Las Meninas

At first when I look at this painting, I thought it was just another ordinary painting involving people in Elizabethan clothing. But after reading Foucault's essay and analyzing it in class, I realized that there are much more going on in this painting. Foucault emphasizes the relationship between the artist and the viewer, and after reading his essay, I started to look at the painting in a different way. I was wondering about what the author was trying to tell us, why the characters were positioned this way, and what were they doing. That night I researched about the painting, and it turns out that the people in the painting were royalty, and the two people in the mirrors were King Philip and Queen Mariana. And the position that they were standing would mean that the artist in the painting was painting a portrait of them, while the actual painting Las Meninas was a painting of the artist painting a portrait of the king and queen. I thought this was really interesting because the artist incorporated himself in the painting, and so the real artist (not the one in the painting) was painting a picture of him (the one in the painting) painting a picture of the viewers, which at the time when it was painted, was actually the artist himself! This all sounds very confusing but that’s the beauty of it, art is mysterious and fun.