or of Philip VI and his queen?

Is that mirror showing a reflection of the royal couple

painted on Velazquez's canvas?

Or the real king and queen who are actually present in the room?

Is the sudden attentiveness the beginnings of a curtsy on the

part of the maid because

the royal couple have come into the studio...

or are just departing?

It's full of games that play with the mind,

it's full of complicated layers of meaning,

all of which build into a meditation on which it is to paint.

And they are so fiendishly ingenious that they have challenged

generation after generation of writers and commentators

and artists to nail its ultimate meaning. And do you know?

I don't think anyone has yet quite got to the bottom of it.

But if presumptuously I were to tell you in a sentence

what I think it's about,

I think it's about who or what, in every sense,

controls the way we look.

The look we put on when we know we're being watched,

our body language when we suddenly have to defer to authority,

the concentrated look of the artist glancing from subject

to picture and back again.

There's really only one sovereign of staring here

and it's not the king.

He only exists in the picture courtesy of the painter.

The royal ego is shrunk and contained inside that small frame

at the back of the room.

A reversal of roles that was provocative in the West

and inconceivable in the East,

where anything so cheeky would get you in the deepest trouble.

And taking liberties with conventions didn't stop

when monarchs went missing from the picture.

The Dutch Republic fought Spain

to a standstill to secure its freedom.

But independence often goes along with civic myths

and in Holland, the rich burgers of Amsterdam like to portray

themselves as vigilant militia companies,

ready at the drop of a hat to go off to war.

Though, when they commissioned group portraits,

what they actually wanted for their money

was just a bunch of likenesses.