Diego Velazquez painted the Spanish royal court with such unflinching honesty that he made kings look human and dwarfs look dignified. Las Meninas is considered the most analyzed painting in Western art — a work so complex that scholars have spent four centuries debating what it means. But while Velazquez painted truth on canvas, he spent years fabricating a noble ancestry to win admission to the Order of Santiago, because in seventeenth-century Spain, being a painter was considered beneath a gentleman.

This episode traces Velazquez from his Seville apprenticeship through the Madrid court, Las Meninas, and the obsessive campaign to prove a nobility his family did not possess.

• Velazquez’s Seville training and the early bodegones that caught the attention of the Spanish court
• The court painter position and the unflinching royal portraits that made Philip IV look startlingly human
• Las Meninas — the painting within a painting that has obsessed art historians for four centuries
• The fabricated genealogy, the Order of Santiago campaign, and why being a painter was considered shameful