‘Las Meninas is among the rare paintings that summarizes the experiences of the past and predict the experiments of the future’ Jonathan Brown, 1998
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A Souvenir by Velasquez
The man and artist was undoubtedly a genius. And, if not a genius, higher in sense than the common man. And it is a fact that the common man imagined a medium that can transfer image on his first contact with the telephone. Thus Velasquez did know that humanity will come up, in the centuries to come, with a surface, an instrument, that can actually capture the light per se that produced the source of his paintings. But Velasquez was more than just a smart man. He was a genius. He could think of the consequences of that invention. He knew how people, at least in the mainstream sense, all the important people that define things and judge, as the Council judged and rejected him as the non noble man that he was on 26 February 1659, think. That such people will always exist and resist to the new. He knew how this invention would make everyone able to access this Art, as Benjamin said and how the masses would diminish it in what Richard Hennesy described in 1979, and in what Baudelaire was madly upset for in 1852. He knew people in that era would look up to the old ages to re discover what was long lost (and that loss had already begun in the eyes of Velasquez). He also knew that artists have claimed the nobility of Art since the years of Phidias in Athens and till the reign of Charles V and Philip II. Taking into consideration his originality and his generally opposition to the system of painters’ life style, like when he refused to paint religious themed paintings, Velasquez would not try to imitate what artists had been doing since the beginning of the civilisation that he was part of. Furthermore, the new techniques were almost there. He could precisely predict what would happen from then on as he could clearly see what had happened till then; and he clearly depicted both, and in some cases, in combined in one. As Jonathan Brown said ‘Las Meninas is among the rare paintings that summarizes the experiences of the past and predict the experiments of the future’. Velasquez claimed the nobility of Photography as a liberal Art, through Las Meninas, the painting that the ‘whole world look at and no one see’ (P.-L. Imbert 1873 as cited in Pruitt, 2003) (a quote that could easily have as a reference Photography itself).
Photography as a Liberal Art
