Las Meninas

A large room in the Royal Alcazar of Madrid. The five-year-old Infanta Margarita stands at the centre, attended by her ladies-in-waiting, her maids of honour. A painter stands at a large canvas on the left, brush and palette in hand, looking outward from the canvas toward us. In a mirror on the back wall, two small figures: the king and queen of Spain. A man in the doorway, light behind him. A dog.

The painter in the painting is Velazquez. The canvas he is working on is the one we are looking at. We, the viewers, stand where the king and queen stand. That is what the mirror reflects: us, or them, or both, depending on which reading you accept.

But there is a physical pentimento too. The red cross on Velazquez's chest, the emblem of the Order of Santiago, was not painted when the canvas was finished. He received the knighthood in 1659, three years after completing the work. He returned to the painting and added it himself. Or, according to a tradition that Palomino recorded in 1724, King Philip IV picked up a brush and painted it in with his own hand. The cross is a later addition either way. It is a correction to a finished masterpiece, made by the artist or his king.

"Foucault called it the representation of classical representation. The painting is about what it means to paint, to look, and to be seen."

Velazquez was court painter to Philip IV for nearly thirty years. He was also a courtier, a palace official who held the post of aposentador mayor, responsible for the king's lodgings and travel. The painting was made inside the palace where he worked. He knew every person in it.

The little girl in the centre, Infanta Margarita, was five years old. She would marry Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I at seventeen and die at twenty-one, having given birth to six children. Velazquez would die the year after completing this painting. He had spent his career trying to prove that painting was a noble art, not a craft. The cross he added was the proof he had been waiting for.

• The mirror does not reflect what it should. If the king and queen are standing where we stand, the mirror should show them from the front. But convex mirrors distort. Some scholars argue the mirror reflects the canvas being painted, not the room. The debate has continued for three and a half centuries.
• The man in the doorway. Jose Nieto, the queen's chamberlain. He is leaving, or arriving, or standing as witness. His position at the back of the room, framed by light, mirrors Velazquez's position at the front. Two men. Two roles. One room.
• The large canvas is blank to us. We see only its back. Everything that Velazquez is painting in the painting is hidden from us. We are watching an act of creation we cannot see the result of -- except that we are looking at it.