Chapter 8 - Las Meninas: Painterly PolemicsCritique of Theory
Velázquez, I believe, tried to free painting from this subservience [its association and dependence on literature as in historical painting] by suggesting that viewing a work of art could instead be like an unmediated encounter with a living, moving reality.
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…. Las Meninas occupies an uneasy position within the conventional genres of seventeenth-century painting.
The painting [Las Meninas] thus seems to participate uneasily in at least three of the principal seventeenth-century genres of painting [portrait painting, history painting, genre painting], creating in the process a unique and distinct hybrid of these types.
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….we are made to bear witness a particular moment. It may be that, as Thomas Glen has argued, the king and queen have been sitting for Velázquez when, suddenly, they prepare to leave. Whatever the case, a sudden movement before the canvas is registered by the glances of a majority of those represented within the canvas.
On [Velázquez’s] second trip to Italy…he produced only portraits, and he used those works to advance his status within the roman art world, the heartland of the history painting tradition. It is clear that he considered himself first and foremost a portrait painter and that, for him, these works had the highest value, equivalent to that granted history paintings. It is through this lens that we need to see Las Meninas. In it, Velázquez proclaims what portraiture can do. It can convey a sense of real life through accurate likenesses of real people; it can capture a convincingly real moment in the lives of these people; perhaps most tellingly, it can establish a kind of reciprocity between the reality of the space before the canvas and what is depicted within.
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In Las Meninas, with the king and queen as implied viewers, Velázquez suggests a real encounter, and through the implication of a narrative that will likely have real figures pass into fictional space, he proposes that portraiture can collapse the distinction between fiction and reality.
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According to Marco Boschini, and, I would argue, Velázquez too, the figures are given life through the performance of the artist’s hand. As Boschini had it, the movements of the painters hand, sometimes rubbing with the fingers, sometimes poking the canvas with his brush, seemed to make the figures jump, as if they were alive. With Las Meninas, Velázquez created what we might call a ‘here-and-now painting’, as opposed to a conventional history painting.
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Las Meninas and Poussin’s self-portraits
….Poussin was heir to Michelango’s belief that the hand was merely the servant of the intellect.
Velázquez, by contrast, did not turn his back on the materiality of painting. Scholars have always had difficulty with the fact that Velázquez shows himself in Las Meninas actually engaged in the act of painting. In all likelihood, it is the very first representation in Spain of a painter shown in such a way. (in the notes it says: Fernando Marias, Velázquez: Pintor y criado del rey (Madrid, 1999), p.12.)
Velázquez has shown himself holding a palette in his left hand, his brush poised, ready for action, in the right hand. The palette is tilted forward so that we are made aware of the paints on its surface, the base material out of which the illusion of painting is created. The instrument by which the material is given life appears just to the left. Together, the palette and brush frame the cross of Santiago emblazoned on the artists’ chest. The manual and material in art, so clearly referenced by brush and palette, do not contradict either the nobility of painting or the nobility of the painter. Ready to apply another stroke to the canvas, the brush seems almost a natural extension of the artist’s hand. Indeed, the joining of hand and brush is even achieved through the specific way in which Velázquez applied the paint. The index finger, thumb and little finger are clearly kept separate from the shaft of the brush, but for the two middle fingers Velázquez dragged the paint across the surface so that these fingers actually merge with the brush. The hand and brush become one.
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I would argue that Velázquez….like Caravaggio, …was engaged in trying to assimilate painting as much as possible to a real experience. After all, in Las Meninas Velázquez presented the viewer with an assemblage of real people set within a real space, all meticulously described and inviting the viewer to confuse the real with the fictional. The figures are life-sized, and the perspective of the room extends our own space. The motion of the figures suggests a temporal push and pull, almost as if we were witness to a sequence of movements, with a past and future; it is a real, moving, living, breathing [thinking?] slice of life.
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The Mirror
The mirror shown hanging on the back wall of the chamber in Las Meninas has long been at the center of interpretations of the painting. As discussed in Chapter 5, it now seems clear that Palomino was correct in seeing the mirror image as a reflection of the painting Velázquez shows himself working on, and not of the king and queen standing in real space in front of Las Meninas. The vanishing point is coincident with the arm of Nieto standing in the doorway, which can only mean that the mirror reflects something to the left, which can only be the front of the canvas we see only from the back. [Precursor to Cubism?] That said, the orthogonals of the perspective are not by any means emphatic. Bright in comparison with the rather muddy paintings that hang next to it on the back wall, the mirror is a center of visual interest at least as important as the vanishing point. It is, Joel Snyder has aptly described it, a rather ‘reluctant perspective’ (Joel Snyder, ‘Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince’, Critical Inquiry, 11 (1985: 552).
The compositional prominence of the mirror comes not only from its brightness, however, for it is cupped within a U-shaped figural grouping formed, from left to right, by Velázquez, the kneeling menina, the infanta, and Nieto. The mirror must have some sort of significance beyond its status as a clever illusionistic trick.
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As Snyder sees it, there is a passage when viewing Las Meninas, from an initial ‘illusory understanding’, where we read the mirror as reflecting the king and queen, to a realization that this cannot be true and that the mirror in fact reflects the hidden painting. In this way, its viewing becomes a journey of understanding, one which thematizes the very activity that Velázquez shows himself engaged in.
What I mean is that the initial impression that the mirror reflects the king and queen truthfully, as a mirror was thought to do, would remain in the mind of the king even as he came to understand that the mirror actually reflected the painting of the king and queen. This in turn would have stimulated thoughts on how a mirror image may or may not be different from one crafted by the hand of an artist.
The strong relationship between the mirror and the hidden canvas enhances such a comparison. Velázquez shows himself holding a brush in his right hand and a palette in his left. The brush points downward toward the pigments arrayed on the palette. He holds a number of other brushes in the left hand along with the palette, and this grouping creates a strong diagonal that spans the pictorial gap between the mirror and the canvas. The principal distinctions between an image made by reflection and one made by an artist revolve around materiality (referenced by pigments spread out on the palette) and the actions of the hand. The back of the canvas in Las Meninas also figures that materiality. The area of Las Meninas given over to the back of this canvas is startlingly large and scholars have never adequately explained why it should have been so. As Guy Tal has suggested, by showing the back, with the stretcher, the canvas, the nails, but without a frame, Velázquez completes the inventory of materials necessary to the making of a picture (suggested in a personal communication). In this way Velázquez reveals painting in all of its materiality, and not simply as a framed Albertian illusion of another world.
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A mirror reflects the natural world without any material intervention. In fact, if any material at all is applied to the surface of a mirror, the image is degraded. With painting, the exact opposite is true. Without the material of paint applied to the surface of the canvas there is no image. As Jonathan Miller has put it, ‘Because in contrast to the mirror, the perception of whose imagery require us to ignore its surface – the more we see on a mirror the less we can see in it – the imagery which appears in a painting is actually constituted by the visible brushstrokes on its opaque surface’ (Jonathan Miller, On Reflection, exh. Cat. (London, National Gallery, 1998), p. 79.). it seems likely that Velázquez created the visual bridge between mirror and painting using the palette and brushes as a way of signaling the viewer this essential distinction. The mirror may reflect reality, he seems to say, but for painting to perform the same role, material, in the form of pigment and canvas, was an absolute requirement.
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That painted image may not have captured motion to the same degree that a reflected image did, but a reflection, while true to reality, disappears when the subject disappears. This is exactly what happened to Narcissus when he disturbed the surface of the water by trying, according to Alberti at least, to embrace the image. …A painting….does not depend on the continuing presence of the subject. It is permanent and fixed and thus can make the sitter immortal, going one better than the reflected image.
My Mirror Masks depend on a viewer to ‘activate’, or ‘complete’ them by looking at them. They also remain as paintings in themselves depicting masks – working on more than one level.
The mirror may produce a true likeness, but only a material image like a painting can fix the likeness in permanent form.
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