Professing Rhetoric with Diego Velazquez by Stephen M. Llano

Diego Velazquez knows what he sees. He stares out at us via his representation in Las Meninas. This painting has more interpretation on it now than pigment, and there is no sign of it slowing down. As Michel Foucault wrote about the piece, “The relation of language to painting is an infinite relation . . . neither can be reduced to the other’s terms; it is vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.” Words are inadequate to answer the challenge but we are still compelled to produce them. We want to be worth that gaze.

A recent essay by Kelly Grovier argued that Las Meninas can be understood via the small red jar that is offered to the princess by her attendant. Grovier writes that this jug “would have been recognized by contemporaries as embodying both mind-and-body-altering properties.” The jug, which contained a substance from the New World that has hallucinogenic effects, is, for Grovier, the subject of this painting. We take the perspective of the Infanta seeing a hallucination of herself after imbibing a magic potion. Grovier asserts that in the end Las Meninas represents a drugged perception.