After spending years copying old master works, what did Pablo Picasso do with them?

After spending years copying old masterworks, Pablo Picasso rearranged them. He treated earlier paintings as starting points for invention rather than works to reproduce literally.

Picasso studied traditional art intensely, including works by Spanish masters such as Diego Velázquez and El Greco. As a young artist, he copied paintings at Madrid’s Prado Museum, absorbing their composition, drawing, light, and perspective. Later, he reworked those ingredients through his own modern style.

His 1957 series Las Meninas shows this approach clearly. Picasso made 58 related paintings based on Velázquez’s famous 1656 masterpiece, changing scale, space, color, lighting, and the appearance of the figures. The result was not a conventional copy but a sustained visual conversation with the original.

“Rearranged” does not mean Picasso merely moved figures around. He reconstructed old subjects according to his own artistic logic, often pushing them toward Cubism. This is why his relationship with the Old Masters is usually described as reinterpretation, transformation, or creative appropriation rather than simple imitation.