Who Is Watching Whom? Unpacking the Puzzle of Velázquez's Las Meninas

In Las Meninas, a five-year-old Spanish princess, the Infanta Margaret Theresa, stands in a room of the royal palace in Madrid surrounded by her maids of honour, a chaperone, a bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog, while the painter Diego Velázquez stands at a huge canvas and looks straight out at us. A small mirror on the back wall reflects King Philip IV and Queen Mariana, which suggests that the royal couple is standing exactly where we, the viewers, are standing. The scene feels like a snapshot of a single moment, yet nobody can say for certain what exactly is happening, and that uncertainty is the reason it has become one of the most analysed paintings in Western art.

The people in the room

The title means "The Ladies-in-waiting". At the centre is the Infanta, the only surviving child of Philip and Mariana at the time, who would later marry the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. On one side, Doña María Agustina Sarmiento kneels and offers her a drink in a small red cup on a golden tray. On the other side, Doña Isabel de Velasco is about to curtsy.

To the right stand two court dwarfs, Mari Bárbola from Austria and the Italian Nicolás Pertusato, who is playfully nudging a sleepy mastiff with his foot. Behind them the princess's chaperone, Doña Marcela de Ulloa, dressed in mourning, talks to a bodyguard. Far in the background, José Nieto Velázquez, the queen's chamberlain, pauses on a short flight of stairs in a bright doorway. One critic noted that we cannot tell whether he is coming or going.

And on the left, holding a brush and palette, is the artist himself. Velázquez painted himself working on a canvas so large that some writers note it is about the same size as Las Meninas itself.

Who was Velázquez?

Diego Velázquez was born in Seville in 1599 and died in 1660. He was the leading painter at the court of Philip IV and a central figure of the Spanish Golden Age, and he is often counted among the greatest artists in Western history. As a teenager he trained with the Seville painter and teacher Francisco Pacheco, and in 1618 he married Pacheco's daughter, Juana. His early pictures were kitchen scenes with still lifes, such as Old Woman Frying Eggs, which already showed unusual skill at painting real things.

He went to Madrid in the 1620s and entered royal service. Over the years he became more than a portrait painter: he also curated the king's growing art collection, deciding where paintings should hang and helping to acquire works by Titian, Raphael and Rubens that are now in the Prado. In 1651 he was appointed palace chamberlain, a post that brought status but took so much time that he painted only a few works in his last years.

A painter's studio in the palace

The scene is set in Velázquez's own studio in the Alcázar, the royal palace of Madrid. The king had given him a large room that had belonged to his late son, Balthasar Charles, and Philip had his own chair there so that he could sit and watch the painter at work. In seventeenth-century Spain painting was usually seen as a craft rather than a noble art like poetry or music, so the friendship between king and painter was unusual. When Velázquez died, Philip wrote "I am crushed" in the margin of a document about choosing his successor.

The mirror and the mystery

The most debated detail is the mirror on the back wall. The most common view is that it reflects the king and queen as they pose for a double portrait, so that the whole painting shows the scene through their eyes while their daughter has come in to keep them company. Other scholars, including H. W. Janson and Joel Snyder, argue that the mirror is reflecting the canvas Velázquez is painting, whose front we cannot see.

The art historian Ernst Gombrich imagined a simple story: perhaps the princess was brought in to relieve the boredom of a long sitting, and the king or queen remarked that this would make a fine picture. Kenneth Clark imagined something even more human, a five-year-old who has had enough of posing while her maids try to coax her. No single theory has won everyone over. Velázquez may have known Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, which hung in Philip's palace and also has a mirror at the back reflecting figures who stand where the viewer stands.

How to look at it: details to notice

First, count the eyes. Of the nine figures, five look directly out of the picture, at the royal couple or at us. Standing in front of it, you feel watched and drawn into the room at the same time.

Next, follow the light. It pours in from windows on the right and from the open door at the back. The Infanta stands in full light, her pale hair and wide skirt making her the brightest shape in the room, while the figures around her are partly in shadow. Notice also that all the people occupy only the lower half of the canvas; the dark upper half, with its rows of paintings and its ceiling, gives the room its depth. The lines of the walls and ceiling meet near the man in the doorway, which is the vanishing point of the perspective.

Then look at the painter's chest. He wears the red cross of the Order of Santiago, a knighthood he only received in 1659, three years after finishing the picture. According to the early biographer Antonio Palomino, the king ordered it added after Velázquez died, and some said Philip painted it himself. Infrared images also show small changes: at first Velázquez tilted his own head the other way.

Fire, restoration and a riot

The painting has been cut down on both sides, and it was damaged in the 1734 fire that destroyed the Alcázar. Afterwards, the Infanta's left cheek had to be almost entirely repainted. It was first called simply "The Family", and the name Las Meninas only appeared in a Prado catalogue in 1843. When the British conservator John Brealey cleaned it in 1984, the Spanish press attacked him and a small riot broke out outside the room where he worked, although experts later judged the restoration excellent.

Where is Las Meninas now?

Las Meninas hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, which it entered when the museum was founded in 1819. Because of its size, importance and value, it is never lent out to other exhibitions, so the only way to see it is to go to Madrid.

A painting about painting

The Italian painter Luca Giordano called it the "theology of painting", and in 1827 Sir Thomas Lawrence called it "the true philosophy of the art". Francisco Goya made an etching of it in 1778 and later used it as a model for his own royal family portrait. Between August and December 1957, Pablo Picasso painted 58 variations on it, which now fill a room of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. The philosopher Michel Foucault opened his 1966 book The Order of Things with a long analysis of it. Édouard Manet called Velázquez the "painter of painters". What they all saw is a picture that asks us where we stand, who is looking at whom, and what a painting really is.

Learn with Las Meninas: English phrases about looking

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to look straight at	to look directly at someone	The painter looks straight at us.
in the background	in the area behind the main figures	A man stands in the background.
a point of view	the position from which something is seen	The picture shows the king's point of view.
to catch someone's eye	to attract someone's attention	The bright mirror catches your eye.
to be up for debate	to be still discussed, with no final answer	The meaning of the mirror is up for debate.

Try this: Describe a group photo in three English sentences, using "in the background" and "to catch someone's eye".