Cervantine Blackness

• Author(s): Nicholas R. Jones

• Categories: Literary Criticism

• Type: Book
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• Published: 2024-10-22
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• Publisher: Penn State Press

There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the le...

Bizet's Carmen Uncovered

• Author(s): Richard Langham Smith

• Categories: Music

• Type: Book
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• Published: 2021
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• Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Part I.Preparing the ground.Vitoria and Waterloo : French music and the Peninsular Wars --Pictures and jottings : Carmen and the rise of Andalusian tourism --Spain on the Paris stage --Part II.Fictions, realities, structures.From novella to libretto --Libretto into opera --The forgotten Englishman --Part III.Characterisation, music and the staging of place.Carmen's places --Carmen the gypsy --In the pit, on the stage.

Diego Velázquez's Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-century Seville

• Author(s): Tanya J. Tiffany

• Categories: Art

• Type: Book
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• Published: 2012
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• Publisher: Penn State Press

"Explores the early works of seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Velâazquez. Focuses on works from 1617 to 1623, examining the painter's critical engagement with the artistic, religious, and social practices of his native Seville"--Provided by publisher.

Velázquez and The Surrender of Breda

• Author(s): Anthony Bailey

• Categories: Biography & Autobiography

• Type: Book
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• Published: 2011-11-08
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• Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Behind the famous painting by Diego Velázquez lies a rich story of the artist's life in art What began as propaganda art to celebrate a rare Spanish victory in the Eighty Years' War with Holland, The Surrender at Breda is today recognized as Velázquez's narrative masterpiece. Breda is packed with vivid military detail—whole armies are suggested on the huge canvas, twelve feet high and eleven feet wide. Unlike typical surrender scenes, there is neither a heroic victor on horseback nor a vanquished commander on his knees. Instead the rivals appear on foot almost as equals. The loser bends forward to offer the key and receives a chivalrous pat on his shoulder, as if to say: "Fortune has favored me, but our roles might have been reversed." Anthony Bailey examines the paintings from which the artist arose, coaxing stories from them that flesh out a complete portrait of one of the world's major artists whose personal life has remained largely unknown.

Artistic Circulation between Early Modern Spain and Italy

• Author(s): Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Tommaso Mozzati

• Categories: Art

• Type: Book
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• Published: 2020-01-27
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• Publisher: Routledge

This collection of essays by major scholars in the field explores how the rich intersections between Italy and Spain during the early modern period resulted in a confluence of cultural ideals. Various means of exchange and convergence are explored through two main catalysts: humans—their trips or resettlements—and objects—such as books, paintings, sculptures, and prints. The visual and textual evidence of the transmission of ideas, iconographies and styles are examined, such as triumphal ephemera, treatises on painting, the social status of the artist, collections and their display, church decoration, and funerary monuments, providing a more nuanced understanding of the exchanges of styles, forms and ideals across southern Europe.