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Representations 1 (February 1983)
Along with Vermeer’s Art of Painting
and Courbet’s Studio, Velázquez’s Las Meninas (fig. 1) is surely
one of the greatest representations of pictorial representation in all of
Western painting. Why has this work eluded full and satisfactory discussion by
art historians? Why should it be that the major study, the most serious and
sustained piece of writing on this work in our time, is by Michel Foucault?
There is, I shall argue, a structural explanation built into the interpretive
procedures of the discipline itself that has made a picture such as Las
Meninas literally unthinkable under the rubric of art history. Before
considering the work, as I propose to do, in representational terms, let us
consider why this should be so.
Historically, we can trace two lines of
argument about Las Meninas: the first, most elegantly encapsulated in
Théophile Gautier’s “Où est donc le tableau?” has been concerned with the
extraordinarily real presence of the painted world. The frame appears to
intersect a room whose ceiling, floor, and window bays extend, so it is
suggested, to include the viewer. The light and shadow-filled space is not only
intended for the viewer’s eyes—as in the case of its much smaller predecessor
hung at the Spanish court, Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding. Given the great
size of the canvas, it is intended also for the viewer’s body. The size of the
figures is a match for our own. This appeal at once to eye and body is a
remarkable pictorial performance which contradictorily presents powerful human
figures by means of illusionary surfaces. In the nineteenth century it was a
commonplace for travelers to Madrid to refer to it in what we can call
photographic terms. Continuing a tradition started in the eighteenth century
about such works as Vermeer’s View of Delft, it was compared to nature
seen in a camera obscura, and Stirling-Maxwell, an early writer, noted
that Las Meninas anticipated Daguerre. The pictorial quality of presence
is sustained in the apparently casual deportment of the figures that is
distinguished, as so often in the works of Velázquez, by a particular feature:
the fact that we are looked at by those at whom we are looking. To twentieth
century eyes at least, this gives it the appearance of a snapshot being taken.
In the foreground, the little princess turns to us from her entourage, as does
one of her maids, and a dwarf, and of course Velázquez himself who has stepped
back from his canvas for this very purpose.
The gaze out of the canvas is a
consistent feature in Velázquez’s works. In their separate portraits, royalty
and dwarf alike meet our eyes, but most astounding are the minor figures in the
larger scenes: two of the peasants celebrating Bacchus in an early work (fig.
2), for example, or the memorable soldier to the left and the officers to the
right of The Surrender at Breda, or the woman situated at the margin
between the two spaces of The Spinners. I refer to this phenomenon as a
gaze, to distinguish it from a glance. It does not initiate or attend to some
occurrence; empty of expression, it is not, in short, narrative in nature. The
gaze, rather, signals from within the picture that the viewer outside the picture
is seen and in turn it acknowledges the state of being seen. Though not
invented for the occasion of Las Meninas, the device is heightened here
because it is thematized by the situation, or possibly the situations at hand.
Just what the situation is—hence what the
subject of the work is—has been the concern of the second line of argument
about Las Meninas. The problem is not one if identification—an early
commentator identified each participant in the scene (even including the figure
pausing in the light of the distant doorway whose role of marshal in the
queen’s entourage significantly matches Velázquez’s role in service to the
king). However the presence of the king and queen marked by their reflection in
the prominent mirror at the center of the far wall, and the large picture seen
from the back on its stretcher, which intrudes at the left, raise problems.
Where are the king and queen or what is the source of their reflections, and
what is the subject being painted in the unseen canvas? The impulse in recent
studies has been to answer these questions by attempting to supply the plot—a
little playlet as one scholar calls it—of which this picture is a scene. The
little Infanta, so this account goes, has dropped in to see Velázquez at work,
stops to ask her maid of honor for a drink of water and looks up when surprised
by the unexpected entrance of her parents, the king and queen.
. . .
In short Las Meninas is now
understood as a visual statement of the social rank desired by the painter.
. . .
In order to reduce Las Meninas to
its current meaning two moves are necessary: first, against the evidence of the
picture it is argued that artist and king are represented together and their
proximity is seen as the central feature of the work; second, art historians
separate what they claim to be the seventeenth century meaning of the work from
its appearance, which is put in its place as merely the concern of
modern viewers.
It is this insistence on the separation
of questions of meaning from questions of representation that makes Las
Meninas unthinkable within the established rubric of art history. The
problem is endemic to the field.
. . .
What is missing is a notion of
representation or a concern with what it is to picture something. And it is
therefore not surprising that in recent times it is students of texts who have
most successfully turned their attention to the works of artists such as
these—artists whose works are self-conscious and rich in those representational
concerns to which literary studies have been more attuned.
. . .
I am not just imagining two kinds of
pictures, but describing two modes of representation that are central in
Western art. As an example of the first, Albertian model we might keep in our
mind’s eye a work such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino. The artist is a
viewer who is actively looking out at objects—preferably human figures—in
space, figures whose appearance, considered as a matter of size, is a function
of their distance from the viewer. For the second, which I call the northern or
descriptive mode, think of Vermeer’s View of Delft. A fragment of a
larger world is compressed into a piece of canvas, impressing its surface with
color and light without taking the position of a viewer external to it into
account. No scale or human measure is assumed. In Velázquez’s Las Meninas
we find the two as it were compounded in a dazzling, but fundamentally
unresolvable way. While in the Albertian picture the artist presumes himself to
stand with the viewer before the pictured world in both a physical and
epistemological sense, in the descriptive mode he is accounted for, if at all, within
that world. A pictorial device signaling this is the artist mirrored in the
work (as in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini) or a figure situated as a looker
within, rather like a surveyor situated within the very world he maps. In Dutch
paintings of this type the looker within the picture does not look out. That
would indeed be a contradiction since a picture of this sort does not assume
the existence of viewers prior to and external to it, as does the Albertian
mode.
In Las Meninas the looker within
the picture—the one whose view it is—not only looks out, but is suitably none
other than the artists himself. What is extraordinary about this picture as a
representation is that we must take it at once as a replication of the world and
as a reconstruction of the world that we view through the window frame. The
world seen has priority, but so also do we, the viewers on this side of the
picture surface. Let me explain. Paradoxically, the world seen that is prior to
us is precisely what, by looking out (and here the artist is joined by the
princess and part of her retinue), confirms or acknowledges us. But if we
had not arrived to stand before this world to look at it, the priority of the
world seen would not have been defined in the first place. Indeed, to come full
circle, the world seen is before us because we (along with the king and queen
as noted in the distant mirror) are what commanded its presence.
Las Meninas is produced not out of a single,
classical notion of representation as Foucault suggests, but rather out of
specific pictorial traditions of representation. It confounds a stable reading,
not because of the absence of the viewer-subject, but because the painting
holds in suspension two contradictory (and to Velázquez’s sense of things,
inseparable) modes of picturing the relationship of viewer, and picture, to
world. One assumes the priority of a viewer before the picture who is the
measure of the world and the other assumes that the world is prior to any human
presence and is thus essentially immeasurable.
. . .
It has been my intention in this brief
section to begin to suggest ways in which pictorial representation, an
aesthetic order, engages also a social one. It seems to me, however, to be a
mistake to conclude, as has been done on occasion, that Velázquez paints the
bankruptcy (as it undoubtedly then was) of the Spanish court and the failure of
the royal line. What is remarkable—in the sense of needing to be remarked—about
this art is something that Velázquez shares with a number of seventeenth
century artists. It is that his understanding of the complex conditions of
representation—both aesthetic and social—did not undermine his trust in it. As Las
Meninas shows, Velázquez sees himself as part of the very court he sees
through.
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