Supposing … : On Variation in Picasso’s Las Meninas (after Velázquez) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Reading Pablo Picasso’s suite of paintings, Las Meninas (after Velázquez) (1957), alongside William Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), this essay asks: What can Picasso’s variations on Las Meninas teach us about aesthetic form in the Renaissance that Michel Foucault did not in his charismatic reading at the opening of The Order of Things? With particular attention to Picasso’s rearrangement of the Infanta’s face, I suggest that the interlocking, double profile dismantles the Infanta’s forward-facing gaze. By eliminating the “essential void” that Foucault understood to underwrite all acts of representation, Picasso’s variations also suggest a new model for literary criticism, one which uses supposition as a method of reading. Through acts of supposing and the variations such acts produce, literary criticism might attend to the contingency of form and a poem’s latent capacity to be otherwise. I argue that, when viewed from the angles of vision supplied by Picasso’s variations, an aesthetic feature of Shakespeare’s Sonnets traditionally called “vagueness,” “imprecision,” or “uncertainty” snaps into focus as the sonnets’ capacity to shelter their own variations, and I argue that an adequate criticism describes the fullness of this capacity.