Velázquez’s Las Meninas

Velázquez’s Las Meninas was sequestered in the Spanish royal collections from 1656, when it was painted, until the opening of the Museo del Prado in 1819. From that moment, it has been one of the most famous masterpieces of western painting, inspiring many published studies of its remarkable perspectival construction and of its iconography, as well as challenging later generations of artists, from Pablo Picasso to the present. The essays in this volume provide an introduction to the reception history and the critical fortunes of a painting that has received an avalanche of attention from art critics and art historians, geometricians, philosophers, photographers and semioticians. Together, the six essays trace the discussion of Las Meninas through two centuries providing the reader with a sense of the history of taste and of the ever-fluctuating parameters of art appreciation, history, criticism and theory.

• Covers unique history of the literature of Las Meninas • Provides a jargon-free introduction of the painting in contemporary art theory • Clear elucidation of Foucault\'s notoriously difficult 1966 essay

Introduction Las Meninas: the theology of painting Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt; 1. The aura of a masterpiece: 19th-century responses to Las Meninas in France and Spain Alisa Luxenberg; 2. Las Meninas at Kingston Lacy Hugh Brigstocke; 3. ‘Why drag in Velásquez?’: Realism, aestheticism, and the American response to Las Meninas M. Elizabeth Boone; 4. Las Meninas as representation Estrella de Diego; 5. Velásquez and the twentieth century Barbara Rose.