Introduction

Abstract

Several years ago, I had the opportunity of visiting Barcelona for the first time and saw ‘Las Meninas’, or rather the many ‘Meninas’, in the Picasso Museum. I was spellbound both by the unique charm of each painting, large or small, monochrome or coloured, round or angular, of an individual or of a group, charming, ugly or humorous… and by the rich variety and the inexhaustible energy of the artist who produced it. It is stimulating to the mind and to the senses to know that the energy derives from Picasso’s appreciation of Velazquez’s original ‘Las Meninas’, which I saw in the Prado, later on the same journey. The effect of looking at those more than forty transcriptions of the ‘Meninas’, which face each other across a large room and which reflect their ‘reading’ of Velazquez in their communication with each other, is like listening to music, which repeats the same notes and the same theme, yet always fragmenting them, only to bring them together again in each new variation.KeywordsWhite HoleGreek TragedyMedieval LiteratureIntellectual AspectRomantic IdeaThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.