The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez offers a synthetic overview of one of the greatest painters of Golden Age Spain and seventeenth century Europe as a whole.

With contributions from art historians and those working in other disciplines, this book offers fresh approaches to the vast literature on this artist. Velázquez's portraits of his patron, King Philip IV, and his wives are examined by two historians in an effort to reconstruct their reception and readings by contemporaries. Two historians of Golden Age Spanish literature provide an interdisciplinary account of the relationships between poetry, theater, and the visual arts at the Spanish court, as practiced by Velázquez, the poet Francisco de Quevedo and the dramatist, Calderón de la Barca. An expert on the history of Spanish music offers an unprecedented examination of how instruments 'play' in Velázquez's compositions.