The democracy of ‘Las Meninas’

2023-04-16 23:04:53

room twelve of muse of the Prado, half past one p.m. The Infanta Margarita stares at me. She is attended by Doña María Agustina Sarmiento and Doña Isabel de Velasco, meninas of the queen, while Diego Velázquez portrays himself portraying the kings. Standing before the Sevillian painting, Laura Cumming’s words come to mind in that essay about the bookseller who lost his head because of Velázquez’s work. “Everyone who stands before Las Meninas, held by the eyes of those missing children and servants, finds himself exactly where other people were located in the past.” Velázquez puts us in the company of everyone who is watching him now and has seen him before.

In room twelve of the Prado Museum, standing before the painting by Velázquez, we are part of a moment that has remained intact throughout the centuries. In front of Las Meninas, the world turns upside down: citizens take the place of kings, and kings seem remote and tiny, like extras in a crowd. Observing that canvas, we are all gathered, squeezed together, in history: Velázquez, the princesses, the servants, the artist and the hundreds of thousands who have passed in front of an immense frame displayed before the world like a window. Laura Cumming is right about that painting: “Las Meninas brings us together in its unlimited democracy.”

All kinds of hypotheses have been woven about them, including that of being a portrait of the boredom of the court of Felipe IV, and that on the canvas is revealed as part of an unresolved enigma. It takes hours to detail it. Fix your gaze on a single character, squeeze him to say new things. All together it is impossible to control them. They rebel and blur. Standing, surrounded by a swarm of visitors and tourists, I discover that the democracy of Las Meninas has been broken. Even if I wanted to, I can’t take the place of the spectators who came before me. A swell moves me, a murmur, an elbow, a stumble. I flee from room 12 and stand in the central gallery. The world is turning upside down, no doubt.

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