Maids of Honor

Check out this interesting link about Las Meninas!

http://www.evl.uic.edu/chris/meninas/

This reading threw me off at first. As dumb as it probably is…I didn’t look at the picture on the last page until I finished reading the whole thing. Although I had to go back through the reading a second time, after I looked at the picture, to really understand it, I think I’m better off because I understand the reading really well now. To begin, I noticed that the reason I was so confused at first is because this essay is kind of an argument in reverse. There is no thesis and thus we do not know the authors intentions for the rest of the paper. I was wandering what all this discussion about “invisible” meant. It is important to notice that a lot of words on the first page, including: spectator, appeared, observing and blind point, all relate to vision.

Throughout the rest of the essay, Foucault explains the painting in a very detailed and abstract manner. I say abstract because some of the concepts he brings up, are not ones that a reader would necessarily be able to produce. For example, when discussing the composition of Las Meninas, Foucault mentions an invisible “X” across the lower half. The center of the “X” meets right in the middle of “Infanta’s” eyes. This further supports his argument that she is an important figure in the lives of King Philip and his wife Mariana. This “X” makes perfect sense once we read about it, but I, for one, certainly would not have been able to come up with the idea on my own…

            On the last two pages of the essay, Foucault pretty much sums up his argument and his thoughts on Velazquez’s argument (through the painting). “Perhaps there exists in this painting by Velazquez, the representation as it were, of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us. And, indeed, representation undertakes to represent itself here in all its elements, with its images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call it into being. But there, in the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation - of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject - which is the same - has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.” Ultimately I believe Velazquez’s argument here is that a painting of what goes on around the King and his wife is more descriptive and gives more insight than a simple portrait would. The viewer gets a better impression of King Philip and Mariana’s lives from Las Meninas than the viewer would from a portrait.