Velázquez's Las Meninas

Velázquez was not primarily employed as a painter. He was a courtier, and by 1656 a senior one, responsible for the king's lodgings and the arrangement of royal spaces. He painted comparatively few pictures, and this one — made four years before his death — is the most ambitious thing he ever attempted.

The scene is a room in the Alcázar in Madrid. The five-year-old Infanta Margarita stands at the centre, attended by two ladies-in-waiting, the meninas who give the painting its later name. To the right are two members of the household — Maribárbola and Nicolás Pertusato, court dwarfs, the second nudging a large dog with his foot. Behind them stand a chaperone and an escort. At the back, framed in a lit doorway, a man named José Nieto pauses on a step. And on the left, brush in hand, behind a canvas of enormous size, is Velázquez himself.

On the rear wall, between two dim paintings, hangs a mirror. In it are Philip IV and Queen Mariana.

That mirror is where the argument starts, and it has not stopped.

One reading: the king and queen are standing where we are standing, being painted. Velázquez is at work on their double portrait, we occupy their position, and the mirror shows us who we have been substituted for. The Infanta and her retinue have come in to watch, and the whole company has just turned to look at the royal couple — which is to say, at us.

A second reading: the mirror is not reflecting the room at all, but the canvas. Velázquez is painting the portrait we cannot see, and the mirror shows us its surface. On this account the royal couple need not be present.

A third: the reflection is of the doorway, or of a picture hanging out of view.

The optics have been modelled, the room reconstructed from inventories, the sightlines argued in print for decades. No reading has become consensus. What can be said with confidence is that Velázquez knew exactly what he was doing — the ambiguity is engineered, not accidental. Every device in the picture works to unsettle where the viewer is: a reflection that implies a presence, a doorway that opens onto a further space, a canvas whose subject is withheld, and nine pairs of eyes of which several look directly out.

There is a second, quieter subject. The cross of the Order of Santiago on Velázquez's chest is not a record of fact at the time of painting. He was not admitted to the order until 1659, three years later, after a protracted investigation into whether a man who worked with his hands could be considered noble. The cross was added afterwards. A long-repeated story holds that Philip IV painted it himself; that account appears in early sources but is not documented in a way historians treat as reliable, and it is best left as a legend that says something true about how the picture was regarded.

The painting nearly did not survive. In 1734 the Alcázar burned. Las Meninas was cut from its frame and carried out, and it bears damage from that night. It entered the Prado when the museum opened in the nineteenth century, and it has left the building exactly once since.