In the following essay I’m going to compare and contrast two 17th century artworks – “Las Meninas” by Diego Velazquez (1656) and “The Allegory of Painting” by Johannes Vermeer. Paintings depict artists working on a portrait, however, in Velasquez’s work the viewer is the person who is being painted and in Vermeer’s the viewer is just an observer of the artistic process. The only reason the observer knows that he is the center object of the future fictional painting is in the mirror on the back wall. The couple in the reflection is King Philip IV and his wife, Mariana. (Foucault, 8). The radical difference between the two artworks is that Velasquez in his “Las Meninas” uses the idea of gaze – eye contact between the viewer and the painting’s
