The Best Painting in the World?
Oct 31st, 2007 by admin
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Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) by Velazquez
What kind of mess is this? What is it “about”? There are so many people. Which of them is the subject?
Answer: Las Meninas—The Maids of Honor—is what an artist does who is obliged to paint a royal portrait and who entertains himself with what is NOT the royal portrait.
Velazquez squirmed at the canvas each time a royal sitter, dressed up for the occasion, walked into his studio for another portrait. Painting routine portraits of the members of the royal family had become a cruel duty. He put off painting them and they took him months to finish. He didn’t dislike painting portraits but he disliked being ordered to paint the same subject over and over again. That he tried at all to say something new about the model was proof of his discipline and his honesty.
But more and more the model’s clothes became the real subject of the picture, or the model’s toys, or the furniture in the room, or the clock on the mantel. By the time he painted Las Meninas, one of his last paintings, this everything-else-but-the-royal-sitter had become almost funny. The room itself was the subject. Plus all the people attendant on the Infanta, including her dog. Plus himself, Velazquez, full-length.
The dark, tall-ceilinged, musty room in the old palace was his prison—the situation he had gotten himself into, for good and for bad. The picture was an anthology of the subjects of all the paintings he had every made. Las Meninas wasn’t only his self-portrait, it was his circumstances, his autobiography.