Diego Velázquez
Las Meninas 1656
oil on canvas 125 x 109”
1634–5
Museo del Prado, Madrid
But surely his most celebrat-
ed work, and the most writ-
ten about, is the artist’s enig-
matic Las Meninas, painted
in 1656. Authors Jonathan
Brown and Carmen Garrido
(Chief of Conservation at the
Prado) describe the paint-
ing as “the largest oil sketch
ever painted…as he had
sought to make the world
come alive by suggesting
the appearance of visual
data through strategies of in-
definiteness.” X-rays reveal
that the artist made minimal
changes here (one of which
is the direction of his gaze in
his self-portrait at the left).
Brown and Garrido continue
to say, “Velázquez was able
to project his ideas onto the
canvas without vacillation.”4
We may justly call this a tour
de force of sprezzatura.
Indeed, in more than one way—teacher Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644) wrote of his student that he was so “im-
pressed by his virtue, integrity and excellent qualities, and also the promise of his great natural genius” that he gave
Velázquez his daughter’s hand in marriage at age 19. Before Velázquez was thirty he had become first painter to the
king in Madrid. By the 1640s he had