DIEGO VELASQUEZ:LAS MENINAS

Las Meninas is a 1656 painting by Diego Velasquez,the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age,in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The works complex enigmatic composition raises questions obout reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities,Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analysed works in Western painting. Las Meninas is shown in a large room in the Madrid palace of King Philip
the 4 of Spain, and presents several figures, most indentifiable from the Spanish court, captured, according to some commentators, in a particular moment as if in a snapshot. The young Infanta Margarita is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Las Meninas has long been recognised as one of the most important paintings in the history of Western Art.
Provenance and condition of painting
The painting was referred to in the earliest inventories as La Familia(The Family). A detailed descripcion of Las Meninas,to which we owe the identification of several of the figures, was published by Antonio Palomino, (The Georgio Vesari of the Spanish Golden Age)in 1724.
Subject matter Las Meninas is set in Velasquez studi in Philip 4 Alcazar palace in Madrid. The hight-ceiling room is presented, in the words of Silvio Gaggi,as a simple box thet could be divided into a perspective grid with a single vanishing point. In the centre of the foreground stands the Infanta Margarita.
Composition The painted surface is divided into quarters horizontally and sevenths vertically. This grid is used to organise the elaborate grouping of characters, and was a commom device at the time. Velasquez presents nine figures -eleven if the king and queens reflected images included- yet they occupy only the lower half of the canvas. The elusiveness of Las Meninas,according to Dawson Carr, suggests that art, and life, are an ilusion. The relacionship between illusion and reality were central concerns in Spanish culture during the 17 th century, figuring largely in Don Quixote, the best known work of Spanish Baroque Literature.

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