Las Meninas in the context of "Margaret Theresa of Spain"

A court painter was an artist who painted for the members of a royal or princely family, sometimes on a fixed salary and on an exclusive basis where the artist was not supposed to undertake other work. Painters were the most common, but the court artist might also be a court sculptor. In Western Europe, the role began to emerge in the mid-13th century. By the Renaissance, portraits, mainly of the family, made up an increasingly large part of their commissions, and in the early modern period one person might be appointed solely to do portraits, and another for other work, such as decorating new buildings.

Especially in the Late Middle Ages, they were often given the office of valet de chambre. Usually they were given a salary and formal title, and often a pension for life, though arrangements were highly variable. But often the artist was paid only a retainer, and paid additionally for works he or, less often, she produced for the monarch. For the artist, a court appointment had the advantage of freeing them from the restriction of local painters' guilds, although in the Middle Ages and Renaissance they also often had to spend large amounts of time doing decorative work about the palace, and creating temporary works for court entertainments and displays. Some artists, like Jan van Eyck or Diego Velázquez, were used in other capacities at court, as diplomats, functionaries, or administrators.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona, Spain. The figures are confrontational and not conventionally feminine, being rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes, some to a menacing degree. The far left figure exhibits facial features and dress of Egyptian or southern Asian style. The two adjacent figures are in an Iberian style of Picasso's Spain, while the two on the right have African mask-like features. Picasso said the ethnic primitivism evoked in these masks moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force" leading him to add a shamanistic aspect to his project.

Drawing from tribal primitivism while eschewing central dictates of Renaissance perspective and verisimilitude for a compressed picture plane using a Baroque composition while employing Velazquez's confrontational approach seen in Las Meninas, Picasso sought to take the lead of the avant-garde from Henri Matisse. John Richardson said Demoiselles made Picasso the most pivotal artist in Western painting since Giotto and laid a path forward for Picasso and Georges Braque to follow in their joint development of cubism, the effects of which on modern art were profound and unsurpassed in the 20th century.

Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress is one of the best-known portraits by Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Executed in oil on canvas, it measures 127 cm high by 107 cm wide and was one of Velázquez's last paintings, produced in 1659, a year before his death. It shows Margaret Theresa of Spain who also appears in the artist's Las Meninas. Currently, the painting is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

This is one of the several court portraits made by Velázquez on different occasions of Infanta Margaret Theresa who, at fifteen, married her uncle, Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor. She is the little infanta who appears in Las Meninas (1656). These paintings show her in different stages of her childhood; they were sent to Vienna to inform Leopold of what his young fiancée looked like.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (baptised 6 June 1599 – 6 August 1660) was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, and of the Spanish Golden Age. He is generally considered one of the greatest artists in the history of Western art.

He was an individualistic artist of the Baroque period (c. 1600–1750). He began to paint in a precise tenebrist style, later developing a freer manner characterized by bold brushwork. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family and commoners, culminating in his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).

Spanish Baroque painting refers to the style of painting which developed in Spain throughout the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century. The style appeared in early 17th century paintings, and arose in response to Mannerist distortions and idealisation of beauty in excess, appearing in early 17th century paintings. Its main objective was, above all, to allow the viewer to easily understand the scenes depicted in the works through the use of realism, while also meeting the Catholic Church's demands for 'decorum' during the Counter-Reformation.

The naturalism typical of the Caravaggisti in Italy, and the dramatic illumination of Tenebrism that was introduced in Spain after 1610, would go on to shape the dominant style of painting in Spain in the first half of the 17th century. The style was later influenced by Flemish Baroque painting, as the Spanish Habsburgs ruled over an area of the Netherlands during this period. The arrival of Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens in Spain, who visited the country in 1603 and 1628, also had some influence Spanish painting. However, it was the profusion of his works, as well as those of his students, which would go on to have an even greater impact from 1638 onward. Ruben's influence was later combined with the technique used by Titian, which incorporated loose brushstrokes and broken contours; the fusion of these influences was key to the creation of the works of Diego Velázquez, the most prestigious artist of the period.

Spanish art has been an important contributor to Western art and Spain has produced many famous and influential artists including Velázquez, Goya and Picasso. Spanish art was particularly influenced by France and Italy during the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, but Spanish art has often had very distinctive characteristics, partly explained by the Moorish heritage in Spain (especially in Andalusia), and through the political and cultural climate in Spain during the Counter-Reformation and the subsequent eclipse of Spanish power under the Bourbon dynasty.

The prehistoric art of Spain had many important periods-it was one of the main centres of European Upper Paleolithic art and the rock art of the Spanish Levant in the subsequent periods. In the Iron Age large parts of Spain were a centre for Celtic art, and Iberian sculpture has a distinct style, partly influenced by coastal Greek settlements. Spain was conquered by the Romans by 200 BC and Rome was rather smoothly replaced by the Germanic Visigoths in the 5th century AD, who soon Christianized. The relatively few remains of Visigothic art and architecture show an attractive and distinct version of wider European trends. With the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the 8th century there was a notable Moorish presence in art specially in Southern Iberia. Over the following centuries the wealthy courts of Al-Andalus produced many works of exceptional quality, culminating in the Alhambra in Granada, right at the end of Muslim Spain.

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines) is a book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. It proposes that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, ways of thinking, which determine what is truth and what is acceptable discourse about a subject, by delineating the origins of biology, economics, and linguistics. The introduction to the origins of the human sciences begins with detailed, forensic analyses and discussion of the complex networks of sightlines, hidden-ness, and representation that exist in the group painting Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-waiting, 1656) by Diego Velázquez. Foucault's application of the analyses shows the structural parallels in the similar developments in perception that occurred in researchers' ways of seeing the subject in the human sciences.