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The “Las meninas” painting is the most iconic work of the Prado Museum in Madrid.
Sometimes a jug is just a jug. Others, it is the door to a new way of perceiving.
In the masterpiece “Las Meninas”, a play of shadows and mirrors that has never ceased to intrigue, a small terracotta jug in the center of the canvas, until now almost unnoticed, transforms the work, a snapshot of sumptuous life, into a treatise on the illusory and transcendental nature of existence.
Without this clay object, the mystery of the work fades, which has captured the attention of observers for more than three and a half centuries, since Velázquez’s brush illuminated it in 1656.
To fully appreciate how a popular piece of pottery from Latin America becomes a goal to capture the world again, we must remember the cultural context in which the painting was born and what it intended to portray.
Characters
The work shows a self-portrait of the artist at the age of 57, four years before his death in 1660 and after spending the last three decades as a chamber painter with King Philip IV of Spain.
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Velázquez is one of the great masters of Spanish painting.
Palette in hand on the left side of the scene, Velázquez’s life-sized “selfie” looks at us as if we were the very object he is trying to capture on the huge canvas in front of him.
It is a painting upon a painting in the imaginary surface of a canvas that we cannot see.
In the center of the painting, to the left of Velázquez, we see the Infanta Margarita, daughter of King Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, flanked by a couple of ladies on duty.
The rest of the dimly lit room in the Royal Palace of Madrid is lit by a diverse group of courtiers.
Doors of perception
Through an open door at the back of the scene, a foggy silhouette, the queen’s chamberlain, prepares to leave the painting, but not before stopping to look at us, as if eager to follow him into the unknown.
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Kings Philip IV and Mariana of Austria appear in the mirror in the background, but we do not know if Velázquez paints them or if they are the reflection of a canvas he has already painted.
To the left of the door, a mirror reflects the ghostly faces of the king and queen, whose position in the world of opera is unknown. The monarchs andThere are, but there are not.
These aspects of the work – the open door and the real faces in the ghostly mirror – have led many observers to suspect that there is much more at work in the painting than it appears.
The “absent” presence of the king and queen, who appear in the painting but not in the scene, forces us to conclude that it is a philosophical work on the substance of substance and the closeness of the here and now, much like a frozen image of a scene from bustling palace life.
The puzzle of their reflection ensures that we are not passive spectators, but actively try to understand where they are in the world.
Does the mirror place them where we are, as subjects of a portrait that Velázquez is painting?
Or does the mirror show what is already on that large canvas, of which we only see the back? This second option would make the image in the mirror an imaginary reflection of the surface of an imaginary painting portraying characters whose whereabouts we can only guess.
A vanishing point that vanishes
“Las Meninas” plays with our mind and our retina.
On the one hand, the perspective lines of the canvas converge and drag our gaze towards a vanishing point, which is the door.
But on the other hand, the mirror draws our attention to the back of the painting, to evaluate the possible position of the real ghosts.
We are constantly being dragged in and out of work, while the room that Velázquez draws becomes a strange elastic, transitory and eternal dimension, a tangible realm, but also foggy and imaginary.
Velázquez’s images have an almost psychotropic effect on us. They promote an almost trance-like state in which painting has brought the public generation after generation.
Perhaps we are describing a hallucination or a mystical vision rather than a painting.
The pitcher
Easy to ignore at the intersection of optical, philosophical and psychological perspectives that appear in the painting, there is an object that perhaps offers a material clue to the claimed effect of Velázquez’s hallucinogenic masterpiece on our consciousness: a vibrant red dot in the form of a small jug.
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The little red cup may go unnoticed, but it has significant meaning.
This modest jug, which a pleading servant offers the young infant (and us) on a silver platter, should have been recognized by contemporaries as the embodiment of mind and body altering properties.
Known as a vase, this simple piece of clay was one of the most coveted handicrafts among which Spanish explorers of the New World brought back to antiquity in the 16th and 17th centuries.
According to art historian Byron Ellsworth Hamann, who has carefully studied the origin of many of the objects appearing in Velázquez’s paintings, including the silver tray of “Las Meninas”, the brightness characteristic of pitcher and the reddish hue distinguishes it as a product of Guadalajara, Mexico.
A secret blend of local spices cooked in clay during the making of the vase ensured that any liquid it contained was delicately scented.
But the vase was known to perform another, more surprising function.
Hallucinations
In 17th-century Spanish aristocratic circles it became something of a fashion for girls and young women to munch on the edges of these porous clay jugs and slowly devour them completely.
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“Las Meninas” has been fascinating for more than 300 years.
A chemical consequence of the consumption of foreign clay was a dramatic lightening of the skin to an almost ghostly hue, which at the time was an aesthetic aspiration and a display of wealth and that one’s livelihood did not depend on work done under the sun that darkened the skin.
Oddly, consuming pot clay was less dangerous than some contemporary alternatives, such as smearing a Venetian paste of lead, vinegar, and water on your face, resulting in blood poisoning, hair loss, and death.
But the ingestion of clay vessel also caused the dangerous reduction of red blood cells, paralysis of the muscles and destruction of the liver.
It also caused hallucinations. According to the autobiography of a contemporary painter and mystic, Estefanía de la Encarnación, published in Madrid in 1631, the addiction to biting vessels translated into greater spiritual awareness.
The woman says it took her “a whole year” to get rid “of this vice”, but that the narcotic effect caused her visions that allowed her to “see God more clearly”.
Symbol of imperial twilight
When we map the physiological and psychotropic effects of addiction to vessels in the “Las Meninas” puzzle, the painting takes on a new and perhaps even more disturbing meaning.
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Velázquez seems to indicate the red color of his palette, the same color from which the vase in the painting would have come.
The altered consciousness of the Infanta, whose fingers surround the vase (did he just nibble it?), Suddenly expands from the epicenter of the canvas’s action to the whole mentality of the painting.
Also, we can see Velázquez’s brush indicates a point of the same intense red on his palette, the same from which the vase was born.
Spooky in its pallor, even the Infanta seems to levitate from the ground, an effect obtained by the shadow that the artist inserts under the hem of her parachute dress.
Even the parents of the Infanta, whose images float directly on the vase, they begin to appear as holographic spirits projected from another dimension rather than mere reflections in a mirror.
Suddenly, we see “Las Meninas” for what it is, not just a snapshot of a moment, but a meditation on the evanescence of the material world and the inevitable evaporation of the self.
During his nearly four decades of court service, Velázquez witnessed the gradual decline of Philip IV’s rule. The world was slipping away from him.
The vase, a trophy of colonial enterprises and of imperial power in decline, is the perfect symbol of this sunset and the abandonment of the mirage of now.
The vase skillfully fixes the confused scene and, at the same time, is directly involved in its confusion.
Both physical, psychological and spiritual in its symbolic implications, the vase is a keyhole through which one can glimpse and unlock the deeper meaning of Velázquez’s masterpiece.
* This article was originally published on BBC Culture, in English, and you can read it here.
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