Las Meninas means "the ladies-in-waiting." The painting shows Velázquez at work in the royal palace of Madrid in 1656, with the five-year-old Infanta Margarita surrounded by her attendants and a small mirror at the back that reflects King Philip IV and Queen Mariana.
The title points at the girl and her maids. The picture itself is built around the painter, a huge canvas with its back to the room, and a pair of blurred faces in a mirror, and for more than three centuries people have argued over which of them it is really about.
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Velázquez never called it that. The first inventory made after Philip IV's death, in 1666, described the picture as the Infanta's ladies-in-waiting and a female dwarf, and later lists called it "The Family." The name Las Meninas first appeared in print in 1843, when the Prado catalogue gave it, almost two centuries after the painter died.
So the title everyone uses is a museum's label, and it names the least strange thing in the room. At court, the girl needed no introduction.
What needed explaining was the rest: a painter standing among the royal household with a brush in his hand, a mirror that holds the king and queen, and a red cross on his chest that Velázquez had not yet been given when the picture was finished.
What was Las Meninas called in Velázquez's day?
The picture hung in the Alcázar, the royal palace of Madrid, and the Alcázar burned. A fire destroyed the palace in 1734, and Las Meninas was damaged and later restored by Juan García de Miranda. Before that, the paper trail is thin and the names are plain descriptions.
The inventory of 1666, drawn up after the king's death, listed the ladies-in-waiting and the female dwarf by Velázquez's hand, and "The Family of Philip IV" followed it for generations. Nobody was naming a masterpiece. They were counting what the crown owned.
The painting entered the Prado when the museum was founded in 1819, and in 1843 its catalogue printed Las Meninas for the first time. The name stuck because it described what a visitor saw first. It also left out the stranger part of the picture, which hung at the back of the room.
What You'll Discover
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Why a painter had to prove himself.
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