This book is a collection of 32 articles about Velázquez which appeared in scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues and newspapers and magazines between 1964 and 2006. Several are published in English for the first time. The text is the record of a lifelong engagement with thelife and works of this enigmatic artist and evaluates many of the numerous attempts to solve the mysteries presented by the Spaniard’s paintings. These questions are considered in the final essay, ‘Velázquez, today and tomorrow’, which is published here for the first time.Two themes unite the essays. Velázquez was the court painter to Philip IV, and the changing relationship between painter and patron provides the framework for interpreting the artist’s career. The centerpiece of thisrelationship is Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which is the subject of two long articles, the now-classic ‘On the Meaning of Las Meninas’ (1978) and ‘Las Meninas as a masterpiece’ (1999). The second theme is the problem of attributions
