ROBERT WICKS
Using Artistic Masterpieces as Philosophical Examples:
The Case of Las Meninas
Although theoretical issues govern the content of
philosophical aesthetics, references to individual
artworks have a hand in its theorizing. Many of
these works are familiar, such as the Egyptian
Pyramids (c. 2560 b.c.e.), the Parthenon (447–432
b.c.e.), Polycleitus’ Doryphoros (450–440 b.c.e.),
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (1503–1506), Michelan-
gelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–1512), Shake-
speare’s Hamlet (c. 1600), Beethoven’s Symphony
No. 5 in C Minor (1804–1808), Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain (1917), John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), Andy
Warhol’s Brillo Box (wood, 1964), and Philip
Johnson’s AT&T Building (now Sony Tower)
(1984). Through overuse, such examples can re-
duce to mere placeholders for categories such as
“ancient architecture,” “classical music,” “master-
pieces of painting,” “tragedy,” “pop art,” “post-
modern architecture,” and the like. One need only
reflect upon how some aestheticians have used
Duchamp’s Fountain and Warhol’s Brillo Box
interchangeably as examples of “ready-made”
art. This is despite their several decades of art-
historical differences and dissimilarities in repre-
sentational structure, since one is a commercial
item and the other is a painted copy of a commer-
cial item.1
References to artworks in the absence of de-
tailed art-historical knowledge of other works
by the same artist can generate misrepresenta-
tions and misunderstandings of the work, and it
should not be surprising that some existing tra-
ditions of these abstracted references have given
rise to a legacy of misconstrual. A case in point
is how one of the finest paintings in the Western
artistic tradition, namely, Diego Velázquez’s Las
Meninas (1656), has been set into many people’s
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68:3 Summer 2010

c 2010 The American Society for Aesthetics
minds as the visual epitome of the seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century scientific worldview. This
is how Michel Foucault describes it in his best-
seller, The Order of Things (1966), using an
interpretive approach—we can label it an “oeuvre-
independent” one—that attends to the work in vir-
tual isolation from other paintings that Velázquez
completed. The present aim is to show how Fou-
cault’s oeuvre-independent approach to interpret-
ing Las Meninas has precipitated a one-sidedness
in philosophical discussions of the work since the
1960s. I refer here mainly to otherwise excellent
and influential articles by John Searle, and Joel
Snyder and Ted Cohen, along with a similar assort-
ment of writings by others who continue to adopt
Foucault’s, Searle’s, and Snyder and Cohen’s oeu-
vre-independent methods for understanding the
work.2
Such has been the prevailing philosophical
practice when discussing Las Meninas within the
Foucauldian legacy. Once we consider Las Meni-
nas’s meaning more concretely in relation to some
of Velázquez’s other paintings, it becomes evident
that although Foucault himself characterizes Las
Meninas as a paradigmatic illustration of “classical
representation,” the art-historical context reveals
that the painting represents the classical outlook
only partially, since it also embodies the outlooks
Foucault describes exclusively in contrast to the
classical one, namely, those of the Renaissance and
Modern eras. Las Meninas cannot consequently
do the exemplificatory work that Foucault intends
without ignoring crucial layers of the work’s mean-
ing. These layers, as we shall see, are shown sig-
nificantly through the relationship between Las
Meninas and an assortment of other works by
260
Velázquez that include the companion work to
Las Meninas, namely, The Spinners (1657), sev-
eral works from his early period, an important re-
ligious work from his middle period, and his many
portraits of dwarfs.
Foucault is not the only major philosopher who
uses single works of art illustratively to present
complex phenomena such as historical periods,
artistic phases, social movements, or psycholog-
ical conditions. Hegel is perhaps the most well
known for this theorizing style, as he states, for in-
stance, that “the Pyramids put before our eyes the
simple prototype of symbolical art itself.”3 A re-
lated kind of one-sidedness arises upon interpret-
ing Carl Hübner’s The Silesian Weaver (1844)—a
work frequently cited in the Marxist literature—as
a condensation of Marxist attitudes toward cap-
italism, or Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St.
Anne (1510) as a psychoanalytic document that
reveals the contents of Leonardo’s unconscious.
The inherent difficulty resides in presenting only
a contributing aspect of a whole as the essence of
the whole. This can obviously result from inter-
preting the work apart from other works by the
same artist to yield a relatively superficial con-
ception of the work’s meaning, as Martin Hei-
degger does with Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes
(1885).
A more oeuvre-cognizant interpretation of
masterpieces such as Las Meninas alternatively
provides support for a philosophical principle and
associated precautionary note about using works
of art—especially great ones (and these are of-
ten the ones used)—to depict theoretical themes.
As a rule, the greater the work, the richer will
its meaning be, and in view of this richer mean-
ing—one typically revealed by comparing and con-
trasting the work to others by the same artist—
the less likely will its semantic content be suffi-
ciently circumscribed to represent a single time
period, general historical principle, or concrete so-
cial or psychological constellation in any sharply
defined, single-minded way, contrary to how
Hegel speaks about the Pyramids and Symbolic
Art or to how Foucault speaks about Las Meni-
nas and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
scientific worldview.
With such philosophical considerations in mind,
let us now turn to the details of Las Meninas in an
effort to appreciate its complicated and difficult-
to-contain meaning.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
i. LAS MENINAS
The originally untitled painting from 1656 that has
become known as Las Meninas (the “maids of
honor,” “ladies-in-waiting,” or “handmaidens”)
was one of Diego Velázquez’s finest works, and
Velázquez (1599–1660) was one of the world’s
most accomplished painters.4 Since its first public
exhibition in Madrid’s Museo del Prado in 1819—
prior to which time the large, 10 12 by 9 foot paint-
ing had remained for over 160 years in the Spanish
royal family’s private collection—it has been rec-
ognized as a masterpiece in both Spain and in the
history of Western art. Despite such an illustrious
art-historical status, this monumental work con-
tinues to elude our understanding.
Las Meninas shows an informal assemblage of
people in Velázquez’s studio, which was located
in Madrid’s Alcázar Palace.5 While a large dog—
possibly the King’s dog—relaxes in the immediate
foreground, we see, in sequence, a boyish-looking
figure, reported to be a midget, a stout, female
dwarf, an elegantly dressed five-year-old Span-
ish princess as one of the painting’s centers of
attraction, her two young maids of honor, and
Velázquez himself, now in his late fifties, who
pauses to set his eyes on us while at work on
a large canvas whose surface we cannot directly
see. A nun and a watchman stand nearby, super-
vising the children. Posed in a doorway in the dis-
tant background, the Queen’s Chamberlain—part
of whose responsibility is to open and close doors
for the Queen—observes the entire scene, resting
his hand upon a curtain or tapestry.6 Located at
the same distance as the Chamberlain in the back-
ground and near the middle of the painting, a
mirror reflects the images of the then fifty-one-
year-old Spanish monarch, Philip IV (1605–1665)
and his twenty-two-year-old wife and niece, Mar-
iana (1634–1696).7
A group of paintings, obscurely rendered and
easy to pass over, but of significant interpretive im-
portance to Las Meninas, covers the walls of the
high-ceilinged salon, among which are two promi-
nent ones that overlook the above variety of royal
household figures. These portray episodes from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and seem like a pair of
signs that Velázquez posted above the carnival-
esque assemblage. Their location is also directly
above the mirror from which shine the images
of the King and Queen. The first is a copy of
Wicks Using Artistic Masterpieces
Peter Paul Rubens’s Minerva Punishing Arachne
(1636) situated directly above Velázquez’s head.8
The second is a copy of Jacob Jordaens’s Apollo
Defeating Pan (1637) located directly above the
man in the doorway.9 The first painting illus-
trates the story of Arachne, an exceptionally tal-
ented weaver, who proudly challenges Minerva
to a weaving contest, wins the contest, but has
her flawless work torn apart by Minerva out of
spite. Saved from a despairing suicide, Arachne
is ultimately transformed into a spider. The sec-
ond painting shows the musical competition be-
tween Apollo and the overly self-confident Pan,
attended by King Midas, who, after strongly con-
testing the official judgment that had pronounced
Apollo the winner, has his ears transformed by
Apollo into those of an ass. Pan receives no pun-
ishment, but the King’s ears are reconfigured to
complement his lack of musical taste.
The gazes of the figures in the royal house-
hold are subtly, but unusually, disjointed and dis-
engaged from one another. Velázquez and the
dwarf look directly at us, as might also the man
in the doorway and the reflections of the King
and Queen in their vague renditions. The princess,
when seen close, seems to look directly at us, but
from a distance, she appears to look at a point to
our immediate right; the taller menina looks to
our immediate left. The watchman looks blankly
above our heads, to our left; the smaller menina
appears to be looking at the head area of the
princess, but not at her eyes; the midget seems
to be looking at the dog’s head, but his eyes are
actually aimed above it; the nun looks oddly at the
wall, or out through a side window. The dog’s eyes
are closed. As a collection, the gazes of the figures
are askew. The gazes’ diverse angles suggest either
that there are people standing in our company to
the left, and possibly to the right of us, or that a
single person—often presumed to be the King of
Spain—is the main audience, where some of the
individuals in the painting are avoiding direct eye
contact out of respect. We will speak more about
these two possibilities below.
Las Meninas has always been a popular master-
piece among artists. Among aestheticians, philoso-
phers, and philosophically minded intellectuals,
a widespread interest in the painting grew dur-
ing the 1960s, when Michel Foucault featured Las
Meninas in The Order of Things, using the open-
ing chapter’s dense discussion of the painting as
a thematic overture for the book. Since then, a
261
series of reiterations, reformulations, and refuta-
tions of Foucault’s interpretation has constituted
the philosophical literature surrounding the work,
the most transformative of which were published
during the early 1980s. This was when the paint-
ing’s geometrical composition was described to
English-speaking readers with a precision that, for
some, settled long-standing uncertainties about
how to interpret the mirror image of the King and
Queen in the painting’s background.
Now, over four decades later, and notwithstand-
ing how oeuvre-independent theorizing about Las
Meninas continues well in his footsteps, Foucault’s
trendsetting discussion has fallen into relative ne-
glect and semi-disrepute. Aside from his intellec-
tual popularity having faded, the attractiveness
of Foucault’s specific interpretation has been di-
minished through a perceived incompatibility be-
tween the painting’s now-acknowledged geomet-
rical composition and a prevailing assumption of
his interpretation, namely, that within the paint-
ing’s fictive construction, the mirror on the back
wall reflects the images of the King and Queen as if
they were standing outside of the painting directly
in front of the mirror, and were looking at that
mirror to see their own reflections. The painting’s
geometrical composition contradicts this account
of the mirror’s reflection, and Foucault’s interpre-
tation has consequently suffered.
With respect to the philosophical issues men-
tioned above, several observations will emerge
from the following analysis of Las Meninas. The
first is that despite his neglect of Velázquez’s oeu-
vre, Foucault’s baseline interpretive approach—
we can call it the “phenomenological approach”
based on how the painting immediately appears
to a casual observer or museumgoer (and hence,
Foucault is not alone here)—remains legitimate,
and that this phenomenological approach should
figure importantly into any interpretation of Las
Meninas. The contrasting geometrical approach,
which attends closely to the position of the paint-
ing’s vanishing point or visual center, its con-
tained angles of incidence and reflection, the
numerically measured heights of the figures and
the like, is also valid, but this validity is not suffi-
cient to undercut phenomenologically based inter-
pretations to an extent where we would therefore
disregard them or set them aside, as some would
submit. Somewhat ineradicably, the phenomeno-
logical approach directs our attention to the imme-
diate, perceptually obvious layer of the painting’s
262
rich, multileveled semantic structure, so rather
than contradicting and excluding it, the geometri-
cal approach complements and deepens the phe-
nomenological approach by revealing additional
levels of meaning. Moreover, these interpretative
approaches operate interactively in Las Meninas
to produce an ambiguity-exploitative composition
that, as will be argued here, constitutes and ac-
counts for a substantial aspect of the painting’s
intriguing quality. Both interpretive approaches
become misrepresentative, however, as do the cor-
responding uses of the painting as a philosophical
exemplar, when employed in the absence of at-
tending to Velázquez’s other paintings.
The second point is that, although the phe-
nomenological basis of Foucault’s interpretation
is legitimate, it does not harbor enough detail to
sustain the arguments for his more particular and
historically striking claim that Las Meninas is the
representation of what he calls “Classical repre-
sentation,” namely, the God’s-eye, personally neu-
tral, scientific style of representation that, accord-
ing to Foucault, rose to prominence during the
1600s and 1700s. To appreciate this shortcoming
in Foucault’s argumentation, we will augment the
phenomenological and geometrical approaches by
considering some of Las Meninas’s symbolic fea-
tures through a more oeuvre-cognizant approach.
This will reveal how Velázquez’s painting is more
perspectivally complex than Foucault had per-
ceived, since it has aspects that, in Foucault’s ter-
minology and as mentioned, reflect not only the
Classical outlook that he emphasizes but also the
Renaissance and Modern outlooks.
The third point is that if we consider the paint-
ing from the geometrical approach, the identity
of the intended audience for Las Meninas does
not seem to have been clearly thematized or ex-
plicated as of yet. Within the painting’s fictive
world, geometrically and more esoterically con-
ceived, the intended audience has an eye level set
at about 4 21 feet high. If we assume further that
his audience is a single individual, since only one
person can comfortably occupy the position ex-
actly opposite the painting’s vanishing point, then
the audience would either be someone sitting in
a chair (or otherwise lowered), or someone who,
when standing at full height, would have an eye
level of about 4 12 feet, such as a young person or a
dwarf. We will explore these alternatives below.
The fourth point is to underscore how Las
Meninas’s meaning is illuminated specifically in
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
conjunction with the comparatively ambitious
work that followed it, The Spinners. The two paint-
ings have a common mythological content and
symbolism that variously reinforces the signifi-
cance of Las Meninas’s geometrically determined,
threefold audience. Through the shared symbol-
ism, we will be able to discern a hitherto unrec-
ognized religious content in Las Meninas that is
compatible with Christian mysticism.10
The above points will combine to show that
the oeuvre-independent, Foucauldian approach
to interpreting Las Meninas that persists within
the philosophical literature precipitates one-sided
interpretations that oversimplify Las Meninas’s
meaning. Our general aim here is to reveal and
record more of Las Meninas’s multidimensional
significance and, by underscoring its status as an
artistic masterpiece, thereby question the appro-
priateness of using it superficially to represent
themes that barely capture or express the work’s
semantic richness.
ii. LAS MENINAS à la foucault
To establish a background to the above claims,
let us continue by outlining Michel Foucault’s in-
terpretation of Las Meninas. His project in The
Order of Things is to describe groups of historical
events whose thematic similarity reveals a series
of entrenched conceptions of factual knowledge,
accentuating the inherent contingency and plas-
ticity of those conceptions as they pass from one
historical period to the next. One of the book’s
specific aims is to account for the appearance
of the human sciences in the nineteenth century
through this survey of knowledge styles that se-
quentially emerged, and then faded, from the
fifteenth century onwards. Foucault accordingly
characterizes these knowledge styles, or what he
calls epistemes, that lead up to the nineteenth cen-
tury, or Modern, historically reflective outlook,
attending mainly to the Renaissance and Classical
periods.11 Las Meninas plays an illustrative role in
Foucault’s exposition of the Classical conception
of knowledge and representation, for he main-
tains provocatively that the painting visually rep-
resents this Classical conception and conveys, in a
nutshell, the scientific age’s personally detached,
ahistorical, and universalistic spirit.12
Foucault adds that one of Classical represen-
tation’s features—and this is where Las Meninas
Wicks Using Artistic Masterpieces
enters squarely into the discussion—is that the ob-
server or constructor of a Classical representation
is never imagined to be a constitutive aspect of the
representation itself. The algebraic equation of a
circle, the laws of gravity, the numerical weight of
a pound of sugar, the measured distance from here
to the moon are assumed to be ascertainable pre-
cisely and identically by any rational being. Wher-
ever, whenever, and whoever the observer might
be has supposedly no bearing on the description’s
truth, which is regarded classically as an indepen-
dent matter. Classical representation accordingly
assumes that it can represent the world as it is in
itself, or at least with universal intersubjective va-
lidity, by self-consciously abstracting away from,
disregarding, or overlooking the presence of the
person who is doing the representing. Such repre-
sentations are constructed ideally from a detached
perspective, and the person who formulates such
representations of how things are in themselves is
expected to set aside his or her personal or per-
spectival peculiarities.
From a more Modern, historically reflective
standpoint, this Classical conception of represen-
tation is naive and unstable, for the Modern spirit
is convinced that in any act of interpretation, the
interpreter’s own position must be taken consti-
tutively into account.13 Within the Modern tem-
perament, representations convey the standpoint
of the representer almost as much, if not philo-
sophically more so, than what is supposedly being
represented. Since the representer does not have a
constitutive role within a Classical representation,
it would follow that, from a Modern perspective,
what a Classical representation is actually about
remains outside of the representation, mostly un-
noticed.
Since Foucault believes that Las Meninas de-
picts Classical representation, and since from the
Modern standpoint he considers such represen-
tations to be naive, he is especially attuned for
noticing destabilizing details within the painting
that indirectly reveal the presence of the repre-
sentation’s actual subject matter, and reveal it as
residing outside of the representation. The inge-
nuity of Foucault’s construal rests in his identifi-
cation of these details and in his description of
how they indicate a subject matter that is essential
to the meaning of Las Meninas, that is, what he
believes Las Meninas is actually about, but that
stands outside of the painting.
263
Following this Foucauldian approach for a mo-
ment and regarding Las Meninas as a repre-
sentation of Classical representation, we have
Velázquez presenting himself in the work as a
painter immersed in the activity of painting, and
we see around him the instruments and results of
the representational process, such as his palette
and brushes, in addition to an array of completed
paintings that hang on the walls. We also see the
basic components of the representational situa-
tion, namely, the representer (Velázquez), the au-
dience (the man in the background who observes
the entire scene from a distance and from behind),
and, as Foucault assumes, the ghostlike subject
matter (the King and Queen of Spain, who appear
only as relatively small, vaguely rendered images
in a distant mirror).14 As if one were setting out
silverware on a table, the painting arranges these
components such that each element, not unlike
each gaze in the painting, remains disconnected
from and noninteractive with the others.
Foucault observes that these elements of rep-
resentation are integrated only beyond the paint-
ing’s borders, in us, the observers, since Velázquez,
the observing man, and the King and Queen all
look at us as we stand outside of the painting.
The elements of representation further coalesce
in us insofar as our place involves a triple over-
lap with the physical place of Velázquez as the
actual painter, the actual King and Queen who
supposedly see their reflections in the mirror on
the back wall, and of other, past and future ob-
servers of the painting. Foucault consequently
maintains that these three elements of represen-
tation (namely, representer, subject matter, and
audience) since they are united in a single point
outside of, rather than within, the painting, high-
light the idea that Classical representation de-
fies its own limits, for we must look beyond the
explicit contents of the Classical representation
to make full sense of its function as a represen-
tation.15 Such is Foucault’s account of how Las
Meninas portrays Classical representation. These
representations present themselves as objective,
self-sufficient representations of the world, but
they are not self-sufficient insofar as they impli-
cate the presence of subjects outside of themselves
to account for what they are mainly about.
To sustain this interpretation, Foucault assumes
that as part of Las Meninas’s fictive arrangement,
the centrally placed mirror at the rear of the
264
painting indicates that the actual King and Queen
are standing outside of the painting, directly op-
posite the mirror, and are seeing themselves in
its reflection. He thus regards the mirror as vir-
tually announcing them to be the subjects of the
gazes of the people in the painting who are look-
ing outward and as the likely subjects of the large,
hidden canvas within Las Meninas upon which
Velázquez is working. This pictorial device places
all observers of Las Meninas, as well as the ac-
tual Velázquez, in the place of the King and
Queen and raises us all imaginatively to a royal
status.
Emphasizing this psychological impact of the
mirror’s reflection upon the audience, some inter-
pretations of Las Meninas claim that the painting’s
popularity has been due partially to how it makes
us all feel like royalty, as we observe others from
the perspective of the King and Queen. The ex-
perience might indeed have been powerful when
the painting was first publicly shown, since social
divisions were more pronounced, and the lives of
aristocrats were more of a mystery to the majority
of the population.16 It is also conceivable that such
an uplifting experience resides in a world outside
of Velázquez’s intentions, since as the official, and
significantly insulated, court painter, he is more
likely to have been addressing his painting essen-
tially to the monarch who employed him, without
intending to include the general public within the
painting’s fictional construction.
As we shall see, the visual dynamics of the
painting are complicated beyond such alterna-
tives. When we consider the mirror reflection from
the geometrical, rather than from the phenomeno-
logical standpoint, it does not reflect objects that
are located directly in front of it, but reflects at an
angle, and does not reflect anyone whom we might
presume to be standing outside of and in front of
the painting. Moreover, if the geometrical inter-
pretation is accepted as definitive, Foucault’s (or
any) interpretation of Las Meninas will be desta-
bilized to the extent that it regards the background
mirror as providing a direct reflection of the paint-
ing’s audience.
iii. phenomenologically versus geometrically
grounded interpretations of LAS MENINAS
The Order of Things appeared in 1966, and, in
1980, John Searle published “Las Meninas and the
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation,” where, in
company with Foucault, he assumes that (1) the
background mirror reflects the King and Queen,
presumed to be standing in front of the paint-
ing, that (2) the painter’s, spectators’, and King’s
and Queen’s positions are intended to coincide,
and that (3) we all see our reflection in the mir-
ror (and thus, as others have described, imagina-
tively assume the outlook of the King and Queen,
feel empowered, and so on).17 Accepting this phe-
nomenologically generated arrangement as prima
facie valid for the painting, Searle observes crit-
ically that the painter’s, models’, and audiences’
perspectives seem to coincide, but in fact cannot
do so on optical grounds, and that this paradox
helps explain some of the painting’s captivating
aesthetic quality. He adds that the contents of the
canvas upon which Velázquez is painting—given
the supposedly close match between the size of
that canvas and the actual size of Las Meninas,
along with the assumption that Velázquez is paint-
ing a portrait of the King and Queen—match that
of Las Meninas itself.18 Searle concludes that Las
Meninas is a painting of Diego Velázquez paint-
ing Las Meninas, and that the painting on the
canvas whose surface we cannot see contains an
image of itself, that in principle contains yet an-
other image of itself ad infinitum. This endlessly
self-containing “picture-within-a-picture” effect is
known artistically as the Droste effect or as the
mise en abyme (“placing into infinity”). A related
literary phenomenon is the “story within a story,”
as occurs more simply in Shakespeare’s Ham-
let (c. 1600) and in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (c.
1605–1615).
Immediately after the publication of Searle’s
article, Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, inspired by
the geometrical approach, challenged Searle’s re-
vived interpretation of Las Meninas in “Reflec-
tions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost,” pointing
out that the mirror on the rear wall is not located
exactly at the painting’s visual center, as Searle’s
interpretation requires, but is off-centered to our
left.19 They also confirm that the painting’s visual
center is positioned neither on the mirror nor at
the painting’s exact geometrical center, but rather
off-center to the right, in the open doorway where
the observing man stands. This indicates that the
images of the King and Queen in the background
mirror are being reflected from someplace other
than directly in front of us, assuming that our van-
tage point is exactly in front of the man in the
Wicks Using Artistic Masterpieces
doorway to coincide with the painting’s visual cen-
ter. In that geometrical position, we are not lo-
cated to see our own reflections in the mirror. We
are situated opposite the open doorway, and in
contrast to everyone in the painting, are looking
through the hall and doorway into the light be-
yond. The bright light in the doorway shines at us,
and it illuminates the surface of the canvas that we
cannot directly see.20
Las Meninas’s geometrical analysis reveals that
the background mirror reflects the contents of the
hidden canvas upon which Velázquez is working,
and that the canvas is a double portrait of the King
and Queen. Whether Las Meninas is also portray-
ing Velázquez’s activity of painting the King and
Queen as they are posing for him outside of the
painting is an independent matter. As far as we
have described the situation, it remains that the
King and Queen could be intended by the paint-
ing to be imagined in that external position. If so,
they would also be imagined to be looking into
the doorway’s light, and indirectly at Velázquez’s
otherwise hidden painting of them through its re-
flection in the mirror on the back wall.21
It would nonetheless support Foucault and
Searle if we could establish on independent
grounds that the actual King and Queen are un-
derstood by the painting to be posing outside of its
physical boundaries. This is indeed how the mirror
makes it phenomenologically seem, but if we set
aside that appearance in favor of the painting’s ge-
ometrical composition, it remains that Las Meni-
nas could be depicting a moment when some other
people are being situated as the audience outside
of the painting, and who are drawing the vague
attention of the group of royal household figures.
We will consider in a moment who these audi-
ences might be and how the geometrical approach
provides some further information. In principle, it
could be anyone who happened to be in the palace
at the time.
At this preliminary point, we can acknowl-
edge two fundamentally different, interpretive ap-
proaches to the painting. The phenomenological
approach suggests that the King and Queen are
standing directly in front of the work, possibly
posing for Velázquez. It also suggests that they
see their own reflections in the mirror and that the
contents of the hidden painting are unknown. The
geometrical approach indicates that the King and
Queen, if they are situated in front of the paint-
ing, do not see their own reflections in the mirror,
265
but see a reflection of the hidden canvas that con-
tains their dual portrait. The phenomenological
approach renders the hidden canvas’s contents un-
known and reveals the identity of the audience as
the King and Queen; the geometrical approach,
as far as we have described things, renders the
identity of the audience unknown and reveals the
contents of the hidden canvas as a painting of the
King and Queen.
If we reflect further upon the painting’s geo-
metrical composition and, in particular, consider
the location of the vanishing point or visual cen-
ter—for this is where the ideal observer’s eye level
would be—we can calculate that this visual center
is located in the doorway, in the light, immedi-
ately beneath the standing man’s elbow, in direct
line with the eye level of the standing menina, at
a height of 4 feet 7 inches.22 The geometrically in-
tended audience for Las Meninas is consequently
positioned at this physical height that is taller than
the 3 foot 6 inch dwarf, taller than the five-year-old
princess at the center of the painting, taller than
the kneeling menina, and yet shorter than all of
the adults in the painting.
If Las Meninas’s geometrical composition lo-
cates its audience at a 4 foot 7 inch eye level, di-
ametrically opposite the man in the doorway, we
should consider who the audience might be, given
the eye level’s relatively low height. Whoever the
audience is, it will contrast with or complement
the standing King and Queen of Spain who are
reflected in the mirror.
iv. the phenomenologically versus
geometrically determined audiences
of LAS MENINAS
Through the geometrical approach alone, in light
of the painting’s 4 foot 7 inch visual center, there
are three possible audiences for Las Meninas
within the painting’s fictive arrangement, each of
which contrasts with a fourth possible audience,
namely, the standing King and Queen who appear
through the phenomenological approach via the
mirror. The former are (1) a average-sized adult,
whose eye level is lower than normal for some rea-
son (for example, who is sitting in a chair, kneeling,
bending down, standing in a recessed floor area,
and so on) (2) a dwarf, or (3) a youngster, prob-
ably about thirteen or fourteen years old. A case
can be made for each, and queries can be raised
266
against each. Artworks can convey incompatible
messages, so these queries can signify that no one
of the indicated audiences strongly excludes or
predominates over the others.
First, the most obvious audience of Las Meni-
nas located at this eye level is King Philip him-
self, sitting, who often visited Velázquez’s studio
to watch the latter paint. Francesco Pacheco re-
ports the following: “The liberality and affability
with which Velázquez is treated by such a great
Monarch is unbelievable. He has a workshop in
the King’s gallery, to which his Majesty has the
key, and where he has a chair, so that he can watch
Velázquez paint at leisure, nearly every day.”23
Velázquez might well have painted Las Meni-
nas mainly for the King’s personal and official
appreciation, since the King probably commis-
sioned the work in its broad thematic outlines
(given its monumental size), and since we know
that at this time (1656), Velázquez was work-
ing with great deliberation to secure a highly
prestigious knightship. The commission of Las
Meninas—presumably as a portrait of the young
princess—would then have presented Velázquez
with a solid opportunity to display his master-
ful painterly talents in support of his own aris-
tocratic aspirations.24 Along these lines, the more
the painting could embody complex geometrical
relationships, the more it would appear to be an
exemplary product of the liberal arts and, hence,
the more Velázquez would appear to be an artist
of the highest caliber, standing on a par with play-
wrights such as Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who
already enjoyed aristocratic status for his literary
accomplishments, as bestowed upon him by King
Philip.
Counting against this interpretation are two
considerations. First, the facial attitudes of some
of the individuals in Las Meninas do not display
kingly respect. The nun gazes at the wall, the guard
looks off into the distance, and many of the looks
are deadpan, rather than ingratiating. No one is
smiling. The scene instead supports the idea that
we have before us a moment when the group is
suddenly being interrupted, as opposed to a situa-
tion where everyone has been respectfully cog-
nizant of the King’s presence for an extended
period of time, as he has been sitting in a chair
observing Velázquez paint.
Moreover, the portrayal of mythological
themes in Las Meninas’s wall paintings can be read
as criticizing the King, either in his artistic taste
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
or in his lack of tolerance for artistic ambition.
The two paintings set above the group of individ-
uals in Las Meninas, namely, Minerva Punishing
Arachne and Apollo Defeating Pan, are prima fa-
cie unflattering comments on the King. One way
to neutralize their critical presence is to argue that
the palace inventories confirm that both paintings
were actually located on the wall of Velázquez’s
studio as shown in Las Meninas, and that they,
along with the rest of the paintings on the studio’s
walls, consequently have no specific bearing on
Las Meninas’s meaning.
It remains that Velázquez composed Las Meni-
nas in a manner that shows these two paintings
prominently, especially since the large upper space
in the painting is a compositional rarity. Moreover,
as we shall see, the same mythological content
appears in Las Meninas’s companion piece, The
Spinners, which makes it less likely that this con-
tent appears as a mere accident. This gives us some
reason to suppose that if Velázquez intended the
audience to be the King, he also included a subtle
expression of his frustration as a painter who was
seeking aristocratic recognition of his talents, but
had not yet received it.
As an alternative to the seated King, we should
consider whether Las Meninas is locating the
young Queen Mariana in the King’s usual seat.
Supporting this proposition is the presence of her
daughter at center stage, her Chamberlain at the
back door, and the relative informality of the set-
ting. That the head of the Queen’s contingent of
ladies-in-waiting is present and overlooking the
scene is also consistent with the Queen’s pres-
ence. Locating her in the King’s usual seat would
lend a more feminine atmosphere to Las Meninas
and would render its connection to The Spinners,
which is composed entirely of women, more pro-
nounced.
Instead of either the seated King or Queen, one
can also envision one of Philip’s dwarfs as an alter-
native audience, although dwarfs’ average height
is a bit shorter than 4 feet 7 inches, at about 4
feet to 4 feet 4 inches This option should be con-
sidered seriously for several reasons, the first of
which is the presence of an exceptionally large
number of dwarfs in Philip’s court—over one hun-
dred. As we also know, Velázquez was an enthusi-
astic and compassionate painter of their portraits.
It is also the case that insofar as the court dwarfs,
as jesters, enjoyed freedom of speech and were
consequently allowed to be more honest with the
Wicks Using Artistic Masterpieces
King, their courtly role matched that of Velázquez,
since he was a mere painter and manual laborer in
addition to being the King’s long-term friend and
Chamberlain.
For Velázquez to indicate geometrically a dwarf
as an intended audience for Las Meninas would
essentially be to situate himself as this audience
through the use of symbolism. His paintings of
court dwarfs can be seen, in part, as self-portraits
of his own status, for they are portraits of socially
less respected individuals who are also often privy
to higher-level secrets. This kind of social status in-
volves a simultaneous subordination and uplifting
that, on a larger scale, structurally matches the way
Las Meninas simultaneously subordinates and up-
lifts its audience in how, on the one hand, we are
led to identify with the royally standing King and
Queen through the mirror, while on the other, led
to identify with someone placed at a lower eye
level than all of the average-sized adults shown in
the painting.
This effect is, in fact, doubly determined within
the painting: it occurs via the complementarity
of the phenomenological and geometrical inter-
pretations, as just noted, but it also occurs within
the phenomenological register alone. As the au-
dience looks at the mirror on the back wall and
identifies in stature with the standing King and
Queen, Velázquez’s figure also looks down on the
audience to situate it at an eye level lower than
the other adults in the painting. These observa-
tions support the proposition that in Las Meninas,
Velázquez intends to portray his own ambiguous
status in the court of King Philip.
Once one acknowledges this “Las Meni-
nas as self-portrait” or “Velázquez as court
jester–dwarf” audience option, Foucault’s inter-
pretation of Las Meninas falls to the ground,
since the painting would be significantly about
Velázquez himself, where Velázquez’s figure is in
the painting centrally and explicitly, and not hid-
den outside of it, as Foucault’s interpretation re-
quires. Strengthening this idea, we also have on
record one of the first descriptions of Las Meni-
nas from 1696 by Felix da Costa, who observed
that Las Meninas seems to be more of a por-
trait of Velázquez than of the young princess. Fi-
nally, this dwarf-as-symbolizing-Velázquez option
also coheres with the compositional prominence
of Minerva Punishing Arachne and Apollo Defeat-
ing Pan on the studio’s back wall, since the sym-
bolic import of these works can be understood as
267
expressing Velázquez’s position as an underappre-
ciated artist.
One might nonetheless question this interpre-
tation of the audience, since it remains that the
average height of dwarfs is slightly less than
4 feet 7 inches, and since the female dwarf in
Las Meninas is portrayed as having a height of
3 12 feet. Also, most of the dwarfs in Velázquez’s
other portraits appear to be smaller individuals.
If we keep in mind that Philip IV had over one
hundred dwarfs in his entourage, however, whose
collectivity probably represented an assortment
of medical conditions that entail different average
heights, then the dwarf-as-symbolizing-Velázquez
proposition is not implausible.25
Third, and perhaps most interestingly, we can
imagine a young girl of thirteen or fourteen
years old as the geometrically determined audi-
ence, since only the standing menina’s eye level
uniquely matches and is in close proximity with
the height of the painting’s 4 foot 7 inch van-
ishing point, and since thirteen or fourteen years
old is arguably the age of the standing menina.26
One might ask, though, why Velázquez would
have his audience identify with a menina, who
appears to be only a subordinate figure in the
painting.
If we combine these various audiences, we have
on the phenomenological, perceptually obvious,
and universally perceivable face of things the
standing King and Queen as reflected in the mir-
ror. Many interpretations of Las Meninas, such
as Foucault’s and Searle’s, focus here and often
end here. Then, from a more esoteric, geometri-
cal angle that would be understood only by those
who have been educated in the details of per-
spective painting, we have an audience consti-
tuted possibly by four overlapping figures: (1) the
King himself, expressing Velázquez’s interest in
receiving a knightship and who probably commis-
sioned the painting of his daughter, possibly to
complement the portrait of his deceased son, Bal-
tasar Carlos, that Velázquez had completed two
decades before and whose composition clearly
foreshadows Las Meninas; (2) the Queen, since
her daughter, her Chamberlain, and her chief lady-
in-waiting are present in the room and since the
scene is relatively informal; (3) a dwarf, symbol-
izing Velázquez’s ambiguous status in the court;
and (4) a young girl of thirteen or fourteen years.27
To understand the significance of the young girl,
we need to consider the symbolic aspects of Las
268
Meninas in conjunction with some other works by
Velázquez.
v. symbolic aspects of LAS MENINAS
A year after his work on Las Meninas,
Velázquez finished another monumental painting
that presents similar interpretation-related puz-
zles and whose precise subject matter still remains
to be identified. This work, also originally untitled,
is usually referred to as The Spinners.28 Its fore-
ground portrays a set of women spinning yarn in
a tapestry workshop, and its background contains
a mythologically suggestive tableau that contrasts
anomalously with the painting’s foreground real-
ism. The subject portrayed is presently accepted
as the fable of Arachne—a fable noted above as
the subject of one of two large paintings in Las
Meninas that stand above the royal household
figures.
Although we cannot here explore the diverse
interpretations of The Spinners in detail, two ob-
servations bear on the present discussion of Las
Meninas.29 The first is that if Velázquez portrayed
the fable of Arachne in his last two monumen-
tal works, then its significance—a significance that
Foucault never comes close to considering—must
be included in the interpretation of either paint-
ing. Of the various audiences we have identified,
we have noted that the presence of the fable of
Arachne supports the idea that Las Meninas is sig-
nificantly a self-portrait of Velázquez’s ambiguous
status in the court of Philip IV, where he regards
himself on a par with the court dwarfs and jesters.
The Spinners also supports the third possibil-
ity mentioned above, namely, that one of the
audiences of Las Meninas is intended to be a
menina-figure of some sort. To appreciate this, we
can consider independently how, in Las Meninas,
there is a congruence between the positioning of
Velázquez’s hand, brush, and palette in Las Meni-
nas and the positioning of St. John’s hand, pen,
and book in Velázquez’s early painting, St. John
the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos (1618). This
invites us to consider whether in Las Meninas—a
work that seems to be a straightforwardly secu-
lar, court painting—Velázquez is identifying with
St. John and is portraying himself as a religious
visionary. In the painting of St. John, the saint is
shown in the midst of writing the Book of Revela-
tion, pausing to look up inspirationally at an image
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
of Mary, who appears as the Woman of the Apoc-
alypse. Velázquez rendered this image of Mary
explicit in his companion piece of the same year,
The Immaculate Conception.
This brings us back to the standing menina
in Las Meninas. If we develop the idea that
Velázquez is portraying himself as St. John in
Las Meninas, then as a religious visionary he
would be gazing beyond the painting’s borders to-
ward a young and beautiful thirteen- or fourteen-
year-old girl, as prescribed by Pacheco as the
ideal image for the Immaculate Conception. This
can explain why Velázquez situated the paint-
ing’s vanishing point next to the fourteen-year-old
menina’s face, why he located a nun’s face immedi-
ately and associatively adjacent to the menina, and
why he situated the menina in a way that draws
our attention to the illumination in the doorway
beyond.
With respect to the doorway’s bright illumina-
tion, there are symbolic features of Las Meninas
that suggest what the doorway could signify. The
architectural plans of Velázquez’s studio show that
directly behind Velázquez’s head, and to the left
of the mirror as we look at it, rather than another
obscure painting, there is a closed door that is
the structural counterpart to the open doorway
in which the observing man stands. This closed
door seems to bear no significance, but if we no-
tice how it is the second element in an evenly
spaced sequence of rectangles ranging from left to
right, namely, the large hidden canvas, the closed
door, the reflecting mirror, and the open door-
way, we may have here symbolized a traditional
four-step, ascending series of spiritual illumina-
tion. The canvas would represent the realm of illu-
sion, the closed door, the unenlightened material
world, the mirror, the realm of illusory or antici-
patory enlightenment, and the open doorway, the
realm of genuine enlightenment beyond the social
order, culminating in a God’s-eye view. This four-
step series is familiar within mystical traditions
going back to Plato, and, during Velázquez’s time,
it was a common motif in Christian mysticism.
In connection with the latter, it helps to recall
that the prominent Spanish mystic St. Teresa of
Ávila (1515–1582) was named patroness of Spain
in 1617 and was canonized in 1622 by Pope Greg-
ory XV. In addition, the Spanish mystic Sor Marı́a
de Ágreda (1602–1665)—known for her contro-
versial exaltation of the Virgin Mary in her book
The Mystical City of God (c. 1655)—was the
Wicks Using Artistic Masterpieces
spiritual and political advisor to King Philip IV
for over twenty years, as over six hundred letters
between them document.30 Both St. Teresa and
Sor Marı́a were of converso (that is, Jewish) her-
itage, as might have been Velázquez himself.31
Supporting the proposition that Velázquez is
symbolizing a stepwise or ladder-like advance to
enlightenment in Las Meninas, we find that The
Spinners contains a prominent ladder that is inter-
pretable as symbolizing the same idea. This ladder
image was probably inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s
engraving, Melencolia I (1514), which contains a
similarly positioned ladder as such a symbol, there
suggesting Jacob’s ladder to the heavens, upon
which angels ascend or descend.32 Velázquez’s
teacher, Francisco Pacheco, celebrated Dürer’s
graphic works in his writings, so we can assume
that Velázquez was aware of Dürer’s famous en-
graving and its symbolic import.
With respect to the open and illuminated door-
way in Las Meninas, Velázquez used a simi-
lar compositional device of looking through the
painting into a distant divine scene in one of
his earlier religious paintings, Kitchen Scene with
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1618),
where we look, not into the illumination of the
divine symbolized by pure light, but likewise into
a room that contains Christ in a chair, sitting like a
king. Velázquez’s occasional use of a white head-
scarf to adorn his images of Mary—as in his The
Adoration of the Magi (1619) and The Corona-
tion of the Virgin (1645)—also adds to the religious
resonance of the woman at the spinning wheel in
The Spinners, who is wearing such a scarf. This is
notable because Velázquez locates her head at the
base of the transcendence-indicating ladder.33 The
spinner’s positioning and symbolism consequently
match that of the menina in Las Meninas, whose
head is correspondingly positioned in visual con-
junction with the transcendence-indicating door-
way and its accompanying stairway. This gives
us some reason to interpret both transcendence-
indicating women as Mary figures, if we read
Velázquez as identifying himself with St. John in
Las Meninas.34
In Las Meninas, only the painting’s audience is
in the position to see through the open, brightly il-
luminated doorway, beyond the painting’s worldly
realm and conceivably into the realm of the divine.
As we have seen through Velázquez’s multiper-
spectival composition and symbolism, everyone is
implicitly situated as this audience in one way or
269
another, King, Queen, meninas, and dwarfs alike,
and the more universal message seems to be that
only by “standing outside of oneself”—in this case,
only by standing outside of the painting—is the
path to enlightenment discernable.
In sum, not only does the fourfold symbolic
sequence complement on a more otherworldly
and ecstatic scale the more worldly and imme-
diately perceivable hierarchy that we apprehend
explicitly within the painting, as we move upwards
from the dog, to the midget and dwarf, to the
princess and meninas, to the adults, and finally to
the ghostly images of the King and Queen, but it
also shows that Foucault’s intuitions were correct
when he discerned that the painting expressed a
God’s-eye, or divine, vision of things.
vi. conclusion
By exploring Las Meninas as a paradigm case, this
article has argued for a more oeuvre-cognizant ap-
proach toward the interpretation of artistic mas-
terpieces, insofar as the works are intended to
be used as philosophical examples. Las Meni-
nas is illustrative since, within the philosophi-
cal literature, we presently have a forty-year-long
tradition of interpreting the work in an oeuvre-
independent manner, where the tradition fosters
a situation that does not provide enough inter-
pretive potentiality for important dimensions of
the work’s meaning to emerge easily. As this ex-
cursion into Las Meninas’s art-historical context
has shown, these further dimensions of meaning
present themselves when we compare it to other
works by the same artist. Almost seventy years
ago, in 1943, José Ortega y Gasset advocated this
kind of approach:
This fundamental characteristic of Velázquez’s painting
[namely, its realistic open-endedness] only appears in
full clarity when we contemplate his entire oeuvre. In
general, the radical intentions of a painter only become
evident when we bear in mind all his pictures, and let
them pass through our memory almost with the speed
of a film. Then we see which are his continuous and
progressive traits, which are the radical ones.35
In an effort to reinstantiate and follow Ortega’s
methodological recommendation, the present
oeuvre-cognizant interpretation of Las Meni-
nas yields a multiplicity of meaning along the
270
following dimensions: it renders explicit four pos-
sible audiences that the geometrically grounded
interpretation of the painting determines; it un-
derscores the relevance of Las Meninas’s mytho-
logical content; it reveals more of how Velázquez’s
own persona and painterly status at the court have
impressed themselves into the work’s meaning;
and it reveals a hitherto unrecognized Christian
content in the painting. It also reveals, contrary
to Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas, how the
painting expresses not only Classical content but
also Medieval–Renaissance and Modern content
in the form of Christian mysticism and multi-
perspectivism, respectively. By showing that the
structure of Las Meninas reverberates on several
levels with the structure of Velázquez’s ambiguous
status at the court, it reveals Las Meninas as sig-
nificantly a self-portrait of Velázquez and, to that
extent, Foucault’s interpretation of the painting as
a nonstarter.
At minimum, these added dimensions and con-
siderations suggest that before using an artistic
masterpiece as a philosophical example, it is worth
approaching the work from an art-historical, oeu-
vre-cognizant perspective, lest one perpetuate the
kind of one-sidedness that we now have in the
Foucauldian tradition of interpreting Las Meni-
nas. It is fair to wonder how many writers who
mention the Mona Lisa, for example, have a clear
sense of where it falls in Leonardo’s career, which
paintings he painted before and after that work,
and whether these works have any direct bear-
ing on the Mona Lisa’s meaning. The same can
be asked about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 as
a philosophical example, or any of the works in
the list mentioned at this article’s outset, such
as Warhol’s Brillo Box or Duchamp’s Fountain,
whose instances in philosophical literature are
abundant. To conclude, it is safe to assert that
whenever oeuvre-independent modes of interpre-
tation prevail within a context where the artworks
have become overfamiliar and deeply entrenched
as examples in scholarly writing, the impression
that these works are well understood is probably
an illusion.
ROBERT WICKS
Department of Philosophy
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand 92019
internet: r.wicks@auckland.ac.nz
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
1. George Dickie’s “What is Anti-Art?” is exemplary.
See George Dickie, “What is Anti-Art?” The Journal of Aes-
thetics and Art Criticism 33 (1975): 419–421. With some def-
initional legerdemain, Dickie characterizes Warhol’s Brillo
Box (p. 420) as a “made-ready-made” (that is, it is a “ready-
made” and is not a “ready-made”) for the sake of including
it with Duchamp’s Fountain as a member of the category
“ready-mades.”
2. Examples include the main text of Amy Schmitter’s
“Picturing Power: Representation and Las Meninas,” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1996): 255–268,
which investigates, in a similarly oeuvre-independent way,
what and how Las Meninas represents, speaking at length
about the painting without mentioning other paintings that
Velázquez completed. In one of the footnotes, she dismisses
the idea of exploring Las Meninas’s companion piece, The
Spinners (Las Hilanderas)—a key painting that we will con-
sider—on the grounds that its meaning is no more clear than
that of Las Meninas (and hence, promises no informative
results) (p. 267, note 5). Out of a total of fifty-two end-
notes, two (namely, notes 23 and 32) depart from the arti-
cle’s overall tenor and provide some supportive references
to Velázquez’s other works.
Another example is Joel Snyder’s lengthy article, “Las
Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince,” Critical Inquiry 11
(1985): 539–572. The article contains a paragraph (p. 542,
plus one accompanying endnote—out of thirty) devoted to
the outward-looking gazes in Velázquez’s portraits, which
are mentioned in contrast to the predominantly inwardly di-
rected gazes in Velázquez’s historical works. This reference
to Velázquez’s other works is brief, and it does not note
how the gazes’ angles are dispersed in Las Meninas. This, of
course, leaves the article in no position to consider what the
significance of the dispersal might be. Although Snyder’s
article includes much art-historical information, he does not
consider any of Velázquez’s other works in detail.
The most revealing example of the Foucauldian legacy,
however, is the most recent. The Journal of Conscious-
ness Studies devoted an entire issue—twelve articles—to Las
Meninas in 2008 (Vol. 15, No. 9). References to (among
others) Foucault, Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty,
Žižek, and contemporary neurophysiology define the issue’s
intellectual tone. Eleven of the twelve articles mention no
other works by Velázquez, and one article mentions two
other works in passing. It is fair to say that the issue shows
no evidence that it believes art-historical factors are relevant
in interpreting Las Meninas.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine
Art, trans. T. M. Knox, Vol. I. (Oxford University Press,
1975), p. 356.
4. The title Las Meninas first appears in an 1834 inven-
tory from the Museo del Prado. It was entitled The Family
of Philip IV in a 1734 inventory. A 1686 inventory referred
to it as a painting of “the empress Infanta of Spain, with her
ladies and servants and a dwarf, where the painter portrayed
himself painting.”
5. The palace’s destruction by a 1734 fire has made the
direct examination of Velázquez’s studio presently impossi-
ble.
6. Antonio Palomino, who arrived in Madrid in 1678,
published a description of the painting in 1724 and provided
some specific names: (1) the midget, Nicolasito Pertusato,
(2) the female dwarf, Maribárbola, (3) the five-year-old
Wicks Using Artistic Masterpieces
Infanta of Spain, Doña Margarita Marı́a (1651–1673), (4) the
seven-year-old menina, Isabel de Velasco (1649–1659), (5)
the fourteen-year-old menina, Marı́a Agustina Sarmiento
(b. 1642), (6) the Lady of Honor, Doña Marcela de Ulloa
(d. 1669) (in mourning, dressed as a nun), (7) a soldier or
Guardadamas (often suggested to be Diego Ruiz de Az-
cona), (8) José Nieto, the Queen’s Chamberlain and head
of the Queen’s tapestry works (who rests his hand on what
could be a tapestry), and (9) Velázquez himself, who was
also the King’s Chamberlain.
This is the presently received, virtually unquestioned list
of characters in Las Meninas. The standing menina is said to
be Isabel de Velasco, who was seven years old at the time.
Velázquez portrays this menina with a height of about 4 feet
10 inches, and though short, this is a more likely height for
the fourteen-year-old menina, Marı́a Agustina Sarmiento.
Both meninas also appear to be more than seven years old,
judging by the noticeably larger sizes of their hands in con-
trast to those of the five-year-old princess.
7. In the literature on Las Meninas, the King and Queen
are usually spoken of as a pair, almost always in a single
breath, but there was some personal distance between them.
With some hesitation, Philip married his fifteen-year-old
niece at age forty-four because his son from an earlier mar-
riage, Baltasar Carlos (1629–1646), to whom his niece had
been betrothed, had died three years earlier, and he needed
another son and heir. In the year after Las Meninas was
painted, that hoped-for son, Philip Prospero (1657–1661),
was born, the first of three.
8. Velázquez’s student and son-in-law, Juan Bautista
Martı́nez del Mazo (1612–1667), painted these copies. Mazo
also did a copy of Las Meninas in which he omitted the re-
flections of the King and Queen in the mirror—reflections
that, as we shall see, play a central role in Foucault’s inter-
pretation of Velázquez’s original.
9. The painting of Apollo defeating Pan is sometimes
referred to incorrectly as that of Apollo flaying Marsyas.
This mistitling appears in scholarly essays by (among oth-
ers) Amy M. Schmitter, “Picturing Power: Representa-
tion and Las Meninas,” p. 256, and Madlyn Millner Kahn,
“Velázquez and Las Meninas,” The Art Bulletin 57 (1975):
225–246, p. 229, not to mention recent books, for exam-
ple, Velázquez: The Complete Paintings, by Fernando Checa
(New York: Abrams, 2008), p. 199, where the author states
that “Apollo Flaying Marsyas, after Jordaens, is easily recog-
nized.” Rubens portrayed the contest between Apollo and
Pan in a more sketch-like work that is virtually identical to
Jordaens’s painting and is the source of these images, but
Mazo’s copy more closely matches Jordaens’s version.
10. This will soften Jonathan Brown’s and Carmen Gar-
rido’s claim that Velázquez painted his final religious work,
namely, The Coronation of the Virgin (1640–1644) at least a
decade before Las Meninas. See their book, Velázquez: The
Technique of Genius (Yale University Press, 1998), p. 117.
11. The term ‘modern’ can refer to a time period begin-
ning in the early 1600s with Descartes (and Velázquez), as in
“modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant”; it can refer
to a time period when a greater emphasis started to be given
to one’s historical situation, heritage, and future direction,
namely, beginning with Kant in the late 1700s and extend-
ing across the following century, which is how Foucault uses
the term; it can refer to a period beginning with the start of
the twentieth century, as in “modern art,” that seeks to dis-
271
engage from the nineteenth-century artistic styles and start
radically afresh.
12. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in
the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1965, repr. 1988),
Foucault centers his characterization of the Age of Reason
upon “a date can serve as a landmark: 1656, the decree that
founded, in Paris, the Hôpital Général” (p. 39). The year
1656 also marks the completion of Las Meninas in Madrid,
and in The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1966),
Foucault similarly uses this painting as the leading image to
characterize the Age of Reason.
13. Kant is the initial representative of this more reflec-
tive position according to Foucault, and given the former’s
historical position at the tail end of the Enlightenment, Kant
construes the constitutive presence of the representer within
his or her very own representations nonhistorically and uni-
versalistically, as he stands as a prelude to the more his-
torically centered versions that we find in the nineteenth
century.
14. Velázquez’s studio—the setting for Las Meninas—was
also the former room of Philip IV’s son, Baltasar Carlos
(1629–1646), who had died exactly a decade before. Insofar
as the deceased prince’s presence permeates the painting,
the prince might be a better candidate for the kind of invisi-
ble presence that Foucault’s interpretation is seeking, since
the King and Queen are present in the painting explicitly as
mirror reflections.
15. It is regrettable that although Foucault looks beyond
the painting in a phenomenological sense, he does not look
beyond Las Meninas in the oeuvre-cognizant sense of con-
sidering any other of Velázquez’s works.
16. Alisa Luxenberg writes, “What an empowering ex-
perience it must have been after 1820 for ordinary viewers,
without court connections, to see this painting and step into
the royal shoes.” Alisa Luxenberg, “The Aura of a Mas-
terpiece: Responses to Las Meninas in Nineteenth-Century
Spain and France,” in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, ed. Suzanne
L. Stratton-Pruitt (Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 8–46.
17. John Searle, “Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pic-
torial Representation,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 477–488.
18. Searle was not the first to imagine this. It was first
suggested in the 1819 Prado catalogue (see Jonathan Brown,
Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting
[Princeton University Press, 1978], p. 101). The idea has
also been mentioned by R. A. M. Stevenson, Velázquez, ed.
Denys Sutton (London, 1895 [repr. 1962], p. 98) and Kurt
Gerstenberg, Diego Velázquez (Munich: Deutscher Kun-
stverlag, 1957), p. 191.
19. Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, “Reflections on Las
Meninas: Paradox Lost,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 429–447.
20. Las Meninas was cleaned and restored in 1984, one
effect of which is that “the light surrounding the figure in
the doorway has a new, arresting brilliance” (“The Cleaning
of Las Meninas,” Editorial, The Burlington Magazine, Vol.
CXXVII, No. 982, January 1985, p. 3).
21. Snyder’s and Cohen’s claim in 1980 that the mirror
reflects the contents of Velázquez’s hidden canvas was not
new. It was articulated long ago by Antonio Palomino, who
published one of the early descriptions of Las Meninas in
1724, now canonically received within art-historical circles.
Palomino wrote: “The canvas on which he is painting is
large and nothing of what is painted on it can be seen,
272
for it is viewed from the back, the side that rests on the
easel. Velázquez demonstrated his brilliant talent by reveal-
ing what he was painting through an ingenious device, mak-
ing use of the crystalline brightness of a mirror painted at the
back of the gallery and facing the picture, where the reflec-
tion, or repercussion, of our Catholic King and Queen, Philip
and Mariana, is represented.” Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt,
“Introduction,” in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, ed. Suzanne
L. Stratton-Pruitt (Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 1–7.
22. John M. Moffitt states in his carefully researched
article that “The viewer’s eye level, that is the vanishing
point, is located at 1.4m [ = 4 feet 7 inches] above the level
of the sunken floor.” John F. Moffitt, “Velázquez in the
Alcázar Palace in 1656: The Meaning of the Mise-en-Scéne
of Las Meninas,” Art History 6 (1983): 271–300, p. 285.
23. Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez (Oxford University
Press, 1982), p. 193.
24. Velázquez aspired to become a Knight of the Mili-
tary Order of Santiago, but King Philip did not confer this
most prestigious title upon Velázquez until November 1659
(Velázquez died eight months later, at age sixty-one). The
King had awarded the same knightship to the court play-
wright, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, in 1637 (at age thirty-
seven), who had begun his career in the court at the same
time as Velázquez, in the early 1620s, and whose family
had the requisite noble heritage (unlike Velázquez’s, whose
maternal grandfather, a cloth merchant, could have had a
converso, that is, Jewish, background, as might also have
had his Portuguese paternal grandfather). In 1677, over a
decade and a half after Velázquez’s death, Madrid painters
were still being taxed on their work as ordinary manual art.
This context invites the interpretation of Las Meninas as
Velázquez’s argument, echoing the earlier Italian efforts of
Alberti and Leonardo, for the nobility of painting as a lib-
eral art and, by implication, for the appropriateness of his
receiving a knightship.
25. In the Journal of the American Medical Associa-
tion, there has been some debate over whether certain of
Velázquez’s painted dwarfs represent an achrondroplastic
condition, a hypothyroid cretin condition, or an instance
of Kniest syndrome. See “Velázquez’s Dwarfs: A Profu-
sion of Diagnoses” (letters to the editor), JAMA 262 (1967):
349–350.
26. See note 6 above, which suggests that the standing
menina is too tall to be the seven-year-old Isabel de Velasco,
but is more likely the fourteen-year-old Marı́a Agustina
Sarmiento, if it is one or the other. The average height of a
contemporary seven-year-old girl is over a foot less than the
approximately 4 foot 10 inch menina, whose eye level is set
at 4 feet 7 inches when bending over slightly.
27. In Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School (1636), Bal-
tasar Carlos’s parents, King Philip and Queen Isabel, ob-
serve their son on horseback from a distant balcony. They
visually accompany their son as small-sized figures in the
painting, just as the mirrored figures of the King and Queen
in Las Meninas accompany their daughter. The correspon-
dence also lends weight to the idea that the King and Queen
are Las Meninas’s implicit audience.
28. An original inventory of 1664 included a painting
called “Fable of Arachne,” and this might have been a
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
reference to The Spinners, given that the owner had a
number of works by Velázquez. An early inventory of 1711
described the painting as “women working in a tapestry fac-
tory” (namely, the Queen’s tapestry workshop), and this de-
scription determined the title for which it has been known,
namely, The Spinners or Las Hilanderas.
29. As representative of the opinions surrounding The
Spinners, see John F. Moffitt, “Painting, Music and Po-
etry in Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas,” Konsthistorisk Tid-
skrift/Journal of Art History 54 (1985): 77–90; John F. Moffitt,
“The ‘Euhemeristic’ Mythologies of Velázquez,” Artibus
et Historiae 10 (1989): 157–175; Verena Krieger, “Arachne
als Künstlerin. Velázquez’ Las hilanderas als Gegenentwurf
zum neuplatonischen Künstlerkonzept,” Zeitschrift für Kun-
stgeschichte 65 (2002): 545–561; Richard Stapleford and John
Potter, “Velázquez’ Las Hilanderas,” Artibus et Historiae 8
(1987): 159–181; Jan Baptist Bedaux, “Velázquez’ Fable of
Arachne (Las Hilanderas): A Continuing Story,” Argumen-
tation 7 (1993): 29–43; Wendy Bird, “The Bobbin and the
Distaff: Erotic Imagery and the Meaning of Velázquez’s Las
Hilanderas,” Apollo Magazine (2007): 59–64.
30. R. A. Stradling writes, “Belief in the Immaculate
Conception had taken a firm hold upon the Spanish Catholic
imagination in the previous century, and Philip IV was a
lifetime supporter of the notion that the Virgen Immaculada
was the only fit receptacle for the bringing of God into the
world.” R. A. Stradling, Philip IV and the Government of
Spain 1621–65 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 344.
31. In Clark Colahan, The Visions of Sor Marı́a de
Agreda: Writing Knowledge and Power (University of Ari-
zona Press, 1994), the author writes: “there is specific evi-
dence that the Jewish mystical tradition reached Sor Marı́a
de Ágreda, as it reached Teresa de Ávila, in the form of
Christian cabala” (p. 38). For Velázquez’s possible converso
heritage, see note 24 above.
32. See Frances Yates, “Chapman and Dürer on Inspired
Melancholy,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin, Vol.
XXXIV (1981). (Transcript of lecture given at the University
of Rochester, September 18, 1980.)
33. The white headscarves also appear on two older
women in other paintings, one of which is Kitchen Scene
mentioned above and the other of which is An Old Woman
Cooking Eggs (1618).
34. Additional women in The Spinners resonate with
Mary images from Velázquez’s other paintings, most obvi-
ously The Coronation of the Virgin. The same model appears
to have been used for the Virgin and the only woman in The
Spinners who looks directly at us. Also, the hand positions
of the central Arachne figure in The Spinners match those
of the Virgin in The Coronation of the Virgin. The woman in
the right foreground of The Spinners, next to the yarn swift
who holds the orb (possibly suggesting an astronomical sym-
bolism, for example, the muse, Urania), also resonates with
The Immaculate Conception, where Mary stands upon an
orb (the moon). In short, The Spinners reiterates the Mary
figure several times, and this establishes a rationale for in-
vestigating what the painting’s Christian content might be.
35. José Ortega y Gasset, “Introduction to Velázquez,”
in Ortega y Gasset: Velázquez, Goya and the Dehuman-
ization of Art, trans. Alexis Brown (London: Studio Vista,
1972), pp. 84–106.
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