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Dressing Las Meninas
Amanda Wunder, City University of New York
March 17, 2022 · 4:30 pm—6:00 pm · 113 Friend Center and Zoom
Department of Art and Archaeology
![](https://humanities.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/CROPPED-Detail-of-Infanta-Margarita_Las-MeninasAWunder-002-1.jpg)
The inventive work of the artisans who dressed the court of Philip IV has always been visible in Diego Velázquez’s court portraits, yet the tailors, embroiderers, farthingale-makers, shoemakers, and their colleagues have long been forgotten, largely ignored by historians and art historians. None of the garments that they made have survived the centuries, and Velázquez—who enjoyed a monopoly over court portraiture—is an unreliable narrator when it comes to fashion. In this lecture, I use extensive archival documentation to reconstruct the life and work of a court tailor named Mateo Aguado who dressed the Infanta Margarita (best known as the central character in Las Meninas) and many of Velázquez’s other well-known sitters in a career that spanned over forty years. While making the case for recognizing a previously anonymous artisan as a significant creative force, this talk also offers new insights into Velázquez’s approach to the fashions that feature so prominently in his most iconic paintings.