Las Meninas

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Las Meninas (Spanish for The Maids of Honour) is a painting of 1656 by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It has long been recognised as one of the most important paintings in Western art history. The Baroque painter Luca Giordano said that it represents the "theology of painting", while Sir Thomas Lawrence called the work "the philosophy of art". More recently, it has been described as "Velázquez's supreme achievement, a highly self-conscious, calculated demonstration of what painting could achieve and perhaps the most searching comment ever made on the possibilities of the easel painting."

Las Meninas shows a large room in the Madrid palace of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures, most identifiable, from the Spanish court caught in a particular moment like a snapshot, as many writers have remarked. Some look out of the canvas at us, whilst others act among themselves. The young Infanta Margarita is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, and two dwarfs. Just behind them, Velázquez himself is shown while working on a large canvas. His gaze is directed neither at the canvas or any of the depicted figures. Velázquez looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand. A mirror hangs in the background, and reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen of Spain. The actual royal couple appear to be placed outside the picture space in a similar position to that of the viewer, though some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on.

The painting raises many questions about reality and illusion. Because of the problems and paradoxes of perspective presented, as well as the complex relationship between the viewer and the different figures, Las Meninas has been widely analysed and interpreted since its creation.

Background

Court of Philip IV

In seventeenth-century Spain, painters rarely enjoyed high social status. The art of painting was regarded as a craft, inferior to the higher arts such as poetry or music. Nonetheless, Velázquez, worked his way up through the ranks of Philip IV's court, and in February 1651, he was appointed palace chamberlain (aposentador mayor del palacio). The post brought him considerable status and material reward, but its duties made heavy demands on his time. During the remaining eight years of his life, he painted only a few works, mostly portraits of the royal family. He had been thirty-three years in the royal household at the time he painted Las Meninas.

Detail showing Philips IV's daughter, the Infanta Margarita. Her left cheek was largely repainted following fire damage in 1734.

Philip IV's first wife, Elisabeth of Bourbon, died in 1644, and Philip’s son and only heir, Baltasar Carlos, died two years later. The resulting lack of a successor forced Philip to remarry, and in 1649 he wed Mariana of Austria.^[a] Velázquez, then at the height of his powers, painted portraits of Mariana and her children, Margarita and Felipe Prospero, but Philip himself resisted being portrayed in his old age. However, he allowed Velázquez to include him in Las Meninas. In the early 1650s, he gave Velázquez the Pieza Principal ("main room") of the late Baltasar Carlos's living quarters to use as his studio. It is here that Las Meninas is set. Philip had his own chair in the studio, and would often sit and watch Velázquez at work. Though constrained by rigid etiquette, the art-loving king seems to have had an unusually close relationship with the painter. After Velázquez's death, he wrote "I am crushed" in the margin of a memorandum on the choice of his successor.

During Velázquez's late 1640s and 1650s period as court painter, he also served as the curator of Philip IV's expanding collection of European art. He seems to have been given an unusual degree of freedom in the role. He supervised the decoration and interior design of the rooms holding the most valued paintings, adding mirrors, statues, and tapestries. He was also responsible for the sourcing, attribution, hanging, and inventory of many of the Spanish king's paintings. By the early 1650s, Velázquez was widely respected in Spain as a connoisseur and for the attributions he made on the authorship of paintings in Philip's collection. Much of the collection of the Prado today—including works by Titian, Raphael, and Rubens—was acquired and assembled under Velázquez's curatorship.

Provenance and condition of painting

The painting was described in the earliest inventories as La Familia ("The Family"). A detailed description of the painting, to which we owe the identification of several of the figures, was published by the Vasari of the Spanish Golden Age, Antonio Palomino in 1724.

Examination under infra-red has shown that Velázquez made minor pentimenti or alterations to the figures as he worked; at first his own head inclined to his right, rather than his left. The painting was damaged in the fire that completely destroyed the Alcázar in 1734, and was restored by court painter Juan García de Miranda (1677–1749). The left cheek of the Infanta was almost completely repainted to compensate for a substantial loss of pigment. In recent years, the picture has suffered a loss of texture and hue. Due to exposure to pollution and crowds of visitors, the once-vivid contrasts between blue and white pigments in the costumes of the meninas has faded. The painting has been cut down on both the left and right sides. It was last cleaned in 1984 under the supervision of the American conservator John Brealey, due to a "yellow veil" of dust that had gathered since the previous restoration in the ninetheenth-century. The cleaning provoked, according to the art historian Federico Zeri, "furious protests, not because the picture had been damaged in any way, but because it looked different". However, in the opinion of López-Rey, "this restoration was impeccable." Due to its size, importance, and value, the painting does not travel, and is not lent out for exhibition.^[b]

Description

Subject matter

The Infanta Margarita (1651–1673), in mourning dress for her father in 1666, by Juan del Mazo. The background figures include her young brother Charles II and the dwarf Maribarbola, also in Las Meninas. She left Spain for her marriage in Vienna the same year.

Las Meninas is set in Velázquez's studio in in Philip IV's Alcázar palace in Madrid. The high-ceilinged room is presented, in the words of Silvio Gaggi, as "a simple box that could be divided into a perspective grid with a single vanishing point". In the center of the room's foreground stands the Infanta Margarita (1638–1683). The five-year-old princess, who later married the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, was at this point Philip and Mariana's only surviving child.^[c] She is attended by two ladies-in-waiting, or meninas: Dona Isabel de Velasco, who is poised to curtsy to the princess, and Dona María Agustina Sarmiento de Sotomayor, who kneels before Margarita, offering her a drink from a red cup, or bucaro, that she holds on a golden tray. To the right of the Infanta are two dwarfs: the achondroplastic German Maribarbola, and the Italian Nicolas Pertusato, who playfully tries to rouse a sleeping mastiff with his foot. Behind them stands Dona Marcela de Ulloa, the princess's chaperone, dressed in mourning and talking to an unidentified bodyguard (or guardadamas').

To the rear and at right stands Don Jose Nieto Velázquez, the queen's chamberlain during the 1650s, and the head of the royal tapestry works, who may have been a relative of the artist. Nieto is shown pausing, with his right knee bent and his feet on different steps. As the art critic Harriet Stone observes, we cannot be sure whether he is "coming or going". He is rendered in silhouette and appears to hold open a curtain on a short flight of stairs, with an unclear wall or space behind. Both this backlight and the open doorway reveal space behind and, in the words of the art historian Analisa Leppanen, lure "our eyes inescapably into the depths". The royal couple's reflection pushes in the opposite direction, forward into the picture space. As is shown by extending the line of the meeting of wall and ceiling on the right, the vanishing point of the perspective is in the doorway. Nieto is seen only by the king and queen, who share the viewer's perspective, and not by the figures in the foreground.

Velázquez himself is pictured to the left of the scene, looking outward before a large canvas supported by an easel. On his chest is the red cross of the Order of Santiago, which he did not receive until 1659, three years after the painting was completed. According to Palomino, Philip IV ordered this to be added after Velázquez's death, "and some say that his Majesty himself painted it". From the painter's belt hang the symbolic keys of his court offices.

Detail of the mirror hung on the back wall, showing the reflected images of Philip IV, and his queen Mariana of Austria.

A mirror on the back wall reflects the upper bodies and heads of two figures identified from other paintings and by Palomino as King Philip IV and his Queen, Mariana. The most common assumption is that the reflection shows the couple in the pose they are holding for Velázquez as he paints them, whilst their daughter watches; and that the painting therefore shows their view of the scene.

Of the nine figures depicted, five are looking directly out at the royal couple, or the viewer. Their glances, along with the king and queen's reflection, affirm the royal couple's presence outside the painted space. Alternatively, the art historian H. W. Janson suggests that the image of the king and queen is a reflection from Velázquez's canvas, the front of which is obscured from the viewer. Other writers say the canvas Velázquez is painting is too large for a portrait and about the same size as Las Meninas. Las Meninas contains the only known double portrait of the royal couple painted by Velázquez.

The point of view of the picture is approximately that of the royal couple, though this has been widely debated. Many critics suppose that the scene is viewed by the king and queen as they pose for a double portrait, while the Infanta and her companions are present to relieve the boredom. Others speculate that Velázquez represents himself painting the Infanta Margarita. No single theory has found universal agreement.

The back wall of the room, which is in shadow, is hung with rows of paintings, including one of a series of scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses by Peter Paul Rubens and copies, by Velázquez's son-in-law and principal assistant Juan del Mazo, of works by Jacob Jordaens. The paintings are shown in the exact positions recorded in an inventory taken around this time. The righthand wall is hung with a grid of eight smaller paintings, visible mainly as frames owing to their angle from the viewer. They can be identified from the inventory as more Mazo copies of paintings from the Rubens Ovid series, though only two of the subjects can be seen.

Composition

Detail of Dona María de Sotomayor, showing Velázquez's free brushwork on her dress.

The painted surface is divided into quarters horizontally and sevenths vertically, and this grid is used to organise the elaborate grouping of characters. The technique was commonplace at the time. Velázquez presents nine figures—eleven if the king and queen's reflected images are taken into account—yet they occupy only half the area of the canvas.

The viewer looks into a scene which is several layers deep. The first is defined by the canvas and the dog and the male dwarf on the right. The second zone of the composition contains the figures of the Infanta and her maids and dwarf. Then comes the artist himself, and set slightly behind him the chaperone and guard, and well behind them the plane of the rear wall with its rows of paintings. Beyond this, through the door, the stands the figure of Nieto. The reflection in the mirror on the rear wall creates a further zone.

In 1960, the art historian Kenneth Clark suggested that the success of the composition results first and foremost from the accurate handling of tone:

Each focal point involves us in a new set of relations; and to paint a complex group like the Meninas, the painter must carry in his head a single consistent scale of relations which he can apply throughout. He may use all kinds of devices to help him do this - perspective is one of them - but ultimately the truth about a complete visual impression depends on one thing, truth of tone. Drawing may be summary, colours drab, but if the relations of tone are true, the picture will hold.

As well as by tone, the scale of relations is managed by the play of light and shade and the application of linear perspective. The pictorial space in the midground and foreground is lit from two sources; by thin shafts of light from the open door, and by broad streams from the window to the right. The light from the window illuminates both the studio foreground and the unrepresented area in front of it, where the king, queen, and viewer are assumed to be. The mirror acts as a focus of reflected light. The British critic Jonathan Miller points out that apart from "adding suggestive gleams at the bevelled edges, the most important way the mirror betrays its identity is by disclosing imagery whose brightness is so inconsistent with the dimness of the surrounding wall that it can only have been borrowed, by reflection, from the strongly illuminated figures of the King and Queen".

Despite certain spatial ambiguities, this is the painter's most thoroughly rendered architectural space. In the view of Stone:

We cannot take in all the figures of the painting in one glance. Not only do the life-size proportions of the painting preclude such an appreciation, but also the fact that the heads of the figures are turned in different directions means that our gaze is deflected. The painting communicates through images which, in order to be understood, must thus be considered in sequence, one after the other, in the context of a history that is still unfolding. It is a history that is still unframed, even in this painting composed of frames within frames.

According to López-Rey, Las Meninas has three focal points: the Infanta Margarita, the self-portrait, and the half-length reflected images of Philip IV and Queen Mariana. Within the composition, the bareness of the dark ceiling, the back of Velázquez's canvas, and the strict geometry of framed paintings contrast with the animated, brilliantly lit and sumptuously painted foreground entourage. In no other composition did Velázquez so dramatically lead the eye to areas beyond the viewer's sight. The canvas he is seen painting, and the space beyond the frame where the King and Queen stand, can only be imagined.

Mirror and reflection

In the Arnolfini Portrait (1483), Jan van Eyck uses an image reflected in a mirror in a similar manner to Velázquez in Las Meninas.

The spatial structure and positioning of the mirror's reflection are such that Philip IV and Mariana appear to be standing on the viewer's side of the pictorial space, facing the Infanta and her entourage. According to Janson, not only is the gathering of figures in the foreground for Philip and his wife’s benefit, the painter's attention is concentrated on the couple, as he appears to be working on their portrait. Although they can only be seen in the mirror reflection, their distant image occupies a central position in the canvas, in terms of social hierarchy as well as composition. As spectators, our position in relation to the painting is uncertain. It has been debated whether the ruling couple are standing beside the viewer or have replaced the viewer, who sees the scene through their eyes. Lending weight to the latter idea are the gazes of three of the figures—Velázquez, the Infanta, and Maribarbola—who appear to be looking directly at the viewer.

The mirror on the back wall indicates what is not there: the king and queen, and in the words of Harriet Stone, "the generations of spectators who assume the couple's place before the painting". Writing in 1980, the critics Snyder and Cohn, observed,

[Velázquez] wanted the mirror to depend upon the useable painted canvas for its image. Why should he want that? The luminous image in the mirror appears to reflect the king and queen themselves, but it does more than just this: the mirror outdoes nature. The mirror image is only a reflection. A reflection of what? Of the real thing—of the art of Velázquez. In the presence of his divinely ordained monarchs … Velázquez exults in his artistry and counsels Philip and Maria not to look for the revelation of their image in the natural reflection of a looking glass but rather in the penetrating vision of their master painter. In the presence of Velázquez, a mirror image is a poor imitation of the real.

In Las Meninas, the king and queen are supposedly "outside" the painting, yet their reflection in the back wall mirror also places them "inside" the pictorial space.

Detail of the mirror in van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Van Eyck's painting shows the the pictorial space from "behind", and also two further figures in front of the picture space, like those in the reflection in the mirror in Las Meninas.

The painting is likely to have been influenced by Jan van Eyck's 1434 painting the Arnolfini Portrait. At the time, van Eyck's painting hung in Philip's palace, and would have been familiar to Velázquez. The Arnolfini Portrait also has a mirror positioned the back of the pictorial space, reflecting two figures who would have the same angle of vision as does the viewer of Velázquez's painting; they are too small to identify but it has been speculated one may be intended as the artist himself, though he is not shown in the act of painting. According to Lucien Dällenbach:

The mirror [in Las Meninas] faces the observer as in Van Eyck's painting. But here the procedure is more realistic to the degree that the "rearview" mirror in which the royal couple appears is no longer convex but flat. Whereas the reflection in the Flemish painting recomposed objects and characters within a space that is condensed and deformed by the curve of the mirror, that of Velázquez refuses to play with the laws of perspective: it projects onto the canvas the perfect double of the king and queen positioned in front of the painting. Moreover, in showing the figures whom the painter observes, and also, through the mediation of the mirror, the figures who are observing him, the painter achieves a reciprocity of gazes that makes the interior oscillate with the exterior and which causes the image to "emerge from its frame" at the same time that it invites the visitors to enter the painting.

Jonathan Miller asks: "What are we to make of the blurred features of the royal couple? It is unlikely that it has anything to do with the optical imperfection of the mirror, which would, in reality, have displayed a focused image of the King and Queen." He also notes that "in addition to the represented mirror, he teasingly implies an unrepresented one, without which it is difficult to imagine how he could have shown himself painting the picture we now see."

Interpretation

The elusiveness of Las Meninas, according to the writer Dawson Carr, "suggests that art, and life, are an illusion". The relationship between illusion and reality were central concerns in Spanish culture during the seventeenth-century, figuring largely in the best-known work of Spanish Baroque literature, Don Quixote. In this respect, Calderón de la Barca's poem Life is a Dream is commonly seen as the literary equivalent of Velázquez's painting:

What is a life? A frenzy. What is life?
A shadow, an illusion, and a sham.
The greatest good is small; all life, it seams
Is just a dream, and even dreams are dreams.

Detail showing the red cross of Order of Santiago painted on the breast of Velázquez. Palamino recorded that "they say" that the cross was added by Philip IV after the painting was completed.

The writer Jon Manchip White notes that the painting can be seen as a résumé of the whole of Velázquez's life and career, as well as a summary of his art to that point. He placed his only confirmed self-portrait in a room in the royal palace surrounded by an assembly of royalty, courtiers, and fine objects that represent his life at court. The art historian Svetlana Alpers suggests that in his portrayal of the artist at work in the company of royalty and nobility, Velázquez was seeking to claim high status for both the artist and his art, and in particular to propose that painting is a liberal rather than a mechanical art. This distinction was a point of controversy at the time. It would have been significant to Velázquez, since the rules of the Order of Santiago excluded those from mechanical occupations.

The twentieth-century French philosopher and cultural critic Michel Foucault devoted the opening chapter of his 1970 book The Order of Things to an analysis of Las Meninas. Foucault describes the painting in meticulous and minute detail, but in a language that is "neither prescribed by, nor filtered through the various texts of art-historical investigation". Foucault views the painting without regard to the subject matter or the artists’ biography, technical ability, sources and influences, social context, or relationship with his patrons. Instead he analyses its conscious artifice, highlighting the complex network of visual relationships between painter, subject-model, and viewer:

We are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us. A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another's glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another as they cross. And yet this slender line of reciprocal visibility embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints. The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject.

For Foucault, Las Meninas contains the first signs of a new episteme, or way of thinking, in European art. It represents a mid-point between what he sees as the two “great discontinuities” in art history, the classical and the modern: "Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velazquez, the representation as it were of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us ... representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form."

Las Meninas as culmination of themes in Velázquez

File:Martha and mary.jpg

Diego Velázquez's Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 1618. The smaller image may be a view to another room, a picture on the wall, or a reflection in a mirror.

Many aspects of Las Meninas relate to earlier works by Velázquez where he plays with conventions of representation. In the Rokeby Venus—his only surviving nude— the face of the subject is visible, blurred beyond any realism, in a mirror. The angle of the mirror is such that although "often described as looking at herself, [she] is more disconcertingly looking at us" In the early Christ in the House of Martha and Mary of 1618,^[d] Christ and his companions are seen only through a serving hatch to a room behind, according to the National Gallery, who are clear that this is the intention, although before restoration many art historians regarded this scene as either a painting hanging on the wall in the main scene, or a reflection in a mirror, and the debate has continued.^[e] The dress worn in the two scenes also differs—the main scene is in contemporary dress, whilst the scene with Christ uses conventional iconographic biblical dress. This is also a feature of Los Borrachos of 1629, where contemporary peasants consort with the god Bacchus and his companions, who have the conventional undress of mythology. In this, as in some of his early bodegones, the figures look directly at the viewer, as if seeking a reaction.

In Las Hilanderas, painted the year after Las Meninas, two different scenes from Ovid are shown, one in contemporary dress, and the other, in antique dress, as a tapestry on the back wall of a room behind the first. In a series of portraits of the late 1630s and 1640s, all now in the Prado, Velázquez painted clowns and other members of the royal household posing as gods, heroes or philosophers; the intention is certainly partly comic, at least for those in the know, but in a highly ambiguous way.

His portraits of the royal family themselves had hitherto been straightforward, if often unflatteringly direct and highly complex in expression. On the other hand, his royal portraits, designed to be seen across vast palace rooms, feature more strongly than his other works the bravura handling for which Velázquez is famous: "Velázquez's handling of paint is exceptionally free, and as one approaches Las Meninas there is a point at which the figures suddenly dissolve into smears and blobs of paint. The long-handled brushes he used enabled him to stand back and judge the total effect."

Influence

In 1692, the Neapolitan painter Luca Giordano (1634–1726) became one of the few allowed to view paintings held in Philip IV's private apartments, and was greatly impressed by Las Meninas. Giordano described the work as the "theology of painting", and was inspired to paint A Homage to Velázquez (National Gallery, London). By the early eighteenth century, Velázquez's work was gaining recognition beyond Spain. British collectors, seeking to buy his work, began to travel to Spain by the later part of the century. The popularity of Italian art was then at its height amongst British connoisseurs, so they concentrated on those of Velázquez's works that showed obvious influence from Italian painting, while largely ignoring works such as Las Meninas.

An almost immediate influence can be seen in the two portraits by Mazo of figures from Las Meninas, which in some ways reverse the motif of that painting. Ten years later, in 1666, he painted the Infanta Margarita (above)—who was then fifteen and just about to leave Madrid to marry the Holy Roman Emperor—and in the background showed figures in two further receding doorways, one of which was the new King, her brother, and another the same dwarf, Maribarbola, who appears here. Another Mazo portrait of the Queen, by then widowed, again shows, through a doorway in the Alcázar, the young King with dwarfs, possibly including Maribarbola, and attendants who offer him a drink.

File:Charles IV of Spain and His Family 1.jpg

Francisco Goya's Charles IV of Spain and His Family references Las Meninas, but is less sympathetic towards its subjects than Velázquez's portrait.

Francisco Goya etched a print of Las Meninas in 1778, and later used Velázquez's painting as the model for his Charles IV of Spain and His Family. As in Las Meninas, the royal family in Goya's work is apparently visiting the artist's studio. In both paintings the artist is shown working on a canvas, of which only the rear is visible. Goya, however, replaces the atmospheric and warm perspective of Las Meninas with what Pierre Gassier calls a sense of "imminent suffocation". Goya's royal family is presented on a "stage facing the public, while in the shadow of the wings the painter, with a grim smile, points and says: 'Look at them and judge for yourself!'"

The nineteenth-century British art collector William John Bankes traveled to Spain during the Peninsular War (1808–1823) and acquired a copy of Las Meninas painted by Mazo, which he believed to be an original preparatory oil sketch by Velázquez—though Velázquez did not usually paint studies. Bankes described his purchase as "the glory of my collection", noting that he had been "a long while in treaty for it and was obliged to pay a high price." The copy was admired throughout the nineteenth century in Britain.

The art world developed a new appreciation for Velázquez's less Italianate paintings after 1819, when Ferdinand VII opened the royal collection to the public. In 1882, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) painted a homage to Las Meninas in his The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, while the Irish artist Sir John Lavery (1856–1941) chose Velázquez's masterpiece as the basis for his portrait The Royal Family at Buckingham Palace, 1913. George V visited Lavery's studio during the execution of the painting, and, perhaps remembering the legend that Philip IV had daubed the cross of the Knights of Santiago on the figure of Velázquez, asked Lavery if he could contribute to the portrait with his own hand. According to Lavery, "Thinking that royal blue might be an appropriate colour, I mixed it on the palette, and taking a brush he [George V] applied it to the Garter ribbon".

During 1957, Pablo Picasso painted 58 recreations of Las Meninas.".

Between August and December 1957, Pablo Picasso painted a series of 58 interpretations of Las Meninas in his characteristically cubist form. These paintings currently fill the Las Meninas room of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, Spain. Picasso did not vary the characters within the series, but largely retained the naturalness of the scene, his works comprise, according to the museum, an "exhaustive study of form, rhythm, colour and movement". A print of 1973 by Richard Hamilton called Picasso's Meninas draws on both Velázquez and Picasso.

In 2004, the video artist Eve Sussman shot 89 Seconds at Alcázar, a high-definition video tableau inspired by Las Meninas. The work is an artistic recreation of the moments leading up to and directly following the approximately 89 seconds when the royal family and their courtiers would have come together in the exact configuration of Velázquez’s painting. To make 89 Seconds at Alcázar, the artist assembled a team of 35, including an architect, set designer, choreographer, costume designer, actors, actresses and a film crew.

Notes

a. ^{^} Mariana of Austria had originally been intended to marry Baltasar Carlos.

b. ^{^} Exceptionally, it was evacuated by the Republican Government, together with much of the Prado's collection, during the last months of the Spanish Civil War to Geneva, where it hung in an exhibition of Spanish paintings in 1939, next to Picasso's Guernica.

c. ^{^} Philip's only surviving child from his first marriage was now Queen to Louis XIV of France. Philip Prospero, Prince of Asturias was born the following year, but died at four, shortly before his brother Charles II was born. In addition, one daughter from this marriage, and five from Philip's first marriage, had died in infancy.

d. ^{^} According to López-Rey, "[The Arnolfini Portrait] has little in common with Velázquez' composition, the closest and most meaningful antecedent to which is to be found within his own oeuvre in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, painted almost forty years earlier, in Seville, before he could have seen the Arnolfini portrait in Madrid."

e. ^{^} The restoration was in 1964, and removed earlier "clumsy repainting". Jonathan Miller, in 1998, continued to regard the inset picture as a reflection in a mirror.

Sources

• Alpers, Svetlana. The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others. Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-3001-0825-7
• Brady, Xavier. Velázquez and Britain. Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 1-8570-0303-8
• Carr, Dawson. Painting and Reality: The Art and life of Velázquez. Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 1-8570-0303-8
• Clark, Kenneth. Looking at Pictures. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1960.
• Gaggi, Silvio. Modern/Postmodern: A Study in Twentieth-Century Arts and Ideas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. ISBN 0-8122-1384-X
• Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. ISBN 0-6797-5335-4
• Honour, Hugh & Fleming, John. A World History of Art. London: Macmillan, 1982. ISBN 1-8566-9451-8
• Kahr, Madlyn Millner. Velazquez and Las Meninas, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 57, No. 2 (June 1975). p. 225. JSTOR
• Janson, H. W. History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
• López-Rey, José. Velázquez: Catalogue Raisonné. Taschen, 1999. ISBN 3-8228-8277-1
• MacLaren, Neil, revised Allan Braham: The Spanish School, National Gallery Catalogues. National Gallery, London, 1970. ISBN 0-9476-4546-2
• Miller, Jonathan, On reflection, National Gallery Publications Limited (1998). ISBN 0-3000-7713-0
• Museo del Prado. Museo del Prado, Catálogo de las pinturas. Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, Madrid, 1996. ISBN 8-4748-3410-4
• Searle, John R. Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation. Critical Inquiry, 6, Spring, 1980.
• Snyder, Joel & Cohen, Ted. Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost. Critical Inquiry, 6, Spring, 1980.
• Stone, Harriet. The Classical Model: Literature and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century France. New York: Cornell University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8014-3212-X
• White, Jon Manchip. Diego Velazquez: Painter and Courtier. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1969.

Further reading

• Brooke, X. A masterpiece in waiting: The Response to 'Las Meninas' in Nineteenth Century Britain. In Masterpieces of Western Art: Velazquez's 'Las Meninas'. Cambridge: Stratton-Pruitt, 2003. pp. 47–49.
• Stratton-Pruitt, Suzanne (ed). Velazquez's 'Las Meninas'. (Cambridge): Cambridge UP, 2003.

External links

• Joel-Peter Witkin "Las Meninas (Self Portrait)"
• Museo Picasso "Las Meninas"
• Velázquez — La Kabala y Las Meninas Template:Es icon