Where is velazquez las meninas

When he painted Las Meninas, he had been with the royal household for 33 years. Philip IV's first wife, Elizabeth of France, died in ; and their only son, Balthasar Charles, died two years later. Lacking an heir, Philip married Mariana of Austria in , and Margaret Theresa — was their first child, and their only one at the time of the painting.

Subsequently, she had a short-lived brother Philip Prospero — , and then Charles — arrived, who succeeded to the throne as Charles II at the age of three. It is here that Las Meninas is set. Although constrained by rigid etiquette, the art-loving king seems to have had an unusually close relationship with the painter.

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Because it is a very large painting. Actually, it's a painting with a very large painting inside it. That's the same size as the painting it is. Did you follow that? I did. It is very complicated. So what we're seeing here is, in the center, the princess attended by the maidens of honor, a dwarf, her governess, and some other attendants.

And on the back wall a mirror, which is the sort of puzzle in a way of the painting. We know it's a mirror because unlike the canvases on the back wall, this is a much more reflective surface. We can see the beveled edge of the glass, and of course in that frame, we see a reflection of the King and Queen of Spain, Philip IV and his wife. And some art historians have suggested that we must be them looking into the mirror and seeing our own reflection.

Which is why the princess is looking out at us, and even the dog is, in a sense, taking notice. And why there is just sort of general attention being very much focused on where we are in front of the painting.

Perhaps we're in the space of the king and queen, and this painting was meant for the study of the king, who would have been the person looking at it. So it's very much meant for his gaze. That issue of looking, of gaze, is I think for me really one of the central keys to this painting.

You used to speak about it with such passion. I tried imagining myself as I was then, standing with Royce in front of Las Meninas , expounding on the painting with the gushing hyperbole of an adolescent.

I was still at the innocent phase of my lifelong infatuation with Spain, and was probably telling my companion about the quintessential Spanishness of the work, its exotic and surreal character, its mixture of sombreness and sensuality, its element of the grotesque, its underlying magic.

He suggested I was devoting far too much time to art and not enough to living. He interpreted the passion with which I spoke about painting as my way of sublimating sexual frustration. He told me that what I really needed was a girlfriend, and that I would be better off going to bars and discos than spending so many hours visiting monuments and museums.

Though I would gradually recognise the truth of his words, their immediate impact was to irritate me profoundly, as did his subsequent gesture of walking off in the direction of a young woman whom he said was more beautiful than any of the pictures we had seen. It was as if he had violated the inner sanctuary of a temple. What I never lost was my fascination with Las Meninas , partly because it was so tied up with my developing relationship with Spain and the Hispanic world.

For, as I began returning to Spain with ever greater frequency, and as a passion for life subsumed one for art, I came almost to think of the painting as a watchful, background presence, accompanying me as I became progressively more caught up with a country moving from a repressive dictatorship to a vibrant democracy, to a disenchanted place on the verge of collapse.

Of encouraging me perhaps to head deeper into what I would soon perceive as an ever-expanding labyrinth. So I decided, as I neared the age of 60, to look more closely at a painting that is famously a mystery.

A mystery that at first sight might not seem like one. A work that could easily strike the viewer simply as a realistic portrayal of Spanish court life, with the artist painting in his studio, and a young princess visiting him there with her retinue. Palomino was lucky enough to have been able to research his account of Las Meninas when there were still people around with memories of when it was painted.

He is a reliable source.