The Age of Adolescence

THIS PAST SUMMER, with a transfixed ten-year old by my side, I stood in Madrid’s palatial Museo Nacional del Prado, face to face with Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez. We gazed at the self-portrait of this grand master of the bravura brush stroke, gripping his palette in his left hand and wielding a paintbrush in his right, and we admired the wasp-waisted five-year-old Infanta Margarita who poses pertly before him in the endlessly fascinating Las Meninas. I pointed out diminutive King Philip IV and his queen, caught in their black-rimmed mirror just left of a coffered door, which opens mysteriously onto a dazzle of light. But about the court dwarfs—Maria Bárbola, with her bulbous head and short arms, and Nicolasito Pertusato, who kicks the lazy mastiff—I had little to say. A barrage of earnest questions from the child beside me exposed a glaring lacuna in my art history background. Why are they there? What are they doing? Were they servants, too? Why did the Spanish court keep them?