Abstract

Now, back to the picture. On the illusionist reading the spectators have become identical with Philip IV and Maria Ana. Given its position across the room and our position at the front of the scene, we would have to see ourselves in the mirror, but we only see the royal couple. Now what exactly is the painter on the left painting? Well it is obvious that he is painting us, that is, Philip IV and his wife. He looks straight at us, scrutinizing our features, before applying the brush to the canvas. We have plainly caught him in the very act of painting us. But in what sort of picture is he painting us? The standard interpretation is that he is painting a full length portrait of what we see in the mirror. But there is an objection to that interpretation which seems to me fairly convincing. The canvas he is painting on is much too large for any such portrait. The canvas on which he is painting is indeed about as big as the one we are looking at, about 10 feet high and 8 feet wide . I think that the painter is painting the picture we are seeing; that is, he is painting Las Meninas by Velazquez. Although this interpretation seems to me defensible on internal grounds alone, there are certain bits of external evidence: as far as we know, the only portrait Velazquez ever painted of the royal couple is the one we are looking at, Las Meninas. Velazquez is plainly painting us, the royal couple, but there is no other picture in which he did that; and indeed he seldom used such large canvases for interiors. The Spinners is a large-scale interior but most of his big canvases are equestrian portraits of Spanish royalty. John R. Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Speech Acts, The Campus War, and Expression and Meaning