In the background, the aposentador, or Palace marshal, to the Queen, Don Jose Nieto Vela zquez, stands on the steps leading into the room from the lit-up door.
Las Meninas has three foci: The figure of the Infanta Margarita is the most luminous; the likeness of the Master himself is another; and the third is provided by the half-length images of the King and the Queen in the mirror on the rear wall. Vela zquez built the composition on live diagonals, anchoring it, as it were, on the two which intersect at about the spot where the Infanta stands, and encompass at one end the shining mirror and the lit-up doorway and at the other the expanse of light which fans out in the foreground. The interlocking of these luminous areas is the more vivid as the middle distance is cut off by the shadows which spread across the floor. The depth of the chamber is stressed by the alternation of window jambs and picture frames on the right-hand wall, the stretcher of the large canvas on the left foreground, and the perspective sequence of the empty lamp hooks on the ceiling, which mark as central the spot in the rear wall where the King and the Queen !.
are seen reflected in the mirror. In no other painting has Vela zquez rendered space in so architectural a manner as in this, the only work in which he has depicted a ceiling. Neither is there any other composition of his that is so vividly keyed to the space lying out of the picture frame. .
Recent studies of Las Meninas, inspired by the ideas of Michel Foucault, have paid considerable attention to the seemingly novel relationship between the scene on the canvas and the spectator. These ideas tacitly assume that the picture was meant to be seen by the public-at-large, as if it were hanging in an important museum, as it is today. (They also exaggerate the novelty of the way in which the spectator is involved in the picture.) However, the original placement indicates that this is not the case.
