2021
Rebecca J. Long, ed.
Winner
El Greco: Ambition and Defiance
Chicago and New Haven: The Art Institute of Chicago. Distributed by Yale University Press, 2020
Renowned for a singular artistic vision, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco (1541–1614), developed his distinctive painting style as he assiduously pursued professional success. This fresh and engaging survey of El Greco’s work explores varied aspects of the artist’s career —his aesthetic education in Italy, the mixed reception of his mature works in Spain, his uncompromising approach to business, and the baroque logistics of his Toledo workshop— and reveals the depth of El Greco’s astounding ambition.
The impressive volume focuses in particular on his 1577–79 altarpiece paintings for the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo —among them the magnificent Assumption of the Virgin— which heralded the artist’s arrival in Spain after productive periods of formation and re-formation in Crete, Venice, and Rome.
Lavishly illustrated and clothbound with gilded edges, this publication features reproductions and scholarly discussions of more than 60 works ranging from large-scale canvases to intimate panels, with essays that elucidate the motives and meanings behind the artist’s constantly changing and inventive approach.
Livia Stoenescu
Honorable mention
The Pictorial Art of El Greco. Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The Pictorial Art of El Greco: Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media investigates El Greco’s pictorial art as foundational to the globalising trends manifested in the visual culture of early modernity. It also exposes the figurative, semantic, and allegorical senses that El Greco created to challenge an Italian Renaissance-centered discourse.
Even though he was guided by the unprecedented burgeoning of devotional art in the post-Tridentine decades and by the expressive possibilities of earlier religious artifacts, especially those inherited from the apostolic past, the author demonstrates that El Greco forged his own independent trajectory. While his paintings have been studied in relation to the Italian and Spanish school traditions, his pictorial art in a global Mediterranean context continues to receive scant attention.
Taking a global perspective as its focus, the book sheds new light on El Greco’s highly original contribution to early Mediterranean and multi-institutional configurations of the Christian faith in Byzantium, Venice, Rome, Toledo, and Madrid.
Gabriela Siracusano and Agustina Rodríguez Romero, eds.
Honorable mention
Materia Americana
Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero, 2020
The studies on American artistic production in viceregal times have revolved since their beginnings around the problem of style, meaning, or attribution, among others. In recent years, hand in hand with a look more attentive to social and cultural issues and to interdisciplinary intersections, an inquiry into the materiality of these objects has appeared as unavoidable.
In this sense, Materia Americana is a book that, for the first time, brings together the research of leading art historians, chemists, physicists, curators, and museologists concerned with Spanish-American art, and purports to become a reference book for future works on the subject.