Anales de Historia del Arte

Call for papers (2023): Born under Saturn. Genius and image of artists

Fernando Ramos Arenas — 2023-09-14

Elena Paulino Montero. Arquitectura y nobleza en la Castilla bajomedieval. El patrocinio de los Velasco entre al-Andalus y Europa. Madrid: La Ergástula, 2020, 374 pp.

Sergio Ramiro Ramírez — 2023-09-14

Amalia María Yuste Galán. La “señal” del pedrero. Obra y Fábrica del claustro de la Catedral de Toledo (1383-1485). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2022, 360 pp.

María Dolores Teijeira Pablos — 2023-09-14

Raúl Romero Medina. La promoción artística de la Casa Ducal de Medinaceli. Memoria visual y arquitectura en Andalucía y Castilla (siglos XIV-XVI). Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles, 2021, 500 pp.

Laura Rodríguez Peinado — 2023-09-14

Nicolás Menéndez González. Juan de Colonia y la construcción empírica. Saberes de las formas y del hacer en el preludio de la era del tratado arquitectónico. Burgos: Fundación VIII Centenario de la catedral de Burgos, 2022, 642 pp.

Begoña Alonso Ruiz — 2023-09-14

Teresa Laguna Paúl. Miguel Perrín, Imaginero de barro. Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla, 2022, 186 pp.

Juan M. Monterroso Montero — 2023-09-14

Sonia Jiménez-Hortelano. Arte y arquitectura en el Real Monasterio de Santiago de Uclés (1500-1750). Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2022, 464 pp.

Luis Arciniega García — 2023-09-14

Pablo González Tornel (dir.). Ánima. Pintar el rostre i l´esperit. Pintar el rostro y el alma. Painting the face and soul. Valencia: Ediciones Trea, 2022, 376 pp.

Ana Maqueda de la Peña — 2023-09-14

Juan Jesús López-Guadalupe Muñoz, Adrián Contreras Guerrero y José Antonio Díaz Gómez, (eds.). Mecenazgo, ostentación, identidad. Estudios sobre el Barroco Hispánico

Pedro M. Martínez Lara — 2023-09-14

Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos. Maquetista y artillero. León Gil de Palacio (1778-1849). Entre ciudad y patrimonio. Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2022, 390 pp.

Jesús Cantera Montenegro — 2023-09-14

Sonsoles Hernández Barbosa. Vidas excitadas. Sensorialidad y capitalismo en la cultura moderna. Vitoria-Gasteiz: Sans Soleil Ediciones, 2022, 275 pp.

Luis Sazatornil Ruiz — 2023-09-14

Julia Ramírez-Blanco. Amigos, disfraces y comunas. Las hermandades de artistas del siglo XIX. Madrid: Cátedra, 2022, 216 pp.

Beatriz Sánchez Santidrián — 2023-09-14

Pedro Medina. Islarios de contemporaneidad. Anomia digital y crítica de perspectivas múltiples. Murcia: CENDEAC, 2021, 359 pp.

Juan de Andrés Arias — 2023-09-14

Review: Sally Faulkner"A contradictory cinema. Eight Spanish films of the 1960s." Madrid: La Casa de la Riqueza, 2022.

Laura Caballero Ruiz de Martín-Esteban — 2023-09-14

“Un animal que está siempre vivo”: una conversación entre Carlos Alberdi, Asunción Molinos Gordo y Rocío Robles Tardío sobre Pablo Picasso y su imagen de artista

Anales de Historia del Arte — 2023-09-14

Fernando Gallego, a Spanish Painter?

Elena Muñoz Gómez — 2023-09-14

Fernando Gallego is a painter as famous as he is little known. His life and work in Castile between the 15th and the 16th century have been well documented and some of the works originally attributed to him are, despite doubts about their attribution, central in the traditional canon of Spanish Art History. This article asks how this canon of national culture has been constructed based on an analysis of the art historical publications on Gallego from the 18th to the 21st century. The analysis follows the retrospective construction of a figure that, even today, still determines educational programs and the work at museums and other institutions which are key in the production of collective identity. The critical deconstruction of the artist’s biographies emphasizes the weight of the historiographical narratives behind many of these texts. The analysis of central concepts such as style and nation reveals how the idea of a Spanish painter, who in these texts usually embodied both his individuality and his time, was central to present central national notions of what Spain was intended to be and guarantee a certain continuity of historical values.

Hic est Raphael? Carlo Maratti and the Figure of the Artist in the Seventeenth Century

Francesca Susanna Croce — 2023-09-14

As Raphael (1483–1520) before him, Carlo Maratti (1625–1713) supervised one of the most renowned schools of the day and became one of Rome's most prominent painters. By using primary sources such as his biographies by Giovan Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) and Lione Pascoli (1674–1744) as well as his graphic and painterly works, this chapter examines how the Baroque artist's image was constructed and displayed. A major point of comparison between Maratti and Raphael and Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) was that he was among the best draftsmen of the seventeenth century and was inspired by the ancient world. This chapter also explores the artist’s private life, from his long-lasting affair with a young model to his purported moderation and sobriety. During the Seicento, legitimacy and power were assigned to artists by connections to figures (actual or fabricated) and in biography, these connections were expressed through the reworking of tropes and motifs taken from the greatest biographers of the past. A joint project that Maratti undertook with his close friend Bellori focused on revalorizing and commemorating Raphael and Annibale Carracci which served as a legitimizing tool for his career. Maratti's self-fashioning contributed to his great success and his championing of the Classicist aesthetic and ideal artistic lineage with Raphael at the forefront is essential to understand the image of the modern artist.

Contemplating the yellow flowers: The construction of the artist’s image in two paintings by Shi Tao

Wu Rongqiao — 2023-09-14

The hermit is a typical theme in the visual discourses of Literati Painting. Rising from the 11^th century, the Literati Painting is very expressive of the authors’ thoughts and feelings, which makes an artistic space for catharsis. Therefore, the image of hermit has become a symbol of the artists’ virtues and aspirations. However, there is a certain difference between the idealized image and the real image of the artist. This embellishment of the image is not a deliberate trick of the artists, but a result of multiple factors. This paper aims to explore the construction of the artist’s image in the paintings of the 17^th century through the analysis of Shi Tao's two works with the theme of “Contemplating the yellow flowers”.

The construction of the artist's romantic image: Antonio M.ª Esquivel, the painter who was saved

Aránzazu Pérez Sánchez — 2023-09-14

During the second third of Spain's turbulent 19th century, the Sevillian artist Antonio Mª Esquivel developed his painting career amidst many difficulties that forged his personal and professional character. Loyal to the nascent liberalism, the artist rose to fame in the capital, where he became one of the leading painters and more active participants in the Liceo Artístico y Literario de Madrid, founded by his friend José Fernández de la Vega. In Madrid he felt the solidarity of his fellow artists after he suffered an illness that temporarily caused him the condition most feared by a painter – blindness. Cured thanks to the generous help of artist friends and admirers, Esquivel then devoted all his efforts to the protection of the Fine Arts. Thus, thanking all those who helped him in his direst straits, and leaving as a legacy the creation of the Society for the Protection of the Fine Arts. His life and his work have become an epitome of the romantic artist who is the subject of novelised biographies, modest and proud at the same time, responsible for the creation of his own image in the eyes of his contemporaries and posterity.

The critical fortunes of Jacques-Louis David in the Spanish periodical press (1782-1882)

Mercedes Cerón — 2023-09-14

This article explores the treatment of Jacques-Louis David by the Spanish press during the century after his first mention in 1782. It considers the use of David’s activities as part of the Spanish counter-revolutionary propaganda in the 1790s, as well as the reaction of the press to his adoption as Imperial painter by Napoleon. Moreover, it discusses the references to David made in the context of nineteenth-century artistic debates, his relationship with Francisco de Goya, and his transformation into a fictional character in Romantic feuilletons.

The image of the female artists during the Francoism through the press: from the babbling girl to the female-male painter

Irene Barreno García — 2023-09-14

This article proposes a study on the image of the female artists that was transmitted through the first Francoist press. Based on some specific case studies, the analysis of the documentary sources shows how the official media talked about these painters, what topics about their life and work were the most frequent in the critical, misogynist discourse of the time and how their productions were received by the general and specialized public. Gender studies provide the methodological approach to address this issue; the press reports examined reflected the social and gender parameters dictated by national-catholicism and were inherited, for the most part, from the 19th century. It has been thus possible to see how the discourse on female artists was oriented towards the reaffirmation and strengthening of the woman model that existed during the dictatorship. However, the article also pays attention to the cracks produced in these discourses by the complexity of these artists’ identities and the diversity of their positions. Especially through the analysis of interviews in the press, the article shows how the image offered in the news, in articles and opinion pieces did not always correspond to the reality that these artists illuminated when they spoke for themselves. These tensions and discursive dissonances illustrate a period which was particularly problematic for the development of women’s creative personality.

Jackson Pollock and His Discontent: An Artistic Symptom of Modernity

Alessandra Francesca Caputo Jaffe — 2023-09-14

. This paper offers a study on the life and work of distinguished north American artist, Jackson Pollock, from a critical perspective that analyzes his art as a symptomatology of a general cultural discontent. We will reflect upon the criticisms made by Clement Geenberg and Rosanlind Krauss – and in a way, by Pollock himself – when they identified a sort of involution or regression in his last paintings from the 1950s, characterized by being more figurative. We ask ourselves if that need of identifying constant progress and an unrepeatable authenticity in the creative process is a unique characteristic of a modernity that has been already disputed by Bruno but also in previous works, such as in Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontent. We will try to demonstrate to what extent Pollock's work not only reflects his own personal universe but also a general crisis within modernity, through the appropriation of an innovative visual language that takes many conceptual aspects on different ways of perceiving the world from the example of non-Western cultures.

The artist in the desert. Agnes Martin: notes on art and solitude.

Salvador Jiménez-Donaire Martínez — 2023-09-14

In the past few years, a growing mythology has aroused around the figure of influential, highly praised post-war artist Agnes Martin. Her stripped down, reductive, and completely abstract paintings reveal nothing of her persona. However, her latest retrospectives at Tate Modern and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2015 and 2016, respectively), have sparked a new curiosity about the artist's biography, which is often uncertain and full of contradictions. Her decision to leave New York in 1967, just when her career was becoming internationally acclaimed, and her retreat in the deserts of New Mexico, where she lived almost ascetically (for long periods she didn’t have electricity, telephone, or running water) and in relative isolation until the end of her life have contributed to the mythification of the artist, who is frequently referred to as "priestess of abstraction", "mystic", "icon", “sage” and even “saint”. This text examines Martin's writings, notes, and letters, as well as her spoken statements recorded in documentaries made a few years before her demise, in order to find links between the alienated and contradictory figure of the artist and her aesthetic purpose. Never before was Martin as prolific as when she irrevocably embraced the tranquility of the desert. Solitude turned to be a creative prerequisite for an artist determined to reach “mental clarity”, an imperative state for executing her refined work.

Wolf Vostell’s Joanna the Mad (1980) cycle: iconography, intertextuality and interpretation

Angélica García-Manso — 2023-09-14

In the cycle dedicated to Joanna the Mad (1980), Vostell proposes a synthesis of various iconographic resources, whether from classical Spanish painting (particularly Goya) or contemporary painters such as Francis Bacon; but he also seeks to integrate the theme of the famous academicist painting dedicated to the Queen of Castile by Francisco Pradilla into his own creative repertoire and, incidentally, to make references to Spanish popular music. The result of intertextualisation becomes strongly strange and polysemic, but it also reflects the maturity of the German artist's aesthetic mastery at the time of the cycle's elaboration.

Pontormo, un amore eretico (Giovanni Fago, 2004): a «born under Saturn» painter into the Silver Screen

Adolfo de Mingo Lorente — 2023-09-14

The mannerist painter Jacopo Carucci (1494-1557), called Pontormo, is one of the most mentioned artists by Rudolf and Margot Wittkower in their famous essay Born under Saturn (1963). Forty years later, the filmmaker Giovanni Fago transferred his particular personality to the silver screen, by focusing on the frescoes for the basilica’s choir of San Lorenzo in Florence. The film Pontormo, un amore eretico recreates the cultural atmosphere of the city in 1555, in the years of Cosimo I de Medici, including such relevant names as Benedetto Varchi and Agnolo Bronzino. The main character, played by Joe Mantegna, presents an elderly and taciturn Pontormo, a supporter of the reformist ideas of Juan de Valdés. The film also portraits his infatuation with an enigmatic Flemish weaveress (the actress’s Galatea Ranzi), a figure originally seen in the novel Pas de Deux (1991) by the Swedish writer Ingamaj Beck. The paper offers an analysis of Giovanni Fago’s film based on its script and other sources such as the painter’s Diary and Giorgio Vasari. The text also pays special attention to the locations, artistic recreations (tableaux vivants) and historical figures mentioned in the film.

Pathological, in love and redeemed. Images of the artist in Wes Anderson's films

Rubén de la Prida Caballero — 2023-09-14

In his last released feature film, The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson gathers the largest number of artists –from different disciplines– in his entire filmography. Starting from that character who can be considered not only as a paradigm of hero but also as an Andersonian proto-artist, Max Fischer, and his characteristic features, the present contribution tries to trace a taxonomy of the artists in the cinema of the Texan filmmaker distinguishing their different types, properties and hybridizations. Starting from those "artists of the words" who have been most frequently thematized in the academic literature on the auteur to date, the article also reviews the other recurrent types of artists –plastic and scenic– present in Wes Anderson's cinema, their prevailing personality disorders, their models of interpersonal relationships and the way in which, through the generation of communities by means of their acts of creation –a characteristic that in Wes Anderson acquires autobiographical overtones– these characters, despite their problematic traits, manage to conquer their own redemption.

“Out of the myth and back again in history”: proposals for approaching Pablo Picasso’s biography

Beatriz Martínez López — 2023-09-14

For several years now, there have been underway various works that challenge the canonical readings of Pablo Picasso’s image. Among them, the biographical analysis of the artist from a political perspective is of particular interest, insofar as his ideological and militant commitment was subject to a strict process of neutralization during the Franco regime. Consequently, starting from the Foucauldian definition of genealogy we would like to demonstrate to what extent the narratives on Picasso’s life and political commitment have been conditioned by cultural policies that masked and depoliticized any critical possibility in the interpretation of his development. A commitment that began to become effective in his youth, in the heat of Catalan anarchism, as is reflected both in his artistic production and in the documentation of the period preserved in the French archives. From this approach, we propose a biographical review of the artist that is essentially twofold: on the one hand, we will stress the possibility of using methodologies that, from Cultural Studies , such as those of the theorist Mieke Bal, defend the need for the political positioning of artistic practices. On the other hand, we will transfer this conviction to the literary field to demonstrate that it is possible to build new biographical proposals that contribute to overcoming what authors such as H. Marcuse define as a generalized narcosis. Specifically, we will take as a paradigm the biographical approach to Pablo Picasso from the anarchist aesthetic of André Rezsler. All this will allow us to consolidate an alternative narrative in which the idealized figure of the artist gives way to a broader, more collective and inclusive interpretation of the social reality in which he developed his career.

The Influence of Women Collectors on the International Dissemination of Picasso’s Works

María Ortiz Tello — 2023-09-14

The present article falls within the framework of studies on cultural transfer and artistic circulation, where processes of transmitting artworks are pivotal. It analyzes how the circulation of five Picasso artworks was powered through their loan for exhibition by five women collectors: Mary Hoyt Wiborg, Elizabeth Fuller, Mary Lasker, Marie Harriman, and Ingeborg Eichmann. The article demonstrates to what extent these collectors were key in the dissemination of this group of works through a process of systematic exhibition on an international scale. The study focuses on the processes by which certain works by the Malaga-born artist gained greater visibility through the temporary exhibitions and thanks to the intervention of these collectors. They acted as mediators that interfered not only in their dissemination but also in their resignification; these collectors influenced, through their own motivations, the assimilation and later reception of these artworks.

Picasso in NO-DO: the Documentaries of the Spanish Transition to Democracy

Lidia Merás — 2023-09-14

This article examines the representation of Pablo Picasso in two documentaries produced by NO-DO during the Spanish “second Transition” to democracy. From the textual analysis of Picasso insólito (Antonio Mercero, 1978) and Especial Picasso (Luis Revenga, 1981), I will address Picasso’s construction as a symbol of national reconciliation. NO-DO, the only authorised source of documentary images under Franco’s dictatorship, continued under the name of Revista Cinematográfica Española until 1981, after being deprived from the exclusive broadcast of documentaries since 1978. Having overcome the ostracism to which the painter had been subjected to for several decades due to his communist militancy, the new cultural elites took advantage of the image of the most important Spanish artist of the 20th century to present him as an advocate of pacifism. To this end, these documentaries exacerbated Picasso's Spanish national identity and offered an opportunistic de-ideologization of his life and work by reinterpreting his iconic Guernica, as well as the dove of peace symbol, to present the artist as a supporter of consensus discourses and thus strengthen the nascent democracy.