The Enchantment of Metapicture: Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas

Written by Karen Liu

Edited by Catriona Reid and Miray Eroglu

Diego Velázquez is an artist known for his paintings with complex compositions. As seen in his early bodegones and his most renowned work Las Meninas (1656), Velázquez’s picture-within-a-picture structures function as a means of bridging art with religious and philosophical concepts, which has in turn extended the discussion of his art beyond the confines of the canvas. These complex paintings are what W. J. T. Mitchell defined as metapictures—“pictures about pictures—that is, pictures that refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is” [1]. They do not merely represent the painted subjects on their surfaces, but their self-referentiality also leads to paradoxes and unstable interpretations, thereby turning the our attention to the nature of art and image-making. Las Hilanderas (“The Spinners”), or The Fable of Arachne (Fig. 1), is such a work of metapictorial quality in Velázquez’s oeuvre that has been cast in a mysterious aura for decades, an image that has been interpreted time and time again yet still remains an enigma.

When writing about Las Hilanderas scholars tend to refer to Las Meninas for comparison, since both works were produced during the final decade of Velázquez’s career and exemplify the metapictorial trait of nested structures. The unusual composition of Las Hilanderas has long eluded the scholars as well, hence the two titles with conflicting implications: Las Hiladeras describes the genre scene taking place in the foreground, whereas The Fable of Arachne denotes the mythological story shown in the background [2]. Although the painting’s central narrative is now generally accepted as a mythological subject in the guise of a genre painting, a range of theories have been devised since the mid-twentieth century regarding Velázquez’ intentions and coded moral messages. In light of Micthell’s metapicture theory, I argue that the enchantment of Las Hilanderas originates in its infinite references to itself and images outside it. The mystery surrounding this artwork does not necessarily pose an obstacle to making sense of the image; it rather intrigues us, propels us to decipher its composition, and through these innumerable interpretations Velázquez’s artistic brilliance is materialized.

Fig. 1

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne (w   ithout later additions), 1655-1660, oil on canvas, 167 × 252 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-spinners-or-the-fable-of-arachne/3d8e510d-2acf-4efb-af0c-8ffd665acd8d.

Fig. 2

Saul Steinberg, The Spiral, from New World series, 1961, ink on paper, 37 × 29 cm. http://adambaumgoldgallery.com/steinberg/2016/steinberg2016.html.

Fig. 3

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne (with later additions), 1655-1660, oil on canvas, 220 × 289  cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, https://library.artstor.org/#/asset/AWSS35953_35953_31697830. 

Fig. 4

Titian, Rape of Europa, 1562, oil on canvas, 178 × 205 cm, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/collection/10978.

The well-known myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the story of Arachne, a mortal woman gifted with remarkable talent in weaving, who repeatedly challenges the deity goddess of weavers Pallas into a weaving contest to prove her superior skill. Pallas composes a tapestry with images illustrating the power of the gods over humans and the harsh punishments to those mortals who dare challenge the divine authority, warning Arachne of the consequence of her audacity. Showing no repentance, Arachne weaves a series of images of gods deceiving humans, beginning with Europa carried off by Jupiter in the form of a bull. Las Hilanderas depicts the moment after the contest: when Arachne is declared as the winner and her skill recognized as equal to, possibly superior than that of the goddess, Pallas is infuriated. She tears up Arachne’s work and hits the poor girl on the forehead with her shuttle. Arachne suffers so much pain that she attempts to hang herself, but Pallas finally has pity on her and turns her into a spider for punishment [9]. 

Fig.5  

Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of Europe (Copy after Titian),  182.5 × 201.5 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-rape-of-europe/a136a9c4-3a2f-44bd-ab8a-97fd47c30d7e. 

Fig. 6 

Peter Paul Rubens, Pallas and Arachne (Primary Title), 26.67 × 38.1 cm, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, https://www.vmfa.museum/piction/6027262-8059131/.

As previously mentioned, some details on the tapestry, namely the flying putti on the left, the head of a bull and the floating drapery on the lower right corner have been identified to match Titian’s Rape of Europa painted for Philip II in 1562, a treasured piece in the Spanish Royal collection during the seventeenth century [10]. The overall composition of Las Hilanderas and the internal image of Titian’s painting on the tapestry therefore constitute what Mitchell describes as “the first- and second-order representation, on which the whole concept of ‘meta-’ is based” [11]. By re-framing Titian’s work inside his own, Velázquez completes the iconography of the Fable of Arachne and pays his tribute to the Venetian master, also declaring his ambition to surpass his predecessor metaphorically. However, Velázquez was not the first to emulate Titian by reinterpreting Rape of Europa, and the reading of Las Hilanderas would be much less complicated if it were the only visual quotation contained in this work. Rubens, the eminent Flemish artist who became acquainted with Velázquez during his visit in Madrid in 1628, made an exact copy of Rape of Europa (Fig. 5) among many other Titian’s paintings while he was in Spain, and he also painted his own version of Pallas and Arachne as part of a series on Ovidian themes. Ruben’s work has since been lost but an oil sketch survives (Fig. 6). His original painting would have been known to Velázquez, as a copy made by Mazo, Velázquez’ assistant, is seen hanging on the wall in the background of Las Meninas [12]. The surface of Las Hilanderas may be viewed as a representation of two separate spaces on a physical level, but its composition consists of at least three layers of images: Velázquez’ own original work in the foreground, a reference to Ruben’sPallas and Arachne, and a nod to both Titian’s and Ruben’s Rape of Europa. Las Hilanderas thus evidently belongs to Mitchell’s second category of metapicture in the most intricate sense. It refers to two Roman fables that have already become iconographic traditions in art, and recontextualizes such images made by two other great artists.

Now that we have decoded the mythological narrative and its references, another question arises: who are the other three women standing next to Pallas and Arachne? They might be the Lydian women observing the contest as mentioned in the fable, or carry some other allegorical meanings [13]. But is there any significance of their position being on the threshold between the mythological realm and the workshop? Why are they dressed in courtly gowns? In Sira Dambe’s Faucouldian reading of Las Hilanderas, she argues:

The ladies embody the gaze that will behold and judge the artwork and thus, importantly, authorize its existence as recipient of the public gaze. One might be inclined to think that, as viewers placed inside the canvas, the ladies function as an extension of the onlooker situated outside it. On the contrary, there occurs here an unexpected, and deliberate, inversion: because the ladies focus upon the brilliantly lit alcove and turn their backs to the workshop, from their perspective the latter becomes the background and the former the foreground. The outside viewer is thus relegated to the ’background’ and is drawn into the closed, darkened space of the workshop, fixed there by the unwavering gaze of the lady on the far right [14]. 

Dambe’s refutation of the notion that the ladies “function as an extension of the onlooker” outside the picture may hold true for the modern-day viewer, but not for the painting’s originally intended audience. Indeed, Dambe and many other authors situate the ladies in the contemporary  seventeenth century based on their clothing, despite differing opinions on the figures’ identities or iconographical origins [15]. The seventeenth-century viewer of Las Hilanderas might not be able to explain the presence of the ladies either, but they would surely recognize these women as their contemporaries because of the clothing. This ambiguity only proves that these figures’ function in the composition is to act as a proxy for the early modern viewer indeed, especially considering the lady on the far right is the only person in the painting mediating a connection between the inside and the outside. Since no one knows who they are, they can stand in place for anyone. 

On the other hand, the “deliberate inversion” provides an adequate explanation for Velázquez’s unexpected arrangement of the two scenes, i.e. the primary narrative being placed in the background whereas the secondary in the foreground. It is through the ladies’ presence that the painting is turned inside out, and the two levels of representation become interchangeable. What we see as an accessory—the tapestry—they see as the total picture, whereas we as viewers, who supposedly occupy the most powerful position in the viewing relation, are merely part of the background negligible to them. If we were to reposition ourselves in their perspective, the image that was previously furthest away from us is now the closest—in fact, the tapestry becomes the only thing we could see in front of us. We would then come to the realization that the tapestry is the focal point of the painting, both compositionally and thematically, and the rest—the Fable of Arachne and the workshop—is just framing devices to provide context for Velázquez’s interpretation of Rape of Europa. The implication here is that Las Hilanderas also embodies the first kind of metapicture, a recursive loop of images wherein it is impossible to distinguish the beginning from the end. We might even draw a parallel between Velázquez’s complex structure of layered images to the simple sketch The Spiral (Fig. 2) discussed in Mitchell’s book. Imagining Steinberg drawing the man in the center, drawing his pen, and then drawing the outward spiral that starts from the man’s hand to fill the page, [16] in Las Hilanderas there is a similar process: the painting starts with Titian’s Rape of Europe on the tapestry, re-contextualized in the reference to Ruben’s Pallas and Arachne, then framed inside the everyday scene of a tapestry factory in the foreground. Or, read it clockwise, the line in Steinberg’s drawing starts from the landscape feature at the bottom, spiralling inward, and ends at the tip of the draughtsman’s pen. In Las Hilanderas, then, could it be that the labor of the craftswomen in the front is a metaphor for Velázquez’s creative process behind the painting, and the court ladies also act as a stand-in for the artist himself, who is replicating Rubens’s copy of Titian’s Rape of Europe, an image copied after Ovid’s written story? 

Turning to the foreground, the scene is even more perplexing: who are those women in the workshop? How are they related to the narrative in the background? The lack of interaction between the figures in the front and those at the back, combined with the structure of nested images, sets a clear distinction between the two episodes happening inside the same frame. Nevertheless, putting them parallel with each other is at the same time diminishing the boundary, provided that a connection between them can be drawn. A consensus among scholars is that the central theme of Las Hilanderas at its core is a celebration of art and artists, basing on the historical circumstance that seventeenth-century painters in Spain were struggling to elevate their social status, and Velázquez himself was conducting a campaign to prove his worthiness to be a knight of the Order of Santiago [17]. But every art historian who has written on this painting explains the juxtaposition of the two scenes differently, thereby continuously re-framing Las Hilanderas inside discourses. 

Some authors identify the woman spinning in the left foreground as Pallas in the guise of an old lady, and the woman on the right winding the wool as Arachne. They maintain that the foreground represents the contest between the two and therefore the painting depicts both the beginning and the end of the fable [18]. Other scholars tend to disagree; in Richard Stapleford and John Potter’s interpretation, they suggest that the figures in the foreground all have allegorical origins from sources such as Ripa, Cartari, and Aristotle that are thematically related to, but independent of, the myth of Arachne. The multiplicity of allegories and Velázquez’s own artistic invention combined amount to a complex network of symbols that “identify the durable world of art and the mutable world of human existence” [19]. Or, it is what the women are doing, rather than who they supposedly represent, plays a more important part in our understanding of the overall composition—as Aneta Georgievska-Shine argues, the juxtaposition of the labor in the workshop and finished tapestry is an assimilation of the process of production to painting that serves to illuminates the non-finite process of the making of an artwork [20]. All these attempts to elucidate Velázquez’s composition only seem to mystify the painting even more, as each author’s conclusion always raises more questions and opens up new discussions. But one important aspect seems to remain true across their various stances—the unity of the two episodes is only achieved through the viewer’s perception, because only they can see both scenes at the same time [21]. In other words, since there is visually no interaction between the craftswomen in the foreground and the Fable of Arachne, it is the viewer’s task to establish a connection—however they choose to define it, otherwise the “first- and second-order representation” cannot be synthesized into one coherent image. To Mitchell, this is exactly how metapicture operates. Las Hilanderas constantly demands the viewer’s attention and thereby generates discussions; and in the process of being repeatedly examined, the picture has the potential of becoming a site of theoretical discourse itself, not merely a passive object awaiting to be explained [22].

In Velázquez’s eighteenth-century biography written by Antonio Palomino, the author recounts an anecdote where the artist was criticized by his envious rivals that “all his skill can be reduced to knowing how to paint a head” [23]. Whereas in Las Hilanderas, Velázquez seems to have successfully proved his ability to paint anything and heads, by rendering an elaborate picture full of figures yet none of them with a legible face. As the lady on the left foreground pulling back the curtain, this pictorial space becomes completely open to the viewer, as if Velázquez is inviting us to be the judge of his competition with Titian and Rubens. At the same time, in acknowledging the images created by his predecessors and framing them inside such an unconventional composition, Velázquez’s art symbolizes simultaneously a continuation of history and a defiance of tradition. As Alfred Gell writes, artworks that embody the artists’ technical virtuosity have the power of “casting a spell over us so that we see the real world in an enchanted form” [24]. We see Velázquez’s mastery of techniques in his meticulously executed portraits and narrative paintings, but it is only in the complex compositions such as Las Hilanderas his artistic virtuosity is utterly manifested. Las Hilanderas seen as a metapicture “casts a spell” onto its viewer by constantly challenging their perceptions and interpretations of the painting, thereby establishing itself as a site of discourse, an insolvable puzzle that will continue to incite discussions.

endnotes

Alpers, Svetlana. 2005. The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Dambe, Sira. 2016. “ ‘Enslaved sovereign’: Aesthetics of power in Foucault, Velázquez and Ovid.” In Journal of Literary Studies 22, (December):229-56.

Gell, Alfred. 1992. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, 40-63. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Georgievska-Shine, Aneta. 2017. “ ‘I Repair My Work That Was Left …’: Velázquez and the Unfinished Story of Arachne.” In Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, edited by Alexander Nagel, 179-93. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge.

Grønstad, Asbjørn and Øyvind Vågnes. “Images and their Incarnations: An Interview with W. J.T. Mitchell. ” In W. J. T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures, edited by Krešimir Purgar, 182-94. Florence: Taylor and Francis.

Kahr, Madlyn Millner. "Velázquez's Las Hilanderas: A New Interpretation." The Art Bulletin 62, no. 3 (1980): 376-85.

Mitchell, W. J. T.. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moffitt, John. F.. 1985. “Painting, Music and Poetry in Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas.” In Konsthistorisk tidskrift/ Journal of Art History 54, 77-90.

Ortiz, Antonio Domínguez, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, and Julián Gállego. 1989. Velázquez. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ovid. The Metamorphoses. 2013. Translated by Arthur Golding, edited by Madeleine Forey, 173-178. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Pym, Richard. 1999. “Interdiction of closure in Velázquez’ Fable of Arachne.” In Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 5, 189-199.

Stapleford, Richard, and John Potter. 1987. “Velázquez’ Las Hilanderas.” Artibus Et Historiae 8, no. 15: 159-81.

Stoichita, Victor Ieronim. 1997. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

End Notes: [1] W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 35. [2] Richard Stapleford and John Potter, “Velázquez’ Las Hilanderas,” Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 8, No. 15 (1987): 159, doi:10.2307/1483276. [3] Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes, “Images and their Incarnations: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell, ” in W. J. T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures, ed. Krešimir Purgar (Florence: Taylor and Francis), 184. See also Mitchell, Picture Theory, 38-42 for his discussion on The Spiral. [4] Mitchell, Picture Theory, 62. [5] Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, “Velázquez and His Art,” in Velázquez, ed. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, and Julián Gállego (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 49. [6] Stapleford and Potter, “Las Hilanderas, ” 159. [7] Enriqueta Harris is credited as the first scholar who identified the Fable of Arachne as the subject of this painting in 1940, and Diego Angulo Iniguez further elaborated this idea in 1948. See Stapleford and Potter, “Las Hilanderas, ” 179. [8] Stapleford and Potter, “Las Hilanderas, ” 159. [9] Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 173-178. [10] Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 160. [11] Mitchell, Picture Theory, 42. [12] Harris, Velázquez, 160. [13] Stapleford and Potter believe the three ladies are meant to represent Three Graces (“Las Hilanderas, ” 173.), whereas Madlyn Millner Kahr proposes that the painting be read as a depiction of two episodes in The Virtuous Lucretia. Kahr identifies the figure in armour as Sextus Tarquinius, the figure with lowered arm as Lucretia, and the other three ladies as wives of the Roman officers mentioned in Livy’s fable. See Madlyn Millner Kahr, “Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas: A New Interpretation,” The Art Bulletin 62, no. 3 (1980): 37, doi:10.2307/3050025. [14] Sira Dambe, “ ‘Enslaved sovereign’: Aesthetics of power in Foucault, Velázquez and Ovid,” Journal of Literary Studies 22, (December 2016): 248, doi: 10.1080/02564710608530402. [15] For instances, Dambe: “Placing a helmeted goddess and her victim in the midst of contemporary court ladies creates an unsettling incongruity…” (“Enslaved sovereign,” 247); and Stapleford and Potter: “…three carefully coifed women dressed in contemporary aristocratic gown…” (“Las Hilanderas,”160). [16] Mitchell, Picture Theory, 40. [17] Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 151. [18] See, for instances, J. F. Moffitt,“Painting, Music and Poetry in Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas," in Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 54 (1985), 77-90, doi: 10.1080/00233608508604076; and Richard Pym, “Interdiction of closure in Velázquez’ Fable of Arachne,” in Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 5 (1999), 189-199, doi: 10.1080/13507499908569494. [19] Stappleford and Potter, “Las Hilanderas,” 178. [20] Aneta Georgievska-Shine, “ ‘I Repair My Work That Was Left …’: Velázquez and the Unfinished Story of Arachne” in Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, ed. Alexander Nagel (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2017), 188. [21] Victor Ieronim Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13-15. In his discussion of Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, Stoichita cites a letter from French poet Jean Chapelain and remarks, “it is the spectator’s ‘surprised eye’ that must establish ‘the necessary dependence’ between the two levels of the painting” (15). [22] Grønstad and Vågnes, “Images,” 184. [23] Acisclo Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El museo pictórico y escala óptica, Vol. 3, El Parnaso español pintoresco laureado, (Madrid, 1724), quoted in Sánchez, “Velázquez,” 32. [24] Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 44.