Metapintura

This volume focuses on Spanish art from the Golden Age to the early nineteenth century through a very particular lens: the ways in which, in their works, artists explicitly reflected on themselves, their personal and professional concerns, the rules governing their art, the uses made of it, and the “lives” of images. The book seeks, as far as possible, to construct a “firsthand” history of art and images in which the pictures, prints, and sculptures tell us about themselves. The works splendidly reproduced here include many by Spain’s most revered and influential artists—El Greco, Zurbarán, Sánchez Coello, Velázquez, Murillo, Luis Paret, Goya— as well as a number by artists of other nationalities who worked extensively in Spain or for Spanish patrons, such as Titian, Rubens, and Mengs.

Works of visual art were by no means the only vehicles for the discourse on art: reflections are also to be found in treatises on art and literary works written during the period in question, featuring among their protagonists artists and people in close contact with art. Artists on Art sets out to examine the remarkably rich and varied “compendium” provided by these sources with a view to identifying the major narratives, motifs, and tropes through which attitudes to what we now call “art” were expressed in Spain. Accordingly, although the works of art themselves are the major focus of this volume, its five chapters also examine plays, novels, devotional books, local histories, treatises, and even popular literature to gain a clear idea of the main figures and ideas underpinning approaches to images and to the concept of art.

The text is by Javier Portús, Chief Curator of Spanish Painting (up to 1800) at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, who has spent much of his professional life exploring these questions and who tells this fascinating, complicated story both expertly and accessibly.

ISBN: 9788484803270