I’m not simply interested in reminding the world of Pareja’s existence, or in complicating our reception of Velázquez, although those might be excellent ancillary benefits. Nor am I suggesting that Pareja’s painting is necessarily a neglected masterwork that secretly rivals the image of the Old Master. My question is this: Even if we wanted to, do we know how to read a slave’s “masterpiece”? I’m not asking whether a slave is capable of producing one, but rather what kinds of rhetorical and aesthetic claims such a work can make. What does it mean to apply the word “masterpiece,” originally referring to the culmination of a journeyman’s apprenticeship and acceptance into a commercial guild, to a black journeyman who knew the guild he was seeking admittance to existed in the first place by profiting from the fungibility of his own humanity, from the enslavement of his people? What did Juan de Pareja imagine he was doing when he painstakingly contributed his own entry to the history of European oil painting? Can we make sense of him in that moment? And further down the corridor of time, what can he tell us about our own?