Page 107 - El Rostro Enfermo

Diego Velázquez,
Las meninas, 1656,
óleo sobre lienzo, Facing Las meninas is a challenge for those who
318 x 276 cm, Madrid, believe they master all the adjectives that define
Museo del Prado. admiration when placed before a great work of art.
Las meninas, oil on canvas.
Complex, believable, real, are some of these endless
epithets. It was painted in the Chamber of the
Prince in the Alcazar de Madrid. Lady Mary Agustina
Sarmiento and Elizabeth de Velasco, “meninas” of
the Queen, assist the Infant Margaret, which is being
entertained by the dwarfs Mari Bárbola and Nicolasito
Pertusato, who is somehow trying to bother a
mastiff, while the lady-in-waiting Dona Marcela de
Ulloa, together with a lady’s assistant and José Nieto,
at the background, contemplate the scene. In the
mirror, the faces of Philip IV and Marian of Austria,
parents of the Infant are reflected, painted by the
last of the protagonists, Diego Velázquez (1599-
1660). The perspective is deployed by multiplying
light sources, creating the distinctive magic of the
artists of the time, introducing the viewer not only
in what is seen in the scene, but in what is not,
although it is suggested.
The most common interpretation holds that the
monarchs, who are being portrayed by Velázquez,
would take the place of the viewer, and are
reflected in a mirror in the background, while the
painter, the Infant Margaret and her assistants make
up the scene Velázquez introduces to us. Velázquez
has also literally, turned the painted around, as the
pictorial fact itself becomes the main reason, in
line with the aspirations of liberal art that painters
claimed during that century. But the exceptional
nature of Las meninas is not exhausted in this
original compositional approach. The generous
dimensions of the painting, which depend on a
necessarily adjusted execution to the artist’s hand,
allow us to reconstruct stroke by stroke the visual
creation of the details, hair, clothes and color prints.
This awareness of the art of painting as a subject
and as an act, does not hinder but accompanies
the plausible suggestion of the slightest qualities
created by a brush, such as the light that breaks the
scene and even the air that stands between viewer
and the painting.

107

MONJE.indd 107 14/06/2016 7:58:34