To judge by the biographies of Velázquez written by Lázaro Díaz del Valle, Jusepe Martínez, and especially Antonio Palomino, his career as aposentador mayor de palacio was unequivocally successful, and his redecoration of the Hall of Mirrors his crowning achievement in this arena.1 Velázquez’s work in the Hall of Mirrors demonstrates the way his role as curator of the royal art collection could serve as a vehicle for his ambitions as a painter and the way his curatorial work could, in turn, inform his painting practice. But the reception of this and other projects he carried out as aposentador mayor de palacio also indicates that this work came to be interwoven into his professional identity at the Spanish court, and with significant consequences for the painters that sought to follow his example. Velázquez’s extraordinary success at the court of Philip IV changed what it meant to be a painter for the Habsburgs, and especially what it meant to be their portraitist. Velázquez became an indispensable model of professional success for royal portrait painters after him. That this is the case is made clear enough by the portraits of members of the royal family produced by his followers according to conventions that he had perfected in his own portraits. For these same artists, however, to emulate Velázquez was not only to make portraits that took his paintings as a model; it was also to follow his example as aposentador mayor de palacio.
The generation following Velázquez saw a shift in the types of work pursued by artists at the Habsburg court.2 Nearly every pintor de cámara after Velázquez through the end of this dynasty was hired to work simultaneously as ayuda de la furriera, a position which, like aposentador mayor de palacio, candidates were required to solicit themselves. These included Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Sebastián de Herrera Barnuevo, Juan Carreño de Miranda, Claudio Coello, and Luca Giordano, all of whom made significant contributions to the history of art during the reign of Charles II, Philip IV’s only surviving son and heir to his throne. Their collective oeuvre demonstrates in different ways the impact of Velázquez’s work as a painter on the artistic culture of the Habsburg court. As their employment record suggests, all were aware that Velázquez’s appointments in the managerial infrastructure of the royal palace had played a role in his success as a court painter. Moreover, several substantial projects undertaken by these artists reveal the practical consequences of Velázquez’s double legacy. The work of Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo and of Juan Carreño de Miranda in particular gestures toward the same interchange of painterly and curatorial imaginations so exemplified in the Hall of Mirrors. Aspects of Mazo’s work as ayuda de la furriera offer a case study, however subtle, in the consequences of a painter’s occupation of this post. And paintings made by Juan Carreño de Miranda reveal one especially sophisticated way that Velázquez’s curatorial work could inform painting in his stead. Although only two examples of artistic activity undertaken in the wake of Velázquez, they suggest the different ways in which to be an artist after Velázquez meant to acknowledge both aspects of his career at the court of Philip IV.
It is not possible, however, to discuss the work of artists who followed Velázquez without first discussing the one painting perhaps in the entire history of Western art to which artists have most consistently responded and around which his reception necessarily revolves: Las Meninas, Velázquez’s other tour de force of the 1650s (fig. 6.1). This painting was the single most provocative work that Velázquez executed over the course of his career at the Spanish court. It served artists after him as a model for royal portraiture, one that could seemingly be endlessly reworked according to the needs of the artists who took it as such. Made in 1656 and therefore precisely when Velázquez was assembling the Spanish Hall of Mirrors, Las Meninas, too, is the product of two creative imaginations at work simultaneously. The history of the reception of Velázquez’s career as an artist under the Habsburgs cannot be told without reference to this painting, considered only as a painting. But as a work of installation, with a specific intended audience and a judiciously decorated exhibition space, Las Meninas once again represents the fruits of both of Velázquez’s artistic identities at the Habsburg court working as one.
1 Reconsidering Las Meninas
Velázquez produced Las Meninas at precisely the same moment that he executed the most significant curatorial project of his career. The Hall of Mirrors was a project within which Velázquez’s intelligences as a painter and as a curator were able to work in tandem; so too was Las Meninas, seemingly produced for an exhibition space with which it was in vivid dialogue. The site of display of Las Meninas reinforces the internal working of the painting around what remains its most polemical feature: the mirror at the center of the painting, and the image of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana that it affords the spectator. It should come as little surprise in light of the moment of its production that Velázquez’s greatest painting problematizes the very act of looking. Of the many lines of inquiry the painting manages to inspire, the issue of the painting’s display and thus its viewership broaches a series of interrelated questions with which the painting’s historiography has become inseparably associated: Who is standing in front of it? What is the mirror reflecting? What is the painting’s internal structure? It is here that the conversation surrounding Las Meninas inevitably begins.
The mirror at the center of Las Meninas has been the subject of overwhelming scholarly debate.3 Nevertheless, many of the arguments constructed around the mirror make one of two seemingly incompatible assumptions. The first of these has its origins in the work of Michel Foucault, whose book The Order of Things opens with an ekphrasis of Las Meninas. For Foucault, the problem of the painting’s viewership is central. Foucault’s text directly addresses the game of gazes at work within the painting and even beyond the picture plane, his descriptive prose moving through and outside the painting in an effort to untangle the apparently “incompatible visibilities” of and “invisibilit[ies] made visible” to the painter, his model, and the spectator.4 Throughout this ekphrastic movement, Foucault makes little distinction between the space in front of the painting and that within it, treating them as continuous and drifting back and forth between them as the painting directs his gaze. For Foucault, it is as though the picture plane of Las Meninas functions not merely as a window into a represented space; it bisects the spaces (both fictive and real) for which it accounts, spaces that are interpenetrated by the reciprocal gazes of those on either side of the divide and, crucially, by the mirror at the center of the painting. “What [the mirror] is reflecting,” Foucault writes, “is that which all the figures within the painting are looking at so fixedly, or at least those who are looking straight ahead; it is therefore what the spectator would be able to see if the painting extended further forward, if its bottom edge were brought lower until it included the figures the painter is using as models.”5 Around the time that Foucault was at work on the painting, Las Meninas was on view in a gallery called the “Sala de las Meninas,” where it was exhibited in the company of just one other object: a mirror, installed across from it (fig. 6.2).6 It is not difficult to imagine the vertiginous sense of circularity that this installation would have generated, absorbing everyday visitors to this gallery within a system of interlocking mirror reflections. Likewise, Foucault’s viewpoint, articulated in the age not of royal palaces but of public art museums, is a “democratiz[ing]” one: for Foucault, it appears that “the painter’s gaze … accepts as many models as there are spectators,” Velázquez’s painting thus recasting the average museumgoer as the Spanish monarchs.7 Resituating the work in the 1660s, the interchange between the mirror within the painting and the space just in front of the picture plane seems instead to reveal the painting’s spectators—the figures that are standing in front of the painting, as dictated by the contents of the painting itself—to be the king and queen of Spain. This is the position often adopted by the “philosopher/theorists” who have taken Las Meninas as their subject: that the mirror is reflecting the space immediately in front of the painting.8
Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, 318 × 276 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P001174
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Carlos Manso and Manuel Olivares, Gallery 15A of the Museo Nacional del Prado, 1977. Museo Nacional del Prado; Calle de Ruiz de Alarcón, 23; Madrid, Spain
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
The other possibility that presents itself derives from the most frequently cited source on Las Meninas: Antonio Palomino’s description of the painting in his biography of Velázquez, perhaps the most direct address on the part of one of Velázquez’s (near) contemporaries to the question of what, exactly, is being reflected in the mirror in Las Meninas. When Palomino encountered the painting, it was still on view in the Alcázar palace, which Velázquez had so pointedly worked to transform into a museum of the Habsburg dynasty and its painters and within which he could cement his own role as the creator of the image of Philip IV’s kingship.9 In the only section of Palomino’s prose addressing the mirror, he describes it as follows:
The canvas on which he is painting is large, and one sees nothing of what is painted, because one sees it from the back part that is attached to the easel.
Velázquez demonstrated his clear ingenuity by discovering what he was painting with an ingenious design, making use of the crystalline light of a mirror that he painted at the back of the gallery, and opposite to the canvas, whose reflection, or repercussion, presents to us our Catholic King and Queen, Philip and Mariana.10
Palomino claims that the mirror is reflecting the canvas whose recto is otherwise invisible to the viewer, praising the ingenuity of Velázquez’s use of a mirror reflection to reveal the images of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana on which he depicts himself at work.11 Palomino articulates no interaction between Las Meninas and anything outside the space depicted within the realm of the picture plane, locating the source of the mirror reflection within its confines. Palomino’s account of the mirror reflection is supported by the construction of the space that is the setting of Las Meninas, the former chambers of Prince Balthasar Carlos on the ground floor of the Alcázar palace, which had come to function as Velázquez’s studio. The space depicted is constructed according to geometric perspective, by which a system of orthogonal lines establishes a direct connection between the recto of the canvas on which Velázquez works and the mirror reflection.12 This is the viewpoint most vocally championed by “empirically inclined historians”: that the mirror at the center of Las Meninas reflects the image of the royal couple painted on the canvas within the bounds of the picture plane.13 Between the respective viewpoints of Palomino and Foucault, two answers to the question of what the mirror is reflecting seem possible, each of which represents a visual regime at first glance entirely irreconcilable with the other. The one corresponds to the painting’s geometrically determined internal structure, offering an intellectual resolution to the question that presents itself in the face of Las Meninas, while the other corresponds to the optical illusion of the mirror’s address to a present spectator, and of an experiential resolution to this same question.
Diane Bodart has convincingly suggested that the mirror in Las Meninas does both: it is a double vision that reflects both the surface of the canvas on which the painter Diego Velázquez is shown at work and also his model/spectator, physically present in front of the canvas.14 She suggests, in other words, that Palomino’s assertion that the mirror reflects the front of the canvas within Las Meninas and Michel Foucault’s assumption that it reflects the figures standing in front of Las Meninas are not at odds with one another but occurring simultaneously and, furthermore, that the painting’s efficacy in fact depends on their simultaneous occurrence. Her argument begins with a simple but effective gesture: she includes Las Meninas within the corpus of royal portraiture produced for Habsburg rulers beginning with Charles V and ending around the time of Charles II. For her, the painting constitutes a kind of double portrait of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. Thus situated within this pictorial category, the painting is able to operate within and, as Bodart demonstrates, manipulate the laws of this genre. Her thought process begins with the philosophy of Louis Marin addressing “the powers of substitution, of intensification, and of legitimation of presence specific to the royal portrait as a ‘re-presentation.’”15 For Marin, the king and his portrait are both images of the monarchy and thus existentially equivalent—if not mutually reinforcing—incarnations of the sovereign authority of Habsburg royalty. Taking the portrait as a literal re-presentation that makes present the body of the king in its absence, Marin claims that “at the place of re-presentation”—that is, at the site of the portrait itself—“there is a thing or person absent in time or space, or rather an other, and a substitution operates with a double of this other in its place.”16 This doubling of the sovereign body at the site of the painted portrait is what makes it possible, according to Bodart’s analysis, for “the visual image … to replace the corporeal and individual presence of the monarch.”17 Marin even claims that “the king is only truly king, that is, monarch, in images. They are his real presence.”18 As an expression of the “metaphysics of royalty,”19 a royal portrait can therefore stand in for the physical presence of the king, albeit with one caveat: “The efficacy of the redoubling and of the superimposition between the king and his image rests on their concentration in a single apparition. If the portrait substitutes itself for the king in his absence, it inevitably effaces itself in his presence.”20 In the presence of the king, the bodily manifestation of the monarchy, the portrait loses its power.
These are the laws that Las Meninas, operating as a royal portrait, sets into action. If we accept that Las Meninas is a variation on royal portraiture of the kind that Velázquez was contracted to produce at the court of Philip IV, then we can accept Bodart’s proposal that “the mirror of Las Meninas seems … to play with the redoubling and the superimposition of the body of the king and of his image” that was essential to the very working of imagery of power at the Habsburg court.21 In this aspect of her analysis, Bodart takes up the line of inquiry of Victor Stoichita, for whom the mirror serves as the axis around which the limits of representation of the royal body hinge in Velázquez’s work.22 Bodart concludes that “the mirror suggests, in effect, the condensation within a single vision of the reflection of the portrait-in-progress on the canvas which Velázquez is in the process of painting and of the reflection of the royal couple in flesh and blood … at the opposite end of the gallery.”23 If the mirror reflects both the canvas within Las Meninas and, perfectly simultaneously, the body of the king and queen standing in front of it, then it visualizes the equivalence of the monarch and his image. In addition, Las Meninas offers a solution to a problem emerging from within the metaphysics of kingship and its expression in royal portraiture: the inability of the royal portrait to accommodate the physical presence of the king and queen in front of it, being, as they were, in existential competition with one another as expressions of monarchy. The mirror image of the king and queen in Las Meninas permits the painting to absorb the bodies of the monarchy into itself. Rather than compete with their presence, Las Meninas makes their presence an integrated part of its illusionistic conceit. Even more than it is a royal portrait, then, Las Meninas is a meditation on the very nature of royal portraiture. Thanks to the mirror, the painting only accommodates the presence of the king and queen in front of it. And thanks to the mirror, Las Meninas is the only portrait that accommodates the presence of the king and queen in front of it. The meaning of Las Meninas as a representation of the nature of the representation of sovereignty thus emerges from within a closed system that the painting itself constructs. The interrelationships between the bodies of the king and queen in front of the painting, their reflection in the mirror at the painting’s center, and the canvas depicted within it expand a space across the picture plane, at the heart of which the metaphysics of the royal portrait stage their dynamic.
The site of the painting’s exhibition had a role to play in this extraordinary conceit. The painting imagines a scene in Velázquez’s painting studio in the southern part of the palace, with the escalera del Rubinejo—the staircase whose construction had occasioned the redecoration of the Octagonal Room and that led to the Vaults of Titian—visible in the background.24 However, it was hung instead in an office in the summer apartments of the king, situated within a series of rooms in the northern part of the palace.25 These rooms served the king and queen, in the company of a select entourage, as refuge from the summer heat, but this office in particular was intended for the exclusive use of the royal couple.26 These rooms were also, it should be noted, under Velázquez’s jurisdiction during his time as aposentador mayor de palacio.27 In the absence of any other firsthand accounts of the appearance of this gallery, our knowledge of its contents largely derives from the 1666 inventory of the Alcázar palace. The inventory lists twenty-nine paintings in addition to Las Meninas, executed by painters from across early modern Europe. Although many of the paintings’ authors are not given, those listed included Rubens, Ribera, Guido Reni, Correggio, Tintoretto, Guercino, van Dyck, Veronese, and Snyders, none of whom is better represented in the room than any other.28 Many of the paintings in this decorative program were still life paintings, and others were light-hearted images of Cupids, bacchanals, and landscapes. The decorative program of the room included seven large mirrors and six stone desks, richly bedecked and heavily worked and, in the case of the mirrors, each ornamented with two eagles.29 The inventory made of the Alcázar between 1701 and 1703 also reveals that Agostino Mitelli and Angelo Michele Colonna, the same fresco painters who were contracted to produce a fresco cycle for the Hall of Mirrors, executed frescoes for three rooms in the king’s summer apartments, this office included; it is thought that the subject of this fresco was the fall of Phaeton, historically misinterpreted as the god Apollo.30 One’s first impulse in the face of this material richness may be to attempt to read Las Meninas within the context of the suite of paintings selected for this space.31 More telling, however, are its furnishings. Without documents definitively tying Velázquez to the decoration of this room, perhaps only conservative assumptions about his role in curating the site of display of his most successful painting are prudent. But his role as aposentador virtually guarantees that Velázquez had a hand in the choice to hang his painting in this particular room and gives him plausible responsibility for the gallery’s contents. He likely chose to install Las Meninas in this gallery knowing that it would be surrounded primarily by mirrors. The adjoining rooms in the king’s summer apartments were furnished with the occasional bookshelf or desk, and one included a single mirror, but none contained the same proportion of mirrors as this office.32 In the privacy of this room, itself a kind of “hall of mirrors,” the king and queen would have been surrounded by their own image not in the form of conventional portraits but in the form of mirror reflections.
It is in this context that the king and queen would have seen Las Meninas and, within it, yet another mirror reflection. If Las Meninas functioned as a staging of the central dynamic of royal portraiture, it was surrounded by objects that restaged that dynamic. It is significant that Las Meninas was displayed among mirrors, but just as significant that it was not displayed among portraits (installed instead alongside paintings that were unlike Las Meninas in every conceivable way, that could not have interfered with its essential working). Mirrors and portraits both constitute forms of representation, but each relates to what it represents differently. As Victor Stoichita reminds us, unlike a painting, the image in a mirror does not take the place of what it represents. He writes, “For the mirror to be a representation (and not simply a polished and framed surface), the thing represented must be positioned in front of it, whereas the thing represented in a painting … is always ‘elsewhere.’ ”33 The display of Las Meninas in this gallery capitalizes on the very qualities that distinguish mirrors from any other kind of representational apparatus, including paintings. They are forms of representation that not only accommodate the king’s presence but in fact require it. In order to function as representations of the royal couple, mirrors require the presence of the king and queen in front of them: they require the interplay between representing object and represented body that animates royal portraiture and, furthermore, that animates Las Meninas. The mirrors in this gallery serve as an important reminder that Las Meninas only works when the king and queen meet their painted gaze. Thus considered, the painting no longer appears organized around the mirror at its center, but around an eyeline, one that would have been further emphasized by the reciprocity of the many gazes staring back out of the painting. The decorative program of the site in which Las Meninas was displayed would thus reinforce the painting’s internal working, repeating and even redoubling the operation that made Las Meninas not a royal portrait but the very dramatization of royal portraiture.
In the careful coordination of the painting’s contents, its intended audience, and its site of exhibition, we again see Velázquez’s curatorial and painterly intelligences working as one. It is likely that the mirrors and stone tables in this gallery were evenly distributed around the gallery (with the mirror in Las Meninas, one imagines, serving as an eighth mirror); the furnishings therefore would have made of this space a Hall of Mirrors in miniature, or perhaps turned inside out. If the Hall of Mirrors was the most public exhibition space in the palace by the end of the 1650s, the summer office was among the most private; the paintings Velázquez included in the final decoration of the Hall of Mirrors were suited to the international audience the room was destined to enjoy at the end of the decade, just as Las Meninas was suited to the private use of the summer office. The Hall of Mirrors was a site of representation assembled around the royal body, wherein royal portraits functioned as the axis around which the decorative program was organized; Las Meninas is a meditation on the internal working of the royal portrait, one that incorporates the royal body in its conceit. The Hall of Mirrors included a statement of authorial identity under the Habsburg dynasty; in Las Meninas, which contains the only confirmed self-portrait Velázquez executed in his entire career, Velázquez christens himself the architect of the royal image, sporting not only the red cross of the Order of Santiago, legendarily added to his chest by Philip IV himself, but also the keys to the royal palace that were his right as aposentador.34 Like the Hall of Mirrors, Las Meninas is an exercise in the representation of the Spanish monarchy, one in which paintings, mirrors, audience, artist, and sovereign body work together to create meaning that only emerges from their union. Las Meninas is thus as much a work of installation as it is a work of painting. How the painting works, where it is, and who is looking at it are mutually complementary parts of a larger structure of signification in a total work of art, one that comprehends far more than the contents of the painting alone.
Whatever impression the “Sala de las Meninas” might have made on Foucault and his fellow museumgoers in the twentieth century surely had its precedent here, where Las Meninas was first on view in sight not of one mirror but of many, and before an audience not of many but of just one. Writing three hundred years apart, Foucault and Palomino propose what seem to be superficially contradictory readings of Las Meninas in the site of its display. Nevertheless, both are right. One can only wonder at the visual effects that a room full of mirrors must have had, and at the potential therein for infinite regress, the king’s image replicated in endless mise en abyme. For Louis Marin, at stake in an object like a royal portrait is the representation of kingship but also, as we have seen, kingship itself as representation: “The whole of this endeavor,” he writes in the introduction to his book on this very subject, “attempts to sketch a portrait of the king (a representation of power) in this philosophical frame that would be the monarch himself (power as representation).”35 Person, representation, reflection, refraction, replication—between the king’s body, Las Meninas, and the mirrors exhibited around them, all of these were surely present in this room. “King Philip IV of Spain”—whoever or whatever this ever meant—was likely to be found in the space between them, coming into being at the intersection and as a function of their mutually and perhaps infinitely reinforcing workings as figurations of a sovereign body. “To ‘represent,’ ” Marin earlier writes, “is to show, to intensify, to duplicate a presence.”36 As royal portraitist, the representation of the Spanish king was Velázquez’s highest professional purpose. Here, in the king’s summer office and in the painting that he made for it, he demonstrates his profound understanding and absolute mastery of everything that such a task entailed.
Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Las Meninas, 1656–77, oil on canvas, 142.2 × 121.9 cm, Kingston Lacy Estate, Dorset, National Trust, NT 1257140
Image © National Trust Images/John Hammond
All this is perhaps what is expressed in the omission of the image of the king and queen in the only known copy of Las Meninas, produced by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Velázquez’s son-in-law and principal assistant in the last decades of his career at the court (fig. 6.3).37 Although the circumstances accounting for its production are entirely unknown, the painting contains a subtle nod of comprehension to Velázquez’s project. In this little copy, Mazo reproduces Velázquez’s painting nearly exactly. But Mazo noticeably departs from Velázquez’s model in one significant way: Mazo reproduces the mirror at the heart of Velázquez’s work but omits the reflection of the royal pair within it. Mazo’s copy thus registers his understanding of the ways that Las Meninas operated within and manipulated the laws of portraits of power. The image of the royal couple in the mirror is the site of Las Meninas that instantiates the careful relationship between Velázquez’s painting, the mirror depicted at its center, and its audience, a relationship ostensibly guaranteed by the protocols governing the painting’s exhibition space and redoubled by that space’s decorative program. The artwork is not limited to one or a few of these elements: They all work in concert with one another to produce the painting’s meaning and cannot work without each other. Unlike Las Meninas, there is no evidence to suggest that the king and queen were ever the audience—intended or otherwise—to Mazo’s copy. In fact, the reduced scale of the copy effectively prohibits any potential viewer from imaginatively including himself in the painting. The mirror in Mazo’s copy of Las Meninas, divested of the image of the royal couple, thus registers an absence, and with it the collapse of Velázquez’s carefully constructed system. Moreover, it registers Mazo’s understanding that the reciprocity between the king’s presence in front of Las Meninas and the mirror image within it is what lends the painting its power.
2 Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo’s The Family of the Artist
Of all the painters in the generation after Velázquez to see in him a model of professional success, none followed Velázquez’s example so diligently as Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo. Mazo is first recorded in Velázquez’s workshop as early as 1633, when he is documented as having married Velázquez’s daughter Francisca, and worked for his father-in-law until Velázquez’s death in 1660, after which he was promoted to pintor de cámara in 1661.38 For approximately thirty years, Mazo worked as Velázquez’s closest assistant, helping him produce the many portrait paintings that eventually came out of his workshop, learning his painting technique, and ultimately following so closely in his professional footsteps that Mazo has often disappeared in the historiography into Velázquez’s shadow.39 For Mazo, Las Meninas was a model for portraits that he made of members of the royal family that depicted monarchs in real spaces in the royal palace. The most celebrated of these is his Queen Mariana of Spain in Mourning, which contains a view of the Octagonal Room as Velázquez had decorated it (fig. 6.4).40 In a painting like this one, we observe what is perhaps the most overt recognition on Mazo’s part of the significance of both dimensions of Velázquez’s courtly career. Like so many of the court painters that immediately followed Velázquez, however, Mazo’s emulation of Velázquez was not limited to his painting practice: Mazo took on the position of ayuda de la furriera in 1657, directly reporting to Velázquez in his capacity as aposentador.41 Mazo aided him in the production of the many expense reports that the furriera generated, even assisting in the settlement of payments in the office of the furriera that remained outstanding at the time of Velázquez’s death.42 Although he himself never arrived at the position of aposentador mayor de palacio, Mazo’s holding of the office of ayuda de la furriera reveals his understanding of the importance of this aspect of Velázquez’s professional identity at the Spanish court.
Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Queen Mariana of Spain in Mourning, 1666, oil on canvas, 196.8 × 146 cm, National Gallery, London, NG2926
Image © The National Gallery, London
That a painter like Mazo held the position of ayuda de la furriera would come with at least one surprising consequence. The job of ayuda de la furriera put this little-studied painter in an extraordinary historiographical position in relation to his father-in-law. The description of Las Meninas published in the biography by Antonio Palomino is the longest and most thorough account of Las Meninas that dates to the early modern period, and as such it is easily the most famous and frequently cited. Nevertheless, it was not the first: as for so many of Velázquez’s paintings, the first written commentary on Las Meninas takes the form of an entry in a palace inventory. In his position as ayuda de la furriera, Mazo was charged with authoring the portion of the 1666 inventory of the contents of the royal palace that included the paintings in the royal art collection; it was therefore Mazo who wrote the first written description of the most celebrated painting in the history of Spanish art.43 If Velázquez meant the painting as a thesis on the representation of kingship, Mazo would find entirely different terms by which to make sense of Velázquez’s opus, offering a significantly different picture of what Las Meninas might have looked like to those who happened not to be the king of Spain. He describes the painting as follows:
A painting, [measuring] four and a half varas tall and three and a half wide, with a frame of gilded wood, portraying [retratando] the Lady Empress with her ladies-in-waiting and a dwarf, by the hand of Diego Velázquez, [valued] at 1,500 silver ducats.44
The mirror at the center of Las Meninas remains the single most remarked-upon feature of the painting, but Mazo’s description casts Velázquez’s project unambiguously as a portrait of the Infanta Margarita.
Although seemingly difficult to reconcile with everything that has been said about the painting since its production, this description of Las Meninas reveals a painter’s intelligence at work, and furthermore, that of a painter who inhabited Velázquez’s studio and witnessed the production of Las Meninas in the workshop.45 In the decade during which Velázquez painted Las Meninas, he and his workshop—including Mazo—were busy producing portraits of the queen Mariana and her daughters María Teresa and Margarita to satisfy a substantial demand for images of the royal family.46 Among their number was the Infanta Margarita in a White Dress, thought to have been executed just before Velázquez painted Las Meninas, perhaps even in the very same year (fig. 6.5).47 It is hardly surprising that a painter who had been present to witness the production of both simultaneously might read Las Meninas as a portrait of the infanta akin to the one eventually sent to Vienna; the infanta appears, between the two images, nearly identical. It is perhaps true that Velázquez enjoyed a privileged relationship to the king throughout his career and that in Las Meninas he meant to characterize himself as painter to the king. However, for those who were able to recognize his self-citation, Velázquez perhaps also unwittingly characterized himself as a painter of infantas, if not also of “meninas.”
Diego Velázquez, Infanta Margarita in a White Dress, ca. 1656, oil on canvas, 105 × 88 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie 3691
Image © KHM-Museumsverband
In certain respects, the description of Las Meninas that Mazo makes in the 1666 inventory recasts our understanding of Antonio Palomino’s more famous account of the painting in his biography of Velázquez. It is easy to forget that Palomino was not a contemporary of Velázquez but rather a witness to the reign of Charles II and of the artists who followed in Velázquez’s stead. Rereading Palomino’s text with Mazo in mind, it becomes clear that he has a share in Mazo’s viewpoint. As stated above, Palomino identifies the painting on which Velázquez is working in Las Meninas as a double portrait of the king and queen, thus identifying Velázquez in his role as their official portrait painter and situating Las Meninas within the category of royal portraiture. And yet, the Infanta Margarita appears everywhere in his description of Las Meninas. In the very first sentence of his prose, Palomino describes Las Meninas as a “large painting with the Portrait of the lady Empress (henceforth the Infanta of Spain) Miss Margarita María of Austria,”48 categorizing the work twice more as a painting of the infanta in marginal annotations to his prose.49 Palomino also provides a surprising practical justification for this reading: he makes an immediate comparison between Las Meninas and a self-portrait of Titian “holding in his hands another [portrait] with the Effigy of King Philip II.”50 Scholars, perhaps reading this comparison as a fantastic rhetorical flourish, have never closely analyzed this aspect of Palomino’s text. Yet there is perhaps one especially good reason to do so: the painting in question, the self-portrait of Titian holding a portrait of Philip II, existed. It hung in the Pardo palace alongside series of portraits of Habsburg royals, where it remained until 1604, when a fire destroyed the portrait gallery and with it approximately fifty portraits.51 Although it is lost, a record of the painting remains in the 1564 inventory of the Pardo palace, where it is described as “another [portrait] by the painter Titian.”52 More complete is the description of the painting in the account of Argote de Molina, whose 1582 inventory of the contents of the Pardo palace describes the work as a painting of “the Painter Titian, the greatest of his time, born in Venice, whose portrait one sees, holding in his hands another with the image of King Philip II.”53
It is unclear precisely how Palomino could have known this work, given its disappearance approximately one hundred years prior. Nevertheless, his comparison reorders how we look at Las Meninas in a clear and simple way. This comparison comes within a larger lineage that Palomino traces from antiquity to Velázquez that serves to exalt Velázquez on the grounds of his relationship to a royal patron:
I consider this Portrait by Velázquez [to have] no less artifice than that of Phidias, Sculptor and famous Painter, who put his Portrait in the Shield of the Statue that he made of the Goddess Minerva, making it with such artifice, that if it were to be removed from there, the Statue would also be undone entirely.
No less eternal did Titian make his name by portraying himself holding in his hands another [portrait] with the Effigy of King Philip II; and just as the name of Phidias was never erased, as long as the Statue of Minerva was whole, and that of Titian, as long as that of Philip II endured; so too will that of Velázquez endure from one century to another; as long as may endure that of the Excellent, [and] so precious Margarita; in whose shadow his image is immortalized with the kind influences of such a Sovereign Master.54
In this passage, Palomino employs a trope common to the literary genre of the artist’s biography: “genealogization,” in the terminology of Ernst Kriz and Otto Kurz, by which an artist’s individual accomplishments and innovations are situated within a larger, connected history of artists succeeding one another.55 What is surprising, however, is that this comparison between Titian’s painting holding the portrait of Philip II and Las Meninas establishes a relationship of analogy between not Philip II and Philip IV, but Philip II and the Infanta Margarita, whose image at the center of this work so forcefully recalls the paintings of this same infanta that Velázquez produced in no small quantity at the end of his life. Although Titian’s double portrait has been lost to history, it is survived by a portrait medal and a bronze medallion depicting Titian holding in his hands a portrait of his son Orazio; both of these are thought to have been modeled on the lost self-portrait (figs. 6.6–6.7).56 Insofar as this is the case, they provide a sense of what that double portrait might have looked like. When either medal or medallion is positioned next to Las Meninas, Palomino’s written analogy yields an immediate visual impact. The many figures in Las Meninas appear as a coherent, wholly integrated group. But Palomino’s comparison invites the viewer to reduce the painting to two figures: Velázquez and the seemingly autonomous little figure in the center, who, for all her immersion in the scene coalescing around her, still emerges as its clear protagonist. We are invited to reconsider the possibility that, for audiences excluding King Philip IV of Spain, the relationship that animates this work is not that between Velázquez and the king but that between Velázquez and the infanta.
Italian, Titian and His Son, ca. 1560–70, gold, wax, seed pearl, and wood, 13 × 12.9 × 2.3 cm, National Museums Scotland, K.2004.38
Image © National Museums Scotland
Agostino Ardenti, Titian (1488/90–1576), ca. 1563, lead, 10.3 cm, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, gift of Amanda Marchesa Molinari, 1966.106.21a
Image courtesy of Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine (www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum/)
This raises the question of how to account for the rest of the painting’s contents beyond this essential pairing. Once Las Meninas has been reoriented around these two figures, how can Palomino account for the dwarves, the dog, the ladies-in-waiting that surround them? Like Mazo, Palomino designates this painting a portrait, and the designation is not insignificant. Almost every iteration of the royal image that Velázquez produced over the course of his career at the Habsburg court consisted, as per the norms of the period, of lone figures presented in minimal or even entirely nondescript settings.57 Here, however, Palomino introduces an important qualifier that permits the genre of portraiture to include the many figures beyond the central pair, and to accommodate the many ways in which Las Meninas seems to exceed the practical limits of its genre. His description of the painting begins, as mentioned above, with the figure of the infanta, and it ends with Velázquez, brush and palette in hand. But in between, Palomino offers what he refers to as a “description of the ‘historiado’ of this painting,” and it is here that he identifies and critiques the little collective attending the infanta.58 Palomino not only addresses each figure by name but also analyzes their relative positioning within the painting, considering their placement in the foreground, background, and middle ground, and commenting on the little interactions between them that, in his phrasing, “make for the composition much harmony” and “make for the ‘historiado’ a marvelous effect.”59 Palomino more pointedly defines the term “historiado” elsewhere in his writing, specifically using it to qualify portraiture of a certain complexity and compositional ambition:
And if the Painting, or Surface, where there are one or two independent single Figures, were organized of other supporting elements, such as some bit of Architecture, Landscape, Curtain, Table, etc, though it is a Portrait, in Pictorial terms, we also call it “historiated”; because although there is no more than one Figure, that Congress, organized of several parts, from whose harmonious composition results a perfect whole, we imagine to be “historiated”; since for its constitution one must observe the same graduation, and temperance, as in a History [painting]; and because the said supporting elements stand in for the place, and positioning of the Figures.60
It is true that Palomino never explicitly proposes extra figures among his list of possible “supporting elements.” However, in his commentary on Las Meninas, it is precisely these secondary figures populating the space around the figure of Velázquez and the Infanta Margarita in the painting that make up the “historiado” of this portrait, and it is their harmonious disposition within a larger composition that makes this a “historiated” portrait.61
What Palomino accomplishes in his piecemeal description of Las Meninas is thus the breakdown of its composition into its component parts, which altogether form a single, coherent whole. The work is essentially divided into two components: one the pairing of Velázquez himself and the Infanta Margarita at the center of the painting, the other what Palomino terms the “historiado” of the painting (that is, the scenography around them). The introduction of this qualifying term seems simple enough to account for the many figures containing the infanta and Velázquez in the painting. But there is still another aspect of the painting that is perhaps accounted for by Palomino’s choice of descriptors. Although Palomino uses the term as though it were a noun, “historiado” is a word that takes the form of a past participle, a verb that has been done to some unnamed, preexisting noun. There is one question that logically follows: What, exactly, has been “historiated”? If we reexamine the painting itself, the elements of the “historiado” all seem to converge upon the “menina” at its center: her ladies-in-waiting are clearly attending her, the dwarves and dog in the lower right-hand corner of the painting are all oriented toward her, and even Velázquez leans slightly backward in her direction. If we accept the notion that Las Meninas is in fact best understood as a “historiated” portrait, perhaps the portrait that has been “historiated” is hers. If so, then here we see Palomino taking up the viewpoint of Mazo when he wrote his entries in the inventory of 1666: it is a viewpoint that ultimately sees at the center of Las Meninas a portrait like the Vienna portrait and that assumes such a portrait as the starting point for a multi-figural scene that has been expanded around it.
Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, The Family of the Artist, 1664–65, oil on canvas, 149.5 × 174.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie 320
Image © KHM-Museumsverband
This thought process finds its most compelling expression, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a painting that is itself a careful study of Las Meninas and especially of the pictorial elements out of which it is constructed: Mazo’s The Family of the Artist, likely produced in 1665 and therefore exactly contemporaneous with the inventory of 1666 (fig. 6.8).62 It is universally acknowledged that The Family of the Artist is a translation of Las Meninas into the idiom of Mazo’s own life and career.63 The foreground of the painting contains a series of figures identified as Mazo’s wife and children, presented right at the edge of the picture plane. The family crest appears in the upper left-hand corner in front of a curtain pulled back to reveal the space these figures occupy. The gallery within which they appear is decorated with paintings in simple black frames consistent with those that adorned paintings in the Alcázar, one of these a portrait of King Philip IV hanging on a wall behind a table strewn with papers, a floral bouquet, and a marble bust. In the upper right-hand corner, one sees a figure, presumably the artist himself, working on a painting of a royal infanta in the studio, as another woman and child watch. The coloring of the painting immediately recalls the palette of Las Meninas, the entire painting executed in browns, blacks, reds, and silvery whites. In 1734 Las Meninas was inventoried for the first time not as a painting of the Infanta Margarita but instead as a painting of “the family of Philip IV,” and this is how its title is now sometimes given.64 Like this depiction of a courtly “family,” Mazo’s Family of the Artist is a kind of group portrait set in a gallery space, the collective of figures at its center radically reconfigured as the painting’s author and his immediate family.
As a reworking of Las Meninas, The Family of the Artist offers a reading of Las Meninas that is consistent with Mazo’s claim that Velázquez’s painting is firstly a portrait of the infanta. The little collective of figures that make up the “historiado” in Las Meninas recurs in the foreground of The Family of the Artist. In lieu of Velázquez, the infanta, and her courtly entourage, one finds Mazo’s children and wife, sharing the same little interactions and intimacy so praised in Palomino’s account of Las Meninas.65 In the center, one sees not a mirror reflecting Velázquez’s royal patrons but a portrait of King Philip IV akin to those executed by Velázquez and his workshop at the end of his life. Most telling is the part of The Family of the Artist in which one sees Mazo at work on a painting.66 The view into the studio offered in the upper-right-hand corner of this painting suggests a view of Las Meninas as it might have appeared from within the space on the other side of the picture plane.67 Rather than seeing Velázquez from the front, with the canvas on which he is working occluded from view, the viewer is invited to see Mazo from the back. The canvas on which he works is revealed to be a portrait of an infanta, here recovering the image of the infanta at the center of Las Meninas. In revealing the recto of the canvas on which he works, Mazo dispels the mystery of Las Meninas. Without the mirror at its center, the metaphysical interplay between the body of king and his image that activates Las Meninas collapses in this version, which in no way implies the physical presence of the king within or outside the confines of the picture plane. Nonetheless, nearly every significant compositional element of Las Meninas finds a corollary in The Family of the Artist: from the self-portrait of the painter at work and the image of the royal infanta to the grouping of figures at the very foreground.
And yet, Mazo’s reworking pulls these elements of the painting apart, isolating the Velázquez figure and the painting of the infanta from the rest of the work in the upper right-hand corner of The Family of the Artist. From a spatial standpoint, there is a conspicuous disjunction between this part of the painting and the rest of it. Perhaps it is meant to correspond compositionally to the doorway in the back of the room that is the setting of Las Meninas. But the hard edges that delimit this apparent studio space on its left-hand side and across its horizontal lower border give this aspect of the image a spatial autonomy not afforded the stairway barely visible beyond the frame of the doorway in Las Meninas, an autonomy that makes this space appear oddly discontinuous with the space of the foreground. The confusion arising from efforts to reconcile the two is easily dispelled, however, when one realizes that it only arises if the viewer assumes spatial continuity between the foreground of the painting and its upper right-hand corner. Perhaps another framework entirely is in order here: one might consider, rather, the suggestion of Daniel Arasse that edges might be “edges, nothing more,” that “they don’t represent a thing.”68 The edges that delineate this secondary image-within-the-image are not meant to operate at the level of spatial illusionism: they are operative at the level of the very “surface of the painting,” where they piece together two thematically related but representationally discrete zones.69 The foreground of The Family of the Artist and the image-within-the-image in its upper right-hand corner are perhaps two such zones that were never meant to relate to one another in strictly spatial terms.
If we accept these as two contiguous—but not continuous—zones, then we see in The Family of the Artist the same careful breakdown of Las Meninas into its parts that could be observed in Palomino’s prose. In Las Meninas, the painter and his portrait, on the one hand, and the group of ancillary figures that make up the painting’s “historiado,” on the other hand, are seamlessly merged together into a single scene. If we read the foreground of The Family of the Artist as corresponding to the latter and the image-within-the-image in the upper right-hand corner as corresponding to the former, we see the dismantling of Velázquez’s careful “historiation.” Here again, we might consider the proposal of Daniel Arasse, borrowed from the writings of André Chastel. Arasse, offering a creative paraphrase of Chastel’s essay “Le tableau dans le tableau,” claims that “according to [Chastel], when a painter paints a ‘painting within a painting,’ the latter often presents the ‘production scenario’ of the painting in which it is.”70 Taking the upper right-hand corner of Mazo’s The Family of the Artist as a painting-within-a-painting, so demarcated by the edges that divide this part of the painting from the rest, one might expect it to reflect on the conditions of production of The Family of the Artist, as a whole. But The Family of the Artist is not a freestanding artistic gesture: its subject is fundamentally Las Meninas itself, the model on which every part of The Family of the Artist depends. Mazo’s copy of Las Meninas reflects Mazo’s understanding of how Velázquez’s painting works as a representation of kingship; The Family of the Artist, by contrast, pulls apart the composition of Las Meninas to reflect on how the painting was made. As Velázquez’s assistant in the decade during which Velázquez executed both Las Meninas and the Vienna portrait of the Infanta Margarita, Mazo would have been in the best possible position to see Las Meninas as Palomino does—that is, as a portrait of the infanta around which a group portrait has been expanded. In other words: Mazo would have been in the best position to understand that one of the conditions of production of Las Meninas is the production, first, of the Vienna portrait. It is this condition that The Family of the Artist renders visible.
The description of Las Meninas as a portrait of the Infanta Margarita that Mazo includes in his portion of the 1666 inventory of the Alcázar palace has been almost completely neglected in the scholarship concerning Velázquez’s great painting. As The Family of the Artist reveals, however, Mazo’s claim that Las Meninas is a portrait of the infanta is deeply indicative of a painter’s mind at work, one invested in determining the shape of Las Meninas, its basic structure as an image. The generation of artists postdating Velázquez was eager to join the ranks of the furriera in their master’s stead. The description of Las Meninas that Mazo was positioned to author thanks to his role as ayuda de la furriera, like so much of Velázquez’s own work for this office, is just one demonstration of what a painter’s intelligence could bring to work executed away from the easel.
3 Juan Carreño de Miranda’s Charles II
Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo’s assumption of the post of ayuda de la furriera represents one way that artists after Velázquez reconceptualized what it meant to be an artist at the Spanish court in Velázquez’s wake, his work as such demonstrating the consequences of this reconceptualization into Velázquez’s afterlife; the work of painter Juan Carreño de Miranda represents another. Carreño entered the service of the Spanish monarchy at the height of Velázquez’s career as aposentador mayor de palacio.71 In 1659 Velázquez assigned Carreño the job of painting much of the fresco cycle decorating the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors, including some of its most central scenes.72 Carreño was therefore not only aware of Velázquez’s career as curator of the royal art collection but intimately familiar with the climactic project that Velázquez executed as such. Like other painters after Velázquez, Carreño pursued the position of ayuda de la furriera, which he was granted in 1669, almost certainly the result of his work alongside Velázquez in the Hall of Mirrors, but this was not the only impact of this work on Carreño’s career.73 Following Mazo’s death in 1667, the painter Sebastián de Herrera Barnuevo was selected to take on the position of pintor de cámara. His tenure was short-lived; upon his death in 1671, Carreño was given the title, along with the responsibility for producing the official image of the newly christened King Charles II. Carreño was thus one of Velázquez’s successors as the state portraitist to the Spanish king. It is no coincidence that his portraits of Charles II situate the monarch in Velázquez’s Hall of Mirrors.
Juan Carreño de Miranda, Charles II, ca. 1675, oil on canvas, 201 × 141 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P000642
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
If Mazo was the artist in the generation just after Velázquez to imitate his example most closely, Carreño seems to have best understood the significance to royal representation of Velázquez’s accomplishments in not one but two distinct fields of work. Carreño made over a dozen paintings of Charles II that all followed a single formula (fig. 6.9).74 Whether still a child or already the reigning king, Charles II always appears in these paintings standing in front of a table held up by a bronze lion with a porphyry globe under its paw. His left hand is often resting on a hat placed on the surface of the table, his right hand by his side, sometimes clutching a note of paper. Standing in three-quarter profile and dressed in the austere black costume that Philip IV so often wore in his own official portraits, Charles II faces his audience, meeting the gaze of the viewer. A rich red curtain in the upper left-hand corner is dramatically pulled back to reveal the mirrors hanging on the wall of the gallery behind him, framed by twinned eagles. The reflections in the mirrors reveal that Charles II is standing at the center of the Alcázar’s great paintings gallery, a doorframe visible along with what appear to be paintings, framed in black and filling the walls from edge to edge. In this formula, Carreño recombines elements of Velázquez’s crowning achievements as painter to the king and curator of the royal art collection—Las Meninas and the Hall of Mirrors, respectively—in a way that demonstrates the lasting legacy of both.75
It is little wonder that Las Meninas appealed to artists like Carreño as a model for portraits of Charles II. As a meditation on the nature of royal representation, it visualized the problematic that painters of his official image were forced to confront directly. Charles II, the product of four generations of inbreeding, was born with physical and mental disabilities that surpassed those of any Habsburg preceding him. His impotence would effectively end a dynasty already in decline by the time of his reign. Louis Marin’s assertion that “the king is only truly king, that is, monarch, in images” would take on a special urgency in the face of the fragility of Charles II and his tenuous grip on the throne.76 While the king remained hidden in the palace, out of sight of the scrutiny of ambassadors and diplomats, painters were charged with the veritable construction of their monarch in images, which were produced in greater number than those of nearly any Spanish monarch before him. The challenge to which Carreño’s paintings were required to respond was that of producing images of power so convincing that they could compensate for the king’s unimposing person, that could support the weight of his rule.77 The mirror in Las Meninas emblematizes the equivalence between the Spanish monarchs and their painted image, the process of “transubstantiation” that makes of the royal image the incarnation of power.78 The mirror in Carreño’s portraits of Charles II thus evokes the motif in Las Meninas around which its meaning as a meditation on the art of royal portraiture turned, signaling the stakes of the problem to which Carreño’s portraits were the intended solution.
But Las Meninas would serve Carreño as a model for another kind of royal portraiture entirely, one even more specific to the demands of a sitter like Charles II. The death of Philip IV left Spain, for the first time in the history of the Habsburg monarchy, in the hands of a child too young to take the throne, his mother Mariana required to serve as regent until his maturity in 1677.79 When Carreño’s portraits are directly compared with Las Meninas, the figure of Charles II less closely resembles the figure of King Philip IV reflected in the mirror in Las Meninas than it does the figure of the Infanta Margarita, who appears standing just to the side of it. One of the strategies utilized by Charles II’s official portrait painters was to surround him with the images of the dynastic forebears who ostensibly guaranteed his right to rule.80 The figure of the infanta in view of the mirror image of her parents in Las Meninas served them as a model for portraits of royal progeny, a portrait of the genealogical relationship that could substantiate and therefore sustain a prince’s royal identity. Consider what a painter whose most pressing concern was the legitimation of a frail monarch might have seen when he looked at Las Meninas: taking the figure of the infanta as a starting point, he might have seen the mirror above her, with the images of her mother and father, as an expression of the lineage to which she belonged. In Carreño’s portraits, the figure of the infanta and the image of her parents acting as proof of her dynastic legitimacy in Las Meninas are reworked into the figure of Charles II and the images of his own parents, the guarantors of his right to rule. That this is Carreño’s intention is perhaps most readily corroborated by the portraits of Queen Mariana that Carreño produced as pendants to his portraits of Charles II until the prince’s coming-of-age (fig. 6.10). The image of the queen that appears in the mirror in Las Meninas, mother to the infanta at its center, is externalized in these pendant paintings. Carreño’s depiction of her in mourning dress but seated at a writing desk convey her twin identities as widow to one king and queen mother to another. For Carreño, Las Meninas was as much a portrait of royal offspring as it was a portrait of kingship. In his portraits of Charles II, Carreño reworks those elements of Las Meninas that permit him to refashion the portrait of a king into the portrait of the heir to a genealogy.
Juan Carreño de Miranda, Queen Mariana of Austria, ca. 1670, oil on canvas, 211 × 125 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P000644
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Essential to this reading is that Carreño set Charles II in the Hall of Mirrors, recorded in Carreño’s paintings as Velázquez had redesigned it. Included in his portraits of Charles II are the bronze lions and eagles that emblematized the thematic axis of Velázquez’s decorative program: the Habsburg dynasty itself, here serving as a reminder of the powerful legacy of rule to which Charles II was heir. Radically reducing Las Meninas to the grouping of the infanta with the image of her parents in the mirror behind her, Carreño’s painting is composed primarily of the monarch and the mirror images before which he stands. Visible in these mirror images, however, are not the parents of Charles II but in fact the paintings still hanging in the Hall of Mirrors during his reign. It is as though Carreño had in mind when composing this work the statement made in L’idea de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti by Federico Zuccaro on the effect of mirrors on a gallery hang:
I say, that if a mirror of very fine crystal, that is large, is placed in a room decorated with exquisite paintings, and marvelous statues, it is clear, that fixing my eye on it, this [mirror] is not even the limit of what I can see; but also an object representing, clearly and distinctly, all of those paintings, and those statues according to their material, and their substance; but they only shine in it through their spiritual forms.81
Just as Zuccaro suggests, the mirrors that Carreño paints into his portraits of Charles II themselves replicate paintings from the remainder of the gallery that is their setting. Most readily visible, in particular, are two paintings in the right-hand corner: Rubens’s equestrian portrait of Philip IV and Titian’s Tityus.82 The reigns of Philip IV and Charles II saw the publication of a number of texts specifically addressing the education of princes, many of which featured mirrors as metaphors for the ideals of kingship to which princes should aspire.83 In his citation of real paintings included in Velázquez’s decorative program for the Hall of Mirrors, Carreño invokes one such metaphor included in a book written by Rodrigo Méndez Silva, chronicler to King Philip IV, and titled Breve, cvriosa, y aivstada noticia, de los Ayos y Maestros, que hasta oy han tenido los Principes, Infantes y otras personas Reales de Castilla. In this book, Méndez Silva recommends that a prince know his history, because in history he will find “the foremost, of his ancestors the kings; so that the memory of shining deeds may serve him as a crystalline mirror, and a glorious encouragement to overtake them with the splendors of greater progress. For in one’s generous ancestors, one will find glory; in the disregarded, dishonor, and in the prudent, an exemplar.”84 If the history of the Habsburg dynasty was visible on the walls of the Hall of Mirrors, Carreño narrowed this decorative program down to those two paintings that, read together, picture an allegory of the “shining deeds” of Philip IV. Paired with Titian’s Tityus, Rubens’s equestrian portrait imagines the king in his role as defender of the Christian faith over and against the forces of heresy and vice, the mythical mission of the Habsburg dynasty since the reign of Charles V. In their recombination of elements both from Las Meninas and from the Hall of Mirrors, Carreño’s portraits of Charles II thus marry a genealogical model of portraiture with a working metaphor for the education of princes.
There is yet another way that Carreño’s painting evidences his understanding of the significance of Velázquez’s projects, and of the ways that both Las Meninas and the Hall of Mirrors functioned under Velázquez’s hand as sites of representation of Habsburg power. Las Meninas depends on the interaction between the actual bodies of the Spanish monarchs and the mirror image Velázquez produced of them. This interaction was problematized by the person of Charles II when Carreño took the painting as his model, but so too was the Hall of Mirrors, the significance of which would also bend in response to the new monarch. It is possible to speak of the reception of Las Meninas by painters responding to the needs of a new sovereign, one who was in so many respects very different from the sovereign for which the painting was intended; it is just as possible to consider the reception of Velázquez’s redecoration of the Hall of Mirrors, and of the decorative program that remained on its walls unchanged for decades after the death of Philip IV, in the reign of Charles II. To phrase the matter a bit differently, it is possible to consider how the perceived meaning of this room and its decoration was transformed by the same problems that the death of one king and the rise of another posed to royal portraiture. The redecoration of the Hall of Mirrors at the end of the reign of Philip IV served him a particular purpose: it visualized a glorious history of the Habsburg dynasty for an international audience, and thanks to Rubens’s equestrian portrait, it was a history in which the reigning monarch was already included. As with Philip IV before him, the few royal audiences that Charles II entertained were staged in this very room, but, one imagines, to very different effect. No artistic interventions were made to the decorative program of the Hall of Mirrors until the very end of the reign of Charles II: as the living image of the monarchy, the ascension of Charles II to the Habsburg throne was itself the intervention. The strategies of genealogical reconstruction employed in Carreño’s portraits of Charles II likely found a real-world equivalent in the sudden presence of Charles II in this room, seated on a dais or standing next to a table like a living tableau.85 If King Charles II was figured in his state portraits in view of paintings of his ancestors, he would have appeared to foreign dignitaries surrounded by them as well. With Charles II physically present in their midst, the paintings of Charles V, Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV envisioned the same genealogy on which Carreño’s portraits of Charles II depended.
This is perhaps what is registered in the part of Carreño’s formulation that reorients our attention away from the infanta in Las Meninas and back toward the image of the Spanish monarchs in the mirror at its heart. It is not one but two kings that appear in the reflections in the mirrors in Carreño’s portraits: Philip IV appears as an equestrian portrait, hanging on the walls of the gallery surrounding the figure of Charles II, and the face of Charles II himself appears in these mirrors in profile, seeming to gaze up at those same walls. There is an aspirational element here, whereby Charles II appears to take the advice offered to him in Méndez Silva’s handbook and to study the great deeds of his ancestors. But it also prefigures the eventual inclusion of Charles II’s own image on the walls of the gallery, an event perhaps already foreshadowed whenever the face of Charles II, standing in the Hall of Mirrors, was reflected in the mirrors that Velázquez had installed therein a decade prior. The mirrors hanging on the walls of the Hall of Mirrors appear framed in black wood like so many of the paintings listed in the inventories of this period, and like so many of the paintings appearing in their reflections. The mirrors in the Hall of Mirrors might have replicated the image of the king standing before them in flesh and blood, framing it under the paintings already present on the walls. Likewise, the reflection of Charles II that Carreño paints into the mirror in his portraits imagines his absorption into the series of kings hanging above him, Velázquez’s bronze eagles seeming at once to deliver to Charles II the images of his ancestors and invite him to join their ranks. In this reflection of the face of Charles II in the mirror behind him, Carreño merges elements of the Hall of Mirrors and Las Meninas to visualize the eventual inclusion of Charles II in the line of monarchs before him, the crisis of Charles II’s royal identity finding its resolution in another mirror image.
Carreño’s portraits of Charles II thus demonstrate Carreño’s profound understanding of Velázquez’s accomplishments in two distinct professional arenas: that of painter to the king and that of curator of his art collection. Velázquez’s Las Meninas and his decorative program for the Hall of Mirrors, simultaneous tour de forces in these respective fields, both function as sites of royal representation that depend for their efficacy on the dynamics between royal bodies, paintings, and physical spaces. In his portraits of Charles II, Carreño recombines elements from each, activating these same dynamics in the service of a new sovereign. That Carreño followed Velázquez’s example in his pursuit of employment in the furriera indicates that Carreño recognized the importance of Velázquez’s position as aposentador mayor de palacio. But it is Carreño’s use of the Hall of Mirrors and Las Meninas in his painted portraits of Charles II of Spain that reveal his appreciation of what Velázquez achieved in each. For the painters that came after him, Velázquez left two legacies; Carreño’s paintings suggest that to make art in the wake of Velázquez was to acknowledge both.
For a critical interpretation of Velázquez’s biographies, see Hellwig 2007–8.
For comprehensive overviews of this generation of painters and their professional activity at the Habsburg court, see Pérez Sánchez 1986; and Aterido Fernández 2015, pp. 320–61.
The bibliography on this painting is too voluminous to summarize here in its entirety. On the mirror, see Penzol 1948; Buero Vallejo 1970; Foucault 1970; Mestre Fiol 1972; Campo y Francés 1978; Cohen and Snyder 1980; Searle 1980; Steinberg 1981; Alpers 1983; Moffitt 1983; Kubler 1985; Snyder 1985; Carrier 1986; Stoichita 1986, republished as Stoichita 1995; Kemp 1990; Bal 1991, pp. 247–85; Damisch 1994; Mitchell 1994; Schmitter 1996; Sanmartín Arce 2005; Nieto Alcalde 2007–8; Knox 2009, pp. 162–66; Bodart 2011; and Zaparaín Hernández 2018, among others. For an overview of the many methodologies brought to bear on this painting, see Kesser 1994 and Stratton-Pruitt 2003. A now outdated but still useful general bibliography on the painting can be found in Portús Pérez 2000a, pp. 253–85.
Foucault 1970, pp. 4 and 5.
Foucault 1970, p. 8.
On the exhibition history of Las Meninas in the Prado, see Portús Pérez 2009; for related reflections on the role of the Prado in the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Velázquez, see Portús Pérez 2000b.
Foucault 1970, p. 4. On the “democratiz[ing]” aspect of his analysis, see Arasse 2013a.
So characterized in Stratton-Pruitt 2003, p. 135. On the role played by Foucault in the critical afterlife of Las Meninas, see Dubreuil-Blondin 1993.
That Palomino’s perception of the history of art in Spain and consequently his writings on this topic were inflected by what he saw on the walls of the Alcázar palace was explored in Riello 2016.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 342–43: “El Lienzo, en que està pintando es grande, y no se vè nada de lo pintado, porque se mira por la parte posterior, que arrima à el caballete. / Dió muestras de su claro ingenio Velazquez en descubrir lo que pintaba con ingeniosa traza, valiendose de la christalina luz de vn Espejo, que pintò en lo vltimo de la Galeria, y frontero al Quadro, en el qual la reflexion, ò repercusion nos representa à nuestros Catholicos Reyes Phelipe, y Mariana”; see also Palomino 1947, p. 921; Palomino 1987, p. 165; and Palomino 2018, p. 148.
On the invisibility of the recto of the canvas in Las Meninas, see Portús Pérez 2016b, pp. 186–88.
On the setting of Las Meninas in the former chamber of Prince Balthasar Carlos, including questions regarding the system of orthogonal lines ordering the space depicted, see Moya 1961; Moffitt 1983; Moffitt 1986a; Orso 1986, pp. 165–82; Campo y Francés 1991; Plaza Santiago 1995; Witko 2008; Llórente 2015; Ramón-Laca 2017; and Zaparaín Hernández 2018, among others. That the space functioned as Velázquez’s painting studio is central to the interpretation of the painting offered by Jonathan Brown, which remains essential to the painting’s historiography (see Brown 1978, pp. 87–110; Brown 1986b, pp. 253–64; and Brown 2008a). However, Brown’s argument assumes that the king and queen are simply visiting Velázquez to observe him at work in the studio rather than modeling for Velázquez as he paints their portrait. Although Jonathan Brown’s argument that the painting is Velázquez’s bid for nobility for the art of painting is perhaps most widely known and most highly esteemed, other scholars have pursued different and sometimes complementary lines of argumentation that ultimately arrive at the same conclusion (see Kubler 1966; Millner Kahr 1975; Crawford Volk 1978; Orso 1986, pp. 173–78; Umberger 1995).
So characterized in Stratton-Pruitt 2003, p. 135. The most vocal of these, as per Stratton-Pruitt’s account, is Jonathan Brown, whose publications on Las Meninas will be addressed later in this chapter.
Bodart 2011, pp. 301–6.
Bodart 2011, pp. 16–17.
Marin 1988, p. 5.
Bodart 2011, p. 17: “l’image visuelle … de remplacer la présence corporelle et individuelle du monarque.”
Marin 1988, p. 8.
Arasse 2013a, p. 153. Arasse begins exploring this concept in Arasse 2003.
Bodart 2011, p. 301: “l’efficacité du dédoublement et de la superposition entre le roi et son image repose sur leur concentration en une seule apparition. Si le portrait se substitue au roi en son absence, il s’efface inévitablement en sa présence.”
Bodart 2011, p. 305: “Le miroir des Ménines semble … jouer du dédoublement et de la superposition du corps du roi et de son image.”
Stoichita 1986, republished as Stoichita 1995.
Bodart 2011, p. 305: “la glace suggère en effet la condensation en une seule vision du reflet du portrait en cours d’oeuvre sur la toile que Velázquez est en train de peindre et du reflet du couple royal en chair et en os … à l’extrémité opposée de la galerie.”
For a meticulous reconstruction of the architecture of the room depicted in the painting and its relationship to the escalera del Rubinejo and contiguous spaces, see Sáseta Velázquez 2011 and Sáseta Velázquez 2013.
Fernando Marías, Juan María Cruz Yábar, and Thierry Greub offer different readings of the painting based on the paintings with which it was exhibited in the king’s summer office in Marías 1995b; Cruz Yábar 2017–18; and Greub 2019, respectively, with the latter two attempting a reconstruction of the decorative program. For another hypothesis regarding the painting’s hang in this gallery space (considering such questions as the wall on which the painting might have been hung, the painting’s size in proportion to the wall, and the relation between internal and external light sources), see Moffitt 1991. On the construction and decoration of these galleries, see Bottineau 1956–58, pt. 4, pp. 289–304; Barbeito Díez 1992, pp. 154–57; Checa Cremades 1994a, pp. 405–7; Barbeito Díez 1996, pp. 58–59; and Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 122–48.
See Moffitt 1983, p. 281; Brown 1986b, p. 259; Marías 1995b, p. 250; Marías 2000, p. 159; and Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, p. 122, among others.
Although long before Velázquez likely began even conceptualizing Las Meninas, in 1645 Velázquez was charged with the care of the paintings hanging in these galleries and is said to have reordered them (AGP, Personal, Caja 911, exp. 6; cited in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, p. 124). It is unclear precisely for what purpose and in what capacity Velázquez did this work. If nothing else, it suggests that Velázquez would have been readily familiar with the king’s summer apartments and their decorative program by the time he painted Las Meninas.
For a complete list of the paintings exhibited in this gallery, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 269–94, nos. 161–93.
AGP, Administración General, Legajo 38, exp. 2, fol. 16v: “Siete espejos grandes de cinco quartas de alto las lunas y mas de tres de ancho con molduras de ebano con faxas de espejos en los frisos guarnecidas de molduras ondeadas y dibididas de listas de bronze dorado caladas de labores vale cada uno ochocientos ducados de plata / seis bufetes de pasta enbutidos con sus pies digo de marmol de Jenoba los tableros de bara bien cumplida de ancho y dos baras de largo y bara y qta de alto con sus pies de ebano y bronzes dorados y en las pilastras y frisos de las cornisas sus enbutidos de jaspe de colores de pastas y los tableros de marmol enbutidos todos tasados en cinco mill y duzientos ducados de plata”; see also Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 294–95, nos. 194–206. On the decoration of the mirrors with eagles, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, p. 129.
García Cueto 2005, pp. 105–18.
This is the approach to the interpretation of the site of exhibition of Las Meninas in Marías 1995b.
It is perhaps noteworthy that none of the rooms within the king’s summer apartments listed in the 1636 inventory of the Alcázar have a readily comparable decorative scheme (Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2007, pp. 100–120 and 156–84, nos. 26–44).
Stoichita 1997, pp. 184–85; Stoichita 2015, p. 215.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 342; see also Palomino 1947, p. 920; Palomino 1987, p. 165; and Palomino 2018, p. 145. Palomino’s claim has proven controversial; one especially pointed counterargument appears in the fifth chapter of Brown 2014.
Marin 1988, p. 7.
Marin 1988, p. 5.
The authorship of this painting has remained one of the chief concerns debated in the secondary literature on this work, which was once thought to be a boceto by Velázquez himself thanks to the painting’s eighteenth-century collector, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. On Jovellanos’s ownership and attribution of the painting, see the third chapter of Álvarez-Valdés y Valdés 2006. On the ensuing debate concerning the painting’s attribution and provenance, see Pita Andrade 1952; Harris 1990; Díaz Padrón 2003, pp. 215–25; Carlos Varona 2004; and Brown 2008b. On these and related questions, see also Portús Pérez 2014b, pp. 126–29, cat. 17; and Kientz 2015, pp. 332–33, cat. 108.
The only monograph on the painter to date is Solano Oropesa and Solano Herranz 2004. On this painter and his work, see also Gaya Nuño 1960; López Navío 1960; Cherry 1990; Ayala Mallory 1991; Gutiérrez Pastor 2005; and Novero Plaza 2006–7; as well as the catalogue entries on the paintings by this artist included in Portús Pérez 2014b; Haag 2014; and Kientz 2015. A biography of the painter was included in Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 372–73 (see also Palomino 1947, pp. 961–62; Palomino 1987, pp. 210–11); and a small number of primary sources on this artist and his family can be found in Corpus velazqueño 2000, vols. 1–2. On Mazo’s marriage to Francisca Velázquez, see López Navío 1960 and Solano Oropesa and Solano Herranz 2004, p. 34. On his promotion to pintor de cámara, see Solano Oropesa and Solano Herranz 2004, p. 75; and Aterido Fernández 2015, p. 359, table 6.
On this aspect of Mazo’s historiography, see Morán Turina 2014b. On the question of attribution between Mazo and Velázquez, including that of Mazo’s The Family of the Artist (to be discussed shortly), see Brown 2008c.
On this painting, see especially Bottineau 1955; Ackroyd et al. 2005; and Llórente 2006, pp. 211–28; see also Portús Pérez 2014b, pp. 144–46, cat. 25; and Kientz 2015, pp. 318–19, cat. 101, both of which include a more comprehensive bibliography for this painting.
See Solano Oropesa and Solano Herranz 2004, p. 66; and Aterido Fernández 2015, p. 359, table 6.
On the expense reports produced by the office of the furriera, see chapter 5 of this book. For documentation of Mazo’s settling of outstanding bills in the furriera at the time of Velázquez’s death, see Cordero and Hernández 2000, pp. 342–43.
For a useful introduction to the production and overview of the contents of the 1666 inventory of the contents of the Alcázar palace, see Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 17–21. On the early descriptions of Las Meninas, see Knox 2009, pp. 120–23.
AGP, Administración General, Legajo 38, exp. 2, fol. 15r: “Una pintura de quatro baras y media de alto y tres y media de ancho con su marco de talla dorado, retratando a la senora enperatriz con sus damas y una enana, de mano de Diego Belazquez en mill y quinientos ducados de plata.” This description of the painting persists into the inventory of the contents of the Alcázar palace taken in 1686 and the testament of Charles II made in 1701 (the full history of the record of Las Meninas in inventories of the royal art collection can be found in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, p. 285, no. 182).
The scholars who have worked on the painting in recent decades have rarely interpreted Las Meninas with the Infanta Margarita as its protagonist. But early scholars consistently did so. Carl Justi claimed that the painting is “strictly speaking a portrait of Princess Margaret as the central figure in one of the daily recurring scenes of her palace life” (Justi 1889, p. 414). Yves Bottineau concluded that “the painting is the portrait of the empress, who, before her marriage, was the Infanta of Spain” (Bottineau 1998, p. 286: “la peinture est le portrait de l’impératrice, qui, avant son marriage, était infante d’Espagne”). And F. J. Sánchez Cantón would also identify the infanta as the painting’s central figure in his enumeration of the painting’s personages (Sánchez Cantón 1943, pp. 23–24). For competing interpretations of the painting that assume the primacy of the infanta (neither of which uses the 1666 inventory as its point of departure), see Vahlne 1982 and Mena Marqués 1997. Jonathan Brown offers a pointed response to Mena Marqués in Brown 1999.
For a focused treatment of this period of Velázquez’s life and career, see especially Portús Pérez 2014a. For a brief history of the impact of this period of Velázquez’s career on artists after him, see Portús Pérez 2008.
On the date of the Infanta Margarita in a White Dress, which was likely made for the purposes of negotiating a marriage for the infanta, see Portús Pérez 2014b, pp. 119–25, cat. 15; and Haag 2014, pp. 224–25 and 319–23, cat. 38. The date of Las Meninas is given in Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 343; see also Palomino 1947, p. 921; Palomino 1987, p. 166; and Palomino 2018, p. 149.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 342: “Quadro grande con el Retrato de la Señora Emperatriz (entonces Infanta de España) Doña Margarita María de Austria”; see also Palomino 1947, p. 920; Palomino 1987, p. 164; and Palomino 2018, p. 144.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 342 and 343; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 920 and 921; and Palomino 1987, pp. 164 and 166.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 342: “teniendo en sus manos otro [retrato] con la Efigie del Señor Rey Don Phelipe Segundo”; see also Palomino 1947, p. 921; Palomino 1987, p. 165; and Palomino 2018, p. 148.
On the paintings galleries in the Pardo palace, see Kusche 1991a; Kusche 1991b; Kusche 1992; and Woodall 1995.
AGP, Administraciones Patrimonionales, El Pardo, Caja 9380, exp. 8: “Otro [retrato] de Tiziano pintor.” This inventory has been published as Sánchez Cantón 1934 (for the portrait, see p. 71).
Cited in Roblot-Delondre 1910, p. 59: “Ticiano Pintor, el mas excelente de su tiempo, natural de Venecia, cuyo retrato se ve, teniendo en sus manos otro con la Ymagen del Rey don Phelippe nuestro señor.”
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 342: “Con no menos artificio considero este Retrato de Velazquez, que el de Fidias Escultor, y Pintor famoso, que puso su Retrato en el Escudo de la Estatua, que hizo de la Diosa Minerva, fabricandole con tal artificio, que si de alli se quitasse, se deshiziesse tambien de todo punto la Estatua. / No menos eterno hizo Ticiano su nombre, con averse retratado teniendo en sus manos otro con la Efigie del Señor Rey Don Phelipe Segundo; y assi como el nombre de Fidias jamâs se borrò, en quanto estuvo entera la Estatua de Minerva, y el de Ticiano, en quanto durasse el de el Señor Phelipe Segundo; assi tambien el de Velazquez durarà de vnos siglos en otros, en quanio [sic] durare el de la Excelsa, quanto preciosa Margarita, à cuya sombra immortaliza su imagen con los benignos influxos de tan Soberano Dueño”; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 920–21; Palomino 1987, p. 165; and Palomino 2018, pp. 145–48.
Kris and Kurz 1979, p. 20.
See Hope 1990, p. 60; Woodall 1995, p. 57; Weston-Lewis 2004, p. 368–69, cat. 202; Rosand 2009, p. 66; and Nichols 2013, p. 168. For one approach to the question of Titian’s self-portraits and his self-consciousness as an artist, see Cranston 2000, pp. 98–126.
On Velázquez’s contribution to the history of portraiture under the Habsburgs, see Bodart 2011. On his early court portraits, see Portús Pérez 2012. On his late court portraits, see Portús Pérez 2014b. For a short, focused account only of the various iterations of the royal image that Velázquez produced over the course of his career, see Brown 1986a.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 342: “Descripcion del Historiado de esta Pintura”; see also Palomino 1947, p. 920; and Palomino 1987, p. 165.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 342: “haze à la composicion gran armonia”; “hazen à lo historiado maravilloso efecto”; see also Palomino 1947, p. 920; Palomino 1987, p. 165; and Palomino 2018, p. 145.
Palomino 1715, p. 49: “Y si el Quadro, ò Superficie, donde ay vna, ò dos Figuras solas independientes, estuviere organizado de otros adherentes, como algun trozo de Arquitectura, Pais, Cortina, Bufete, &c. aunque sea vn Retrato, en terminos Pictoricos, llamamos también historiado; porque aunque no aya mas que vna Figura, aquèl Congresso, organizado de varias partes, de cuya armoniosa composicion resulta vn todo perfecto, se imagina historiado; pues para su constitucion se hà de observar la misma graduacion, y templança, que en vna Historia; y porque los dichos adherentes substituyen el lugar, y colocacion de las Figuras.”
Palomino uses the term only twice more in his biography of Velázquez, to describe The Surrender of Breda (MNP, P001172; Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 335; see also Palomino 1947, p. 910; Palomino 1987, p. 156; Palomino 2018, p. 113) and Prince Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School (Wallace Collection, P6; Palomino 1724, vol. 3, p. 332; see also Palomino 1947, p. 907; Palomino 1987, p. 153; Palomino 2018, p. 101). On the latter, see Harris 1976. Palomino’s use of this term and the definition he provides for it recalls a broader conversation in the seventeenth century regarding how to make portraits that are as ambitious as history paintings. The French analogue to Palomino’s historiado was the portrait historié, within which real personages were depicted in allegorical or historicizing dress, sometimes in the company of allegorical figures (Bajou et al. 1997, esp. pp. 91–104). In Italy Bellori’s lives of Andrea Sacchi and Carlo Maratta proposed comparable solutions to the question of how to make portraits that could rival history paintings. The first of these consisted of portraits of an individual figure enlivened with symbols or represented as an allegory, the second of portraits of figures in action (for a convenient English translation of the relevant chapters of this text, see Bellori 2005, pp. 373–440). Fernando Marías offers a different reading of Las Meninas as a “historiated” portrait in Marías 2000.
On the debate surrounding the date of this painting, see Novero Plaza 2006–7. The most ambitious interpretation of this painting can be found in Swoboda 2014. Informative introductions to the painting can also be found in Portús Pérez 2014b, pp. 140–42, cat. 23; Haag 2014, pp. 234–37 and 324–25, cat. 43; and Kientz 2015, pp. 334–45, cat. 109.
See especially Swoboda 2014; see also Novero Plaza 2006–7, pp. 179–80; Portús Pérez 2014b, p. 140, cat. 23; Haag 2014, pp. 236 and 325, cat. 43; and Kientz 2015, p. 334, cat. 109.
Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, p. 285, cat. 182: “la familia del sr Phelipe quarto.” On the changeability of the titles of paintings in the history of Western art, see Ekserdjian 2010 and especially Yeazell 2015.
The most complete study of the identities of the figures in the foreground of this painting can be found in Novero Plaza 2006–7.
The identification of this figure as Mazo is made in Novero Plaza 2006–7, pp. 186–87; Ayala Mallory 1991, p. 269; Solano Oropesa and Solano Herranz 2004, p. 81; Gutiérrez Pastor 2005, p. 310; Portús Pérez 2014b, p. 140, cat. 23; Haag 2014, pp. 236 and 325, cat. 43; and Kientz 2015, p. 334, cat.109.
This part of the painting is organized according to the same system of orthogonal lines observable in Las Meninas. A diagram demonstrating this is included in Solano Oropesa and Solano Herranz 2004, p. 123.
Arasse 2013b, p. 108.
Arasse 2013b, p. 108.
Arasse 2013b, p. 112; paraphrasing Chastel 1978.
On Carreño’s life and work, see Berjano Escobar 1924; Barettini Fernández 1972; Pérez Sánchez 1985; Pérez Sánchez 1986, pp. 17–55; López Vizcaíno 2007; and Portús Pérez 2013. A biography of this painter is included in Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 415–20; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 1024–30; and Palomino 1987, pp. 274–80. For an introduction to Carreño’s working relationship to Velázquez, see Hernández Perera 1960a.
Palomino 1724, vol. 3, pp. 344–45 and 416; see also Palomino 1947, pp. 924–25 and 1025–26; Palomino 1987, pp. 167–68 and 275; and Palomino 2018, pp. 154–57.
For the dates when Juan Carreño de Miranda took up the offices of pintor de cámara and ayuda de la furriera, see Aterido Fernández 2015, p. 359, table 6.
Portús Pérez 2014b, p. 146, cats. 26–27.
On these paintings, see Orso 1982; Pérez Sánchez 1986, pp. 218–19, cat. 38, and p. 222, cat. 42; Orso 1986, pp. 178–82; Sebastián López 1992; Rodríguez G. de Ceballos 2000, pp. 103–4; Morán Turina 2003; Pascual Chenel 2010, pp. 87–100; Bodart 2011, pp. 290–93; Mínguez 2013, pp. 160–62; and Portús Pérez 2014b, pp. 146–49, cats. 26–27.
Marin 1988, p. 8.
For a comprehensive treatment of the challenges posed to portrait painters by Charles II’s physical and mental frailty, see Pascual Chenel 2010 and Mínguez 2013. For briefer overviews of the strategies of representation of Charles II from his ascension to the throne to his funeral rites, see Rodríguez G. de Ceballos 2000 and Sancho and Souto 2009. On art during the reign of Charles II more broadly considered, see Pérez Sánchez 1986; Ribot 2009; and Rodríguez G. de Ceballos and Rodríguez Rebollo 2013.
Marin 1988, p. 8.
Useful starting points on images of children in early modern Spain might include Llórente 2011 and the relevant essays in Coolidge 2014 and Knox Averett 2015. The history of the image of Queen Mariana after the death of Philip IV has a kind of inverse relationship to that of the image of Charles II, starting out as the central figure in the representation of the Habsburg monarchy after the death of the king and receding in importance in representations of the Habsburgs upon Charles II’s maturity. On Mariana of Austria and her image, see Oliván Santaliestra 2006; Llórente 2006; López-Cordón Cortezo 2009, pp. 109–16; Llórente 2010; Llórente 2012; and Mitchell 2019.
On this topic, see especially Mínguez 2013, pp. 59–81. This representational strategy is perhaps best exemplified by a painting like Sebastián de Herrera Barnuevo’s Charles II with the Images of His Ancestors (Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid). On this painting, see Orso 1986, pp. 178–82; Young 1986; Mínguez 1991; Portús Pérez 2000c, pp. 17–18; Portús Pérez 2000d, pp. 217–19; Morán Turina 2003, pp. 71–72; Pascual Chenel 2010, pp. 56–57; Bodart 2011, pp. 290–93; and Mínguez 2013, pp. 67–72. For a broader introduction to Herrera Barnuevo’s portraits of Charles II, see Sancho and Souto 2010.
Zuccaro 1607, vol. 1, p. 6: “Io dico, che se si pone vno specchio di finissimo cristallo, che sia gra[n]de in vna sala ornata di pitture eccellenti, & di statue marauigliose, chiara cosa è, che fissando io l’occhio in quello non pure egli è termine del mio vedere; ma anco oggetto rappresentante chiaramente, & distintamente tutte quelle pitture, e statue à gli occhi miei; & pure in quello non sono quelle pitture, e quelle statue secondo la materia, & sostanza loro; ma solo in lui rilucono col mezo delle lor forme spirituali.”
These are identified as such in Orso 1982, p. 33; Pérez Sánchez 1986, p. 218, cat. 38; Orso 1986, p. 181; Sebastián López 1992, pp. 198–99; Rodríguez G. de Ceballos 2000, p. 104; Morán Turina 2003, p. 72; Sancho and Souto 2009, p. 173; Pascual Chenel 2010, p. 93; Bodart 2011, p. 293; and Portús Pérez 2014b, p. 147, cats. 26–27.
Perhaps the most famous of these was the metaphor of the speculum sine macula, the mirror without stain, according to which the prince acts as a mirror in which his subjects see themselves, and therefore should strive to embody those virtues he would wish for them to emulate. An interpretation of Carreño’s portrait according to this metaphor is offered in Pascual Chenel 2010, pp. 91–92. On the proliferation of treatises addressing the education of princes during the reign of Charles II, see Castilla Soto 2009 and Mínguez 2013, pp. 31–43.
Méndez Silva 1654, fol. 31v: “sean las principales, de los Reyes sus progenitores; para que la memoria de los claros hechos, le sirua de christalino espejo, y glorioso estimulo à adelantarlos con realces de mayores progressos. Pues en sus Ascendiẽtes generosos, hallarà la gloria; en los omissos el deshonor, y en los prudentes el exemplo.”
One firsthand account of such an audience can be found in Domínguez Ortiz 1978.