Interventions: The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay

Where nineteenth- and earlv-twentieth-century responses to Las meninas saw the canvas in terms of photographic, impressionist, and realist aesthetics, interpretations since the second half of the twentieth century have focused either on philosophies of vision or on the elite artistic culture of seventeenth-century Madrid.' Spaces of disciplinan knowledge where, for example, it is easy io write a history of early modern Europe without ever referencing the New World, and almost as easy Io do the reverse:204 where history departments are routinely segmented into "Early Modern European History" versus "Latin American History"; where art history focused on early modern Europe need never look across the Atlantic; and where the realm of colonial Spanish America ends when the beaches of the New World disappear into the ocean.