Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas" is one of the most famous paintings within the Western artistic tradition. While some of its fame rests on the technical skill with which this example of Spanish Mannerist painting was produced, a great deal of the continuing fascination with this work must rest on the fact that it has historically been seen as a example of the ways in which visual imagery can be created and consumed to illuminate important facts about the society that an image represents. This paper presents a semiological analysis of "Las Meninas".
At one level "Las Meninas" is a portrait of some of the members of the Spanish royal court in the middle of the 17th century. But if this were solely the case - and even taking into account Velazquez's talent as one of the greatest portraitists of the modern age - the painting would not continue to compel us as it does.
Velazquez painted more than simply his subjects. He also, of course, painted himself. And by including himself in this painting, he created a work that - according to a painter of the Spanish court who succeeded him - creates a theology of painting. Through the bending of perspective, through the inclusion of mystical elements such as five separate telescopes, through the reversal of subject and audience that takes place by the use of a magical mirror, Velazquez asks his audience - now as much as when the work was first created - to contemplate the nature of vision, to ask us what it is that we see when we look at a painting. His portrait of these particular people becomes a tool that we may use for understanding how all of portraiture - and indeed all of painting - is simply politics by other means.
Before considering the "textual" and substantive complexities raised by this painting (the title of which translates as "The Maids in Waiting" in English), we should first describe what this painting contains compositionally on its most basic level. The 1656 work cente...