Las Meninas Essay

When viewers gaze upon Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (painted in 1656), they can experience the avant-garde aura of its time as the Baroque painting displays both candidness and movement. In the way that Velázquez painted his work of art, Las Meninas can be classified as Baroque Naturalism (Stratton-Pruitt 5), suggesting influence from Caravaggio who painted with realism and strong chiaroscuro (“light-dark” spotlighting tones). The shift from Mannerism to Baroque developed a thematic motto for artists at the latter movement. According to Dutch poet and painter Gerbrand Adriaensz Bredero (1585-1618): “They are the best painters who come closest to life, and not those who consider it a spirited thing to select poses that are unnatural, and to twist and bend the limbs and bones, which they often foreshorten and contort unreasonably and beyond the limits of propriety” (qtd in Martin 40). For Las Meninas, the work of art
Charles Wentinck, author of The Human Figure, observes the relationship between Velázquez’s attitude toward his subjects and his style:

His portraits of princesses were masterpieces of painting pure and simple, but he did not paint these little ladies of the royal line with the warmth of a human heart. He did not look benignly upon their small figures—so touching in the unchildlike rigidity of their courtly stance. He was only a painter—and a somewhat impassive fanatic of the craft at that. The uncharitable Velázquez sacrificed, so to speak, these little princesses to his passion. Human existences were transformed into pictorial beauty so that there remained nothing of the living beyond the fine painting (36).

Analogously, the infanta Margarita was also victim to Velázquez’s passion; for her face remains stiffly supported by her poised neck and the seriousness that it portrays indicates the “unchildlike rigidity” that Velázquez employs on his painted