2022
Benito Navarrete Prieto
Winner
Murillo. Persuasion and Aura
London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2021
Murillo has attracted particular attention from historians since the seventeenth century to the present day, though opinions of his oeuvre have varied from period to period. The communicative power of his paintings, both then and now, has led him to be used and exploited for different ends.
He deliberately cultivated this quality from the time he became an accomplished artist in his native Seville, where he enjoyed great prestige during his lifetime thanks to the resources of his art, his talent and his ability to elicit emotions and arouse passions.
His paintings, as if they were prophecies, can only be understood from a visual culture approach and by analysing what his images provoke. Their seemingly easy and familiar appearance is merely the mirror that Murillo, with his command of local codes and the devices of painting, places in front of viewers to trigger a complex empathetic process designed solely to persuade and seduce them, often anticipating their response.
Laura Fernández-González
Honorable mention
Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021
Philip II of Spain was a major patron of the arts, best known for his magnificent palace and royal mausoleum at the Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial. However, neither the king’s monastery nor his collections fully convey the rich artistic landscape of early modern Iberia. In this book, Laura Fernández-González examines Philip’s architectural and artistic projects, placing them within the wider context of Europe and the transoceanic Iberian dominions.
Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire investigates ideas of empire and globalization in the art and architecture of the Iberian world during the sixteenth century, a time when the Spanish Empire was one of the largest in the world. Fernández-González illuminates Philip’s use of building regulations to construct an imperial city in Madrid and highlights the importance of his transformation of the Simancas fortress into an archive. She analyzes the refashioning of his imperial image upon his ascension to the Portuguese throne and uses the Hall of Battles in El Escorial as a lens through which to understand visual culture, history writing, and Philip’s kingly image as it was reflected in the funeral commemorations mourning his death across the Iberian world. Positioning Philip’s art and architectural programs within the wider cultural context of politics, legislation, religion, and theoretical trends, Fernández-González shows how design and images traveled across the Iberian world and provides a nuanced assessment of Philip’s role in influencing them.
Original and important, this panoramic work will have a lasting impact on Philip II’s artistic legacy. Art historians and scholars of Iberia and sixteenth-century history will especially value Fernández-González’s research.
Noelia García Pérez
Honorable mention
The Making of Juana de Austria: Gender, Art, and Patronage in Early Modern Iberia
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021
Edited by art historian Noelia García Pérez, this first-ever collection of essays on Juana of Austria, the younger daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and sister to Philip II of Spain, offers an interdisciplinary study of the Habsburg princess that addresses her political, religious, and artistic dimensions. The volume’s contextual framework shows her sharing agency with other women of her dynastic family who governed in the sixteenth century and developed an outstanding reputation for promoting artists and works of art. The Making of Juana of Austria demonstrates how Juana’s role as a leading patron of the arts offered her a means of creating her own image, which she then promulgated through the objects she collected and her crowning architectural endeavor, the Monastery-Palace of the Descalzas Reales.
Drawing on early modern literature, archival documents, and artworks, the essays in this volume delineate a new portrait of Juana of Austria. Contributors not only highlight her multiple facets—princess of Portugal, regent of Castile, and the only female Jesuit in history—but also show her as a discerning art patron and collector who pursued an active role of patronage, through which she constructed her own art collection and used it to articulate a visual statement of her lineage, power, and religious convictions. Her role as an art promoter culminated with the foundation of the Descalzas Reales and the works of art she collected and displayed within its walls.
The Making of Juana of Austria offers a new perspective on female rule and patronage, exploring the achievements of a crucial figure in the history of art, court, and gender in early modern Europe.