The model, the painter, the spectator and their dance. Foucault as spectator/reader of Velázquez’s Las Meninas

Abstract

How do you look at things and how do you talk about them? How does this view and talk about life change from one era to another? Las Meninas by Velasquez opens, as is known, Michel Foucault's reflection in The Order of Things just by discussing the problem starting from a detailed analysis of a classic of painting. Following the lesson of one of his philosophical masters, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for Foucault the problem of the relationship between what is seen and what is said is always decided halfway between an aesthetic and a semiotic dimension of what is visible and what is not visible: the relationship between these two dimensions is the basis of the different ways in which in different eras the criteria of what can be represented are established. Velasquez's Las Meninas is in any case an authentic semiotic puzzle, if only because it condenses in itself the transition that takes place between different eras (renaissance, classical and modern) and because it is not possible to understand what is the main subject of the representation (painter, models or spectator). Certainly the three different protagonists of the vision are all in various ways in the picture visible and invisible, present and absent and this dance between being and not being present/visible establishes the limits within which the order of things is defined, in both cases when the discourse is held by the painter of a certain era with his aesthetics of things, or when it is a philosopher, with his semiotic background, to define what is scientifically plausible.