Voces del Prado

The Room of Las Meninas

Montserrat Sabán Godoy, Management Technician, 1977-2016

This picture was in a small room, one in which only Las Meninas could be hung, together with a mirror that produced reflections. This meant that the mirror effects in Las Meninas itself were replicated by the room. It was quite impressive. But you know what’s happened? The Museum has changed a great deal in terms of its public. At that time the public was quite small, so it wasn’t very difficult. But then the time came when people couldn’t get into the room; they had to queue in order to get in. You entered through one door and you came out through another, because the painting hung in a room with an entrance and an exit door. But, of course, people stopped in front of the painting to look at it, and there weren’t only people in the Las Meninas room, but also in the previous hall, which was filled with members of the public. When the Museum had few visitors, it made sense to organise things in this manner, but when the number of visitors to the Museum increased, it couldn’t be sustained. That’s why all of the Velázquez paintings were placed in Hall 12, because it’s very large. So, even though a whole school might stop in front of Las Meninas, there is plenty of space for other people behind them. Sometimes you have to organise the hall. It’s horrendous trying to supervise it, because there are so many people that you can’t even see who you have ten paces in front of you. But it’s different, because it’s spacious, and you have several points of exit and entry, so if there’s an emergency it’s safer. In the old format, it was just a box, a dead-end trap.