Diego Velázquez

Velázquez spent most of his career as a court official to Philip IV, which limited what he painted and sharpened how he painted it. The royal portraits are unsparing: the Habsburg jaw is not corrected, the expressions are tired.

Las Meninas, from 1656, is the painting art historians cannot stop writing about. The artist stands at his own canvas, the royal couple appear only as a reflection, a princess and her attendants occupy the foreground, and the whole arrangement puts the viewer in a position that keeps shifting.

He also painted court dwarfs with the same seriousness he gave the king, which was unusual to the point of remarkable. Two trips to Italy loosened the handling considerably. The Rokeby Venus and the portrait of Innocent X came out of that period. Manet called him the painter of painters.