The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight
-John Berger, Ways of Seeing
In 1656 the leading painter in the Spanish Golden Age, Diego Velázquez, completed his most widely recognized piece—Las Meninas or The Ladies-in-Waiting. Velázquez, born in southern Spain in 1599, began painting at the age of eleven. After establishing a career as an artist, Velázquez was appointed to Philip IV’s court—first as Assistant to the Wardrobe and later to Gentleman of the Bedchamber. In 1647 he was given the task of “modernizing the old Alcázar palace” (National Gallery). Having developed a close working and personal relationship with the king and queen, he was commissioned to create what would eventually become his most well known painting, Las Meninas. He painted a depiction of himself in Las Meninas, an artistic ode marked by the incorporation of his own role in their life.
Las Meninas depicts Velázquez in the role of artist and family friend, standing off center behind a large canvas. The apartment setting of the room in which the family is inhabiting includes the Infanta Margarita Teresa, the daughter of Philip IV, as well as the ladies in waiting for the royal family in various states of work. A man stands in the back of the frame, hovering in the darkened doorway. The details in Las Meninas provide even more characters from which the story begins to be told. The Spanish Baroque period often featured “genre paintings,” paintings in which everyday life was depicted. It was a departure from the previous style of history paintings and portraits which often took liberty in representation. In genre paintings, life was depicted as it was lived.
For Velázquez, Las Meninas takes inspiration from the 1434 painting The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Genami by Early Netherlandish artist Jan van Eyck. It was common for Baroque painters to return to their predecessors’ hidden techniques and minute styles. In a mirror behind Velázquez is a reflection of the king and queen themselves. It is no wonder that the unique composition of Velázquez’s painting sparked centuries of art historians to question what the true meaning behind the painting is.
Did Velázquez know that Las Meninas would become the most widely analyzed painting in the western canon of art history? It is completely unclear from the content of the painting. For over the last three hundred years, both art historians and theorists have been attempting to decipher the true intention behind Las Meninas. As the most popular and recognizable piece in the history of western art, Velázquez sparked interest in a rather unique collection of thinkers. For this paper, I would like to examine what I am calling the “Holy Trinity” of Las Meninas interpreters: the Father—Michel Foucault’s 1966 publication The Order of Things; the Son—Jacques Lacan’s seminars; and the Holy Spirit—including the more recent impact of the painting in the work of Graham Harman in Art and Objects, as well as Byron Ellsworth Hamann in The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay. I hope to interweave these three paths of thought into a clear picture of just how widely applicable and influential Velázquez’s painting has been and remains in our society.
To begin with the Father of Las Meninas, Michel Foucault published his interpretation of the painting in his 1966 book, The Order of Things. He wrote extensively on the archeology of the human sciences, and brings a historicism to the contents of Velázquez’s painting. Las Meninas to Foucault completely represents Classical era representation—he believed that the Classical era is an era of representation itself. For Classical representation, everything fits and nothing is missing. Foucault argues in The Order of Things that the painting itself is a representation of a particular void. He writes that:
The invisibility that it [the painting] overcomes in this way is not the invisibility of what is hidden: it does not make its way around any obstacle, it is not distorting any perspective, it is addressing itself to what is invisible both because of the picture’s structure and because of its existence as a painting. (Foucault 8)
What he is suggesting here boils down to an analysis in which the painting itself functions as a void. While the main questions of Las Meninas usually are in regard to who is being painted and who the main subject of the painting is, Foucault takes a different approach with this idea of representation through layers and the negation of representation forming a void.
Foucault believes that it is the layers of the painting that make it accessible, and he argues that the gaze within the image is not intended to be seen, and cannot be seen. Foucault writes: “the entire picture is looking out at a scene for which it is itself a scene” (Foucault 14). It is a large theme in The Order of Things that representation relies on something being subtracted. It seems as though the obvious subtraction in Las Meninas is what appeals to Foucault.
Obvious absence implies some intentionality behind it, yet Velázquez does not give up what his intentions are within the life-sized canvas. Foucault chooses to focus in his analysis on the gaze, yet argues that “No gaze is stable, or rather in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles infinity” (Foucault 13). For his analysis, there is no true gaze, and as viewers of the painting our own gaze pulls us into the void along with the contents of the painting.
Foucault represents the Father within the Holy Trinity of Las Meninas as he interpreted the painting in a way no art historian had attempted to do before. Foucault functions as the founder of what comes that very same year, in a seminar by Jacques Lacan. For the sake of this analysis, Lacan represents the Son in the Holy Trinity. His analysis of Las Meninas turns Foucault’s around, but maintains a similar origin of thought.
In May of 1966, only two months after Foucault’s publication of The Order of Things, Lacan delivered a series of seminars in which he examined Las Meninas for himself. Lacan represents the Son in the Holy Trinity as he followed Foucault and, using the birth of Foucault’s analysis, creates one of his own. The birth of Lacan’s analysis of Las Meninas comes in his disagreement with Foucault’s belief that the painting is a mirror. Lacan believes that Velázquez merely created a window.
As fathers and sons often disagree, Foucault and Lacan did not see eye-to-eye on what is happening in Las Meninas. Both speak to the “picture plane” of the painting, agreeing that the canvas behind which Velázquez himself stands represents the picture plane itself. Lacan chooses to believe that the mirror in which the reflection of the king and queen appears is an indication of what Velázquez is painting on his canvas. This is a common understanding—or possible misunderstanding—with traditional art historians. However, he claims that it is the fact that we do not know what it is that is being painted on the canvas that facilitates our desire.
Out of Lacan’s analysis of Las Meninas comes his theory of object a, the unattainable object of desire that we all experience. Lacan believes “we never see the other from where the other looks at us.” When looking into a mirror, such as the one within Las Meninas, the object a is what you don’t see in the reflection because it is what you can never see yourself. For Lacan, the vanishing point of the painting rests at the man in the doorway, as he is leaving the painting and his presence locates us as the spectator of the painting, hence Las Meninas acting as a window. Lacan argues that the “painting is a trap for the gaze.”
While the Father of Las Meninas believed that we all fit within the painting and that nothing is missing within the representation of Classical representation, the Son of Las Meninas focused on exactly what was missing, arguing that it is our lack that creates our desire. We now have reached the final portion of The Holy Trinity of Las Meninas. In Christianity, the Holy Spirit represents the personage of spirit, with no true body in which to inhabit. The Holy Spirit of Las Meninas is the grip that the painting has on our world today. It takes the remnants of what has come before to create a ghostly omnipotent grasp on our interest in the painting. While Foucault fathered the unique analysis of Las Meninas and bore Lacan’s analysis as its successor, two vastly different theorists have both directly and indirectly revisited Las Meninas as personages of spirit. Neither fits in a true category of analysis as presented by Foucault and Lacan, yet each adds individual insights on what could possibly be happening in the painting.
To begin with, The Holy Spirit of Las Meninas appears in Byron Ellsworth Hamann’s 2010 essay published in The Art Bulletin—“Interventions: The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay.” Hamann is a link between the old and the new, and provides a clear example of how Las Meninas is a painting the influence of which spans time and space, continuously being reimagined through the ages. Unlike his predecessors, Hamann applies a distinctly modern lens of postcolonial and materialistic theory to the painting. Similar to Foucaultian historicism, Hamann uses the example of Pre Columbian studies in which he historicizes and speculates on the true meaning behind the piece. Hamann believes that the painting acts as an ideal image of the relations between the two shores of the Atlantic. He writes:
These transatlantic connections are rendered visible in three painted details: the red ceramic vessel Infanta Margarita reaches for, the silver tray this vessel rests on, and the red curtains reflected in the mirror at the back of the room. All three signal products of the New World, products of the labor of Amerindian subjects of the Crown. All are objects whose depiction by Velázquez in this painting was made possible by Spain’s colonial empire. (Hamann 6)
Hamann takes an approach to analysis of the objects present in the frame in a similar sense that theorist Graham Harman (unfortunately similar last name to Hamann, distinctly different taste in the wide world of art history) explores in his book Art and Objects. Harman fits together with Hamann to produce the Holy Spirit of Las Meninas, representing what is not directly explored but can be traced through a comparison of work. Harman argues that the problem with modernity is that we have valued objects over our relationship to them. He believes that every object defies the existence of other objects, and arguably uses this belief to interpret art in the broadest sense possible. For Harman, Hamann’s choice to signal out three individual objects from the painting would fit within his theory of Object-Oriented Ontology, which would suggest that these three objects consciously sway the contents of Las Meninas. Harman arguably does not widen his analysis of art history in Art and Objects beyond works not worthy of further attention, but his theory can be applied here in connection with Hamann’s essay and provide further insight on the mystery that is Las Meninas.
Harman writes that Object-Oriented Ontology’s “rather different approach is to treat the artwork as a compound, one that always contains the human being as an essential ingredient” (Harman 44). It is the objects themselves that Hamann chooses to focus on that represent the human being as an essential influence over the possibility of hidden postcolonial influence within Las Meninas. Hamann similarly writes: “Objects are central to human social life, and their use by people endows them with complex meanings. By placing these objects in his canvas, Velázques could not help but bring their complex associations into his composition” (Hamann 15). As Harman explores, the human being is an essential ingredient, and it was a human being who chose to include the objects in which the relationship between the colonies becomes clear. Hamann writes that the objects “give us an idea of how the world of seventeenth-century Europeans was conceptualized” (Hamann 12). For Foucault, this would be evidence of the episteme in which the painting was created.
Further, Hamann writes that the three objects which represent colonization were wholly intentional on the part of Velázquez. His choice to include the intention of the painter himself and not merely an analysis of the content of the painting is unique to his theory and not found in Foucault or Lacan. He writes:
The labor of Velázques enables us to see, now, the cup, the tray, and the curtain that lie at the center of my reading. These things were not included in the painting simply because they happened to be furnishings (however common) in a moment that took place in the Alcázar one sunny day. These things are in the painting because Velázquez consciously put them in his composition. (Hamann 26).
While he argues that the objects represent the wide influence of colonization and empirical tendencies of the royal family, Hamann returns to his predecessors and once more examines the gaze of the painting. He questions why and how the representation is ordered, and how the objects influence that order. He writes: “my own study of seemingly obscure details within Las Meninas has attempted to restore visibility to men and women who cannot be directly seen within the painting itself” (Hamann 29). He writes that the three objects are the products of human labor, that they are the “odds and ends of native ornament, torn from context and repeated as ‘empty’ decorative themes” (Hamann 28). Through the lens of Art and Objects, the labor that created those objects provides the visibility of their lives. On the topic of visibility, Hamann writes his most moving observation that places Las Meninas directly within the episteme of colonization, an observation that is inspired by the light from which the scene is illuminated—the unpictured window:
None of the figures in Las Meninas looks at the window directly; we can only assume its presence through the light that pours in on the right. How, then, might we map those aspects of the realm of colonial studies that—although potentially of great importance—early modern Europeans did not look on, and that we now can infer only obliquely? (Hamann 29)
To Hamann, unlike Foucault and Lacan, the direct human influence in Las Meninas is what brings meaning to the painting. While his predecessors focused on the representation of representation and the psychoanalytic influence of desire, Hamann looked directly at what is being said in the minute details. His approach is similar to Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology as it seems to give these objects the consciousness of who is not directly pictured. The labor that went into the creation of these objects let alone the artistic work that Velázquez put into painting them onto a canvas is what is seen but not seen. The objects act as stand-ins for those that are not directly depicted.
While the Holy Trinity of Las Meninas is merely a fragment of the much broader work that has been published on the painting over the many years it has puzzled viewers, it perhaps represents a diverse and important selection of interpretations. By examining all three in unison, a sense of the painting as a whole can begin to emerge. It is unlikely that any art historian or theorist will truly capture what is being portrayed in Las Meninas, and, while we may never know, we can use all three lenses presented by Foucault, Lacan, and Hamann to see what is unseen, and to unsee what is seen. As Foucault himself writes: “Representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form” (Foucault 16).
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. BBC and Penguin, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books, 1994.
Hamann, Byron Ellsworth. “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 92, no. 1/2, [Taylor & Francis, Ltd., College Art Association], 2010, pp. 6–35, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27801653.
Harman, Graham. Art and Objects. Polity, 2020.
The National Gallery, London. “Diego Velázquez.” The National Gallery, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/diego-velazquez.