At once object since it is what the artist represented is copying onto his canvas and subject since what the painter had in front of his eyes, as he represented himself in the course of his work, was himself, since the gazes portrayed in the picture are all directed towards the fictitious position occupied by the royal personage, which is also the painter's real place, since the occupier of that ambiguous place in which the painter and the sovereign alternate, in a never ending ﬂicker, as it were, is the spectator, whose gaze transforms the painting into an object, the pure representation of that essential absence.