The story behind the painting
Las Meninas
Velázquez builds a royal portrait around the question of who is looking at whom.
- A vast studio opens around the Infanta Margarita.
- The infanta stands in white between two attendants.
- Velázquez pauses at the towering canvas on the left.
- The king and queen appear only inside the rear mirror.
- José Nieto pauses in the bright doorway behind the group.
- Several figures look outward, drawing us into the room.
Las Meninas is a 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez of the young Infanta Margarita among her maids of honour and court servants, with the painter himself at a huge canvas and the king and queen reflected in a mirror; it hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
What does Las Meninas show?
The room opens around the Infanta Margarita, her attendants, and a painter at work. Light enters from the right and picks out the figures against the deep interior. We seem to have arrived in the middle of an encounter.
Velázquez painted Las Meninas in 1656. It brings together a group portrait, a studio scene, and a question about the act of looking. The people are identifiable, but the exact situation continues to invite different readings.
The Museo del Prado, which owns the painting, explains that it was painted in 1656 in the Cuarto del Príncipe of the Alcázar in Madrid, the very room it shows. Most of the people around the infanta were identified by the writer on art Antonio Palomino, whose history of Spanish painters, published in 1724, gave Las Meninas a section of its own, the only work he treated that way. (Museo Nacional del Prado)
Who are the people in Las Meninas?
The infanta stands near the center between her attendants. One kneels to offer her a small vessel, while another bends toward her. Their movements focus attention on the child without making the rest of the room disappear.
According to the Prado, the infanta is attended by two of the queen’s meninas, or maids of honour: María Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco. To the right are Mari Bárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, who is teasing a mastiff; behind them the lady-in-waiting Marcela de Ulloa stands next to a guardadamas, or attendant, and the chamberlain José Nieto waits in the doorway at the back. (Museo Nacional del Prado)
On the left, Velázquez stands beside a large canvas whose painted surface we cannot see. He has stepped back with his tools in hand. His presence makes painting itself part of the courtly scene, giving the artist a place among the royal household.
The red cross on Velázquez’s chest is the badge of the Order of Santiago, which he did not receive until 1659, three years after the painting was finished. According to Palomino, the king ordered it to be added after the artist’s death, and some said Philip painted it himself. From Velázquez’s belt hang the keys of his court offices: in 1651 he had been made palace chamberlain, a post that brought status but left him little time to paint. (Wikipedia)
José Nieto pauses in the bright doorway at the back. We cannot be certain whether he is arriving or leaving. The light around him opens another route through the room and carries the eye into its depth.
Who is reflected in the mirror in Las Meninas?
The king and queen appear in the small mirror on the back wall. Their reflections suggest a space beyond the scene we can see. They prompt us to consider where the royal couple might be standing and how our viewpoint relates to theirs.
The Prado identifies the faces in the mirror as Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, the infanta’s parents, who are watching the scene; it reads the moment as the infanta and her servants pausing at the arrival of the king and queen. For the museum, the mirror turns the picture into a reflection on the act of seeing, asking viewers to consider the limits between painting and reality and their own place in the scene. (Museo Nacional del Prado)
Where the royal couple stand has been argued over at length. The most common view is that they are posing for the canvas Velázquez is painting, so the picture shows the room from their position; the art historians H. W. Janson and Joel Snyder suggested instead that the mirror reflects the portrait on Velázquez’s hidden canvas. No single theory has won universal agreement. (Wikipedia)
The figures do not all look in the same direction. Some attend to the infanta, some face outward, and others seem absorbed in their own actions. This mixture makes the scene feel momentary, even though its arrangement is carefully controlled.
What happened to Las Meninas after 1656?
The earliest inventories called the picture La Familia (‘The Family’). It was damaged in the 1734 fire that destroyed the Alcázar and was restored by the court painter Juan García de Miranda, who almost completely repainted the infanta’s left cheek. The canvas has also been cut down on both the left and the right. (Wikipedia)
It stayed in the royal collection, moving to the new Royal Palace in Madrid, and entered the Museo del Prado when the museum was founded in 1819. The Prado’s catalogue first called it Las Meninas in 1843. Because of its size, importance and value, the painting is not lent out for exhibitions. (Wikipedia)
Why is Las Meninas so famous?
The Prado calls the room one of the most credible spaces ever painted in Western art, and the picture a decisive step towards illusionism, in which Velázquez goes beyond likeness to suggest life itself. Since Palomino it has never lost its status as a masterpiece, and few paintings have drawn so many, or such varied, interpretations. (Museo Nacional del Prado)
Artists have answered it ever since. The Italian painter Luca Giordano called it the ‘theology of painting’, Francisco Goya etched a print of it in 1778, and between August and December 1957 Pablo Picasso painted 58 interpretations of the picture and its figures, which now fill a room of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. (Wikipedia)
The painting connects the visible room with the space in front of it. The unseen canvas, the mirror, and the outward glances keep our own position in question. We look at the court while also feeling that we may have entered its view.
The details at a glance
Sources and further reading
- Las Meninas — Museo Nacional del Prado
- Artist biography: Diego Velázquez (Wikipedia, English)
- Las Meninas (Wikipedia, English)