By providing precise and accurate examples placed and scrutinized in their historical context, Art and Faith in Tridentine Spain (1545-1690) explains how painting, sculpture, and sacred space were able to convey and accomplish the dogmatic decisions and the spiritual message of the Council of Trent. Beyond the Decree on the Holy Images, it is to the letter and to the spirit of all dogmatic Canons that post-Council art refers. From the 1500s to the 1680s Counter-Reformist art became a valuable and effective arm of the Church of Rome.
Analyzing seventeenth-century images of the dead Christ produced by Gregorio Fern?ez, author Ilenia Col?endoza investigates how and why the artist and his patrons manipulated these images in connection with the religious literature of the time to produce striking images that moved the faithful to devotion. In so doing, she contributes new findings to the topic of Spanish sacred sculpture. The author re-examines these sculptures not only in the context of a larger sculptural group but also as independent sculptures that were intended as powerful aids to contemplation and devotion as was prescribed by the writings of San Juan de la Cruz and Luis de Granada. Combining study of the sculptural works with that of liturgical sources, she reveals the connection between the written word and the sculpted work of art. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the author links Fern?ez's sculptural program with the strategic objectives of major patrons of the period, such as the Duke of Lerma and King Philip III of Spain, both fervent defenders of the Catholic faith.
"The seven texts in this cross-section of fiction and nonfiction reveal a nation at the brink of modernity, embracing revolutionary ideas and reeling in their explosive impact. The opening chapters establish the theoretical framework for Perez-Romero's analysis, describing the intellectual and social environments of medieval Spain and tracing the developments in Spanish historical and literary scholarship that point to the existence of a new path of investigation."--Jacket.
Collecting and displaying finely crafted objects was a mark of character among the royals and aristocrats in Early Modern Spain: it ranked with extravagant hospitality as a sign of nobility and with virtue as a token of princely power. Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain explores how the writers of the period shared the same impulse to collect, arrange, and display objects, though in imagined settings, as literary artefacts. These essays examine a variety of cultural objects described or alluded to in books from the Golden Age of Spanish literature, including clothing, paintings, tapestries, playing cards, monuments, materials of war, and even enchanted bronze heads. The contributors emphasize how literature preserved and transformed objects to endow them with new meaning for aesthetic, social, religious, and political purposes – whether to perpetuate certain habits of thought and belief, or to challenge accepted social and moral norms.
The history of women in early modern Spain is a largely untapped field. This book opens the field substantially by examining the position of women in religious, political, literary, and economic life. Drawing on both historical and literary approaches, the contributors challenge the portrait of Spanish women as passive and marginalized, showing that despite forces working to exclude them, women in Golden Age Spain influenced religious life and politics and made vital contributions to economic and cultural life. The contributors seek to incorporate the study of Spanish women into the current work on literary criticism and on the intersection of private and public spheres. The authors integrate women into subfields of Spanish history and literature, such as Inquisition studies, the Spanish monarchy, Spain's economic and political decline, and Golden Age drama. The essays demonstrate the necessity and value of incorporating women into the study of Golden Age Spain.
Drawing on recent research by established and emerging scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, this volume reconsiders the art and architecture produced after 1563 across the conventional geographic borders. Rather than considering this period a degraded afterword to Renaissance classicism or an inchoate proto-Baroque, the book seeks to understand the art on its own terms. By considering artists such as Federico Barocci and Stefano Maderno in Italy, Hendrick Goltzius in the Netherlands, Antoine Caron in France, Francisco Ribalta in Spain, and Bartolomeo Bitti in Peru, the contributors highlight lesser known "reforms" of art from outside the conventional centers. As the first text to cover this formative period from an international perspective, this volume casts new light on the aftermath of the Renaissance and the beginnings of "Baroque."
This book explores the cultural conditions that led to the emergence and proliferation of Saint Hermenegildo as a stage character in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It considers how this saint became a theatrical trope enabling the Society of Jesus to address religious and secular concerns of the post-Tridentine Church, and to discuss political issues such as the supremacy of the pope over the monarch and the legitimacy of regicide. The book goes on to explain how the Hermenegildo narrative developed outside of Jesuit colleges, through works by professional dramatist Lope de Vega and Mexican nun Juana Inés de la Cruz. Stefano Muneroni takes a global approach to the staging of Hermenegildo, tracing the character’s journey from Europe to the Americas, from male to female authors, and from a sacrificial to a sacramental paradigm where the emphasis shifts from bloodletting to spiritual salvation. Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book is geared toward scholars and students of theatre history, religion and drama, early modern theology, cultural studies, romance languages and literature, and the history of the Society of Jesus..
A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art provides a diverse, fresh collection of accessible, comprehensive essays addressing key issues for European art produced between 1300 and 1700, a period that might be termed the beginning of modern history. Presents a collection of original, in-depth essays from art experts that address various aspects of European visual arts produced from circa 1300 to 1700 Divided into five broad conceptual headings: Social-Historical Factors in Artistic Production; Creative Process and Social Stature of the Artist; The Object: Art as Material Culture; The Message: Subjects and Meanings; and The Viewer, the Critic, and the Historian: Reception and Interpretation as Cultural Discourse Covers many topics not typically included in collections of this nature, such as Judaism and the arts, architectural treatises, the global Renaissance in arts, the new natural sciences and the arts, art and religion, and gender and sexuality Features essays on the arts of the domestic life, sexuality and gender, and the art and production of tapestries, conservation/technology, and the metaphor of theater Focuses on Western and Central Europe and that territory's interactions with neighboring civilizations and distant discoveries Includes illustrations as well as links to images not included in the book
During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the Mercedarian Order of friars, founded in the 1220s, underwent a period of reform from which it emerged utterly transformed. This study sets out to examine not only the context of that reform - the policies of the crown and the papacy, the condition of Catalonia and Spain at large, the circumstances prevailing within the Order and the dialogue with its past - but also to grasp the essence of monastic reform itself against this diverse background. The imposition of other than purely religious criteria onto the reform agenda alerts us to the deeper implications of monastic change in Early Modern Europe. For the Mercedarians the result by 1650 was a wholly new Order; the evolution of this process, by turns calculated and unexpected, is here explored.
