Les Fileuses

For a long time people thought this was simply a scene of women at work in a Madrid tapestry workshop, and Velázquez painted it that way in his late years, probably around 1657. Then in 1948 a scholar noticed what is actually going on. The women spinning in the foreground are the setup, and the real story is happening in the bright room behind them. There stands Athena, goddess of weaving, in a helmet, facing the mortal Arachne who boasted she could weave better than any god. In the myth Athena loses her temper and turns the girl into a spider, doomed to spin forever. Velázquez buries this contest in the background and gives the front of the canvas to ordinary labor, the spinning wheel on the left blurred into a whir of motion because he painted the speed of it rather than the spokes.