On the chest of the painter in Las Meninas is a red cross, the badge of the Order of Santiago, one of Spain's most prestigious knighthoods. But Diego Velázquez painted the picture in 1656, and he was not made a knight of the order until 1659. So who added the cross, and when?
A manuscript written decades later says it was painted in after Velázquez's death, on the orders of King Philip IV, and some stories claim the king did it himself. When the painting was cleaned in the 1980s, conservators noted that the brushwork of the cross is consistent with the rest of the picture, and some critics have argued that only Velázquez could have painted it. The question has never been fully settled.
That would suit the painting. It shows the five-year-old Infanta Margarita in her room at the Alcázar in Madrid, attended by maids of honor, the word meninas itself, along with two court dwarfs, Maribárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, and a sleepy dog. Velázquez stands at the left in front of a huge canvas, looking out at us. At the back, a mirror shows the faces of the king and queen, so we are standing where they stand. Who is looking at whom is never quite clear.
The mix of portrait, genre scene and puzzle has fascinated artists for centuries. Pablo Picasso painted fifty-eight variations on it in 1957, and the philosopher Michel Foucault opened his book The Order of Things with a long analysis of it.
It is also a bold statement of status. Painters in seventeenth-century Spain were treated as craftsmen. Velázquez shows himself at the center of the royal family, with the king himself looking on, as if painting were a noble art. The cross, however it got there, makes that point.
Velázquez's Las Meninas appears on our: