In 1734 the Alcázar in Madrid burned and more than five hundred paintings were lost. Las Meninas came out. It came out damaged, and the court painter Juan García de Miranda repainted the Infanta's left cheek where the paint had gone — so part of the most examined face in Spanish painting is not by Velázquez.
The picture that was called The Family
Velázquez finished it in 1656, and for nearly two centuries nobody called it Las Meninas. The royal inventories list it as the family — the family of Philip the Fourth — and the name used now, from the Portuguese word for the young women who attended the royal children, attached itself in the Prado catalogue of 1843. The Infanta Margarita stands in the middle with two attendants, two court dwarfs and a dog; a chaperone and a guard talk behind them; a man has stopped in the lit doorway at the back. Velázquez stands at the left with a brush, in front of a canvas turned away, and whatever is on it stays private. On the back wall a mirror holds the king and queen, which puts whoever is looking at the painting roughly where the monarchs stood.
The fire, and the cheek
The palace fire took the heart of the Spanish royal collection, including other paintings by Velázquez in the same rooms. The Alcázar was not rebuilt; the Bourbon kings put the present Royal Palace up on the site. Las Meninas was got out of the building and listed again with the surviving pictures in 1747 and 1748. García de Miranda, who lived from 1677 to 1749, was the court painter given the repair work, and the Infanta's left cheek had lost so much paint that he repainted it almost entirely. The painting went to the Prado in 1819 and has not left: a little over three metres high and nearly three across, hung so that the room in it lines up with the room you are standing in.
The cross he was not entitled to
Velázquez wears the red cross of the Order of Santiago on his chest, and in 1656 he was not a knight of it. The order wanted proof of untainted ancestry and proof that a candidate's work was not a trade. Painting was manual work done for payment; his application was refused once, and the king's backing and a papal dispensation were needed to carry it. He was admitted on 28 November 1659 and died the following summer. Antonio Palomino, writing in 1724, recorded that the king ordered the cross painted onto the picture after the painter's death. When the surface was cleaned in the early 1980s the brushwork of the cross was found to match the paint around it. The written record and the paint have never been reconciled.
This one came out of the fire, with one cheek repainted. More than five hundred did not come out at all.
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