EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Velazquez and the King’s Left Eye

The Metropolitan Museum announced yesterday that it has re-attributed the earliest known painting of King Philip IV by Velazquez (left) to the master. In 1973 during a reconsideration of all their European holdings they downgraded this portrait to a workshop copy. Ever since scholars have thought that this portrait was second-rate. Now they have changed their minds. It is by Velazquez, after all.

The painting, the youngest portrait of the Spanish monarch, has been undergoing year-long restoration in the Met’s Department of Conservation. It is not in good condition and much of it has been lost or over-painted. One detail was completely missing and had to be reconstructed in its entirety: the king’s left eye. Little in the portrait could be more important than that because, from an artist’s point-of-view, the eye is the gateway to their mind. It is not just the king’s eye they were replacing but all the missing meaning that Velazquez had placed in that eye. To reconstruct it, they used an acetate tracing from a bust-length portrait of Philip elsewhere which, they say, matches their portrait exactly. I suspect that they were right to do so because, as you can see from a comparison with Velazquez’s self-portrait in Las Meninas, both the king’s new left eye and artist’s original one have the same kind of droop. No-one has seen this similarity before so they would not have known this but it has clear significance. Either Velazquez gave the king his own drooping eye when painting the king’s portrait or he, in painting himself, adopted the king’s and, perhaps, that famous lower Hapsburg lip as well. It is most unlikely that they shared both features in life. The discovery is interesting.

If Velazquez really did give himself features of the king’s face, it would make sense within the explanation of Las Meninas that I placed online two days ago. There I explain how the king and queen, reflected in the mirror, are not actually watching the scene from in front of the canvas but are alchemical symbols in the mind’s eye of the artist. The mirror is that “eye”. As royal symbols united, male and female, the king and queen represent the androgynous purity of the soul that alchemists hoped to attain. Thus, in taking on features of the king (and, perhaps, the queen too for that matter), Velazquez in painting his masterpiece thought that he was on his way (symbolically, of course) to attaining that royal status. He is morphing into the king. This may be a little difficult to grasp for those new to spiritual alchemy but, if you have a minute or two, please read my very short analysis of the painting. It’s simple and, unlike all other interpretations of Las Meninas, short and logical too.² You’ll be surprised.

1. Carol Vogel, "Reconsidered. A Met Velazquez is Vindicated", New York Times (online), Dec. 21st, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/arts/design/21velazquez.html 

2. There is, of course, a vast amount to explain in Las Meninas but none of its secondary meanings and references make any sense until one understands the construction of the space. That is really what I do in all my explanations: set the scene so that subsequent interpretations have a firm foundation.