Las Meninas

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Pages: 1

Diego Velázquez's masterpiece, Las Meninas (1656), has inspired a number of diverse modern interpretations, ranging from Picasso's radical reworkings of it to Michel Foucault's subtle writing about it.1 We shall offer a deconstructive reading of this everenigmatic painting proceeding from Foucault's interpretation in Les mots et les choses. Foucault insists that Las Meninas, being an example of the Classical representation, resembles the painter's thought communicated metaphorically in the invisibility of the "real" painter in the depicted mirror. This convergence of the painter's position with that of the royal couple does not take into account the embedded structure of a text or painting, which excludes the concrete author or painter. Las