The Perspective Room of Las Meninas

A perspective picture is constructed for an eye standing before it. Move this eye, the subject point in Lacan’s terms, and see how the picture itself changes.

What does it show?

The model builds the room of Las Meninas schematically, not to scale: in front the picture plane, on the back wall the mirror and the open door, on the left the huge canvas with its back to us and the painter beside it. The red lines are the central projection of the room’s edges onto the picture plane as seen from the subject point S. All the lines running into depth meet at a single vanishing point, the perpendicular projection of S onto the picture plane. The “Velázquez’s vanishing point” button places S so that the vanishing point falls within the open door on the back wall, at the level of the man going towards the light.

The “mirror reading” shows Foucault’s interpretation in Les Mots et les choses (1966): the mirror on the back wall reflects the place in front of the picture, that of the king and queen, that is, of the viewer, and representation is ordered around this invisible centre.

The “window reading” shows the reading Lacan proposed on 18 May 1966, in the lesson Foucault attended. For Lacan the key is not the mirror but the window: the interval between the picture plane and the subject point, and the distance between the painter and his canvas, which his brush cannot reach. The gaze is not caught in the mirror; it is the window we ourselves constitute by opening our eyes.