“Enslaved sovereign”: Aesthetics of power in Foucault, Velázquez and Ovid
Summary Michel Foucault's essay on Las Meninas has created spaces for diverse analyses of Velazquez's painting and of Foucault's reading of its intimations. My purpose in this paper is to argue for an interpretation of both painting and essay that is shaped by an exploration of aesthetics of power rather than by perspectival considerations. To further delineate Velazquez's interest in the inherently antagonistic relation between artistic expression and institutional power, I extend my inquiry to his Fable of Arachne, a painting that could have served Foucault's aesthetic and epistemological purposes well, and to a text from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which this painting is firmly rooted.