Excerpt from The Vanishing Velazquez by Laura Cumming, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
The Vanishing Velázquez

We see paintings in time and place (no picture makes this clearer, putting us on the spot and in the moment) and always in the context of our own lives. We cannot see them otherwise, no matter how objective we might hope to be. Novelists long ago recognized this truth; literature is full of characters falling in love with the people in paintings, obsessing over enigmatic figures or shapes, feeling intimidated—or intensely disappointed, in the case of Madame Bovary—by their first sighting of a tarry Old Master. Fictional people are allowed to have feelings about art entirely unconnected with the analysis of formal attributes, still less any knowledge of art history. But this is not how the rest of us are encouraged to view art by specialists and historians, for whom feelings may be dubious, unstable or irrelevant. If one should happen to experience an involuntary personal response, an eminent art historian once advised me, as if mentioning some embarrassing arousal, one should always keep it firmly to oneself.

Over time, many scholars have written about the mysteries of Las Meninas: who or what Velázquez might be painting on that huge canvas—is it the king and queen, is it this very painting— who the painter is looking at, what the mirror reflects, what is happening in the picture, how it was constructed. Architects have made scale models of the room in an attempt to "solve" these puzzles through perspective, although the painting does not itself abide by those laws. Physicists have experimented with mirrors and light to comprehend the paradoxes. Art historians have attempted to deduce, stroke by stroke, how on earth the illusion was achieved. The philosopher Michel Foucault, in an essay in Les mots et les choses, with its famous conclusion that Las Meninas is nothing less (and perhaps nothing more, for him) than "the representation of Classical representation," inaugurated whole schools of theoretical interpretation.

But the compelling humanity of Velázquez's vision is ignored. Some historians actually believe he was only talking to himself or his employer, Philip IV, the little king in the mirror, so that all the beautiful open-ended complexities that have enthralled viewers down the centuries are either our mistaken fantasy or a closed conversation between two Spanish men. Yet Las Meninas is living proof of the opposite, that when painters make images they do not do so in some kind of austere isolation or without hope of an audience beyond the studio. For this painting accepts as many interpretations as there are viewers, and part of its grace lies in allowing all these different responses to coexist, no matter how contradictory, by being such a precise vision of reality and yet so open a mystery. Velázquez is able to make you, and all before and after you, feel as alive to these people as they are to you; everyone sees, everyone is seen. The knowledge that this is all achieved by brushstrokes, that these are only painted figments, does not weaken the illusion so much as deepen the enchantment. The whole surface of Las Meninas feels alive to our presence.

This is at least as central to the technical feat of the painting as it is to our personal response, and still it goes unmentioned. There seems to be some collective recoil from the idea that art might actually overwhelm, distress or enchant us, might inspire wonder, anger, compassion or tears, that it might raise us up as a Shakespeare tragedy raises its audience. Even quite fundamental emotions are not in the language of scholarship, let alone museums, which rarely speak of the heart in connection with art. Yet so many people have loved Las Meninas.

I believe this response is too often overlooked, even though it is clear that painters do not make pictures without some hope of reaching more than our eyes. Since art history does not concern itself much with the power of images to move or affect us, I went looking for other people's reactions to art down the years in the literature of our daily existence. And it was here, among the memoirs, diaries and letters that tell of our encounters with art, that I came upon the strange case of this lucky—or unlucky— provincial tradesman, as he describes himself, and his love for a long-lost Velázquez.

Excerpted from The Vanishing Velázquez by Laura Cumming. Copyright © 2016 by Laura Cumming. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.