An Analysis of Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez

This is a 1656 painting called "Las Meninas" by the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, Diego Velazquez:

In “The Order of Things”, the philosopher Michel Foucault writes the following on Las Meninas:

“The painter is staring at a point to which, even though it is invisible, we, the spectators, can easily assign an object, since it is we, ourselves, who are that point: our bodies, our faces, our eyes. The spectacle he is observing is thus doubly invisible: first, because it is not represented within the space of the painting, and, second, because it is situated precisely in that blind point, in that essential hiding-place into which our gaze disappears from ourselves at the moment of our actual looking.

In appearance, the painting’s locus is a simple one; a matter of pure reciprocity: we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us. A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another’s glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another as they cross. And yet this slender line of reciprocal visibility embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints. The painter is turning his eyes towards us only insofar as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter’s gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.

The opaque fixity that the painting establishes on one side renders forever unstable the play of metamorphoses established in the center between spectator and model. Because we can see only that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing? The painter is observing a place which, from moment to moment, never ceases to change its content, its form, its face, its identity.

It may be that, in this picture, as in all the representations of which it is, as it were, the manifest essence, the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing—despite all mirrors, reflections, imitations, and portraits… 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 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.”

Explanation:

Our inability to capture a firm subject of the painting is an inalienable fact from our own “invisibility”, the non-existence of a natural “man” or “human”, that the very concept of “human” is a social construction which has not always existed as we generally think. Hence, Las Meninas expresses itself as a reminder of this deception. This is, moreover, indicative of “the necessary disappearance of the painting’s foundation”, which is to say that there is no foundation or origin of “man” as a natural entity, that there is no original or innate human nature. 

Las Meninas presents us with a number of appearances-based illusions; Foucault's trick is that there is no genesis. No original subject, no original person—in other words, no original "man"—exists to start this chain of deceptions or representations. Also keep in mind that "mirrors, reflections, imitations, and portraits" in Foucault's view are equivalent to "resemblance" and "representation": all a void. Once we free this image from the “relation that was impeding it”—the relation being to ourselves, the subject, “man,”—we can see these representations in their “true” form: that is, in their construction and artificiality, lacking a foundation because, of course, there is none—that we can see the socially constructed and “artificial” concept of the “man” which doesn’t have a natural foundation.