and so the ceiling covers us as well as the royal family. Velazquez is including us in the painting.

Ray and I spent many hours (and many drinks) in various bars around The Prado talking about Las Meninas and how it came to be and why it still resonates so profoundly. One's mind sinks into Las Meninas. It is hard not to create a narrative around it or to feel a connection to the people depicted. I imagine Velazquez and Philip were close friends (or as close as a King could be with a painter) and that in Las Meninas they conspired to make a great painting for themselves and for Spain. I've read that depicting a painter with the royal family was highly unusual. It is possible that this was a way for the King to impart to Velazquez a degree of noble status and reward him for his service to Spain. The family entourage must have been thrilled to be playing such a rare prominent role in a royal portrait by the great Velazquez. (like getting a small part in a Spielberg movie today.) I envision the children occasionally sneaking into the studio to watch how they were being immortalized. Indeed, it is known that Philip visited the work in progress quite frequently.

Las Meninas is rich and complex and can be about many things but I can't help but think that it is mostly about family and remembering. I have a wall of family photographs in my house, some old some new. From time to time I try to remember details of the moments depicted: who took this picture? Which wedding were we at when it was taken? When? Who is that in the background? What was going on in my life then? These old snapshots become part of a ritual of remembering or, perhaps, of not forgetting. I can imagine Las Meninas as serving, to some degree, a similar purpose for Philip. Here is Margarita (whom he referred to in letters as his "joy") among the people he saw most often in his daily life and perhaps the people he knew best. They are not in a formal setting or in an artificially official pose, but rather we see them without a royal veneer: a family being a family (I can picture Velazquez and Philip discussing, with some amusement, which mannerism or expression to include in the painting that would most accurately represent each person.) Nobody is really sure why, but for ten years prior to Las Meninas Philip did not sit for a portrait. It has been theorized that the for a time he was in mourning over the death of his first wife, Elisabeth of Bourbon, and two years later the death of his son, Baltasar Carlos. Letters also indicate that he was sensitive about being portrayed as an aging king. Whatever the reason, he must had some sense of fragility, of things changing. Spain, after years of constant war, was in decline. I imagine that for Philip the time depicted in Las Meninas was a relative sweet spot in his life and a time he wanted to remember during the inevitable changes to come. Velazquez died a few years after Las Meninas was completed and several years later Philip would be planning and preparing Margarita to be married off to King Leopold I of Austria (a year after Philip's death, Maragarita was on her way to Austria.) Upon Velazquez's death, Philip awarded him the Order of Santiago which we see represented as a red cross on Velazquez's chest. It is said that Philip painted the cross himself. In the margin of an official correspondence dealing with choosing Velazquez's successor, Philip wrote, "I am crushed."

From the day it was finished, Las Meninas resided in Philip's private office until his death in 1665. I can imagine Philip looking up at it often and remembering.





a postscript- you may be curious to know, as I was, what happened to Margarita in a "where are they now?" kind of way. Here is a blurb from Wikipedia:

In the summer of 1666, the fifteen-year-old Spanish infanta left Spain and traveled with several Spanish attendants to Austria, where she was solemnly welcomed by Leopold I. Their wedding took place in Vienna on 5 December 1666. Despite the difference in their ages and Leopold's unattractive appearance, the couple were very happy together since they shared a number of interests, especially theatre and music. She called him "Uncle" (even after they were married); he called her "Gretl".

One of the most outstanding events during their reign was the splendid performance of the opera Il pomo d'oro ("The golden apple") by the Italian composer Marco Antonio Cesti in order to celebrate Margaret Theresa's seventeenth birthday in July 1668. This magnificent performance is frequently considered as the peak of the Baroque opera in Vienna during the seventeenth century.

After giving birth to six children and weakened by many miscarriages, Margarita Teresa died at the age of twenty-one — leaving Leopold heartbroken. Her only surviving child was the Archduchess Maria Antonia.

And here are a couple of paintings of her-- the first one was done a few years after Las Meninas and was painted by Velazquez (Ray aptly described her as looking like a puff pastry.) The second portrait was painted by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo who depicted her in mourning dress in the year of her Father's death.

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Posted By Duane to On Painting at 7/05/2008 02:02:00 PM