For Foucault, Las Meninas is much more than a simple representation of the infantas and court attendants of Velázquez’s royal patron, the king of Spain, Philip IV. It expresses the rise of European Man as a sovereign subject at the height of imperial and colonial power. Its famous trompe l’oeil presents Europe’s monarchical and aesthetic regimes simultaneously. Politics and art become overlapping and interchangeable expressions of absolute power. In this conception, Las Meninas isn’t merely an impressive painting of a powerful subject by a masterful painter; it is also symptomatic evidence of a historical process then unfolding. And that process was the arms race among Europe’s royal houses in their bid to plunder the Americas, initially via campaigns of extermination and the enslavement of indigenous peoples, and subsequently through the enslavement and deportation of Africans to the New World. Velázquez took a selfie of the entire idea of European mastery as it clicked into place. In his masterpiece, we see the rulers discovering how to make their own project legible to themselves. This is the nature of my power, the painting says, I am the natural subject of history, the center and master of the universe.