Fearful that your eye has lost its innocence after hearing so much of the picture, you enter the tiny room at the museum on the Prado in which is hung Las Meninas—­The Maids of Honour, painted by Velasquez in 1656.  My experience was a typical one.  I went hastily through the larger Velasquez gallery in not only a challenging but an irritable mood.  The holy of holies I was enraged to find, seemingly, crowded.  There was the picture, but a big easel stood in the foreground blotting out the left side; some selfish artist copying, some fellow thrusting himself between us and the floating illusion of art.  In despair I looked into the mirror that reflects the picture.  I suspected trickery.  Surely that little princess with her wilful, distrait expression, surely the kneeling maid, the dwarfs, the sprawling dog, the painter Velasquez—­with his wig—­the heads of the king and queen in the oblong mirror, the figure of Senor Nieto in the doorway, the light framing his silhouette—­surely they are all real.  Here are the eternal simplicities.  You realise that no one is in the room but these painted effigies of the court and family of Philip IV; that the canvas whose bare ribs deceived is in the picture, not on the floor; that Velasquez and the others are eidolons, arrested in space by the white magic of his art.  For the moment all other artists and their works are as forgotten as the secrets in the lost and sacred books of the Magi.  There is but one painter and his name is Velasquez.

This mood of ecstatic absorption is never outlived; the miracle operates whenever a visit is made to the shrine.  But you soon note that the canvas has been deprived of its delicate glaze.  There are patches ominously eloquent of the years that have passed since the birth of this magisterial composition.  The tonal key is said to be higher because of restorations; yet to the worshipper these shortcomings are of minor importance.  Even Giordano’s exclamation:  “Sire, this is the theology of painting,” falls flat.  Essence of painting, would have been a truer statement.  There is no other-worldliness here, but something more normal, a suggestion of solid reality, a vision of life.  The various figures breathe; so potent is their vitality that my prime impression in entering the room was a sense of the presence of others.  Perhaps this is not as consummate art as the voluptuous colour-symphonies of Titian, the golden exuberance of Rubens, the abstract spacing of Raphael, the mystic opium of Rembrandt; but it is an art more akin to nature, an art that is a lens through which you may spy upon life.  You recall Ibsen and his “fourth wall.”  Velasquez has let us into the secret of human existence.  Not, however, in the realistic order of inanimate objects copied so faithfully as to fool the eye.  Presentation, not representation, is the heart of this coloured imagery, and so moving, so redolent of life is it that if the world were shattered and Las Meninas shot to the coast of Mars, its inhabitants