2018

The End Again: Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain

As fin de siglo Spain struggled with perceived decadence and decline, the visual arts reflected the debate and influenced the outcome. This volume argues that the way artists understood and depicted the concepts of degeneration and regeneration is essential to understanding the broader societal conversation and is inseparable from definitions of Spanish modernism.

Oscar E. Vázquez examines how painting, sculpture, drawing, and popular illustrated materials approached “endings” and “beginnings” during the Bourbon monarchy’s restoration. Throughout this period, people inside and outside the art world came to associate degeneration with certain types of artistic productions, spaces, and human bodies, imbuing them with backwardness, violence, criminality, and disease. Pictorial representations contributed to this understanding that specific things, actions, attitudes, and ways of being were degenerative and backward or, alternatively, regenerative and modern. Vázquez explores the significance of these disparate perceptions and how their visual representations reflected Spanish national identity and modernism.

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Painted in Mexico, 1700-1790: Pinxit Mexici

This volume represents the first serious effort to reposition the history of 18th-century Mexican painting, a highly vibrant period marked by major stylistic changes and the invention of new iconographies. Illustrated with newly commissioned photography of never-before-published artworks, the book provides a broad view of the connections of Mexican painting with transatlantic artistic trends and emphasizes its own internal developments and remarkable pictorial output. During this time painters were increasingly asked to create mural-size paintings to cover the walls of sacristies, choirs, staircases, cloisters, and university halls among others. Significantly, the same artists also produced portraits, casta paintings (depictions of racial mixing), folding screens, and finely rendered devotional images, attesting to their extraordinary versatility.

Authored by leading experts in the field, the book’s essays address the tradition and innovation of Mexican painting, the mobility of pictures within and outside the viceroyalty, the political role of images, and the emphasis on ornamentation. Rounding out this volume are over 130 catalogue entries that offer new and authoritative interpretations

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Baroque Seville: Sacred Art in a Century of Crisis

Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens.

Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos—divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes.

Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization.

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