Jessica Pi

On the tricentennial of Velázquez's Las Meninas(1656-7), Picasso made a peculiar and titanic tribute to this historical masterpiece of Spanish painting, deconstructing it in a series of fifty-eight oil paintings between August 14 and December 30, 1957. We could reach a consensus in accepting - at least - that two creative processes are at play in Picasso's Las Meninas: (1) the deconstruction of the Velazquez's work in a series and (2) the construction of a total of 58 oil paintings that deserve to be appreciated qualitatively as a totality, an aspect to which I will refer using the term suite, which (like Goodman's word variation) I will borrow from the field of music. This article aims to explore the qualitative reasons of this suite as a totality, exploring its strategies of deconstruction of Velazquez's 1656-7 work and focusing on what I consider the political reasons of Las Meninas and Picasso's intimate relationship to death exorcism as the inner construction devices of the suite.

This article furnishes a systematisation of the Mediaval aesthetic vocabulary. This task is developed by means of the adoption of a dynamic of intersection among the various Aristotelic species qualitatis, which are taken as the basic structural elements of the requested system. Two versions of beauty are established, which will expand into two kinds of aesthetics, one leaded by pulchritudo, with intellectualistic implications and the other leaded by formositas, which will turn into an autonomus aesthetics; both of them have let a strong legacy to contemporaneus aesthetics.