Diego Velázquez's "Las Meninas"

A beautiful and wonderful friend of mine gave me a copy of one of their favorite books, “Eros : The Bittersweet” by Anne Carson, for my birthday. It’s, as I’ve been describing it so far, a 160 page essay about eros. Even though some chapters (namely the one that claims the Greek alphabet is the best the world has seen so far) really piss me off, the work on a whole has honestly given me a new perspective on the concept of eros/love/desire. The reason I’ve posted this Velazquez painting that every art history major knows by now and rolls their eyes at is that the book gave me a different light for it. As you study the scene, your eyes go in a certain direction. Most viewers start with the center-most girl, and then scan all the major players surrounding her. Only after absorbing the main idea (and understanding that “las meninas” means ‘brides of honor’), does the viewer see the mirror in the background exposing that they are actually not the ones intended for viewing the work, rather that the then king and queen of Spain were. Foucault analyzed this painting as the precise hiding point from which our gaze disappears and we become fully aware of our actions. I remember starting college and one of my first professors ripping up my paper and asking, “Who are these people in white lab coats behind you agreeing and dictating all these actions?” I would now say they are the King and  Queen of Spain, or they are Me, or they are You.