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Updated: May 15, 2025
Luca Giordano called Las Meninas the "theology of painting." Wilkie declared that the Velasquez landscapes possessed "the real sun which lights us, the air which we breathe, and the soul and spirit of nature." "To see the Prado," exclaims Stevenson, "is to modify one's opinion of the novelty of recent art."
He superintended the ceremonies and festivals of the royal household; he arranged in the halls of the Alcazar the bronzes and marbles purchased in Italy; he also cast in bronze the models he brought from abroad, and he yet found time to paint his last great picture, "Las Meniñas," or the "Maids of Honor," which represents the royal family, with the artist, maids of honor, the dwarfs, and a sleeping hound.
Las Meninas is the perfect flowering of the genius of the Spaniard. It has been called impressionistic; Velasquez has been claimed as the father of impressionism as Stendhal was hailed by Zola as the literary progenitor of naturalism. But Velasquez is too universal to be labelled in the interests of any school.
To this period are assigned twenty-six pictures Senor Beruete only admits the authenticity of eighty-three in all, it may be mentioned twelve of which are royal portraits, seven those of buffoons and dwarfs, three mythological and two sacred subjects, and the two famous pieces of real life, Las Meninas and Las Hilanderas.
Renovales, seeing that the curiosity about him was diminishing, entered the little hall that contained the picture of Las Meninas. There was Tekli in front of the famous canvas that occupies the whole back of the room, seated before his easel, with his white hat pushed back to leave free his throbbing brow that was contracted with a tenacious insistence on accuracy.
As a piece of easy actual life, the composition has never been surpassed, and perhaps it excels even "The Meninas," inasmuch as the hoops and dwarfs of the palace have not intruded upon the domestic privacy of the painter's home, in the northern gallery. Velasquez seems to have been a man of honour and amiability. He filled a difficult office at the most jealous court in Europe with credit.
The balance in his work of the most disparate and complex relations of form, space, colour, and rhythm has the unpremeditated quality of life; yet the massive harmonic grandeurs of Las Meninas have been placed by certain critics in the category of glorified genre. Some prefer Las Hilanderas in the outer gallery.
But whether primitive or modern, realist or symbolist, he would always have been a painter of dramatic genius. He is the unicorn among artists. Fearful that your eye has lost its innocence after hearing so much of the picture, you enter the tiny room at the museum on the Prado in which is hung Las Meninas The Maids of Honour, painted by Velasquez in 1656. My experience was a typical one.
Rhythmically more involved and contrapuntal than The Maids, this canvas, with its brilliant broken lights, its air that circulates, its tender yet potent conducting of the eye from the rounded arm of the seductive girl at the loom to the arched area with its leaning, old-time bass-viol, its human figures melting dream-like into the tapestried background, arouses within the spectator much more complicated états d'âme than does Las Meninas.
The Family of Charles IV, his patron and patroness, with the sheep-like head of the favourite De la Paz, is here in all its bitter humour; it might be called a satiric pendant to that other Familia, not many yards away, Las Meninas. There are the designs for tapestries in the basement; Blind Man's Buff and other themes illustrating national traits.
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