Velázquez's 'Las Meninas'

by Edited by Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt

• ISBN13: 9780521804882
• ISBN10: 0521804884
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-11-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Velàzquez's Las Meninas was sequestered in the Spanish royal collections from 1656, when it was painted, until the opening of the Museo del Prado in 1819. From that moment, it has been one of the most famous masterpieces of western painting, inspiring many published studies of its remarkable perspectival construction and of its iconography, as well as challenging later generations of artists, from Pablo Picasso to the present. The essays in this volume provide an introduction to the reception history and the critical fortunes of a painting that has received an avalanche of attention from art critics and art historians, geometricians, philosophers, photographers and semioticians. Together, the six essays trace the discussion of Las Meninas through two centuries providing the reader with a sense of the history of taste and of the ever-fluctuating parameters of art appreciation, history, criticism and theory.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
List of Contributors	xi
Introduction	1	(7)
Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt
The Aura of a Masterpiece: Responses to Las Meninas in Nineteenth-Century Spain and France	8	(39)
Alisa Luxenberg
A Masterpiece in Waiting: The Response to Las Meninas in Nineteenth-Century Britain	47	(33)
Xanthe Brooke
Why Drag in Velazquez?: Realism, Aestheticism, and the Nineteenth-Century American Response to Las Meninas	80	(44)
M. Elizabeth Boone
Velazquez's Las Meninas: An Interpretive Primer	124	(26)
Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt
Representing Representation: Reading Las Meninas, Again	150	(20)
Estrella De Diego
Las Meninas in Twentieth-Century Art	170	(33)
Gertje R. Utley
Bibliography	203	(18)
Index	221