Where is las meninas located now

During the remaining eight years of his life, he painted only a few works, mostly portraits of the royal family. When he painted Las Meninas, he had been with the royal household for 33 years. Philip IV's first wife, Elizabeth of France, died in ; and their only son, Balthasar Charles, died two years later.

Lacking an heir, Philip married Mariana of Austria in , and Margaret Theresa — was their first child, and their only one at the time of the painting. Subsequently, she had a short-lived brother Philip Prospero — , and then Charles — arrived, who succeeded to the throne as Charles II at the age of three.

It is here that Las Meninas is set. Although constrained by rigid etiquette, the art-loving king seems to have had an unusually close relationship with the painter.

The place where the painting normally hangs is "the room which is most visited by big groups," said the year-old who was wearing a mask and a plastic visor. With famous museums shuttered across the globe by the pandemic, the Prado is reopening a month ahead of the Louvre in Paris, along with the city's two other big museums -- the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen.

But as Spain progressively rolls back the mid-March restrictions imposed to slow the virus' spread, the museum is reopening with a limited capacity of only 1, people per day compared with 15, on peak days last year, director Miguel Falomir said.

Although the epidemic is now well under control, it has claimed the lives of more than 27, people in Spain, including the head of the museum's finance division. Read also: Bilbao's Guggenheim is Spain's first big museum to reopen. So every visitor will be able to spend almost unlimited time contemplating the "The Adoration of the Magi", an oil-on-wood triptych painted by Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch at the end of the 15th century.

And for the first time, the 17th century canvas of "Saturn Devouring His Son" by Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens will be showcased alongside Francisco Goya's version of the same subject, painted nearly years later. But visitors can only get in by booking 24 hours in advance, agreeing to a temperature check at the entrance and wearing a mask throughout the visit.

You used to speak about it with such passion. I tried imagining myself as I was then, standing with Royce in front of Las Meninas , expounding on the painting with the gushing hyperbole of an adolescent. I was still at the innocent phase of my lifelong infatuation with Spain, and was probably telling my companion about the quintessential Spanishness of the work, its exotic and surreal character, its mixture of sombreness and sensuality, its element of the grotesque, its underlying magic.

He suggested I was devoting far too much time to art and not enough to living. He interpreted the passion with which I spoke about painting as my way of sublimating sexual frustration. He told me that what I really needed was a girlfriend, and that I would be better off going to bars and discos than spending so many hours visiting monuments and museums. Though I would gradually recognise the truth of his words, their immediate impact was to irritate me profoundly, as did his subsequent gesture of walking off in the direction of a young woman whom he said was more beautiful than any of the pictures we had seen.

It was as if he had violated the inner sanctuary of a temple. What I never lost was my fascination with Las Meninas , partly because it was so tied up with my developing relationship with Spain and the Hispanic world.

For, as I began returning to Spain with ever greater frequency, and as a passion for life subsumed one for art, I came almost to think of the painting as a watchful, background presence, accompanying me as I became progressively more caught up with a country moving from a repressive dictatorship to a vibrant democracy, to a disenchanted place on the verge of collapse.

Of encouraging me perhaps to head deeper into what I would soon perceive as an ever-expanding labyrinth. So I decided, as I neared the age of 60, to look more closely at a painting that is famously a mystery. The fact that the picture is entitled 'Las Meninas' reinforces this.

However, the scene does not stop there. His purposeful elusiveness cannot fail to raise many questions. Primarily, who is he painting on the huge canvas which almost touches the ceiling? Some critics argue that he is painting the scene directly to his left; that of La Infanta Margarita and her 'Meninas'.

If this is the case then her parents, the King and Queen of Spain are sidelined because they are just watching their daughter. Margarita is simply there to observe her parents.