Professional paper

When Image sets Reality Perspectival alchemy in Velázquez's Las Meninas

Luigi Cocchiarella ; Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

Abstract

There are images in History of Art, Science, Technique, Humanities, which are milestones. Las Meninas is one of these. Several levels of reading and deepening have been proposed by historians and theoreticians, and many interpretations have been made. Yet the very sophisticated construction of this masterpiece seems to escape any univocal hypothesis, making it as well astonishing as enigmatic.
Our interest in this extraordinary opera stems from the fact that it belongs to that special category of paintings whose meaning is inextricably based on and linked to their projective structure; therefore, aware of the wideness of the implications, we will mainly focus on its geometric and graphic feature.

Keywords

Diego Velázquez; Alcázar de Madrid; perspective; geometry and graphics; photogrammetry; projective geometry; descriptive geometry; optics; catoptrics

Hrčak ID:

151347

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/151347

Publication date:

19.1.2016.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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