What Makes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas One of the Most Fascinating Paintings in Art History
Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninas almost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scrutiny ever since. If the public’s appetite to know more about it has diminished over time, that certainly isn’t reflected in the view count of the analysis from YouTube channel Rabbit Hole above, which as of this writing has crossed the 2.5 million mark. So has this video on Las Meninas from Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter. What element of this particular painting has stoked such fascination, generation after generation after generation? Easier, perhaps, to ask what element hasn’t.
“Through the 36 years he worked for King Philip IV, Velázquez produced dozens of paintings of the Spanish royal family,” says the narrator of the Rabbit Hole video. But the large-scale Las Meninas is different: “the painting appears more like a snapshot of daily life than a typical visage of royals posing to be painted.”
The figures it depicts include Philip’s five-year-old daughter Infanta Margaret Theresa and her entourage, as well as Velázquez himself, at work on a painting — which may be a portrait of the king and queen, reflected as they are on the mirror in the back wall, or perhaps the very image we’re looking at. Or could we possibly be Philip and Mariana ourselves?
On the rearmost plane of Las Meninas stands the queen’s chamberlain Don José Nieto Velázquez (possibly a relation of the artist), on whom it can hardly be a coincidence that all of the painting’s lines converge, like a vanishing point on the horizon. Diego Velázquez’s representation of himself bears an even more conspicuous detail: the knighthood-symbolizing red cross called the Order of Santiago. Born a commoner, Velázquez worked for most of his life in close proximity to the royals, and seems to have made no big secret of his aspirations to join their ranks. Presumably, the Order of Santiago was added after the painting was complete, since Las Meninas is dated to 1656, but Velázquez wasn’t finally knighted until 1659, close to the end of his life.
Different theories exist to explain who exactly added that red cross to the painting, as covered by YouTuber-gallerist James Payne in the Great Art Explained video just above. Like most works of art that have endured through the centuries, Las Meninas has its unsolvable historical mysteries, despite its unusually well-documented creation. But for serious art enthusiasts, the most compelling question remains that of just how Velázquez pulled it all off. “Las Meninas, with all its splendid effects, is a vigorous argument for the virtue of painting,” says Puschak. “This gets at the heart of the mirror, the vanishing point, and the multiple centers of focus. ‘See what my art can do,’ Velázquez is saying to the viewer” — whether that viewer is King Philip, or someone across the world nearly four centuries later.
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Salvador Dalí Sketches Five Spanish Immortals: Cervantes, Don Quixote, El Cid, El Greco & Velázquez
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.