Las Meninas

His portrait of these particular men and women becomes a tool that we may well use for understanding how all of portraiture - and indeed all of painting - is merely 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 must first describe what this painting contains compositionally on its most basic level. The 1656 work centers on a Infanta Maragarita, a princess from the ruling house. She is surrounded by the ladies-in-waiting from the title as well as her common dwarves plus a large dog that we may possibly also assume is one of her well-liked companions. Standing behind these figures within the foreground are a duenna - a combination of chaperone and nurse - along with a male bodyguard. Behind these a couple of stands a man inside a brightly lit doorway.

Velazquez has used each light and composition to designate the power relationships that exist among these a number of figures. For example, although Margarita is the smallest figure inside the painting, she is clearly the central character of this narrative (Schmitter 257). All of the movement inside painting appears to swirl around her, particularly that from the a couple of maids who each lean inwards to her, as if they have been tipping forward into space, saved from falling only by the steadfastness how the princess gives to their forms.

The dwarves occupy the forward-most space within the painting, but our eyes tend not to linger on them.

However, the artist, who seems so directly back at us, reminds us in every glance that our authority is only apparent. We might believe that we now have a particular degree of power over this image even as the royal couple once believed that they had a particular degree of power over this image. But it's the artist himself who has the final say in what we see and how we look.

Foucault argued that a lot with the power of "Las Meninas" stems during the simple fact that it was created during an age wherever paintings were supposed to provide unmediated depictions of the world. In other words, it was the career of Velazquez as a Mannerist Spanish painter with the 17th century to tell the truth. But what he did instead was to undermine the entire thought of the single fact and to place in its stead the concept of the fact that may be actively mediate and constructed by all individuals who are involved - in this situation the painter as well as the subjects (who stay the same) and the audience, which always contains the king and the queen and also contains a often changing cast that, for the moment at least, includes us as well.

This is a painting around the power of representation and thus also, in some large measure, for the power of beauty to compel us to look at that that is certainly lovely and away from that which is not, and the contrasting use of lightness and darkness over a "perfect" infanta as well as the "deformed" dwarves underscores this (Bizri 19).

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