The Relevance of Velázquez’s ‘The Girls’ in Modernity

In the history of modern thought, The Girls is the subject of a legendary text that serves as the opening chapter to Words and Thingsthis “Archaeology of Human Sciences” that Michel Foucault published in 1966 (relaunched among us by Edições 70, in 2022, with introductory texts by Eduardo Lourenço and Vergílio Ferreira). Briefly, we will say that Foucault systematizes the central question, modern par excellence, of the way in which the image, in painting and elsewhere, can summon the spectator’s gaze – let us remember, by the way, that the 1960s were also the golden age of art. New Vacancy cinematographic.

Referring to the presence of Velázquez, on the left of the painting, in front of a canvas, Foucault writes: “The painter looks, with his face slightly turned and his head tilted towards his shoulder. He fixes an invisible point, but one that we, spectators, can easily determine, since that point is ourselves: our body, our face, our eyes.”