Con una brizna de snobismo -ignorando un Botticelli recién comprado por el Louvre, que bien podría aspirar a esa calificación-, Proust afirmaba que la Vista de Delf de Vermeer era el cuadro más bello del mundo. Financial Times se pregunta cual es la pintura más grande de la historia del arte. Y no habla de Rafael, ni de Rembrandt, maestros absolutos y definitivos.

A juicio de Jackie Wullschlager, la pintura más grande de la historia del arte pudiera ser Las Meninas. Y sus razonamientos periodísticos [Financial Times, 14 oct. 0] me parecen muy pertinentes:

Is this the greatest painting in the history of art? It is not just that we feel we are there, in a fragment of time held intact across the ages – we are also eavesdropping on the painter in the act of thinking and looking. Self-portrait and group portrait, reality and illusion, what Velazquez’s contemporaries called «the theology of painting» and social rebellion: «Las Meninas» changed art’s idea of itself, its scope, and its relationship with truth.

Completed in 1656, it questioned the artifice of representation as no painter had ever done, even as Velazquez created with joyful conviction a human drama whose immediacy and naturalness, whose every nuance, glance, texture of flesh or silk, is brought alive through the mysterious, difficult power of paint.

It is a moment in a story. Velazquez is at his easel in a picture gallery in the Spanish court. The Infanta with her pale gold hair holds the stage; dignified and autocratic, she nevertheless does not want to pose. Her ladies-in-waiting – las meninas – cajole; they and her playthings, the ugly, compelling dwarf Maribarbola and the big laconic dog, occupy the first plane of reality. To their side, Velazquez depicts himself painting, confidently, exuberantly; the bright flashes of his palette stand out against the murky canvases above and the soft dissolving greys of the meninas’ gowns.

Behind the painter, his patrons Philip IV of Spain and Queen Mariana – presumably the subjects of the work on his easel – are mere sketches, reflected in a mirror. For the first time in art, genius takes precedence over aristocratic birth: the artist is vivid as life, the monarchs insubstantial puppets.

Centuries ahead of his time, Velazquez concealed social radicalism by the play of perspective and the tonal unity that give the painting its structural brilliance and cohesion. Light falls from the front, back and side; shadows and highlights give the illusion of depth, and pull us into the picture. So does the artist’s gaze; he and the sullen dwarf look straight out at us. Today’s twists of artist-viewer reciprocity have nothing on Velazquez. We, he, monarch, maidservant and dwarf breathe within the same airy space, in this most thrilling portrayal of humanity in all its diversity, individuality and refusal to conform.