Velázquez

"To know you have to see and to see you have to look; contemplate; enjoy contemplating. We must learn 'to open (our) eyes, not loosen (our) tongues' (Gombrich); we must learn to see the depth within works of art with the eyes of our souls. Watch and contemplate without haste. Possibly, an absence of critical baggage could make this process too difficult or tiring or distracting. Brown says that Velazquez and Las Meninas...as a pictorial surface have almost completely disappeared from our sight. And so, with hardly any pictorial surface; our little princess, the king, the dog, the dwarves and our kind of meninas have gone astray, often buried in endless texts of tiring literature. This book invites us to recover our penetratng innter look; to enjoy the pleasure of seeing paintings; the extraordinary painting of Velazque. If this view is not exercised by art historians, who will exercise/"