'Las Meninas': Greatest Work Ever

Blake Gopnik visited Diego Velazquez’s painting “Las Meninas” every day for a week and concluded that it “is the absolutely greatest work of art in the Western tradition.” “Las Meninas” seems at first glance to be a masterpiece of realist portraiture, a massive detailed picture of the five-year-old Infanta Margarita of Spain and her entourage. But closer scrutiny reveals that it’s actually a frozen scene in which the king and queen, standing where the viewer stand, have interrupted the painting of the Infanta’s portrait. And even closer scrutiny—researchers rendering a 3-D model of the scene—show that a more likely reading is that it’s a painting of Velazquez painting his own image in a mirror. Yet even that reading leaves things out. “The true subject of ‘Las Meninas,’" writes Gopnik, “is the heroic moment of its own making, recorded ‘live,’ in a real place, as no history painting had ever been before.”