What does «menina» mean in Spanish?
- A woman who served the queen or the infantas since she was a child.
- (Las Meninas) Painting from 1656 in the Prado Museum in Madrid, by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Its complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most analyzed works in Western painting. Las Meninas has long been recognized as one of the most important paintings in the history of Western art. The Baroque painter Luca Giordano said it represents the "theology of painting" and in 1827 the president of the Royal Academy of Arts Sir Thomas Lawrence described the work in a letter to his successor David Wilkie as "the true philosophy of art." More recently, it has been described as "Velázquez's crowning achievement, a highly conscious and calculated demonstration of what painting could achieve, and perhaps the most inquisitive comment ever made on the possibilities of easel painting."