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This edited collection explores the intersection of historical studies and the artistic representation of the past in the long nineteenth century. The case studies provide not just an account of the pursuit of history in art within Western Europe but also examples from beyond that sphere. These cover canonical and conventional examples of history painting as well as more inclusive, ‘popular’ and vernacular visual cultural phenomena. General themes explored include the problematics internal to the theory and practice of academic history painting and historical genre painting, including compositional devices and the authenticity of artefacts depicted; relationships of power and purpose in historical art; the use of historical art for alternative Liberal and authoritarian ideals; the international cross-fertilisation of ideas about historical art; and exploration of the diverse influences of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the histories of nineteenth-century art and culture.
Cultural modernity has habitually been defined as a focus on the means of representation themselves, as opposed to art that imitates external reality or expresses its maker's inner life. The crucial moment is usually considered the emergence of Edouard Manet in mid-nineteenth-century France, and the features of French developments have been seen as defining terms in the theory of modernity. However, recent art and cultural history have often spoken of plural modernities, distinct from the pattern set in France. For the first time, this study in cultural history explores how Spanish culture took a radical turn toward the medium of representation itself in the 1850s and early 1860s. It argues that this happened in a way that is critically at odds with many fundamental theoretical suppositions about modernity.
This book is the first modern overview of the history of historiography in Spain. It covers sources from Juan de Mariana's History of Spain, written at the end of the sixteenth century, up to current historical writings and their context. The main objective of the book is to shed light on the continuities and breaks in the ways that Spanish historians represented ideas of Spain. The concept of historiography used is wide enough to span not only academic works and institutions but also public uses of history, including the history taught in schools. The methodology employed by the author combines the tradition of studies of national identity with those of historiography. One of the key themes in the book is the role of the historical profession in Spain and its influence on national discourse from the nineteenth century onwards.
As Spain rebuilt its colonial regime in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish American revolutions, it turned to history to justify continued dominance. The metropolitan vision of history, however, always met with opposition in the colonies.The Conquest of History examines how historians, officials, and civic groups in Spain and its colonies forged national histories out of the ruins and relics of the imperial past. By exploring controversies over the veracity of the Black Legend, the location of Christopher Columbus's mortal remains, and the survival of indigenous cultures, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's richly documented study shows how history became implicated in the struggles over empire. It also considers how these approaches to the past, whether intended to defend or to criticize colonial rule, called into being new postcolonial histories of empire and of nations.
Focusing on images of or produced by nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-à-vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By considering works in a range of media by an array of canonical and understudied women artists, they demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting.
Scholars from Spain, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States discuss historical writings of the past and how our understanding of the colonial era has been influenced by the expectations of the day.
This volume brings together a range of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to re-examine the histories of facial hair and its place in discussions of gender, the military, travel and art, amongst others. Chapters in the first section of the collection explore the intricate history of beard wearing and shaving, including facial hair fashions in long historical perspective, and the depiction of beards in portraiture. Section Two explores the shifting meanings of the moustache, both as a manly symbol in the nineteenth century, and also as the focus of the material culture of personal grooming. The final section of the collection charts the often-complex relationship between men, women and facial hair. It explores how women used facial hair to appropriate masculine identity, and how women’s own hair was read as a sign of excessive and illicit sexuality.
The pace and scale of the exchange of cultural goods of all sorts&—paintings, furniture, even ladies' fans&—increased sharply in nineteenth-century Spain, and new institutions and practices for exhibiting as well as valorizing &"art&" were soon formed. Oscar V&ázquez maps this cultural landscape, tracing the connections between the growth of art markets and changing patterns of collecting. Unlike many earlier students of collecting, he focuses not upon questions of taste but rather upon the discursive and institutional frameworks that came to regulate art's economic and symbolic worth at all levels of Spanish society. Drawing upon sources that range from newspaper reviews to notarial documents, V&ázquez shows how collecting acquired the power to mediate debates over individual, regional, and national identity. His book also looks at the emergence of a new state apparatus for arts administration and situates these social and political changes in the broader European context. Inventing the Art Collection will be of interest to historians and sociologists of Spain and Europe, as well as art historians and cultural theorists.
The book examines the process of symbolic and material alteration of religious images in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period. The process by which the form and meaning of images are modified and adapted for a new context is defined by a large number of spiritual, religious, artistic, geographical or historical circumstances. This book provides a defined theoretical framework for these symbolic and material alterations based on the concept of iconotropy; that is, the way in which images change and/or alter their meaning. Iconotropy is a key concept in religious history, particularly for periods in which religious changes, often turbulent, took place. In addition, the iconotropic process of appropriating cult images brought with it changes in the materiality of those images. Numerous accounts from antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period detail how cult images were involved in such processes of misinterpretation, both symbolically and materially. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture and religious history.
Los últimos años del siglo XVIII y las primeras décadas del XIX son tiempos apropiados para las gestas cívicas y militares: el desmembramiento del Antiguo Régimen, las revoluciones burguesas, las guerras napoleónicas, los procesos insurgentes y la construcción de las nuevas naciones americanas establecen las condiciones idóneas para el surgimiento de los héroes modernos. El proceso de fabricación y mitificación de estos héroes en España y México, su instrumentalización por la clase dirigente y la aparición de los respectivos panteones heroicos sobre los que cimentar ambas naciones son aspectos analizados en este libro. El estudio comparado de estos dos espacios, divergentes y a la vez complementarios, permite responder a preguntas tan importantes como ¿qué es un héroe?, ¿quién construye a los héroes? o ¿para qué sirven los héroes?