[Live!: AHoA] Required Assignment 3: Work of Art Redux (Track A) - Las Meninas Sombrías (The Gloomy Girls)

I'm a fan of pareidolia and I couldn't help noticing a big face in the background of Velázquez's "Las Meninas". It would be very creepy to be watched by a hidden (and huge) observer. But that would be just another viewer in Velazquez play with see and be seen. It would make sense.

Diego Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (1656).

So I started looking at the painting, paying attention to the "darker" side of it.
The background is very dark and foggy. In the closest foreground, we have these well illuminated subjects that in one hand seem to be elegant and delicate, but in the other hand, have this penetrating stare and a very pale skin - almost dead-like. The Infanta's hair is so blonde and bright that it almost looks white, making the child looks like a very short old woman or a ghost. The two dwarfs at the right (Maribarbola and Nicolas Pertusato) gives the piece an exotic mood, as if they were some kind of circus attraction.
Behind them all, Velazquez himself is on a darker "corner" of the framing - he is also wearing black, with a holy cross on his chest and have a concentrated expression, that could be read as bored or apathetic, almost dead...
In the next level behind that, we have two figures very disturbing: some kind of nun (a religious figure that always reminds us of the holy... and the unholy!) and a very blurred and dark woman. They don't seem to pose for the picture, but to observe the scene, quietly, in the dark...
In the furthest wall, there is the mysterious man, fully wearing black and spying all our characters. He is not part of their group and he seems like a doorkeeper, guarding the threshold between the dark room and a light bright place (behind him): the guardian between worlds...

And then, hidden in the wall, to big for us to realize when near it, there lurks the monstrous face, looking at us (viewers) or at the painting's subjects, hovering above them, judging them and lusting after them. Or maybe warning us of their macabre nature, state or destiny - or our own.

All those elements point to one thing: death. When you realize those persons in the painting are dead for a long time, you can't help thinking how disturbing it can be, having those stares from those ghosts of the past haunting you for all eternity.

I tried to make this interpretation more clear in my humble version of Las Meninas:

Las Meninas Sombrías (The Gloomy Girls; 2014) by Ricardo Roehe.

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My submission: https://class.coursera.org/livearthistory-001/human_grading/view/courses/970641/assessments/17/submissions/3160.
Forums: https://class.coursera.org/livearthistory-001/forum/thread?thread_id=6472