Immortal Thoughts by Christopher Neve;

Author:Christopher Neve;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson Ltd.
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Velázquez’s Las Meninas

Perhaps it was the itinerant people clapping irregular rhythms and singing in high voices, or the legless man wheeling himself around on a tray, that made me think to tell you of how death also hides in Velázquez’s great Las Meninas, though I only mention it in passing.

With difficulty, workmen have unhooked the chandeliers in a large room on the ground floor facing across the palace square in the Alcázar, to make it into a workshop for Velázquez. It is 1656. For more than thirty years he has been painting Philip IV, almost his only patron, and now he is starting on a big picture of the most inordinate originality and concealed cunning. Its chief subject is the king’s favourite infanta, Margarita Teresa, who is five. She will die aged twenty-one after seven pregnancies. The menina on her left is Maria Sarmiento, who will die within two years. The woman with dwarfism is German, though she is called Maribárbola. The man on the steps is Velázquez’s friend José Nieto, a court official. The king and queen appear foggily in the mirror. But Velázquez, who looks past the canvas. What is it that he does not yet know?

Excuse me if I pause to point out how all these figures are set in a structure. The group is shown fairly far forward in the room, with a beautiful, gloomy space behind it. Apart from the burst of light at the back there are two light sources, one immediately to the right of the viewer and another which throws a diagonal strip of sunlight across the floor towards the rear wall. Then there are triangles. These triangles are set up by the stretcher of the canvas, the brushes and mahlstick, and Nicolasito Pertusato with his foot on the dog to the right. There is also, of course, an implied triangle running backwards into the space and another coming forward to include you, the viewer, within the firm cube of the room. But that is not all. Now think of the whole group as seen from above. This puts the infanta’s round dress near the middle of a series of other circles. But even that is not quite all, because there remains the central device or conceit of the picture, which is the mirror. When you look at the painting, its bottom edge is so low down that the mat on the artist’s floor appears to be a continuation of the floor on which you stand. But the whole group turns towards the king and queen, who must surely be standing where the artist stands; that is, where the viewer stands. So, if the canvas in the picture is this painting, the implication is that the whole group is seen in a mirror.

I have tried to describe the painting’s cleverness but find myself speechless at its beauty. Like many people, I had my mind altered about life by seeing it in a way from which I have never recovered. The same happened when I saw Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto (c.

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