Les Mots et Las Choses/

馬內：畫布物質性、外部光源、觀看者的位置。三種不和諧：觀眾位置應該左邊、主角陰影缺乏、眼神高低不對稱。

the materiality of the canvas, the lighting, and the positioning of the spectator […] This invention of the tableau-objet, this reinsertion of themateriality of the canvas into that which is represented, it is that which I believe to be at the heart of the grand modification brought on by Manet…This is most conspicuous in Manet’s Un bar aux Folies-Bergère, which serves as the capstone of Foucault’s thesis.5 Foucault shows how the lines of perspective in this painting offer us three systems of incompatibility that result in the displacement of the spectator—a spectator in motion. […] All of these contradictions are tantamount to a destabilization of the spectator’s positioning, and lacking a stable, definite, or normative place, the spectator is forced to move around the canvas in an attempt to situate herself.

https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/download/864/882/

觀看者與被看者的主體位置對換；主體的消失。不可能是在畫公主，也不可能是在畫國王與王后，而只可能是我們看到的這幅畫（因為畫框大小推測）。因此畫家在畫什麼變得很游移，因為他必須要站在觀看者的視角（王后國王的視角），才有可能畫這幅。

It is important to consider the vast size of this painting: 318 x 276 cm. Almost life-size. The painting is also quite a visual illusion: On the left-hand side, we can see Velázquez himself, depicted in the work, painting on a huge canvas. Perhaps the painting he is working on is the very one we are now looking at? Or is he painting us, the viewers? We might say, no: He is clearly looking at a mirror (apparently a giant one, at that) in order to paint everyone that we see in the painting, just as painters often used mirrors to paint themselves (van Gogh, for example). But, then, how do we account for the couple that is reflected on the mirror on the back wall, King Philip IV and Queen Mariana?

Now, the picture begins to come to life: Their reflection indicates, by logic, that it is this royal couple that is posing for Velázquez. He is painting them, and the people in the foreground of the painting are simply watching the royal couple pose for their portrait. In other words, what we are seeing in Las Meninas is the King and Queen’s view. Velázquez, then, is painting a scene that portrays the process of painting in the very piece we are looking at while also painting a “portrait” of the royal couple, albeit not directly. We are witnessing a painting come to life, but from the perspective of the person being painted.

But here’s the catch that I find incredible: If it is the case that the painting is a depiction of what King Philip IV and Queen Mariana are seeing, then how did Velázquez paint this scene? He would have to get into the heads of the couple to envision what they are seeing. Either he composed the whole work from imagination and memory, or he made use of a combination of mirrors to paint himself and the audience watching the royal couple being painted and also included the royal couple.

Another interpretation is that Velázquez is not actually painting the royal couple; rather, he is preparing to paint the Infanta Margarita Theresa (the young girl at the center of the painting in the white dress) when, all of a sudden, the royal couple comes in, interrupting everyone’s actions as they freeze to acknowledge their monarchs. This interpretation is also plausible, but it still does not explain why Velázquez chose to compose the painting in this particular manner, and it still requires Velázquez to imagine what the royal couple is seeing, whether or not they are the subject of his painting on the left-hand side of the piece.

If Velázquez is not painting Las Meninas on the large canvas that we see in Las Meninas, then how do we account for the size of that canvas? The size of the canvas in the painting was not a typical scale for Velázquez, and the only painting by him with a canvas of this size is Las Meninas!

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/11/foucault-las-meninas-postmodernism-painting-nayeli-riano.html

雙重隱形：畫是背面，看不見；我們站在那個消失點上，因此我們看不到。
主體可能是公主或皇后，也可能是我們，觀看者可能是皇后國王，也可能是我們。觀看者與被觀者有無限的可能。
Foucault:
The painter is looking, his face turned slightly and his head leaning towards one shoulder. He is staring at a point to which, even though it is invisible, we, the spectators, can easily assign an object, since it is we, ourselves, who are that point: our bodies, our faces, our eyes. The spectacle he is observing is thus doubly invisible: first, because it is not represented within the space of the painting, and, second, because it is situated precisely in that blind point, in that essential hiding-place into which our gaze disappears from ourselves at the moment of our actual looking. And yet, how could we fail to see that invisibility, there in front of our eyes, since it has its own perceptible equivalent, its sealed-in figure, in the painting itself.

In appearance, [the painting’s] locus is a simple one; a matter of pure reciprocity: we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us. A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another’s glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another as they cross. And yet this slender line of reciprocal visibility embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints. The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter’s gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.

The opaque fixity that [the painting] establishes on one side renders forever unstable the play of metamorphoses established in the centre between spectator and model. Because we can see only that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing? The painter is observing a place which, from moment to moment, never ceases to change its content, its form, its face, its identity.

It may be that, in this picture, as in all the representations of which it is, as it were, the manifest essence, the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing—despite all mirrors, reflections, imitations, and portraits… [i]n the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation—of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject—which is the same—has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.[6]

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/11/foucault-las-meninas-postmodernism-painting-nayeli-riano.html