The portrait depicts the Infanta Margaret Theresa surrounded by Spanish court servants and the artist himself

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Study backs David Hockney’s theory that Velázquez used a camera obscura to paint Las Meninas

Isambard Wilkinson, Madrid

Friday July 31 2020, 5.00pm BST, The Times

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A study has backed David Hockney’s theory that Velázquez used a camera

obscura to help him paint what is considered to be his greatest masterpiece.

The idea that an optical aid was used to create Las Meninas, a portrait

painted in 1656 of the Infanta Margaret Theresa surrounded by Spanish

court servants and the artist himself working on a large canvas, is almost

heretical among art purists.

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But Miguel Usandizaga, a professor of art at Catalonia Polytechnic

University, claims the Spanish Golden Age master could not have created it

without one.

He did so, the academic says, with the help of a smaller replica, also called

“Las meninas”, which he used “like a negative or slide”. It is now the

property of the National Trust at Kingston Lacy stately home in Dorset.

“Without a camera obscura, Velázquez could not have achieved with such

perfection the duplication of space in the painting and its e�ect: the

confusion between reality and its representation,” Professor Usandizaga told

The Times.

Hockney has claimed advances in realism and accuracy in the history of

western art were the result of advances in the development of camera

obscura — a darkened box with a convex lens or aperture for projecting the

image of an object on to a screen inside, a forerunner of the modern camera

— and that Vermeer, Holbein and Velázquez used them.

Professor Usandizaga’s study used computer graphics to analyse the smaller

painting in England and the original, which hangs in Madrid’s Prado

museum. The former is believed to be a copy of its famous counterpart by

Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, the son-in-law and pupil of Velázquez.

His conclusion was that “the perspective and the general lines” of the two

paintings were too precisely identical to have been done without an aid.

He observed that the larger painting lacked a detail of the bottom of a wall

which was included in the smaller one. “You cannot copy something that is

not there. The smaller one is not a copy,” he said.

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Professor Usandizaga’s theory is that the smaller painting was made first

using a camera obscura, but initially only featured the outlines of the room,

which he claims were done by Velázquez himself.

“After some modification and reversing the operation of the camera by

illuminating its interior and darkening the room, Velázquez projected the

small painting on a larger blank canvas and drew the general lines of the

famous painting,” he said.

When the larger painting was completed Velázquez, Professor Usandizaga

said, did not want to waste the smaller prototype and so commissioned his

pupil to copy in the remaining detail.

“He was sure no one would ever find out that it was exactly the same

painting so he commissioned his pupil to copy the figures of the large

painting to the small so that it could be sold,” he added.

The theory has so far received a diplomatic response. A spokesman for the

Prado museum said: “Las Meninas is a universal piece of art attracting

studies and reflections and the way Velazquez painted it and depicted the

space is one of the most common topics.”

In 2013 Matias Diáz Padrón, a former curator at the Prado, claimed that the

painting in Kingston Lacy is a study painted by Velázquez himself and not a

copy by his pupil. The museum insists that it was painted by his pupil Mazo.

David Hockney has claimed advances in artistic realism

were the result of the development of the camera obscura

MART IN BUREAU/AFP /GETTY IMAGES

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