In Las Meninas you are standing where the king and queen stood

The small mirror on the back wall is not a puzzle about who. The Prado names them: reflected in it are the faces of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, the Infanta’s parents, watching the scene.

The unsettling part is where they must be standing to be reflected at all. They are in front of the picture — in the space you occupy while looking at it. Everyone in that room has stopped what they were doing because the King and Queen have just walked in, and you have arrived in their place.

Who everybody is

Almost uniquely for a 17th-century group, we can name them, because Antonio Palomino identified most of them in 1724.

At the centre is the Infanta Margarita, attended by two of the Queen’s meninas — maids of honour — María Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco. To the right stand Mari Bárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, the latter caught in the act of provoking a mastiff with his foot. Behind them the lady-in-waiting Marcela de Ulloa talks with a guardadamas, an attendant whose job was to accompany the Queen and the Infanta, and which no longer exists.

In the lit doorway at the back, the chamberlain José Nieto pauses on a stair, holding a curtain. And at the left, at a canvas so large we only see its back, is Velázquez himself, looking out at us.

What Velázquez is doing with his hands

Nothing. That is the point.

The Prado draws attention to it: he is not making a brushstroke. He stands back from the canvas, brush and palette held away, looking and thinking. In a century when painting was still argued to be a manual trade, Velázquez painted himself in the act of deciding rather than the act of applying paint — an argument that art belongs to intelligence rather than to skill of hand.

He also painted himself into a royal room, in royal company, at a moment of royal attention. That was not a modest thing for a court painter to do.

How the room is built

The illusion is doing more work than it appears to. The Prado credits two systems at once: ordinary scientific perspective, and aerial perspective — objects losing definition and colour with distance — plus what the catalogue calls “the multiplication of the light sources”. Light comes from the windows at the right, from the open door at the back, and from somewhere in front.

The result is the museum’s own claim, and it is a large one: one of the most credible spaces depicted in western art. Not the most beautiful, not the most inventive — the most believable. You can feel how far away that back wall is.

Reading. The best-known scholarly puzzle is what the mirror is technically reflecting: the King and Queen themselves standing before the picture, or the front of the huge canvas Velázquez is working on — a portrait of them, reflected back to us. The Prado’s own texts take the first position and do not entertain the second. It is worth knowing the argument exists, and worth being honest that the museum which owns the painting does not treat it as unsettled.

Hidden in the king’s office

Here is the part that undercuts every assumption about famous paintings.

For most of its life, nobody saw it. Las Meninas hung in the king’s private office in the palace — the Prado is blunt that “for this reason, the painting was little known”. Its recorded history is a slow shuffle between royal rooms: the Alcázar in 1700, the Palacio Real Nuevo in 1747, moved again in 1772, in a princess’s bedroom by 1794, in a yellow room from 1814.

It became public property only in 1819, when the Museo del Prado opened. The most analysed painting in Spanish art spent its first 160 years as furniture in private apartments.

Palomino saw it, though, and understood what it was. His 1724 history of Spanish painters gave this one work its own section, headed In which the most illustrious work by Don Diego Velázquez is described. It has not lost that status since.

What isn’t known

• What is on the canvas. We only see its back. Whether Velázquez is painting the royal couple, the Infanta’s group, or this very picture is not recorded and cannot be established.
• Exactly what the mirror shows. See above — a live scholarly argument that the Prado does not adjudicate.
• What the moment is. The catalogue says the figures pause “on the arrival of the King and Queen”, but no document records an occasion.
• What it is for. The Prado calls it one of the masterpieces “that has been the subject of the most numerous and most varied interpretations” and lists several — a political reading about the Infanta’s royal status, an art-historical one about the painter’s standing, another about the mirror making the picture a meditation on the act of seeing. It does not choose between them.

Which is the honest position, and rarer than it should be. A museum can tell you that a painting has been read a dozen ways for three centuries without pretending to know which reading is right — and the painting is better for staying open.

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