Representations

“Today I had to meet a man I haven’t see for ten years. And all that time I had thought I was remembering him well—how he looked and spoke and the sort of things he said. The first five minutes of the real man shattered the image completely. Not that he had changed. On the contrary. I kept on thinking, ‘Yes, of course, of course. I’d forgotten that he thought that—or disliked this, or knew so-and-so—or jerked his head back that way.’ I had known all these things once and I recognized them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years...

“I remember being rather horrified one summer morning long ago when a burly, cheerful labouring man, carrying a hoe and a watering pot came into our churchyard and, as he pulled the gate behind him, shouted over his shoulder to two friends, ‘See you later, I’m just going to visit Mum.’ He meant he was going to weed and water and generally tidy up her grave…. A six-by-three-foot flower-bed had become Mum. That was his symbol for her, his link with her. Caring for it was visiting her. May this not be in one way better than preserving and caressing an image in one’s own memory? The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable. But the image has the added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want. It will smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands. It is a puppet of which you hold the strings…. The fatal obedience of the image, its insipid dependence on me, is bound to increase. The flower-bed on the other hand is an obstinate, resistant, often intractable bit of reality, just as Mum in her lifetime doubtless was.”

Our mental images of scenes and of people changes over time. We typically forget that a person is such a way, or we simply might be projecting our own qualities or the qualities of others that we know onto a person we haven’t seen in years. In the two versions of Las Meninas that Dusty gave us in class, we have two depictions of an image that Velasquez held in his mind. The painting by Velasquez is a representation of that image that he thought of; Picasso’s painting is a representation of that representation.

The image that Velasquez saw in his mind might have changed over time, and might have changed even while he was creating the painting. Likewise, the image that Picasso saw in his mind of a rendition of Velasquez’s image may have changed over time as well. However, once each of the paintings was completed, the dynamic of the image held in the respective artists’ minds ceased to matter. (One could even argue that the dynamic ceased to exist altogether). The images as we see them today are static and unchanging, much like a six-by-three-foot flower-bed.

The change that happens to the paintings occurs within our own minds. More specifically, it occurs in the memory. With the exception of people with eidetic memory, we the viewers cannot remember perfectly what each painting looks like down to the last hair on the princess’s head. If we go a few years without looking at either painting, we might forget some small and even some large details—yes, the painter is the same height as the canvas in Picasso’s painting but not in Velasquez’s; the boy in the bottom-right corner is in fact stepping on the dog; the hooks on the ceiling are almost impossible to see in Velasquez’s painting. These details will slip from our memories over time, and we will be left with a general idea of the paintings but unable to recall the exact image.