Michael Jacobs - Everything is happening: journey into a painting

At first glance, Las Meninas which translates as The Ladies in Waiting appears to be what one might call in England a Conversation Piece; a royal group of sorts, though more intimate. And yet there is no conversation. Quite the reverse: there is a powerful mood in the room and it is silent. Silence is the quintessence of the painting.

Here is the painter Velzquez, in a room at the royal palace of Philip IV of Spain, at work with his palette and before a canvas, in the company of the Kings daughter and her entourage. The first thing we notice is that most of the figures are frozen in their stares and manner, and some even in suspended gestures; their attention caught by, and focussed on, some presence outside the frame. The stare of those aware of this external presence is in our direction, which is also apparently that of Velzquezs sitter or subject. This, one can presume from the reflection in the mirror on the back wall, is likely be King Philip IV and Queen Maria Theresa, whose faded images we see, almost spectral, in the glass.

The awe experienced by a beholder of the painting

The picture has become iconic: a national treasure of Spain, poster and fridge magnet, model for paintings by Picasso and others and a riddle that confounds to this day. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, writes

Why is the painting so baffling? The stares directed towards us from

The fact of the mirror in this waltz between reality and illusion is crucial in itself, argues Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, former director of the Velzquez Institute in Madrid. Pure vision, he writes, is the image, in an inaccessible space,

Does this, then, make Las Meninas a painting of and about Philip IV and his queen? Or is it a self-portrait of Diego Velzquez? Or a Conversation Piece depicting the Infanta, her maids and inner circle? The first analyst of the painting, the Portuguese Felix da Costa, writing in 1696, thought that the picture seems more like a portrait of Velzquez than the princess. Or is it a picture of us, indeed, as we observe the scene of those observing us? Or all, or none, of the above? Perhaps it is a painting about painting, some mercurial visual essay on the artists act of representation? Or is it a depiction of the coexistence of reality and illusion? These are among the mysteries of Las Meninas, and so the innumerable questions continue.

Velzquez is an artist whose works are so dazzling in their technique and so uncannily lifelike that it is difficult at times to think of him as a man of flesh and blood. So opens Michael Jacobss introduction to an earlier book, Lives of Velzquez, which combines the only two biographies

Diego Rodrguez de Silva Velzquez came from a Portuguese family on the side of his father Juan Rodrguez de Silva, possibly with some Jewish heritage, while the family of his mother, Dona Jernima Velzquez, was native to Andalusia where the painter was born, in Seville during 1599. By Andalusian custom, he took his mothers name.

The Seville into which Velzquez was born was on the cusp; the beginning of its end as Spains predominant city. By the middle of the twelfth century, it had become the third largest metropolis in the world after Rome and Venice, and the poet Luis de Gngora had called it

The proximity of people to one another, and of rich to poor, caused plague to scourge Seville during the Golden Age, including

Through the maelstrom of pestilence and expulsion, young Velzquez developed a passion for painting, and was admitted in 1610 to what Palomino calls a gilded cage of art and learning run by Francisco Pacheco. Michael Jacobs calls it an important studio for all Pachecos own stiff, Michelangelo-inspired paintings and murals. After five years as Velzquezs tutor, Pacheco writes: I gave him my daughter in marriage, persuaded to it by his virtue, chastity and good qualities, and by the expectations raised by his great native talent.