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This book is the first to address the curatorial career of Diego Velázquez, painter to King Philip IV of Spain and chamberlain of his royal palace. It investigates the role that Velázquez played in overseeing the display of the Habsburg art collection, then the richest in the western world, and the role, in turn, that this practice played in his creative trajectory between his arrival at the Spanish court in 1623 and his death in 1660. This book thus recasts Velázquez’s career as an episode in the history of the curator.
Taking the Vesalian anatomical revolution as its point of departure, this volume charts the apparent rise and fall of anatomy studies within universities in sixteenth-century Spain, focussing particularly on primary sources from 1550 to 1600. In doing so, it both clarifies the Spanish contribution to the field of anatomy and disentangles the distorted political and historiographical viewpoints emerging from previous research. Studies of early modern Iberian science have only been carried out coherently and collaboratively in the last few decades, even though fierce debates on the subject have dominated Spanish historiography for more than two centuries. In the field of anatomy studies, many uninformed and biased readings of archival sources have resulted in a very confused picture of the practice of dissection and the teaching of anatomy in the Iberian Peninsula, in which the highly complex conditions of anatomical research within Spain’s national context are often oversimplified. The new empirical evidence that this book brings to light suggests a far more multifaceted narrative of Iberian Renaissance anatomy than has been presented to date.
Since before the myth of Pygmalion bringing a statue to life through desire, artists have used sculpture to explore the physical materiality of the body. This groundbreaking volume examines key sculptural works from thirteenth-century Europe to the global present, revealing new insights into the strategies artists deploy to blur the distinction between art and life. Three-dimensional renderings of the human figure are presented here in numerous manifestations, created by artists ranging from Donatello and Edgar Degas to Kiki Smith and Jeff Koons. Featuring works created in media both traditional and unexpected—such as glass, leather, and blood—Like Life presents sculpture by turns conventional and shocking, including effigies, dolls, mannequins, automata, waxworks, and anatomical models. Texts by curators and cultural historians as well as contemporary artists complete this provocative exploration of realistic representations of the human body. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
he revival of the bronze statuette popular in classical antiquity stands out as an enduring achievement of the Italian Renaissance. These small sculptures attest to early modern artists' technical prowess, ingenuity, and desire to emulate—or even surpass—the ancients. From the studioli, or private studies, of humanist scholars in fifteenth-century Padua to the Fifth Avenue apartments of Gilded Age collectors, viewers have delighted in the mysteries of these objects: how they were made, what they depicted, who made them, and when. This catalogue is the first systematic study of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's European Sculpture and Decorative Arts collection of Italian bronzes. The colle...
A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance makes a renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. Its introduction, “A Renaissance for the ‘Spanish Renaissance’?” will be sure to incite polemic across a broad spectrum of academic fields. This interdisciplinary volume combines micro- with macro-history to offer a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area. With essays on politics and government, family and daily life, religion, nobles and court culture, birth and death, intellectual currents, ethnic groups, the plastic arts, literature, popular culture, law courts, women, literacy, libraries, civic ritual, illness, money, notions of commu...
There has been a persistent tradition of enlivening sculptures with color. This book presents five essays on polychromy in classical Greek through contemporary sculpture, along with discussions of over 40 extraordinary polychrome sculptures.
We tend to think of sixteenth-century European artistic theory as separate from the artworks displayed in the non-European sections of museums. Alessandra Russo argues otherwise. Instead of considering the European experience of “New World” artifacts and materials through the lenses of “curiosity” and “exoticism,” Russo asks a different question: What impact have these works had on the way we currently think about—and theorize—the arts? Centering her study on a vast corpus of early modern textual and visual sources, Russo contends that the subtlety and inventiveness of the myriad of American, Asian, and African creations that were pillaged, exchanged, and often eventually des...
The first comprehensive study of Calderón in EnglishPedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) is one of the most important dramatists - many would say the single most important dramatist - of the Spanish Golden Age. Spain''s dominant and most prestigious playwright for much of the seventeenth century, his work is still regularly staged and translated, influential in more recent times on writers as diverse as Schiller, Shelley and Lorca. The author of around 120 plays (not counting his numerous Corpus Christi autos) in a variety of styles, Calderón is most famous for his stirring dramas, characterized by rhetorically powerful poetry, dramatic structures carefully calibrated to produce poignan...
During the sixteenth century, antiquarian studies (the study of the material past, comprising modern archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics) rose in Europe in parallel to the technical development of the printing press. Some humanists continued to prefer the manuscript form to disseminate their findings – as numerous fair copies of sylloges and treatises attest –, but slowly the printed medium grew in popularity, with its obvious advantages but also its many challenges. As antiquarian printed works appeared, the relationship between manuscript and printed sources also became less linear: printed copies of earlier works were annotated to serve as a means of research, and printed works could be copied by hand – partially or even completely. This book explores how antiquarian literature (collections of inscriptions, treatises, letters...) developed throughout the sixteenth century, both in manuscript and in print; how both media interacted with each other, and how these printed antiquarian works were received, as attested by the manuscript annotations left by their early modern owners and readers.
The sixteenth century was a critical period both for Spain’s formation and for the imperial dominance of her Crown. Spanish monarchs ruled far and wide, spreading agents and culture across Europe and the wider world. Yet in Italy they encountered another culture whose achievements were even prouder and whose aspirations often even grander than their own. Italians, the nominally subaltern group, did not readily accept Spanish dominance and exercised considerable agency over how imperial Spanish identity developed within their borders. In the end Italians’ views sometimes even shaped how their Spanish colonizers eventually came to see themselves. The essays collected here evaluate the broa...