Las Meninas

Las Meninas, by Diego Velasquez. 1657

Perhaps the first post-​​modernist paint­ing, well before the period assigned to that name. Pespective. Multiple per­spec­tives. Meta. About paint­ing. About the act of paint­ing. Velasquez paints Velasquez. This is not a pipe. This is not Velasquez. Are we, the audi­ence, look­ing at the painter paint­ing us? Or, does our van­ity blind us and pre­vent us from see­ing that it is the king and queen of Spain in that mir­ror, not you? Or eye. Too easy, that one.

Mirrors. Pictures within pic­tures, plays within plays within plays. Rubens on the wall. Hamlet stages Shakespeare. Velasquez stages Nietzsche. Velasquez stages Barth and Coover and Barthelme and McElroy.

All is van­ity as the Infanta Margarita tires of being painted. So tired, they have to bring in her court dwarves to keep her in the pic­ture. Is Velasquez mock­ing the royal fam­ily, mock­ing their pride? The dawn of the Enlightenment and the pre­cur­sor of the postmodern.

I think he wanted us to talk about this mys­tery for cen­turies, just like Joyce wanted us to talk about Ulysses. Finding some­thing new each time we gaze at it. The struc­ture. The com­po­si­tion. The light. Dig up all of the gos­sip on the royal fam­ily. Entertainment Tonight.

Vermeer tries sim­i­lar things, as far as struc­ture and meta paint­ing, though he has no con­nec­tion with royal families.

 

Allegory of Painting

The Art of Painting, by Jan Vermeer. 1666

Simpler. More inti­mate. Modest, per­haps. Calm. One could almost say there is a national dif­fer­ence between the two. One could see this as obvi­ous. Stereotypes. Quick gen­er­al­i­ties that may or may not fit. And because they may or may not fit, by def­i­n­i­tion they are not accurate.

The 17th cen­tury. The age of Spinoza, Leibnitz, Galileo and two extra­or­di­nary painters, Vermeer and Velasquez. But the Infanta Margarita’s maids of honor pro­voke the post­mod­ern, launch it before any­one knew. Meta paint­ing. Introspection. Vanity. And mir­rors. Who knew that the before could do com­men­tary on the after? Who knew that Freud lurked in the wings even then?

 

 

— by Douglas Pinson

 

Copyright ©2009, by Douglas Pinson. All Rights Reserved.

 

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