Velazquez Paints Las Meninas

1656

In his studio in the Alcazar of Madrid, the Spanish court painter Diego Velazquez produced an enormous canvas showing the five-year-old Infanta Margarita surrounded by attendants, with himself, palette in hand, looking out of the painting. It is perhaps the most philosophically slippery picture in European art, a meditation on seeing and being seen that has fascinated artists and theorists ever since.