A. Javier Izquierdo-Martín

ABSTRACT:

While many authors have formulated partial conjectures about the what (content and meaning) or the how (tools and technique) of Las Meninas, the famous painting by Diego Velázquez (1656), only a small subset of works have tried, unsuccessfully in my opinion, to marry cleverly formulated symbolic interpretations about the meaning of the painting with independent praxeological arguments about the special technique used by the painter to accomplish it. Moffitt (1983) is, to my knowledge, the best approach to the integration of the symbolism and technique of Las Meninas. Aided with a mock-up of the original architectonical frame of the painted scene, Moffitt claims that the painter used a camera obscura and that the painting is a proto-photographic demonstration of the objective nature of real space that settles the dispute over the craft vs. art dimensions of painting.

Still the meaning of the real scene being painted by Velázquez is left untouched by such valuable technical and hermeneutical considerations: What kind of natural social situation would demand from Infanta Margarita and her companion the sort of spontaneous attitude they seem to be performing as captured on the painting? Could it be possible to economise explanatory means and formulate a single conjecture for both the meaning and the method of Las Meninas? I will claim in this paper that the famous painting by Velázquez is (i.e. documents) The Making Of... (i.e. the staging and revelation of) an ancient variety of hidden-camera prank (HCP): a camera obscura prank (COP). This idea first came to me while doing research on the discovering procedures employed by actors and victims to put an end to a HCP. I was struck by the curious similarities between some video stills of a HCP’s final "revelation sequence" and some details of the complex specular scene composed by Velázquez in Las Meninas.

The mise-en-scène of so-called palace pranks, a kind of costly and elaborated theatrical productions ritually performed on special occasions (welcoming celebrations, honouring special guests), has been identified as a distinctive element of XVIIth Century Spanish courtesan life. Detailed descriptions of how these pranks were planned and executed can be found in the second part of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615). Moreover, as camera obscura projections allow for the visual fixation of a social scene being an unknown fact to the people on the scene being painted, this is why some camera obscura paintings can be understood as the ancestry of our present Candid Camera television recordings. Hence, it is my claim that Las Meninas is a visual recording of the staging and revelation of a camera obscura prank, a kind of practical joke having the same autochthonous restoration procedure as the modern TV hidden-camera prank, where performing actors typically awake victims by pointing to them that "there’s a camera over there", "you are been watched on TV", etc. (Izquierdo, 2003).

Later on I encountered a most ordinary film document that I find to be a perfect videographic clone of Velázquez’s painting: the promotional The Making Of... (of) a Spanish movie titled El Gran Marciano (2000). This film consists in a three-days long, cleverly staged HCP performed on a group of TV celebrities.

KEYWORDS: ethnomethodological studies of work, history of art (Spanish painting XVIIth), history of humour (hidden-camera pranks), audiovisual-documents (social properties).

(Heraclitus)

Septimus: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

Thomasina: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?

Septimus: It will serve.

Thomasina: Goody!

(Stoppard, 1993: 82)

Way beyond what historians of art have already acknowledged is the fact that an optical projection (seen around 1420) associates painting to our TV screen. This is new. (David Hockney, letter to Martin Kemp, Los Ángeles October 19th 2000, in Hockney, 2001: 278).

While many authors have formulated partial conjectures about the what (content and meaning) or the how (tools and technique) of Las Meninas, the famous painting by Velázquez, only a small subset of works have provided systematic accounts of both its practical and symbolic dimensions.1

The most accomplished works of this last subset have tried, unsuccessfully in my opinion, to marry cleverly formulated symbolic interpretations about the painting representing something2, with independent praxeological arguments about the painter having used something.3 The output of the smartests among these ‘integration’ exercises usually takes the form of a convoluted, epicyclical model implying the assumption of at least two independently formulated hypothesis. This is even and overall evident in the work by Moffitt (1983), the most subtlely fine-tuned integrated model of the theory and practice of Las Meninas that I have come to know. Armed with precise reverse-engineering drawings of the real architectonic frame where the painting of Las Meninas

1 See Marías (1995c) for an acceptably representative selection of fourteen of the most recently published, post-foucauldian scholarly works about this painting. Along with the famous introductory piece by Foucault to his 1966 book Les mots et les choses, the selection includes papers by Svetlana Alpers, Jonathan Brown, Norbert Elias, Jan Emmers, Fernando Marías, John Moffitt, John Searle, Juan Miguel Serrera, Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, Leo Steinberg, Victor Stoichita and Bo Vahlne.

2 A portrait of the King and Queen that are been entertained by Infanta Margarita María and her court (Justi, 1999 [1903]: 645); a sudden interruption, by the appearance of the King and Queen, of a painting session with the Infanta (Harris, 1991: 172-173; Brown, 1995: 70-71); the synthesis of Velázquez’s long-life struggle to balance the desire of artistic freedom with the desire of nobility (Brown, 1986: 256-259), pedagogic allegory about the duties of the new royal generation (Emmens, 1995); a succesful artistitic violation of a current de facto prohibition concerning the painting of the King’s portrait (Marías, 2000: 175-177); scientific hyper-realism as the epithome of liberal art (Moffitt, 1983); cartesian philosophy of the mind extended to the political realm (Diez del Corral, 1999: 64-69); the painting of Las Meninas itself (De Moya, 1961), etc.

3 A front mirror (this hypothesis is used mostly in an implicit form, e.g. Foucault, 1995); two mirrors in square angle (De Moya, 1961); a camera obscura (Moffitt, 1983); a group of models including a double of the painter (De Moya, 1961); sheer artistic 1 should have took place, Moffitt and his draftsman-collaborator Terry L. Fox built-up a mock-up of the original social scene as it could have been in situ observed by the painter4 with the aim of proving that Velázquez used a camera obscura to project an image of a real situation over a lampshade previously inscribed with a charcoal lattice - invention (Brown, 1995), etc. 4 Using historical maps of the site, Moffitt first constructed a cardboard mock-up of the room all experts accord was the real, not imaginary architectonic space where the scene that inspired Velázquez’s work in Las Meninas took place. This was a gallery known as the cuarto bajo del Príncipe, sited in the ground floor of the Alcázar de Madrid, a building that was completely destroyed by fire in 1736. Afterwards, with the aid of reduced photographs, he constructed scale models of all different characters (persons and dog) and architectonic elements (doors, windows, stairs, lamp, mirror, the many paintings on the wall) that appear in the painting. And, of course, of the painted easel that was stamped with a reduced photograph of Las Meninas. Then, following the precise perspective instructions contained in the painting itself, he tried different placements of all elements by displacing them along a series of parallel and perpendicular lines projected onto the architectonic model from the reduced photograph of Las Meninas in the canvass. The figures were first moved longitudinally along the horizon line and the four parallel "projection lines" originated in the four corners of the "east" wall appearing backwards in the painting. And then, laterally, back and forth in right angle along the orthogonal axis of vision. With this procedure of spatial tâtonnement Moffitt attempted to: (a) find the geometrical point originally occupied in the room by the physical source of the vision, i.e. the place inhabited by the eyes of the painter or, as it seemed to be the case here, by the lens of the camera obscura; (b) locate the precise spatial coordinates (in terms of length, width and height measured from the point of view of the walls, floor and ceiling of the room) of each one of the characters, objects and elements present in the room; and (c) retrieve the whole real social and spatial configuration that Velázquez would have saw projected onto his canvass by the camera obscura device. See Mestre-Fiol (1977: 81-123) and Campo y Francés (1992) for the use of similar reverse-engineering procedures to try recover the original focal point and focal distances of the painting (but without the camera obscura hypothesis). Under the hypothesis of Velázquez having applied an innovative variant of Alberti’s classical principles of linear perspective, Kemp (2000: 120) recovers a different set of perspective lines for the respective positions of real painter, painted painter, real canvass and painted canvass. The pioneer work by De Moya (1961) retrieved two different sets of layout and perspective geometrical co-ordinates for the original arquitechtonic frame where the painting process took place. The first set is calculated under the substantive speculation that Velázquez was painting a portrait of the King and Queen and the (independent) technical speculation that an assistant of the painter (or a mannequin) was positioned as his double. The second set of calculations is based on a more consistent theoretical model in which a technical conjecture about the use of a secret painting procedure (two mirrors in square angle) is deduced from a clever but somehow vacuous substantive hypothesis: that the hidden content of the painted canvass is Las Meninas itself. The problem with the hypothesis of a purely self-referential painting is that the choosing of the particular subject of the painting is considered to be completely arbitrary and thus unexplainable. A forest landscape would have serve instead of Infant Margarita and her companion: hence there’s nothing to say about the what of the 2 an improved technological version of the ancient perspective framing device known as "Alberti’s veil" (Moffitt, 1995: 180).5 Then, in the final interpretive part of his work, Moffit goes on to asserts that Velázquez did make use of a camera obscura device to (a) produce an scientific, proto-photographic demonstration of the objective independent nature of real space that (b) once and for all settled the controversy on the craft vs. artistic dimensions of painting; and (c) constituted the finest visual allegorical defence of the nobility of painting. It is worth quoting at lenght the original article by Moffitt on these three interlocked points: painting except that it is "self-referential".

"It is our unshakable conclusion that, in order to achieve the kind of rigorously consistent level of visually accurate reproduction which we have just documented, some kind of a mechanical device would have had to have been used by the painter. Anyone who has (as we have) attempted to reproduce visual reality exactly by brush or pencil knows this to be a demonstrated fact. The historians of Renaissance art would today moreover know that one such means of mechanically transferring the visual facts of the Cuarto Bajo del Príncipe in 1656 on to Velázquez’s canvass depicting Las Meninas was very likely to have beeen something like Leon Battista Alberti’s ‘velo’, especially as this useful device was described in this author’s Della Pittura, a book which belonged to Velázquez... Neverheless, it is also highly likely that Velázquez might have also used a more ‘modern’ version of the ‘velo’, that is, the camera obscura. The physical facts of the chiaroscuro of Las Meninas and the increasingly ‘flattened’ and ‘painterly’ figures of the more distant figures bear out this supposition. So also does the documentary evidence, specifically the interesting citation (no. 174) in the posthumous inventories of Velázquez’s professional equipment making mention of a thick, round glass placed within a box (‘Un vidrio grueso redondo, metido en vna caja’), which contextually appears to be a convex lens placed in a viewing-box, or ‘camera.’ If, for instance, this simple open box with a lens, and (probably) a reflecting mirror, had originally been covered by a reticulated glass viewing-plate, then the latter would have functioned exaclty in the same way as a ‘velo’ -just more efficiently, as Velázquez’s contemporary Vermeer knew, whose use of the camera obscura is well known. [...] But the camera obscura could have been only a tool employed to a larger, even philosophical, end, that is, the demonstration that

5 The most convincing set of literary and visual evidences pointing to the fact that Velázquez did use different types of lens-mirror instrumental arrangements, and most notably of the camera obscura, in a continued and masterly fashion is, in my opinion, the one furnished by Hockney (2001), which include an analysis of strategic details from several paintings: Vieja friendo huevos (1618), El aguador de Sevilla (h. 1619), Tres músicos (1617-18) and El almuerzo (1618) (pp. 126-127, 170-171), El conde-duqe de Olivares (1624) (p. 174) and the master piece Los borrachos (1628-29) (pp. 160-161). Among other things Hockney demonstrate, against the argument in Harris (1991: 172), that the left-handedness and inversion effects associated with the use of mirrors as painting tools could have been easily corrected at the time by using a lens as a convex mirror. 3 painting -because of its use of scientific perspective- is a liberal art [...] Above all else it would appear that the overall purpose of Las Meninas was to serve as a scrupulous ‘dimostrazione’ of scientific perspective and, given that the Spanish painters of the Siglo de Oro desired above all else that their discipline be included among the accepted Liberal Arts, so elevating it from the servile ranks of the Mechanical Arts, then it would have beeen only through the scrupulous adherence to the principles of perspective that it could be demonstrated that ‘La Pintura’ was firmly based upon mathematical principles, and that it was therefore as scientifically valid as the Liberal Arts of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music." (Moffit, 1983: 287-288, 289-290).6 This is clever, perhaps a little too clever. If it is true, as different varieties of classic and contemporary social science have claimed, that content equals procedure (in art as in ordinary life, it should be added), then it could be possible, for the case at hand, to economise explanatory means and formulate a single conjecture for both the meaning and the method of the painting. (Hence complying with standard scientific requirements of consistence, simplicity and elegance). There should be found a singular ordinary (or ethnomethodological) alternate (Garfinkel, 2002) to the integrated formal analytical model of Las Meninas so cleverly designed by Moffitt. Based on independent sets of textual and visual evidences, I will try to demonstrate in what follows that the famous painting by Velázquez was (i.e. documented) what today we would call The Making Of... Las Meninas, that is, the staging and revelation, of an ancient variety of hidden-camera prank (HCP): a camera obscura prank (COP).7

One of these [draughtmen] you will see drawing a full-length character against the light; — That’s illiberal, ----dishonest, ----and hard upon the character of the man who sits. Others, to mend the matter, will make a drawing of you in the Camera; ---that is most unfair of all, ---because, there you are sure to be represented in some of your most ridiculous attitudes. (Sterne, 1961 [1760-1767]: 61)8

6 The third part of Moffitt’s integrated model is patterned under a previous argument by Jonathan Brown. See Brown (1995).

7 Sorry for the police effect.

8 Juanma Iranzo e-mailed me this quote on January 1th, 2004. Thank you, genius.

4 In the pages of his classic study about Velázquez and his century devoted to ascertain the real meaning of the particular social situation being portrayed in Las Meninas [see FIGURE 1], Carl Justi noted that "for Waagen it is like observing nature in a camera obscura." (Justi, 1999 [1903]: 647). In a study published in 1855, William Stirling already entertained this same possibility, even claiming that "Velázquez seems to have anticipated the discovery of Daguerre". Interestingly, Stirling, after noting that the painting shows "a real room", adds that the models are "real chance-grouped people" and the painter "fixed them, as it were, by magic, for all time on his canvass." (Stirling, 1999 [1855]: 275). A convergent conjecture was formulated by Diez del Corral (1999) who finds at work in the scene the "marvellous device" identified as espejo mágico ("magic mirror"), which description resembles that of a camera obscura projection.9 9 The wonderful visual powers afforded by this device -i.e. the ability of clarividentia ("to see through"), that predates later achievements by cinema and television- was a characteristic theme in baroque Spanish literature and theatre, appearing, for example, in Luis Vélez de Guevara’s celebrated comedy El Diablo Cojuelo (1640). "In El Diablo Cojuelo... Cleofás, an student living in Seville, is remembering places from Madrid: the [Paseo del] Prado and the Calle Mayor, and to satisfy his desire to watch the things that are presently happening at the Royal Court in Madrid, the diablillo (little devil) asks the landlady, portrayed as a sorceress, for a mirror. When the people present in the room look out to the mirror, they begin to see carriages, knights, maids and other figures "performing different roles in that teatro del mundo (theatre of the world)." (Diez del Corral, 1999: 65). A most curious detail of this scene (Vélez de Guevara, 1999 [1640]: 102) -and a deeply interesting one, indeed, in view of the praxeological approach to the art of Las Meninas offered here- is that when the landlady, as spectator of the magic mirror projections, declares to have finally located King Philip IV and Queen Mariana de Austria at the end of the parade, Cojuelo tells her to realize that what she is really seeing are not the real persons -the "models"- but their portraits -the "paintings". 5

A direct consequence of admitting the hypothesis of the camera obscura projection is the question of which, among the individual objects and persons that appear in the painting, could be the main candidates for the category of "not being part of the original social situation" witnessed by Velázquez. The first candidate must be now clear: Velázquez himself. Most probably the painter wasn’t there, in the same place and with the same attitude with which he later portrayed himself. This conjecture is supported by the information provided by the X-ray inner photographs of the painting that were produced on the occasion of its last restoration in 1984 (see Mena-Marques, 1984). The X-ray images of Las Meninas show that Velázquez later on superimposed his own painted figure over a previously existing one.10

10 "The only important change is the one visible under the self-portrait of the painter. The underlying figure was done with the face turned to the scene, in a three-quarter profile, wearing on her shoulders a sort of cape which contrast highly in the radiography... The previously painted figure seems younger and dress different. Her face has softer, feminine features than those of Velázquez self-portrait. [n. 3: Some authors have wanted to see in this underlying figure the representation of the Infanta Maria Teresa, who is absent from the final familiar portrait.] (Garrido, 1992: 584). In a later analysis, Carmen Garrido, a member of the team of restorers at the Museo del Prado in Madrid that accomplished the restoration work on Las Meninas finished in May 1984, and the art historian Jonathan Brown, have added new information about the

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content of the pentimenti ("painter’s regrets", that is painting overlaps or later alterations) visible on the painting: "Velázquez did only a few modifications in the course of accomplishing the final work. He projected his ideas on the canvass without hesitations. The right hand of the little princess is in a slightly lower position that in the initial version, the profile of Agustina Sarmiento, the left menina, also presents some minor rectifications, and the legs of Nicolás Pertusato, the dwarf who is gently treading on the dog, are also corrected. But the most important change is the one that can be appreciated in the self-portrait [of Velázquez]. Under the head of the painter there is another who looks more directly at Infanta Margarita and the persons round her. (Some have suggested that this figure could represent Infant María Teresa, the older daughter of the King, although it is difficult to identify her). The figure in the previous version wore a capelina (little cape) over her shoulders." On this very point, Calvo-Serraller (1995: 56) recalls the "apparently surprising manner with which Philip V used to refer to [Las Meninas] as "the painting of María Teresa", the Infanta whose very non-presence, real or virtual, in it, denied the original title of La familia." Other interpreters have assigned this missing character the role of ideal external spectator of the painting, thus speculating about Infanta Maria Teresa being its ultimate addressee (see Mestre Fiol, 1977: 115ff). Marías (1995b: 278) says the figure with the capelina is still Velázquez.

The second main candidate in this chapter are the two Royal images that seem to be reflected by the mirror in the back wall. Even if we accept that what seems to be a mirror is a mirror -and not a tapestry like some authors have argued- it is highly probable that the faces of the King and Queen were not visible in the mirror when Velázquez was drawing the initial sketch of Las Meninas.11 Referring to the fact, previously mentioned by Stirling12, of the existence a boceto (preliminary sketch) of the painting, Justi observes that "the content of the sketch almost completely coincides with the bigger painting. Under the colour, they can be seen, with outlined with a pen, the

11 There’s no known portrait of King Philip IV and his second wife, Queen Maria de Austria, nor by Velázquez or any other painter. Curiously enough, Jonathan Brown has considered the factual origin of the imaging content reflected in the mirror a crucial (but undecidable) hermeneutic enigma and, at the same time, a problem whose solution is wholly indifferent for the ultimate, generic allegoric meaning that his historical analysis invest on the painting "The problem concerns the question of whether the mirror reflects the image on the canvass or the imaginary presence of the monarchs outside the picture frame. Unfortunately, despite many valiant attempts, this problem cannot be solved by measurement alone, because it is now clear that Velázquez tempered geometry with intuition when he composed the painting. [...] The purpose of the mirror is to insinuate the presence of the King (and Queen) in the atelier. If the King were present in person before the picture, he could see, as it were, his own reflection in the mirror. If absent, the picture would be understood as a portrait of the Infanta and her retinue, while the mirror image would be attributed to the reflection form the easel, as did Palomino. In either case, the presence of the King proved once and for all that painting was the noblest of arts." (Brown, 1986: 259-260).

12 "At the beginning of this century [XIX] the original sketch of the painting belonged to Jovellanos, that poet and statesman. At the present moment it hangs on the Real

7 delicate and accurate lines that mark the face of the Infanta, her eyes, and her hair down. In the mirror the Royal couple is absent, although the red curtain is already there." (Justi, 1999 [1903]: 647). Museo de Pinturas." (Stirling, 1999 [1855]: 277).

Still, the meaning of the scene being painted by Velázquez here is left almost completely untouched by the, on the other hand, unavoidable though interpretable technical arguments put forward by this new line of praxeological thinking in art history. What kind of natural, i.e. ordinary ‘social situation’ (Goffman, 1964) would demand from Princess Margarita María (the five-years old daughter of Spanish King Philip IV and his second wife, his niece Mariana de Austria), and her companion the sort of spontaneous attitude they seem to be performing (Brown, 1995: 68) as captured on the painting? Are they just artificially posing for the artist or were they unadvertedly captured by him in some sort of natural social demeanour? And not just "some sort" of behaviour and attitude but just this sort of behaviour and attitude: this unique way of looking at and looking towards (Justi, 1999 [1903]: 646), this peculiar way of being around, being together, being behind, etc. They don’t seem to be doing just like this as a request just to do so: they don’t seem to be just posing (Justi, 1999 [1903]: 645). Are the characters, for example, waiting for? Waiting for something -a task or and event- to be ended or accomplished? Waiting for someone, the King and Queen, maybe, to arrive at the room? Aren’t they simply playing around or having lunch? But there are many forms of being "just playing around".

Of course, with the aid of camera obscura projection it is perfectly possible to produce a painting of a real scene without the painting process being seen and heard by the persons present in the scene -this is why (some) camera obscura paintings should be considered the ancestors of our contemporary hidden camera recordings. Thus, under the hypothetical scenario set up by Moffitt’s hypothesis, a highly relevant question -and one that he does not address- will be this: if Velázquez accomplished the original sketch of the painting with the aid of a camera obscura projection, was he visible to the characters appearing in it while working on it? Perhaps he could have been in the same room were the scene being painted was taken place or maybe in a different one -most probable the adjoining room known as the Pieza de la Torre Dorada.13

13 "By a process of triangulation, it has been determined that the painter placed himself about 6.5 m. to the rear of his picture-plane. This point in space -which is what I would call the ‘royal spot’, the point from which we... view the scene- was located in the Pieza

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de la Torre Dorada. Directly above this in the Planta Principal there was situated the King’s executive office -the [Pieza del] Despacho de Verano- which was connected to this Pieza by one of the many escaleras secretas found in this part of the Alcázar Palace. And, as our topographical analyses have revealed, Velázquez’s Las Meninas was ordered to be hung, in perpetuity, directly above this ‘royal spot’!" (Moffitt, 1983: 285-286). Even in the case that Velázquez accomplished his work while being in the same room as his models, there were a lot of different mobile architectural and decorative elements (curtains, folding screens, mirrors, etc.) he could have used to hide himself and his work to their models -also in the acoustic dimension: was there any courtesan musician just playing around?

The mise-en-scène of so-called farsas palaciegas (palace farces), costly staged theatrical productions14 ritually performed on highly frequent ‘special’ occasions -such as Royal marriages, births, baptisms and swearings in, canonizations of Saints, news (or mere rumors) of war victories, diplomatic receptions, welcoming foreign Royal guests (e.g. the visit, in 1623, of the then Prince of Wales, the future Charles I of England), major calendar feasts, etc. (Deleito y Piñuela, 1988: 164, passim)- has been identified as a distinctive element of XVII Century Spanish courtesan etiquette and ordinary life (e.g. Close, 2000: 217-231). Without doubt, the most careful and credible (and funny!) of all available accounts about how actual palace farces could have been planned, executed, experienced, and judged are the lively descriptions of burlas palaciegas (palace pranks)

14 "When he was crowned King, Philip IV unchained his love for theatre. As it is asserted in the Palace accounting books, since October 5th 1622, on Sundays, Thursdays and festive the rooms of Queen Isabel [de Borbón, the first wife of Philip IV] hosted periodical performances of comedies by the most reputed Spanish companies... The importance acquired by these comic performances in the context of Palace celebrations required the provision of a special inspección (management unity), which direction was assigned by an October 29th 1661 decree to the Marquis de Heliche, for the performances done in the Alcázar Palace, and the Duke of Medina de las Torres for the ones taking place in El Buen Retiro. Under the direction of the two men and the guide and sponsorship of the royal enthusiasm, these palace comedies reached to an unsuspected degree of refinement in all kind of light, painting, intrigue, dressing, stage machinery and scenery artefacts (what we now call mise en scène)... On the Marquis of Heliche, his contemporary Bances Candamo, wrote the following in a book about Spanish theatre: "He was the first in designing scenery changes, machine simulations and faked appearances to the point of astonishing the public, art usurping nature in all his domains. Like the new knowledge of painters about parallel lines and paintbrush strokes, which allows concavity to be invested on a flat surface, the state of the scenery apparatus has never been so advanced as it is today..." In 1626 King Philip IV brought from Italy the great Florentine scenery, painter, architect and engineer Cosme Lotti to build a theatre in his Palace. Lotti astonished everybody with his magnificent decorations and his complicated tramoyas, to the point of being called El Hechizero (The Wizard), and for many years he was the designer, director and renovator of all theatrical stage machinery and scenery used for the farsas palaciegas (palace farces) that were performed in the Royal rooms." (Deleito y Piñuela, 1988: 148-149).

9 that appear prominently in the episodes at the Dukes’ Palace that vertebrate the narrative in the Second Part (1615) of Miguel de Cervantes’s founding novel Don Quixote (Close, 1993 and 2000).15 The episode of the horse Clavileño in Quixote, Part II, Chapter XLI, famously commented on sociologically by Alfred Schutz (1954: 148-149), offers an exemplar illustration:

"Y ocupe las ancas el escudero, si es que lo tiene, y fiese del valeroso Malambruno, que, si no fuere de su espada, de ninguna otra ni de otra malicia será ofendido; y no hay más que torcer esta clavija que sobre el cuello trae puesta, que él los llevará por los aires adonde los atiende Malambruno; pero porque la alteza y la sublimidad del camino no les cause váguidos, se han de cubrir los ojos hasta que el caballo relinche, que será señal de haber dado fin a su viaje... Cubriéronse, y sientiendo Don Quijote que estaba como había de estar, tentó la clavija, y apenas hubo puesto los dedos en ella cuando todas las dueñas y canatos que estaban presentes levantaron las voces diciendo: -¡Dios te guié, valeroso caballero! -¡Dios sea contigo, escudero intrépido! -¡Ya, ya vais por esos aires, rompiéndolos con más velocidad que una saeta! -¡Ya comenzáis a suspender y admirar a cuantos desde la tierra están mirando! -¡Tente, valeroso Sancho, que te bamboleas! ¡Mira no cayas, que será peor tu caída que la del atrevido mozo que quiso regir el carro del Sol su padre!... Y así era ello, que unos grandes fuelles le estaban haciendo aire: tan bien trazada estaba la tal aventura por el duque y la duquesa y su mayordomo que no le faltó requisito que la dejase de hacer perfecta... En esto, con unas estopas ligeras de encenderse y apagarse, desde lejos, pendientes de una caña, les calentaban los rostros... y queriendo dar remate a la estraña y bien fabricada aventura, por la cola de Clavileño le pegaron fuego con unas estopas, y al punto, por estar el caballo lleno de cohetes tronadores, voló por los aires con estraño ruido y dio con don Quijote y con Sancho Panza en el suelo medio chamuscados." (Cervantes, 1999 [1615]: 956-963).16

15 "The fact that Quixote was so fast and exceptional a success, allows us, without fear to be mistaken, to include Velázquez among its readers." (Ginzburg, 2000: 58). Although Ginzburg goes onto a very different interpretive path than the one presented here, selecting other paintings of Velázquez as items for inspection and analysis, later on he states that "perhaps the meta-novel by Cervantes offered some ideas to Velázquez, its presumable reader" (id., 60). And then, in a footnote, refers an argument by Jorge Luis Borges (if Don Quixote himself appears in the novel as a reader of Don Quixote, then the empirical reader can be suspected as a character in Cervantes’ novel) as "perhaps" connective to the specular game devised by Velázquez in Las Meninas.

16 "And let the squire, if he has one take his seat on the croup, and let him trust the valiant Malambruno; for by no sword save his, nor by the malice of any other, shall he be assailed. It is but to turn this peg the horse has in his neck, and he will bear them through the air to where Malambruno awaits them; but lest the vast elevation of their course should make them giddy, their eyes must be covered until the horse neighs, which will be the sign of their having completed their journey. [...] They were then blindfolded, and Don Quixote, finding himself settled to his satisfaction, felt for the peg, and the instant he placed his fingers on it, all the duennas and all who stood by lifted up their voices exclaiming, "God guide thee, valiant knight! God be with thee, intrepid 10 squire! Now, now ye go cleaving the air more swiftly than an arrow! Now ye begin to amaze and astonish all who are gazing at you from the earth! Take care not to wobble about, valiant Sancho! Mind thou fall not, for thy fall will be worse than that rash youth's who tried to steer the chariot of his father the Sun!" [...] They were puffing at [Sancho] with a great pair of bellows; for the whole adventure was so well planned by the duke, the duchess, and their majordomo, that nothing was omitted to make it perfectly successful... And now they began to warm their faces, from a distance, with tow that could be easily set on fire and extinguished again, fixed on the end of a cane... Now, desirous of putting a finishing touch to this rare and well-contrived adventure, they applied a light to Clavileno's tail with some tow, and the horse, being full of squibs and crackers, immediately blew up with a prodigious noise, and brought Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to the ground half singed." (English translation by John Ormsby, avaible at: http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes/english/ctxt/DonQ-JohnOrmsby/DonQ-JohnOrmsby.html). In another classic commentary on a prank that Sancho unsuccessfully intends to perform on Quixote (the episode of the "Enchanted Dulcinea", narrated in Quixote, Part II, Chapter X), Eric Auerbach (1950) elaborates on the topic of the painful experience of the final triumph of ordinary life over illusion.

Commenting another episode -the one of the "hunting prank" performed on Sancho Panza by the Dukes and their retinue (Quixote, Part II, Chapter XXXV)- Close (1999: 171-172) also points out that the fictional description of the mise-en-scène of this prank is not only consistent with available historical documents about the arts and practice of real hunting in Spain during the XVII Century, but also with historical documents about the real mise-en-scène of similar pranks.

"The dreadful events that follow the hunting and that include the illusion of a forest fire, Muslim troops, the blowing of trumpets and the sounds of cavalry attacking and battlefield racket, perfectly simulated... real military spectacles such as the demonstrations which celebrated the visit of the young King Philip III to the Castle of Denia in 1599 with several feigned battles of this type; and even a prank (similar to the one performed on Sancho in Quixote, Part II, chapter II) consistent in really arranging the defence of the castle to drive back a pretended attack by the Muslim army."

Thus, if we link the former ‘technical procedure’ (i.e. the camera obscura) with the later ‘social situation’ (i.e. the burla palaciega) premises, it can be claimed that this most mysterious of paintings was actually produced as a document of the staging and revelation of a sort of hidden-camera prank (HCP).17

17 As far as I know, the detailed use of the modern audiovisual format of the hidden-camera prank as an analytical model of Las Meninas is a completely original scientific hypothesis. Nevertheless, this hypothesis is consistent, at least partially, with vaguely remarks made en passant by several authors in the sense that the painting has an air of divertimento (scherzo) -"el capricho [es] nuevo" (Palomino)- or looks like having been

11

intended as a ‘painting jest’. It also resounds with some final remarks made in Marías (1995b) about the entertainment function that could have served the work process of Las Meninas. Based on some context information given by Palomino ("Esta pintura fue de Su Majestad muy estimada, y en tanto que se hacía asistió frecuentemente a verla pintar, y así mismo la Reina nuestra señora Doña María Ana de Austria bajaba muchas veces, y las señoras infantas, y damas, estimándolo por agradable deleite, y entretenimiento"), and on the certified procedural fact of some minor alterations or pentimentos visible on the finished painting (see infra for details), Marías conjectures that the painting process of Las Meninas could have been intended as a sort of ‘live show’ for the Royal family and their servants: "We frequently lose sight of the fact that works that are now considered master pieces could have had, while in process, some accidental functions -ephimerous ones indeed, perhaps apparently unimportant- different from those of the finished work. Maybe Philip IV, who loved painting tricks and deceptions, together with the other spectators of the work in fieri, could have been the object of a sustained visual game." (Marías 1995b: 277-278; see also Marías, 2000: 174). But, contrary to my hidden-camera prank hypothesis, this author openly rejects the possibility of a camera obscura device playing any role in the hypothetical pictorial show (e-mail from Fernando Marías to Javier Izquierdo, 12/9/03). The critical argument is developed in Marías (1995a: 16).

When we start out with a piece of data, the question of what we are going to end up with, what kind of findings it will give should not be a consideration. We sit down with a piece of data, make a bunch of observations, and see where they will go. Recurrently, what stands as a solution to some problem emerges from unmotivated examination of some piece of data, where, had we started out with a specific interest in the problem, it would not have been supposed in the first instance that this piece of data was a resource with which to consider, and come up with a solution for, that particular problem. (Sacks, 1984: 27)

This idea, in fact, first came to me while doing research on the discovering procedures employed by actors and victims to put an end to a TV’s hidden-camera prank (HCP) (Izquierdo-Martín, 2004). I was struck, while lecturing someday in the classroom, by the curious similarity between some details of the photograms of a particular HCP’s final revelation sequence (which I had titled "Alberto Llanes’ revelation"18) and some details of Las Meninas. Most notably:

(1) The way the main characters (Alberto Llanes, the victim of the TV prank at the left in the image, and Princess Margarita) seem to be glancing to the front in an

18 See Appendix I for a detailed transcript of this sequence. 12 "unfocusedly focused" manner [see FIGURES 2a, 2b]. Several available comments about the successfull solutions that the technical problem of how to capture "fugitive expression" finds in Velázquez paintings, have devoted very detailed attention to peculiar laughing expressions and fleeting ways of glancing points. There is strong evidence, going back to Leonardo da Vinci, about master painters having used special ‘socio-optical tricks’ highly similar to the modern audio-visual montaje of the HCP to accomplish hyper-realist painting effects like these.19 In the case of Las Meninas, together with the intuitive ressemblance with Alberto Llanes’ victimarily (unaware) glancing at the hidden TV camera20, the fast sketch drawing of Infanta Margarita’s peculiar way of glancing to the front is another strong sign of opticality in painting. 19 The most convincing analysis of this problem have been developed by Carl Justi and David Hockney for the case of the central characters in Velázquez’s painting Los borrachos (1628-29). "The more I think about lenses and painting, and after having used the camera clara, the more I am convinced that an aspect that must be primarily sought for, specially in Velázquez, are the expressions of faces. In his Los borrachos (1628-1629), fugitive glances and open mouths must have been very dificult to "capture"... Baco himslef seems to be turning his eyes and the man with the wine bowl has an expression that cannot be maintained for a long time. His mouth opens in a demi-smile causing a narrowing in his eyes and some foldings in their surroundings. This type of expression has to be trapped inmediatedly. The mouth and eyes are wonderfully telling and I think this can only be done by a virtuous painter with the aid of a lense. All other faces show cheerful, really fleeting expressions. Recently I have been drawing a lot of faces, so now I understood how difficult is to achieve this." (Hockney, 2001: 231). In a couple remarks that venture into the realms of the HCP situation, Carl Justi compared the (unknown) technical procedure used by Velázquez in Los borrachos to solve the problem of painting credible "fugitive expression" with a known procedure used by Leonard da Vinci: "Leonardo sometimes invited peasants to have a drink at his workshop and, when they were drunk he told them funny stories with the aim of drawing their faces seen them from a close room. Perhaps Velázquez did read about this method and similarly took some of these people... and after a couple of drinks got them tipsy for his Baco," (Justi, 1999 [1903]: 241). Later on, commenting about another of Velázquez’s master pieces, La fragua de Vulcano (1630), Justi notes that "the impression of instantaneity rests completely upon this expression of surprise without equal, this just capture of the critical moment, what Leonardo called prontitude. [The characters] do not behave like models posing, but like persons which, as required by the situation, do not feel observed." (ibidem.: 285). 20 In both cases, the possition of the ‘camera’ can be ascertained from the (different) orientations of the victim’s eye pupils: while Alberto Llanes glance orients to something at the upper-left side of the image, Infant Margarita María’s eyes orient to something at the lower-right side of the image. Moffitt (1983) locates the real spatial point occupied by Velázquez eyes into the lower-right part of the real area that extends to the front of the painting; going a little beyond, Mestre Fiol (1977: 100-113, Figs. 19-20) identifies this ideal spectator with the absent Infanta María Teresa, the older daughter of Philip IV and his first wife Isabel de Borbón. 13 Anyway, as ethnomethodologist David Goode (1994: 149) once said referring to a very different though similar practical research situation, the popular saying "A picture is worth a thousand words" pertains to this situation.

And (2) the shared presence of secondary characters that seem to be ‘entering’ the room from a backdoor [see FIGURE 3a, 3b]. After a HCP has been revealed, it is very common that a person that seems to be recognized as familiar by the victim -possibly the trusted person that has previously acted as gancho (tout, procurer), mutually introducing the victim and the professional actors that are going to performing the prank, appears in the room, usually entering from a backdoor, once the end of the "special situation" has been announced by the actor(s) of the prank (see infra) to confirm the restoration of ordinary situational specifics. Similarly, in the painting by Velázquez, there is a character, identified by Palomino21 as Don José Nieto, aposentador de la Reina (Royal Lodger of Queen Mariana de Austria), which seems to

21 Antonio Palomino, El museo pictórico y escala óptica, published in Madrid in 1724 (see Brown, 1986: 256-257). 14 be retiring a curtain or opening a door at the back of the room in Las Meninas. For some authors he is just about to be exiting the room (accompanied by the Royal couple), others conjecture he could be just entering the room to signal (the end of?) something to those present in it.

A second experience reinforced me in my growing suspicion on that matter. In a summer vacation visit to the Torre Tavira, in Cádiz (Spain), I became childishly fascinated by the infinite visual spying opportunities and also by the "hyper-realist" cinematographic quality of the camera obscura panoramic projections of the roofs, churches, parks, shops, traffic and people of the city that can be seen, as a daily tourist attraction, from the top of this ancient (XVIIIth century) observatory for the port arrival of merchant ships. I first attended the camera obscura projections in the Torre Tavira in August 2002. Then, a third experience made me return, the next summer, to the Torre Tavira, this time decided to be more attentive to the technical details of the mirror-lens 15 system of projection (in particular, to the way selected portions of the images are focused in first plane while the rest remains blurred as background landscape) and also to collect some videographic document of the sessions of projections.22

The third experience was the reading of the Spanish version (appeared in 2002) of Secret Knowledge, the marvellous detective-history of "secret" painting tools and techniques written by pop artist David Hockney. Based on an unusually high -if measured against the methodological standards prevailing in the field of academic art history- number of direct visual proofs, Hockney convincingly argues in favour of two closely linked, radical historical conjectures: (a) the widely spread use of optical equipment (mirror and mirror-lens combinations) by master painters since the mid-XVth century until the invention of photography at the end of XIXth century; and (b) the various possible reasons that would have caused this technical knowledge to be a top secret artistic, industrial and political matter.

But, still, a fourth and final event had to occur for me to be able to formulate in concrete terms a refined version of my original hypothesis concerning the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of Las Meninas. This second hypothesis, which adds a very simple praxeological restriction to gain comparatively more descriptive power, sustains that the painting in question is, very literally, an ancient pictorial precursor of this most ordinary of videographic documents, The Making Of... a HCP. That is, Las Meninas not only represents but also is the making-of a camera obscura prank (COP) or, to be more exact, the making-of a COP’s revelation sequence.

Together with the classic ‘trailer clip’, the ‘Making-of’ has become a most popular form of film advertisement or ‘film promo’. Through the sounds and images of the Making-of the would be spectators of a not yet released movie can have a glimpse of the hidden work (traditionally not shown on the final cut) performed on studio sets and exterior sets by the large principal crew working on the film.

In fact, a film about "life on a movie set" can be done with a promotional (e.g. movie clips such as The Making Of... The Lord of the Rings or Cómo se rodó... Soldados de Salamina) or documentary intention (see the film Lost in La Mancha, by directors Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton).23 In the most usual case, that of movie

22 See the video document Torre Tavira. Cámara oscura: todo Cádiz en 360º is available at www.torretavira.com.

23 The shooting of Lost in La Mancha, a 2002 release that documents the (un)making of Terry Gilliam’s film The Man who Killed Don Quixote, was indeed pre-emptively 16 promotion, the capture of the sound and moving images of people at work on the movies is usually performed by a small secondary crew (two or three persons) handling cheap equipment, such as handy camcorders and unwired microphones. Apart from the mandatory interviews with director, producer, writer, starring actors or special effects engineers, a typical The Making Of... promo can include a largely varied collection of all sorts of "curiously discardable" or "informal" footage, most of it produced by the primary crew making the film. It can have, for example, a sample of make-up and dressing proofs, script readings, scene essays, warm-up takes and so-called ‘bloopers’ -these usually funny ‘error takes’ being one of the constituent most highly appreciated by devoted fans of this genre. There are can also be seen and heard conversations between cameramen and actors during a lunch break, shoots of all kind of craftsmen and technicians at work constructing props and mock-ups or adding digital effects to a scene, or sound technicians substituting a broken microphone, or director, writer and actor discussing the meaning of a fragment of the script, crew members interacting with people visiting the set, such as family relatives, studio production executives or insurance company adjusters, etc. And, of course and overall, all kinds of sequences showing in vivo film team work (scripting, directing, acting, photographing, recording, etc.) edited as parallell retrospective action (modus operandi) goint back and forth to and from the final-cut images of the movie (opus operatum). encouraged by Gilliam himself as protective evidence against potential negligence suits against him. (After production debacle came real, the script of the film was retained by the insurance company that hedged the producers of the film against potential financial losses derived from the fact of Gilliam being unable to complete shooting on time).

To devise this last (at least for the moment) version of my conjecture, though, I had to wait until the particular kind of video-document that I have been specially and specially unsuccessfully seeking for in the context of my previous research project on HCPs’ revelation sequences -a making-of (of) a HCP, whichever one prank’s it was- would luckily fall into my hands. The particular document of this class that eventually come to me is the prototypical twenty minutes-long ‘Making-of’ documentary conceived as a promotional TV clip to accompany the theatrical release of some very commercial movie. In this case it was the film El Gran Marciano, a curious underground comedy directed by Antonio Hernández that was screened in Spanish cinemas during the fall of 2000 -and that, incidentally, was almost unanimously 17 considered by newspapers and television film critics as one of the lowest of lowest-brow commercial Spanish films in history.

The film in question tells a real story: that of a pharaonic, three-days long, cleverly staged and (for me, at least) very funny HCP performed on a group of then-recent media celebrities, the twelve youngsters selected to participate in the first season of the blockbuster TV program Gran Hermano.24 With the aid of several trusted people, a big crew of professional actors, and a handful cheap but cleverly crafted light and sound effects, props and mock scenery (such as a handicraft replica of a ‘fallen’ spaceship with its own ‘Russian’ spaceman in it), the movie pranksters succeeded in making its victims believe that they have casually discovered the existence of a secret mission to planet Mars, sponsored by the most powerful governments on earth, that had just brought to our planet a newly discovered extraterrestrial form of life.

The following year the producers of the film released the enlarged video (VHS) and DVD versions for home screening, which, as usual, included some extra footage: scenes edited from the theatrical version, samples from the casting of characters, the trailer of the film, and its The Making Of... -accurately titled El Gran Marciano: cómo puñetas lo hicimos (El Gran Marciano: How the Hell We Did It). After a lengthy intensive examination (which included a detailed transcription of relevant audio-visual elements) of some selected scenes from this latter document25, I found that a (virtual) montage of one particular "exterior shoot" from the original film with their corresponding Making-of "interior shoot" of the control room, would constitute a fascinating audiovideographic alternate of the legendary painting by Velázquez.26

24 This was the Spanish version of Big Brother, the highly successful and controversial ‘total’ reality game which original format was copyrighted by Dutch TV producer Endemol.

25 See Appendix II for one of these Making-Off transcriptions.

26 Later on I entertained the possibility of using as evidence video stills from another, more "legitimate" film, El sol del membrillo (1992), directed by Victor Erice and awarded the International Prize of Film Critics at the 1992 edition of the Cannes Film Festival. This film, intended as a truly cinematographic The Making Of... a realist painting, consist in a subtlety dramatised reconstruction of a failed attempt, by painter Antonio López (Tomelloso, 1936), the most prominent figure of the so-called ‘Madrid School’ of realist painters, at capturing into his canvass a quince tree that ripens under the sun in the autumn of Madrid. (I don’t know if there is publicly available film material about the making of Erice’s film itself). Anyway, I eventually discarded this film material because although it was, apparently, "topically relevant" (a video document of the painting process), it is actually "concretely irrelevant" (nothing to do with the singular enigmas of Las Meninas). Finally, immediately after the first public 18 presentation of my thesis about Las Meninas, at the end of September 2003, I went to see another Spanish film that had been recently released. This film, Noviembre, by young filmmaker Achero Mañas, uses a documentary format to tell the fictitious story of an independent street theatre group that used to perform radical forms of realist street shows. In the middle of the film there is a scene filmed at the Museo del Prado de Madrid in which the two main characters of the film, a couple of amateur theatre actors who are founding members of this radical theatre group, are watching the painting of Las Meninas. Suddenly he falls on the floor making everybody in the room (his girlfriend included) believe that he has suffered a heart attack. He is eventually able to recover with the help of the guards of the Museum and, when on the street, reveals to his girlfriend that it was all feigned. Then the off voice that narrates the story proclaims: "It was there, watching the painting of Las Meninas in the Museo del Prado, when the ‘theatre-documentary’ was invented." But when considering that the spectator of the film have to access this and the ensuing (e.g. the ‘famous one’, titled Atentado, in which, as the narrator says, the actors made surrounding pedestrian believe that a person walking on the street has been shot by a terrorist to the point that the mise-en-scène was only revealed when the simulated victim was about to be surgically intervened by the medical emergency services) ‘radical’ theatre performances as audiovisual documents (the aforementioned scenes of the film were indeed shooted using hidden cameras, that is, as candid camera sketches) the avant-garde label ‘theatre-documentary’ is nothing but a ‘posh’ name for that most ordinary of audiovisual inventions, the good old HCP format which, I claim, is the very radically realist dramaturgical ‘idea’ that an attentive watching of Las Meninas could instill in a truly ‘alternative’, post-TV, generation of actors. (A very different type of work would indeed qualify as ‘theatre documentary’, i.e. the infamous October 30th 1938 CBS radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, a radiodrama adapted from H.G. Wells’ original novel by the Mercury Theatre on the Air under the direction of Orson Welles; see Koch, 2002). From this point of view the most accomplished audiovisual alternates of Las Meninas are not the highly intelectual actoral performances shown in November and its Making-Off documentary (Cómo se rodó Noviembre) but, of course, the highly vulgar real performances shown in El Gran Marciano and El Gran Marciano: cómo puñetas lo hicimos.

At the very end of the final revelation scene of the original film, there is a frame that captures a female victim of the prank while she glances at the camera in front of her in an "unfocusedly focused", Princess Margarita-like manner that I have described as to be looking at the camera without knowing it [see FIGURES 5a, 5b]. If we were to superimpose or somehow photographically "mount" a shoot (sadly not included in the released version of The Making Of... for the film, although there are similar ones corresponding to previous scenes) of the action taking place at this very same moment at the nearby, occult "control room" where the director of the film and their assistants, while laughing from time to time at the contents of the images and sounds received from the outside, co-ordinate the work of hidden cameramen and sound technicians that render the scene into "sound and vision" [see FIGURES 6a, 6b, 6c], we would obtain a finely concrete (though speculative) visual proof concerning the somehow bizarre but

19 wholly ordinary work procedures that Velázquez would have employed to accomplish the mysterious painting. And, thus, the no less bizarre and no less wholly ordinary meaning of Las Meninas.27 27 A slightly different type of aesthetical visual proof of my thesis have indeed been produced. Two series of digital photographic collages were crafted, in collaboration with Nerea G. Pascual, graphic designer, and Riki Cases, photographer, to serve as forensic evidence for the aesthetical plausibility of my literary argument about the practice and meaning of Las Meninas. These works, intended as carefully crafted digital alternates of Las Meninas, are freely inspired on four different sources: (a) strategic details of the painting itself (Princess Margarita glancing in front of her in an "unfocusedly focused" manner; the "theatrical" manners of the two girls closer to her); (b) selected stills from the final revelation sequence of the film El Gran Marciano; (c) selected frames from the promo clip El Gran Marciano: como puñetas lo hicimos (control room scenes); (d) selected frames from the film The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1997) and (e) an aesthetical-technical narrative trick widely employed by ‘video cinema’, i.e. the newly-born film genre created by films like Videodrome (David Chronenberg, 1983), Speaking Parts (Atom Egoyan, 1984) or Sex, Lies and Videotapes (Steven Soderbergh, 1985) and epitomised by the aforementioned The Truman Show. See Izquierdo-Martín, Cases and García-Pascual (2003b) for a cursory description of the making of these series of artistic photographic montages. (A quality version of these photographic works will be soon available at www.ricardocases.com.) Appraised from an anthropological point of view, our original series of "pixel images" created with the aid of a professional digital camera and a handful of computer software packages for digital image processing, try to make salient a characteristic phenomenon of immortal, ordinary social order (Garfinkel, 2002) jointly and irreparably shared by all forms of ancient, modern and contemporary visual art. To wit: that, contrary to Benjamin (1988 [1933]), an image (re)produced by mechanical means can only be understood as a hand-made image. As Hockney (2001: 198) claims, nor mirror or lens -not even computer printers- do make marks on paper, only humans do. As to the possible value of these digital exercises when appraised form a strictly historical point of view, I think Michael Lynch comments on Harold Garfinkel and his student’s fresh praxeological recreations of the classical Galilean physics experiments with balls, inclined planes and pendulums (Garfinkel, 2002: 263-285; Bjelic, 2003) are worth quoting: "Needless to say, the efforts to perform the pendulum and inclined plane experiments have doubtul historical value. The materials, competences, and historical context between performances (if, indeed Galileo performed them at all) are so different as to be laughable. However, the enactments can illuminate aspects of local history that are pertinent to investigators of 17th science, just as they are to phenomenologically inspired investigations of embodied actions in non-scientific contexts." (Lynch, 2002: 476, n. 4). Though I don’t know of any thorough ethnomethodological study of the work of "reading a painting", this one of mine pretends to dwell further, for the case of the academic domain of art history and criticism, into the line of enquiry initiated by Eric Livingston’s ethnomethodological study of the lay and professional work of reading Walt Whitman’s poem The Waste Land (Livingston, 1995). 20 [FIGURE 5a - El Gran Marciano (revelation sequence -film texture): victim looking to the camera without knowing it]

[FIGURE 6b - El Gran Marciano: cómo puñetas lo hicimos (control room action): assistant looking at the screen wall] 21[FIGURE 6c - El Gran Marciano: cómo puñetas lo hicimos (control room action): detail screen]

It is curious: when today we reflect about these jesters and think about their possible role in the Spanish Royal Court, it is difficult for us to think that the King Philip II, or Philip III, or Charles II, the same that appear so serious, reserved and distant on portrait, could have been laughing in the presence of these people. But it is true that these monarchs that historians, or some official varieties of them, have presented as serious and rigorous, also had a capacity of amusement, also had a moment for the laughs that those dwarfs and jesters procured to them. (Valdivieso-González, 2002: 186)

The interpretative scheme of (The Making Of...) a COP posits a lot of new relevant questions for the analyst of Las Meninas. For example: did the prank included her companion maidens, the Meninas, Dona Agustina Sarmiento and Dona Isabel de Velasco, as victims? What about the domestic jesters, the grotesque Mari-Bárbola and dwarf Nicolasito Pertusato? And what about the other servants that appear in second plane, the "vaguely prudish maid" (Ortega y Gasset, 1963: 231) identified as a dueña or dama de honor (maid of honor) named Dona Marcela de Ulloa, the guardadamas or rodrigón (sort of effeminate maidens’ bodyguard) close to her28; and Don José Nieto, aposentador de la Reina (Queen’s lodger), who is withdrawing the curtain that covers the backdoor? Who are the touts and who the victims of the prank? Moreover, who could have promoted it? Maybe his parents King Philip IV and Queen Mariana? And then who planned and designed its staging? Did Velázquez aid the King to stage the

28 Mestre Fiol (1977: 90) identifies the guardadamas as Don Diego Ruiz de Azcona, but acknowledging that "there are doubts about the identity of this character". 22 scene29 or was he a mere instrument of the royal desires? Last but not least, with what purpose or aim was it prepared? Just to have fun? As part of a birthday party or other special celebration? To give the Infanta the painting as a surprise gift? But, overall, we have to ask ourselves: how can we know that the scene being painted could be the moment where the COP is being revealed to the victims by the performers?

Under the scenario of a hidden camera palace prank, it is indeed highly possible that it was the King himself the very person who ideated the performance30, or else sponsored it, "giving others license" (Calvo-Serraller, 1995: 45) to prepare and accomplished it -the painter, for sure, but also some would-be ganchos (touts) for the prank. Apart from the painter, the King and Queen, and the dog, all other characters appearing in the painting could, in principle, have acted as ganchos, but it seems more plausible that the ‘child’ part of the companion of the infant Princess Margarita (the meninas María Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco, and the jesters Mari-Bárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato) that appear in the first plane would have also been victims of the prank along with the infant Princess. While the adult part in the second and third planes (the dueña, and the guardadamas with whom she is talking, and the lodger of the Queen which appears near the stairs) would have play the role of ganchos.

On the other hand, if it was Velázquez the one who have the original idea for the painting he would have needed to communicate it to others before doing it; for example, to the heterogeneous group of persons whose aid or collaboration he needed to accomplish it, and most obviously to King Philip IV. More importantly, being a veteran master of his trade at the time, the painter should have been able to describe the presumably ‘complex self-reflexive’ idea for the painting in the most ordinary terms31 so that would-be collaborators and accomplices would find the idea not only understandable -and, thus, practicable as a real, affordable prank (and not as an ‘imaginary’ or ‘ideal’ one)- but also and overall valuable as a potential source of

29 A possibility articulated by Baticle (1999: 116) although she does not address the problem of the social nature of the (staged) situation.

30 "The love that King Philip IV have for theatrical farces wasn’t limited to watch them nor to perform a small role on them as actor. A public rumour that circulated in the court claimed that when he was alone in his room he spent many hours... imagining the plot of a new play that later on he would command to a company for a representation in the theatre of El Buen Retiro or in other public theatre. Modern scholars, though, plausibly deny that Philip IV did wrote any comedy at all." (Deleito y Piñuela, 1988: 146)

31 On the natural ordinariness of all kind of self-reflexive thinking, see Lynch (2000).

23 aesthetic pleasure. Finally, the painter and presumably also the King would have had to generically explain others the hypothetical ‘complex self-reflexive’ meaning of the already finished work to other persons, and they should have had to be able to do so in the most ordinary terms, so that the eventual public could find their explanation fully understandable.

Under the hypothesis of the painting being a COP, the presumed ‘main victim’ of the painting-prank, the infant Princess Margarita María, would have been the most plausible first candidate for an ex post explanation of the meaning of Las Meninas. And what a most ordinary complex self-reflexive meaning for a father to explain to his six-years old daughter than a painting that is, simply, the ‘making-of’ a COP?

After all, the making-of a COP could have been as completely a familiar thing for a six-years old child born and breed in an exemplary baroque Royal Palace which highly ritualised daily life was being continually ‘animated’, that is, ritually disturbed, teased or comically criticised, by the joking activity deployed by a selected casting of the best available ‘practical’ professional humorists of these times, the bizarre army of jesters and pranksters generically known as gente de placer32, as the The Making Of... a

32 Along with jesters or ‘feigned fools’, indistinctly named hombres de placer, bufones, sabandijas or truhanes, and ‘exotic’, non-white exemplars such pygmies (negrillos), the other typical elements of this group were ‘wonder’ human creatures, mainly enanos (dwarfs), locos o simples (fools) and monstruos (monsters), that is, persons presenting a panoplia of ‘salient’ physical and/or psychical handicaps or malformations of a genetic origin. See the catalogue of jesters serving in the Spanish Royal Courts between 1563 and 1700 by José Moreno-Villa (1939) for data about the many courtesan jesters maintained by Philip IV in his Royal Palace (the Alcázar, in Madrid), specially the many ones famously portrayed by Velázquez (see Valdivieso-González, 2002) and particularly the two dwarfs appearing in Las Meninas: the Italian-born Nicolás Pertusato, "Nicolasito" (enano active in Palace since 1650 until his dead, at the age 65, in 1710, that was promoted to the post of Ayuda de Cámara in 1675) and the German-born María Bárbara Asquen jokingly known as "Mari-Bárbola" or "Barbarica" (enana de la Reina that served in Palace during the period 1651-1700). Four other enanos painted by Velázquez have been identified as Francisco Lezcano "Lezcanillo" or "el enano Vizcaino", Don Sebastían de Morra, and Don Diego de Acedo, this one jokingly (and interestingly) known as "El Primo", possibly, as Moreno Villa (ibid: 55) has conjectured, as a joke to the painter, because the presumed second family name of the dwarf was also ‘Velázquez’. And as for the many portrayed truhanes some of them have been also identified: Don Juán de Austria, Juán Calabazas "Calabacillas", Don Cristóbal de Castañeda y Pernía (named Barbarroja), Pablillos de Valladolid, and, possibly, Antonio Bañules and the famous gentilhombre de placer known as ‘Manolito el de Gante’. It is almost sure, as philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1963: 230) pointed out, that this troupe, which enjoyed great freedom of space and time to look around the palace, would have frequently creeped and hussled into Velázquez’s workshop. 24 HCP is for a six-years old child living in a contemporary, urban middle-class home in which routine life is entertained by an ever-growing, ever-changing population of radio and television ‘comedy’ broadcasts.

More to the point of my argument about the making-of Las Meninas and Las Meninas as a making-of, is the description of a characteristic type of Palace entertainment activity which implied the participation of the ‘practical’ comedians that used to be employed in the Royal Palaces of the House of Austria Spanish Royal dynasty during the period 1560-1700 for the homely amusing of the Royal Families. Along with oficios religiosos (ecclesiastic ceremonies) and funciones de toros (bullfighting spectacles)33, funciones teatrales (theatrical shows) constituted an integral part of the almost weekly -and sometimes daily!- palace performance of birth celebrations, positive war news celebrations, welcoming celebrations, and the like.34 And there were also hybrid, extended variants of Palace theatrical shows in which these practical comedians, the jesters, used to join other Palace entertainment professionals, such as theatre actors and painters, and mix their respective artistic abilities with that of amateur artists recruited among noblemen courtesans and the Royal Family itself (Deleito y Piñuela, 1988: 149ff.) One of the preferred topical themes theatrically reconstructed in this funciones were the very same Palace ceremonies ritually performed on a non-theatrical basis.

It is my claim that a new type of divertimento teatral, the COP was conceived –and maybe de facto invented- in and as one or, perhaps, part of one of these occasioned theatrical performances. Supposing, for the sake of simplicity35, that Infanta Margarita

33 See Shubert (2001: 242-249) for the ritual and protocol details of the corridas de coronación (coronation bullfighting) and other Imperial bullfighting spectacles (celebrations of royal baptisms and marriages, war victories, etc.) hosted by Madrid’s Plaza Mayor during the XVII and XVIII centuries. As part of his last, higher post of Aposentador real [Royal Lodger] (occupied from 1652 until his death in 1660), one of Velázquez’s main tasks consisted in allocating the scarce available seats in the balcones of the Plaza Mayor de Madrid to the ever-growing number of noblemen in Philip IV Spanish Imperial Court (see Cordero y Hernández, 2000: 111-123).

34 Here is, as a typical example, the series of Palace celebrations performed to honour the french Duchess of Chevreuse, arrived in Madrid on the 6th December 1637: "juegos de cañas y sortijas [canes and rings games], toros [bullfighting], máscaras [masquerades], funciones teatrales [theatre shows] and diversiones acuáticas [acuatic entertainments] in El Retiro and monterías [hunting races] in El Pardo. Poets chanted hyms to praise the Duchess, and, finally, Velázquez, painted her portrait." (Deleito y Piñuela, 1988: 221).

35 Indeed I think it is more plaussible that all youngsters in the scene played the role of

25 was the only ‘innocent’ participant in the execution of the original theatrical-pictorial scherzo that later come to be known as Las Meninas (thus playing the role of ‘the lone victim’), the production of an entertainment TV show like this should have implied the participation of a minimum production crew. First of all, the front-stage crew could have been composed by four persons: two professional ‘practical’ comedians (the jester-dwarfs Nicolasito Pertusato and Mari-Bárbola), acting both as ‘actors’ and ganchos, and two amateur actresses (the company maids of Infanta Margarita, the meninas María Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco) acting only as ganchos.36 Then, the backstage crew should have been composed, at least37, by one painter. victims. 36 Of course, the person that performs the role of procurer or tout (gancho) in a prank is ‘performing as’ himself, just like any other normal person is ‘performing’ when doing all kind of normal actions (glancing at others, smiling at others, shouting at others, etc.) in the mist of all kind of normal everyday situations. Except for the fact that in this case, unlike what normally occurs in the majority of the myriad case examples examined by Ervin Goffman in his classic sociological study of everyday dramaturgics (Goffman, 1981 [1959]), what the persons is ‘pretending’ is the very fact of being taking part ‘naturally’ in the fictitious situation created in and as the prank. On some of the most original aesthetical codifications operated over the two main axes (speech and gesture) of practical, real-life, Goffmanesque dramaturgical technique by the combined innovations of playwrights and professional actors in XVII Spanish theatre, see the detailed documentary analysis by Rodríguez-Cuadros (1998). 37 It is thus plausible that the master-painter, busied at the task of rapidly drawing a series of sketch marks on the canvass’ surface guided by selected relevant -"constructively useful" they say in the modern computational theory of vision (cf. Hoffman, 2000: 33; see Coulter and Parsons [1991] for a praxeological critique of this new utilitarian philosophical jargon)- parts of the bright projections created by the camera oscura, was accompanied in the dark room by one or several assistants. The assistant of the painter (which main candidate character in the painting is the person, identified as Don José Nieto, the Queen’s lodger, that seems to be opening the curtain of the backdoor) could have been in charge of the technical corrections (e.g. adjusting focus to track small changes in the position of the characters being painted) needed for the correct operation of the camera obscura as a painting instruments. As Hockney (2001: 15) has pointed out "the popular idea about a painter is that of a lonely heroic individual, like, say, Cézanne o Van Gogh, struggling to represent the world in a new and lively way. Medieval or Renaissance artists were not like that, a better analogy would be that of a CNN or a Hollywood studio. These artists worked in big workshops where a hierarchical system of jobs have been established. They used to attract talent young people to their shops and the best of them were rapidly promoted. They were producing the only existing images at that time." See Izquierdo-Martín (2003a) for some painting-like activities identified by an in vivo observation of the work of a cameraman who is taking a front shoot -again, a constructively relevant visual sketch of a human figure made out of electronic light points- of the face of a comedian during the recording of a stand-up comedy TV program. 26 This painter, the famous Diego de Silva Velázquez, hidden, altogether with his ‘camera’ in the shadowed neighbour room (la Pieza de la Torre Dorada) in which a precise combination of tunnelled light and involving darkness was functioning as a natural form of camcorder, would have being carefully but quickly38 preserving for eternity some of the more relevant visual details of the funny (and, otherwise, that is, without the occult participation of the painter, sheerly preposterous) scene taking place front-stage: the patently ridiculous –and hence, potentially comic39- social situation of a group of people that seem to be acting as if they were waiting to be portrayed by a painter or, better, as if they were being portrayed by a painter… while they are already and in fact being portrayed by a (hidden) painter.40 38 "Las Meninas could be called the largest oil-sketch ever made." (Brown, 1986: 261). 39 See Goffman (1963) for the alternative common-sense (and psychiatric) view of flagrant interactional absurdities as activities expressing symptoms of mental illness. A somewhat different interpretative point of view which, in the case at hand, could have also been of (secondary) relevance: note the pre-eminent role of the two dwarf-jesters. For Moreno Villa (1939: 34-35), on the other hand, the presence of Nicolasito Pertusato and Mari-Bárbola in the painting is but the best illustration of the primary cosmetic function served by courtesan dwarfs: that of making salient, by way of contrast, the beauty of the Royal persons close to them. 40 A zero-level, natural kind of joke is practically embedded in the hidden (to the objects eyes) configurational aspect of most camera obscura phenomena: persons can be captured into painting while being completely unaware of their doing as "painting models". In the case of Las Meninas, though, the joke is not just that a camera obscura did as a hidden camera there at the Alcázar Palace, but in the fact that the noble art of spying others through the looking-glass was pictorically rediscovered by Velázquez as (and thus transformed into) a means for laugh and making laugh. I think this is good answer to the million-dollar question: where is the joke here? (I thank Prof. Howard Becker for having asked it to me for the first time after a presentation of an early version of this paper at the session on Art and Everyday Life, Murcia ESA Conference, September 24th, 2003). Also, if we follow the Eliasian line of thinking about the civilizing process of wild warrior-like habits into well-mannered courtisan "rituals of interaction" (see infra for an extended discussion), there could hardly have been need or opportunity for a secondary joking script (say, an artificial situation could have been staged in which Infanta Margarita had to act, talk or believe in a determinate manner, e.g. as if some gift surprise or special guest was about to enter the room of the Cuarto Bajo del Príncipe) to be added to the primary joking situation documented in and as Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Who would, after all, have dared to bother or delude the younger, beloved daughter of the Spanish Imperial King "just for laughts"? More than any generic innovation of structural content or function (Maravall, 1999), it is this gentle shift from spying games to joking situations that, for me, defines the "modern spirit" of Velázquez highly praised pictorial realism. 27 5. For Your Majesty Eyes Only: A Sociological Conjecture about the Invention of a Non-violent Form of Seriousness in Humour

In so far as you have to deal with a society that was aware of a history, that was oriented to a history, then you damn well have to consider that the things you found were put there for you, or for someone such as you, and could have been put there with various attitudes... It is in that kind of context that [sociologist] Harold Garfinkel is not making a joke when he says that other societies may have been leaving things "jokingly" or "interestingly". The question is of developing resources for detecting that. We assume that we have an ancient world which was unsmiling when, of course, all the pictures of them indicate that they were constantly smiling. (Harvey Sacks, quoted in Lynch and Bogen, 1996: 62)

Last but not least, some necessary remarks on the ever controversial topic of the relationships between the ordinary, common, ritual and profane attributes of what we call the sense of humour, and the specialised, private, rational and sacred qualities that we associate with the scholarly analysis of the work of art. It is my claim that, when considered as a document of the staging and revelation of a practical joke, the painting by Velázquez doesn’t lose any artistic merit. On the contrary, it derives a plus of aesthetic value from its new ascription to an enlarged domain of historical cultural practice.41

On this point, it has been the work by Close (2000) on the peculiarly baroque ‘Comic Mind’ (i.e. comic culture) that nurtured the literary genius of Cervantes and specially the lasting thoughts on human nature and human fate expressed on his Quixote, the very touchstone that paved the way for my parallel appraisal of the comic mind of everyday life as enriching the aesthetic field and the artistic value of Las Meninas.42 So, besides being fascinated and moved by it, Spanish King Philip IV, which

41 In deep philosophical-aesthetical, as well as sociological-praxeological terms, the hypothesis of the comic or humorous character of a work of art is intimately linked to the hypothesis of the causal action of hazard, as it is a contrario revealed by the following quote: "From the point of view of art history, it is anachronistic to pretend that the painting of this age [XVII century], except landscapes or perhaps some comic or grotesque subjects, could have been inspired by hazardous inventions. This is the reason why, "Las Meninas", a painting that figures among the master works of the XVII century, cannot be explained using the argument of hazard." (Emmens, 1995: 44, my emphasis).

42 "It is this [inventiveness] which generates the prodigiousness of [Cervantes] comic characters and situations, their larger-than-life quality… and a simultaneous source of admiración (wonderment) and risa (laughter)." (Close, 2000: 24). A second important, if more remote, source of inspiration for this (deep) particular point of my larger 28installed this mysterious painting centred on his younger daughter in one of the most private rooms of the Alcázar Palace (the pieza del despacho de verano, an office adjacent to the King’s bedroom) (Brown, 1986: 259), should have find it very funny and laugh at it often in remembering with how much propiedad (artistry, wit) and discreción (cleverness of style) was it accomplished.43 argument, has been the pioneer sociological work by Harvey Sacks on "the dirty joke as a technical object" (Sacks, 1992b). The third intellectual ally for my point here is a novel which main insights -i.e. some elements for a theology of laughter- had been impressed deeply and latently into my mind for some sixteen years or so: from that distant day when I first saw the movie version (a 1986 release directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud) of it in tv (or was it one of those highschool cinema sessions?)... until January 2005, eve of Epiphany, exactly twenty five years since the introduction of the book was finished by its author (the same day, incidentally, Professor Jonathan Brown appeared in a newspaper interview saying that "each generation has its own answers [to the enigmas of Las Meninas]", Brown, 2005: 43)-, when, confronting the fear, at the end of my first time through reading of the book I dared to watch the film again -this time it was a DVD "collection" copy released in 2004 which, of course, included The Making Of... of the film. Have you said "the fear"? Which fear? "He feared the second book of Aristotle[’s Poetics] because maybe that book could teach how to deform the face of all truth not to became slaves of our own ghosts. The task of he who loves mankind is perhaps to make people laugh at truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth consists in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for truth." (Eco, 2004: 701, emphasis in the original).

Although in a text specifically devoted to the subject, Norbert Elias, one of the most subtle analyst of the social and cultural specifics of European courtesan society, treats Las Meninas merely as a vignette to illustrate some components of a preordinated theoretical model of the historical sociogenesis of epistemological modes of thinking (see Elias, 1995)44, I think that a more interesting -if nor more correct- conjecture about the historical origins and significance of this painting, both as cultural (artistic) and social (moral) invention, can be faithfully inspired by his works. In The Civilising Process, his monumental study of the historical process of domestication of ‘wild’ habits of behaviour, progressively codified into Goffmanesque "theatrical rituals" conformed to etiquette norms, Elias (1987) has showed that ‘courtesan manners’, the ceremonially pacificated ways of verbal and body communication, epitomised by the

43 See Rodríguez-Cuadros (2000) for the quality of "discreción" as applied to the stilish little comedies by playwriter Pedro Calderón de la Barca, another of the lasting artistic genious associated with the Spanish court of Philip IV.

44 Very much like Michel Foucault did in the classic introductory piece to Les mots et les choses (1968), where he used the painting by Velázquez as a mere excuse to expose his theoretical model of the classic episteme of "natural representation" (Foucault, 1995).

29 unendingly recursive etiquette rules at the XVII Century French court of Louis XIV (Elias, 1982), that accompanied the ascent of the new European absolutist states, are the original model of the specific socio-cultural vintage of moral values that we have come to know as ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ and recognise as the very trademarks of Western Civilisation. Elias also located the ultimate material force behind this long-term process of courtesanisation of legitimate interactional behaviour in the mechanics of a new system of social control: the monopolistic appropriation of legitimate bodily violence (and, derivatively, of legitimate fiscal taxation) by the Royal Central Authority of the King.45

Although Elias does not considers the verbal and bodily ‘mannered skills’ of humorous communication as a strategic subject of research on the civilising process it can be correctly claimed that humour was a central vector of the civilising process of habits which social and cultural borders were masterfully portrayed by Elias.46 Commenting on the important role played by of dwarf and jesters in the Spanish Royal Court of King Philip IV, Valdivieso-González (2002: 186) observes that:

"The laugh of the King and Queen was in certain ways surveyed by special courtesan advisors who told them to laugh in a restrained manner at a comedy performance. There is a well-known anecdote about Queen Mariana, the wife of Philip IV at the time Velázquez painted Las Meninas, being reprimanded by her aya [nanny] for laugh too exaggeratedly at the jokes of a dwarf, on the basis that it was not proper for a Queen to lost her composure that way.47 [...] [On the other

45 In a coda to a curious sociological exercise consisting in translating Goffman’s theatrical lexicon into the critical language of (Bourdieu’s post-structural) class analysis, Boltanski (1973: 140-142) offers an interesting remark about the possibility of finding in (the history of) legal grammar(s) robust substitutes for both types of analytical vocabularies. Legal categories are a special kind of linguistic forms which referential meanings are enforceable, that is, can be brought to real existence resorting to the legitimate use of physical violence.

46 The forms of moral reasoning used by XVIIIth Century English nobility to judge on the appropriateness or inappropriateness of concrete manifestations of joking behaviour were exposed by Adam Smith in his classic moral treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759-1790). For example, on the disgust caused to us by the behaviour of someone sitting close to us who reacts laughing "too loud or too long" to a joke that for us is "just laughable" (Smith, 1997 [1790]: 61). See also the remarks by Thomas Hobbes in his De Cive (1647), such as the one on the joking-together/joking-at-absents quality of many spontaneous meetings interpreted as a mutual demonstration of poverty or a collective longing for glory (Hobbes, 1966 [1647]: 64-65).

47 Referring this same story, Deleito y Piñuela (1988: 68) specifies the correct identity for the servant that reprimanded Queen Mariana: it wasn’t her nanny but her camarera (lady-in-waiting), identified as "la Condesa de Medellín."

30 hand] the jesters and dwarfs living in the Alcázar Palace have permission to transgress the etiquette of the courtesan ceremonials, they could behave with self-confidence and cheek."

Now imagine that, in the context of the Spanish Imperial Court of Philip IV, in the middle of the XVII century, a person, for any reason (aesthetical, political, metaphysical or whatnot), would have tried to invest such an unserious thing as a mere burla (prank) with the sacred moral quality of ‘seriousness’. The moral quality of seriousness can be pragmatically constructed in different ways. As applied to pranks, for example, violent pranks or pranks that end in violence are, no doubt, serious things.48 The TV prank, the HCP, is but a softened variety of serious prank: a practical joke that can end been judged by its victim to be a ‘serious thing’ even without the presence of any element of physical violence on it (else as ‘teaser’ or undesired consequence).49 Thus, to cut verbal or bodily violence at the onset, the actors performing HCP use to proffer a varied but limited repertoire of ‘revelation sentences’ that at the same time that ‘reveal’ to the victim the very fact that has been previously and carefully hidden to him (that "this is a prank") have the magical power to suddenly calm down the most offended victim by means of offering her an acceptable justification for the offences made: "There’s a camera over there", "You are been watched in TV", "This is a prank for the TV" (Izquierdo-Martín, 2004: 5.2.)

Then, if we apply the thesis of Elias, under the newly established normas de etiqueta (etiquette rules) which adapted to the Royal monopoly over legitimate physical violence50 the ancient (or, at least, Medieval) resort to the omnirrelevant communicational device of physical violence as a constitutive element of the seriousness of a public performance would have been severely restricted at that time. Hence, it is plausible that a concrete original form of moral appellation to the legitimate

48 See Izquierdo-Martín (2004: 5.2.) for a detailed analysis of audio-visual documents exemplifying this possibilities.

49 See for example J. del Pino, "Una pareja reclama 10 millones de dólares a la MTV por una broma de cámara oculta", diario EL PAIS, Madrid, 15 de junio de 2002.

50 Rodríguez Villa (1913) describes the contents of a Royal document, dated 1651, that prescribes in full detail the mise-en-scène of the specific variety of courtesan etiquette practised in the Spanish Royal Palaces since the adoption of the Protocolo Borgoñón (Burgundial ceremonial) in 1548 by Charles V. Among many other things, the document prescribes in full detail a series of ritual arrangements that have to be made on the normal disposition of royal rooms in the eve of a comedy performance.

31 presence of a "public eye"51 -even if the public reduced to a minimum: the Royal eyes or the selected group of original would-be viewers of a private Royal painting- could have optimally served his purposes.52 After all that is exactly what Cervantes did in the Quixote: then, why Velázquez wouldn’t have tried to render the same ideal strategy of furtively (i.e. artistically) gaining social impunity for discourteous (unconventional) behaviour into the ever mysterious material, visual expression of Las Meninas?

ni externo muro ni secreto centro. (Jorge Luis Borges, "Laberinto")

Partly intended, as has been rightly pointed out by Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido (1998: 193), as strategic moves aimed at leveraging their authors to the artistically intellectual heights attained by Diego de Silva Velázquez (1599-1660) in his work Las Meninas, finished in between 1656-1657 (four years before his death) and

51 The distinctive ‘mode of justification’ expressed by claims as to the benign (pedagogic, democratic, profitable, entertaining) nature of (audio)visual publicity, has become the core of our present standard repertoire of practical motives for ‘peeping’ into others’ lives, misery and suffering (Boltanski, 1993). See Maravall (1980) for a generic argument about the structural functions served by the visual arts in the context of XVI-XVIIth centuries Spanish Imperial politics.

52 An exercise consisting in sound tracking/subtitling the painting with expressions patterned on the typical references to TV cameras and TV public used by actors to reveal and end TV hidden-camera pranks, can get us closer to the verbal concreteness that my conjectured moral justification behind Las Meninas as a political and visual experiment would have needed if it were to attain real expression and thus real social effect. Just at the moment captured by the painting, the instant when Infanta Margarita seems to be saying "aun no" (not yet) (Emmens, 1995: 61) or, better, "ya no" (not now), to the búcaro, the little jug with perfumed water offered to her by Agustina Sarmiento ("X-ray have showed that, originally, Margarita ha her right arm raised, expression surprise or else impatient to get the beverage." [McKin-Smith and Newman, 1993: 41]), the Menina situated at her left in the painting, the King must have say something like to his daughter: "Guess what? You’re been watched by the painter through that whole!", "Want to know something? They’re seen you on the other room", "Look there! To the hole on the curtain in front of you!", "This is a prank, Velázquez and his assistants are painting you on the other room", "There’s a camera obscura behind the curtain", "All this was joke, you have all being painted all this time!", etc.

32 unanimously considered to be the most famous exemplar of Spanish Baroque Art and one of the all-times classic master pieces of visual art, a growing corpus of interpretative essays by renowned art historians, philosophers and sociologist have set for them the Herculean task of trying to solve the multiple (aesthetical, philosophical, historical, technical, sociological, political, religious, etc.) enigmas posed by it.

The work presented here is by no means an exception on the strategic academic dimension, although I will not be pretending here to be presenting new, unknown historical (documentary) evidence about a putatively real (i.e. authentic) The Making of... (of) the painting, or be offering any ‘original’ philosophical-aesthetical ‘interpretation’ of its meaning, or having found the solution to a lasting empirical-theoretical problem in the field of art history (Ángulo-Iñiguez, 1999 [1947]: 96-97). What I do pretend is quite a different thing: to show that humour, as a vastly pervasive phenomenon of social order, not only is a serious scientific research topic but a most valuable one (Sacks, 1992a). For in science as in everyday life, our common, ordinary ‘sense of humour’ constitutes an ‘omnirrelevant’ procedural device (Sacks, 1992c), something like a master communicational key that opens all kinds of cultural locks, that is, all kinds of uniquely specialised domains of cultural practice. This way the (ethnomethodological) study of humour allows for the (ethnomethodological) study all kind of ‘workplaces’ (Mulkay, 1988), even -perhaps specially- those ones that host activities considered to be ‘too technical’, such as scientific laboratories (see Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984). Or, for the case at hand, ‘too artistic’, such as painters’ ateliers.

Last but not least, as applied to the particulars of humorous and joking behavior, the ethmothodological study of practical action and practical reason respecifies the metaphysical enigma of how to find out the impossible way out of Borges’ labyrinth in the form of a peculiarly practical question (Sacks, 1972: 41-49): precisely how is it that joking, the very epithome of the joy of living, can also be accomplished as the most awesome, the most disconcerting form of a tragical feeling for life.53 Ethnomethodological studies about suicide offer a most perspicuous setting to account empirically for this pervasive phenomenon of social order, a sadness redoubling joke, as exemplified by the following conversational exchange between a ‘suicidal caller’ (C) and a ‘help servicer’ (S) included in a pioneer study of telephone calls to a Suicide Prevention Centre:

53 See Maffesoli (2001: 87-88) for a suggestive theoretical formulation of a convergent

33

hypothesis.

C1: ... I mean the thing that makes it even more serious to me is the once or

twice that I’ve mentioned it -not deliberately, but kind of slipping to the family or anything like that, they try to make a joke of it, you know.

S1: Well, no, see here we take all of that seriously.

C2: And believe me, it’s no joke, because as I say, I just don’t feel my life is

worth anything at this point. (in Sacks, 1972: 70, my emphasis).54

Some of the visual concretedness with which this radical phenomenon of social order, that the seriousness of joking is more serious the seriousness of seriousness, could have been, somewhere, sometime rendered analitically available for praxeological historical research -other societies may have been leaving things "jokingly" or "interestingly" (Harold Garfinkel)-, is arguably what Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, a mainstream reference in the academic field of the XXth Century historiographical research on Imperial politics in XVIIth Century Spain, speculated all about in the introductory lines to a theoretical account of the dynamic ‘athmosphere’ that ritually overdetermined into a characteristically political-religious form of life55 the phenomenological structures of everyday life vernacular of the Spanish Royal Court of King Philip IV during the second half of the Siglo de Oro:

54 A second example taken from an ethnomethodological study of the proceedings of a coroner’s report: "A 19 year old Localtown youth who was found dead in a car which had a piece of hose pipe leading from the exhaust to the interior was ‘as happy as the day is long’ said his mother at an inquest on Thursday. The Coroner received a verdict that the youth, Robert Andrews, car salesman of Elder Street, Localtown, took his own life and added: ‘There was no doubt that he intended to take his life but there was no evidence to show the condition of his mind at the time’." This later statement is somewhat strange in view of the fact that much of the relatively long report which follows deals with an apparently stormy love affair the deceased had been having. What is interesting is that, in other cases, such evidence would be taken seriously and used as an indicator of intent. Here, somewhere, the witnesses seem at pains to make out that the affair had not been a serious one. His brother describes a row between the two of the as a ‘tiff’, and his mother described his relationship with the girl thus: "they were just good pals. He had only been calling on her recently and when I asked him if she had given him the push, he replied ‘perhaps I have given her the push’. He had a habit of making a joke of things", she said." (Atkinson, 1978: 162-163, my emphsis).

55 In the long introductory study to a Spanish edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), sociologist Carlos Moya equates the ritual overdetermination of physical social action with the reflexive workings of a short of extended Goffmanian dramaturgics of everyday life, a deeply constituve political-religious theatre [teatro político-religioso] of the ordinary world (Moya, 1984).

34 "The reign of Philip IV (1621-1665) is one of the longest and decisive of our history; it was like a theatre drama in two acts: the first half is dominated by the person of the Conde Duque de Olivares; missing from the scene in 1643, the personal government of the King covers the second half of the century; there was, then, a substantial identity of ideas and purposes, although the deployment of the action changed from drama (with touches of comedy [con ribetes de comedia]) to tragedy. Tragedy of a country and a King that initiated his mandate with dreams of glory and ended thrown into the abbys." (Domínguez-Ortiz, 2003: 165, my emphasis).

Hence my final claim that, if you understand, say, Velazquez’s Las Meninas as a landmark event in the Universal History of jokes, pranks and jests -the invention of The Making of... A Camera Obscura Prank- you are literally getting a little deeper into the ever concrete thickness of detail of any candidate real, sensible object that could have been glossed by Domínguez-Ortiz’s abstract historico-political formulation (‘the tragedy of a country’). Though maybe it wasn’t that tragical, you know...

35 Appendix I: Alberto Llanes’ HCP - Revelation Sequence (d = 39.4 seconds)

((Plano 1: plano corto de A, hombre joven, a la izquierda de la imagen y V, otro hombre joven, a su derecha, sentados ambos a la mesa de un restaurante))

1 A: Te voy a denunciar públicamente, te vuelvo a repetir

2 A: Mira yo- ¿Cómo te llamas?

((Cambia a Plano 2: primer plano, desde una segunda cámara, de V, de frente en el centro de la imagen. A, de perfil, está en el borde izquierdo de la imagen))

3 V: Yo, Alberto

4 A: ¿Alberto qué más?

5 V: Llanes

6 A: Alberto Llanes le

((Cambia a Plano 1: A mira hacia el frente, hacia la cámara 1))

7 A: denuncio públicamente

(0.5)

8 A: de que es

(0.7)

9 V: [¿Qué haces?]

]

10 A: [La verdad] que es un poco impresentable

((mirando todavía hacia la cámara))

((Cambia a Plano 2))

36 11 A: por que:: [Alberto Llanes] ((mirando hacia V))

]

→12 V: [¿Qué haces]

((Cambia a Plano 1: A mira hacia V que mira hacia el frente despistado))

→13 A: ¿Eh?

→14 V: ¿Qué haces?

15 A: ((Se vuelve a mirar hacia el frente)) (0.6)

16 A: Pues estoy mirando p’allí

((hace un gesto extendiendo su brazo derecho y señalando con la mano hacia el frente))

17 A: y estoy mirando::

((recoge la mano derecha hacia el pecho))

(0.4)

18 A: ¿Por qué estoy mirando p’allí?

((vuelve a señalar al frente con la mano derecha))

19 V: ¿Qué, qué??

((Se encoge de hombros y luego vuelve la cabeza para mirar a A))

20 A: Porque si te fijas

((señalando al frente))

→21 V: Tu estas [zum-] ((vuelve a mirar al frente))

[

22 A: [Porque] si te fijas ahí enfrente

37 23 A: No el zumbado eres tú

((lleva la mano derecha con la que estaba señalando al frente hacia la derecha de la imagen y le da varios toquecitos a V con el dedo índice en su brazo))

24 A: el zumbado eres tú

25 A: ((Vuelve a señalar al frente con el índice de su mano

recha))

de 26 A: porque eso es una cámara de

((Suena sintonía musical))

27 A: ((Mueve el brazo con el que señala hacia la izquierda))

((Cambia a Plano 2))

28 A: ((Señala con su brazo hacia la segunda cámara y V mueve

la cabeza siguiendo su indicación))

→29 V: ((Con la boca abierta, frunce ligeramente el ceño))

→30 V:((‘Despierta’ repentinamente: echa el cuerpo hacia

adelante de golpe y baja la cabeza fijando la vista, con expresión sorprendida,en el objeto que le señala A y que por

38 fin ha ‘encontrado’))

31 A: ((Recoge su brazo y V vuelve la cabeza para mirarle, con

inicio de sonrisa))

un 32 V: ((Inicia un gesto de decepción: cierra los ojos, gira la

cabeza lentamente, moviéndola hacia atrás y hacia la derecha, y comienza a soltar un resoplido))

Cambio a Plano 1))

(( 33 V: ((Con la cabeza vuelta completamente hacia la derecha y

mostrando una media sonrisa, vuelve a resoplar; A se ríe mirando hacia la mesa; detrás de ambos se abre una puerta y asoma G, una mujer))

34 V: ((Se lleva las manos a la cabeza y, tras exclamar algo,

muestra una sonrisa desencantada. A le mira riéndose y G, trás, también ríe))

de 35 V: ((Menea la cabeza a derecha e izquierda con gesto de

decepción))

36 A: ((Le da varias palmadas en el hombro y V, riéndose, se

restriega los ojos con la mano y luego se dirige con la mirada hacia alguien, a la derecha de la imagen, a quien no vemos))

39 Appendix II: El Gran Marciano: como puñetas lo hicimos - Sequence 1 (‘Radioactivity’) [d = 49.2 seconds]

1 Cámara de directo (la pantalla muestra en el centro una

imagen alargada delimitada arriba y abajo por dos bandas oscuras): plano del exterior de la nave, toma sagital, desde arriba. Vemos un grupo de seis personas arremolinadas junto a la puerta de la nave.

2 Cambia a cámara del making off: primer plano del realizador

en el interior de la sala de mandos diciéndoles a los cámaras a través del micrófono: "La que entra ahora es la que nos interesa."

Cambia a plano directo: la cámara que enfoca a la entrada

de la nave toma un plano de Maria José entrando en la nave

4 Cambia a plano directo del interior de la nave: vemos al

astronauta tendido en el suelo y luego a Maria José dirigiéndose hacia él. 3

40 5 Cambio de plano: Israel y Maria José dirigéndose hacia el

astronauta, tomados de frente por una tercera cámara.

Making off: primer plano del realizador. Oimos la voz del

director diciéndole: "Es Jorge, es Jorge, ahí."

El realizador se vuelve para mirar hacia uno de los

monitores situado a la izquierda del muro de pantallas y dice: "¿Dónde está Jorge?", mientras el ojo de la cámara del making off se vuelve en la misma dirección que la mirada del realizador para ofrecer un plano del monitor en el que aparece, de espaldas, Jorge, en una imagen monócroma en tonos azules.

Realizador: "Ahí está Jorge, ya (no se entiende)", mientras

el cámara del making off maniobra para tomar un primer plano central del monitor con la imagen de Jorge, de espaldas caminando hacia la nave.

Cambia a plano directo: imagen en color de Jorge, de frente,

caminando por el campo. Jorge les grita a sus compañeros "¡Pero qué haceis ahí tocándolo, estais descerebrados!", gesticulando aparatosamente con los brazos.

Cambia a cámara del making off. Primer plano del realizador

con el micrófono y la botella de agua frente a él. 6 7 8 9 10

41 11 El plano se abre para mostrar, a la derecha de la imagen, al

director de fotografía, sentado junto al realizador, riendo e indicando con su brazo hacia alguno de los monitores del muro de pantallas que está frente a ambos. Se oyen gritos de otras personas en el interior de la sala de mandos.

Primer plano del director de fotografía con su brazo derecho

extendido, riéndose.

La cámara gira hacia la derecha para mostrar, junto al

director de fotografía la cara del director, con gorra, que también rie abiertamente. Oimos la voz de realizador que le dice a un cámara a través del micro: "¡Dame la puerta!"

Giro de nuevo hacia la izquierda para mostrar al realizador

diciéndole al micro: "¡Alfonso dame la puerta, Alfonso dame la puerta!"

Cambio a plano directo del interior de la nave: vemos a

Israel y Marina en el centro de la imagen. 12 13 14 15

42 16 Cambia a plano directo de Jorge, en el centro, e Ismael a su

izquierda, que están junto a la puerta de entrada de la nave, pero todavía en el exterior. Jorge, con las dos manos recogidas contra su pecho, les grita a los de dentro: "¡Salir de ahí, está contamina-"

Cambia a plano directo: un primer plano de Jorge e Israel

juntos, tomado por el cámara-gancho que acompaña al grupo. Oimos el final del grito de Jorge: -dooooo!!!" Jorge se da la vuelta mientras se escucha una voz femenina que le llama: "Jorge".

La cámara sigue a Jorge mientras corre, alejándose de la

nave y, mirando hacia atrás con su brazo izquierdo extendido, exclama "¡Pero cómo podeis permitir hacer esto, coño!"

Cambia a cámara making off. Interior de la sala de mandos.

El director, con gorra, en primer plano, riendo, dice "Es genial". 17 18 19

43 20 Cambia a plano directo, cámara en el exterior de la nave.

Jorge, señalando con su mano hacia la nave, grita a sus compañeros: "¡No podemos entrar ahí dentro, no sabemos de dónde viene!"

Cambia a cámara de making off. Sobre la voz de Jorge que

continua con la frase anterior "-no sabemos de dónde viene!", se nos muestra el plano de uno de los monitores de la sala de mando, imagen en color del grupo reunido en torno a Jorge. Iván, a la derecha de la imagen, dirigiéndose hacia Mabel, abajo a la izquierda, junto a Israel, con camiseta naranaja. Ania, en medio de ellos se desplaza hacia la derecha de la imagen señalando con su brazo hacia un punto fuera de plano. Luego aparece Maria José, con camiseta morada, en el margen izquierdo de la imagen.

Cambia a plano directo de Jorge, en el centro de la imagen, exclamando: "!Nos van a poner en cuarentena, gilipollas!"

Cambia a cámara de making off. Plano de un de los monitores,

imágen monocroma en tonos azules, plano lejano, desde arriba, de varios miembros del grupo. De izquierda a derecha en la imagen se ve a: Maria José, Jorge, Ania e Israel. Se oye el audio de la sala de mandos: aplausos. 21 22 23

44 24 Rápido movimiento de izquierda a derecha de la cámara en el

interior de la sala de mandos: sale de la imagen del monitor, muestra fugazmente el muro de pantallas y luego el tablero de mandos y luego la mano y una parte de la cabeza del director de fotografía, inclinado sobre la mesa partiéndose de risa.

25 El director de fotografía se incorpora y vuelve su rostro

carcajeante hacia la cámara, mientras en la parte inferior de la derecha de la imagen aparece la gorra del director.

Ahora el cámara abre el plano y nos muestra a la izquierda

al realizador, con gafas de sol sobre su frente que también rie. El director de fotografía se lleva una mano a la cabeza mientras exclama: "¡Es cojonudo!".

El cámara enfoca ahora hacia la derecha, al director que

esboza una sonrisa y se toca la barbilla con sus dedos, mientras, por los altavoces de la sala de mandos escuchamos la voz de Jorge que dice: "Es americano, norteamericano." El director de fotografía, recuperándose del ataque de risa, se mesa los cabellos. 26 27

45 28 Cambia a plano directo del actor que hace de astronauta en

el interior de la nave mientras seguimos escuchando el audio del interior de la sala de mando, con las risas de sus habitantes.

Cambia a plano del exterior de la nave: vemos a Jorge en

primer plano. Está inclinado a la entrada de la nave, preguntándole al astronauta que está dentro: "¿Radiactividad? ¿Radiactivit?"

Cambia a cámara del making off. En primer plano, de perfil y

con los ojos tapados por la visera de la gorra, vemos al director y a su izquierda, en segundo plano, el director de fotografía riendo. Oimos la voz del director imitando entre risas la frase anterior de Jorge: "¿Radioactivity?". Mientras oimos esto vemos un doble desplazamiento de la cámara de derecha a izquierda y luego a la inversa que nos muestra primero, fugazmente, al director de fotografía dando una sonora palmada mientras se convulsiona de risa, y luego de nuevo, un plano del director, en el margen izquierdo de la imagen, y a la derecha, detrás de él, una mesa de mezclas sobre la que hay una mano.

El director, riendo, vuelve su cabeza y se dirige hacia

alguien que está sentado detrás de él. 29 30 31

46 32 Cambia a plano directo del exterior de la nave. Jorge en el

centro de la imagen, acompañado de Ismael, a su izquierda, exclama "¡Ahora sí!", dirigéndose a alguien a su derecha fuera de plano.

Cambia a cámara del making off. Plano del interior de la

sala de mandos: vemos al realizador, con camiseta blanca, inclinado sobre la mesa de trabajo y a su izquierda (derecha de la imagen) la cabeza del director de fotografía. La cámara se mueve hacia la izquierda, en el sentido contrario a las agujas del reloj hasta mostrar el micrófono y las dos botellas de agua que tiene ante sí el realizador, que exclama entre risas: "¡Esto es cojonud-!"

(FIN DE LA SECUENCIA) 33

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52 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Session on Everyday Life and the Arts organized by the Sociology of the Arts Research Network at the VI European Conference of Sociology (Murcia, Spain, 23-26 September 2003). Crash of digital image presentation there was compensated by audience’s remarks more attentive than average. The present version (Madrid 5/1/2005; Word count: 20,352) has benefited from that fortunate event. The author also wishes to thank the following people: Ramón Ramos, unending source of academic support, intellectual inspiration and personal delight, and a real Velázquez’s character himself!; Carlos Moya, mentor, friend, and a sociological door out of the ordinary; Riki Cases, toughest of tennis opponents and photographers; Nerea G. Pascual opened the Pandora Box of Photoshop as the most ordinary thing in the world; Jesús Puch, homo audiovisualis, once told me what does a TV studio smells like; Juanma Iranzo, my own private Tristram Shandy; and, last but not least, Beatriz Hernández and the rest of the crew at the Departamento de Vídeo Digital of the Centro de Medios Audiovisuales (CEMAV-UNED, Madrid) -the "usual capturers." Jaume Sisa & Ricardo Solfa are there to remind me of the bomb that exploded into my head. All translations from castellano are mine except when noted.