Velázquez’s Dwarfs and the Modern Uncanny

Abstract

In this article I focus on a “set” of four paintings by Diego Velázquez that form part of his contribution to the interior decoration of the Torre de la Parada. Developing upon Lacan’s response to Foucault’s famous commentary on Las Meninas I argue that Velázquez’s modernity is nowhere more marked than in this set of paintings in which an unprecedented focus is directed towards the liminal figure of the court dwarf. Reading these works as displaced portraits of the King, I suggest that with them Velázquez encountered a certain impossibility in the process of representation. In following Lacan on the uncanny, and by drawing attention to the significance of Velázquez’s depiction of his subjects’ hands in these paintings, I propose that the uncanny presence of these dwarfs should be understood via Lacan’s concept of the objet a: an impossible object that has no place in given reality and that arises from the failure of the painter’s act of inscription.