“If, after all, a scene is real it is necessarily composed of successive instants, in each of which the movements are distinct. They are instants which cannot be mingled, mutually exclusive according to the exigency of all real time.
Other painters paint movements 'moving', while Velázquez paints movements in one single, arrested moment. In fact, the pictures of Velázquez have a certain photographic aspect: it is their supreme quality. In focusing the painting what is real, he arrives at the ultimate consequences. On the one hand, he paints all the figures in the picture as they appear from one viewpoint, without moving the eye, and this affords his canvases an incomparable spatial unity. But on the other hand,
he portrays the happening as it is in a certain and determinate instant; this gives them a temporal unity so strict that it has been necessary to await the marvellous mechanical invention of instantaneous photography to arrive at anything similar, and, incidentally, to show us Velázquez's audacious intuition. Now we can well understand how he differed from the other Baroque painters of movement. The latter painted movements appertaining to many instants which, for that very reason, were incapable of co-existing in one instant alone. Painters, until Velázquez, had wished to flee the temporal and invent an alien world immune to time, peopled by creatures of eternity. He attempts the contrary: he paints time itself, which is the instant, which is existence as it is condemned to be, to pass, to decay. That is the thing he eternalizes and that, according to him, is the mission of painting: to give eternity precisely to the instant - almost a blasphemy! This for me is what is meant by making the portrait the principle of painting. This man portrays the man and the pitcher, he portrays the form portrays the attitude, portrays the instant. And there, ultimately, is
Meninas, where a portraitist is portraying the portrayal.”
(José Ortega y Gasset, 1972)
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