As a full-time professional artist I observe, study and marvel at the art that has been produced over the centuries. In fact, so convinced am I that what Dante said about art being the grandson of God, that, yes, the greatest proof in my book of His existence is found in a Bach fugue, a Shakespeare play, a Tennyson poem or a great painting like Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas.
What can our future be should we not revere our past and learn from it?- Kenneth Zammit Tabona
One can talk about this particular painting so exhaustively that it was my obvious choice to convey what I call the magic of pictures at a time when the political situation is well and truly trapped in the doldrums and when we are trying our best to survive in a world gone crazy. Yes, the situation has never been so volatile and, yet, in sunny Malta hope springs eternal and we carry on with our building projects with pharaonic intensity and enthusiasm regardless of the fact that we have turned this island into a vast dust bowl... but enough of that. Protesting is useless.
No sooner has a project been stymied by objectors during tedious hearings of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority than it is resuscitated under another name and form. It is like the tortures of Sisyphus. So this week I decided to escape the court of Philip IV instead.
Las Meninas, painted in 1656, reflects a chapter in Spanish history that affected the whole of Europe. Ostensibly, Las Meninas, the Maids of Honour, depicts the entourage of a Spanish Infanta, Margarita Teresa, whom Velasquez painted on a regular basis. This little princess was, practically from birth, betrothed to her Habsburg uncle, her mother’s brother, Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor and, among other things, king of Hungary and Bohemia.
Therefore, it was necessary for Leopold to keep track of how his future wife was developing and progressing and Velasquez, happily one of the greatest portrait painters of all time, was on hand to do so. This is why most of Margarita’s portraits are in Vienna. Contrary, however, to the other portraits of Margarita, this particular one stayed in Madrid. This is because it is very much a portrait of domestic familial bliss.
Although it appears as if the princess is the protagonist, it is we, the onlookers, who, alongside Margarita’s parents, Philip IV, the Planet King, and Queen Mariana, are being painted by Velasquez, who are central to the composition.
Velasquez portrays himself peeping out from behind a huge canvas. We know that it is the king and queen being painted because they are reflected in a mirror at the far end of the room, a place to which, unusually for those days, our eye is drawn because of the courtier mounting a staircase against a patch of sunlight.
This happy domestic scene belies the tragedy that was looming in the lives of the Spanish Habsburgs.
Philip IV’s first wife was Elizabeth de Bourbon whose children, bar one, all died in infancy or when still very young. When Elizabeth herself died in 1644, the only surviving child was a princess, Maria Teresa, who eventually married her double first cousin Louis XIV.
It was essential that Philip was to marry again to have a male heir. This king, a product himself of intense intermarriage, chose his Austrian niece and first cousin, Mariana, who gave him two children; Margarita and her sad and ill-fated brother Carlos who was destined to be the last Spanish Habsburg and who, till today, is known as Carlos the Bewitched.
It was therefore on the daughter and grandson of Margarita, Prince Josef Ferdinand of Bavaria, that the future of Spain as a kingdom was pinned despite the fact that Louis XIV’s son, the Grand Dauphin, had a senior claim and that the Archduke Karl was eminently more suitable.
Margarita herself died aged 21 while her daughter Antonia, who married the Elector of Bavaria, was equally short-lived.
It was this son, Joseph Ferdinand, who succumbed to smallpox aged 13, who upset the balance of power in Europe as France and Austria, even while Carlos the Bewitched was still alive, fought like jackals over the carcass of a moribund Spain in a war appropriately called The War of the Spanish Succession.
But there’s more to the painting than that. So iconic is it that it obsessed an artist who, like a colossus, bestrides the 20th century. There are uncounted studies and interpretations of Las Meninas by Pablo Picasso. This uncompromising, if not downright cruel genius, was a creative machine, leaving a prodigious body of work which in auction houses today go for telephone numbers; London ones not Maltese ones!
Velasquez, Goya and Picasso are the top Iberian painters whose lives were inextricably involved with the history of their country. The 17th century Velasquez with the twilight of Habsburg rule in Spain, Goya with the Napoleonic invasion and Picasso with the Spanish civil war and the long dictatorship of General Franco.
When one thinks of Goya one immediately visualises the horrific drama of the painting called The Third of May in which Spanish patriots are being executed by Napoleonic troops.
Picasso’s chef d’ouevre, Guernica, a symphony in black and white, made the world aware of the martyrdom of the Spanish people in the 1930s.
When one thinks that Las Meninas also inspired Maurice Ravel to compose his poignant Pavane Pour Une Infante Defunte, the circle is complete and this painting, whose then revolutionary composition turned painting upside down, has messages and meanings that transcended the ages and which are relevant even today. What can our future be should we not revere our past and learn from it? A tragically futile Sisyphean torture nonetheless!