Foucault's Las Meninas and art‐historical methods

Abstract

Summary This article focuses on the ways in which Foucault's Las Meninas has been represented and critiqued in art‐historical texts and endeavours to gauge its significance to the discipline, in particular, the “New Art History” of the 1970s and 1980s. Art historians have not yet adequately engaged the historical, philosophical, theoretical and methodological dimension of Foucault's articulation of an archaeology of the structures of thought and the significance of this inquiry to the writing of art histories. However, Foucault's unprecedented reading of Velazquez's painting ‐ unfettered by art‐historical methods ‐ played a significant role in facilitating a critique of the limitations of canonical art‐historical interpretive procedures. Art historians Svetlana Alpers, Norman Bryson and Eric Fernie have, for example, drawn attention to the insularity of the discipline; its emphasis on connoisseurship; its preoccupation with the construction of meaning via archival documents and iconographic and stylistic analysis. Against this framework Foucault's elucidation of Las Meninas's self‐reflexive meditation on the nature of representation was groundbreaking.