ABSTRACT
Seventeenth-century Baroque painting in Spain was dominated by the prodigious genius of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velazquez. Velazquez was born in Seville, where he joined the painter's guild in 1617 and produced his first paintings, consisting mainly of genre scenes, portraits, and Christian subjects. Velazquez combined artistic genius with an intellectual training based on the humanist traditions of the Renaissance. A key iconographic theme throughout his career consisted of portraits of dwarfs, some of whom were important members of Philip's court. In the 1640s, Velazquez painted one of his most remarkable dwarf portraits—that of Sebastian de Morra. In the Fable of Arachne, Velazquez unites the seemingly disparate foreground and background by thematic, iconographic, and formal parallels. In Las Meninas, which is considered the summation of Velazquez's career and has been the subject of numerous interpretive efforts, the artist merges in a single space what is juxtaposed in the Fable.
