Spanish Art
- LAST REVIEWED: 26 August 2011
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 August 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0038
- LAST REVIEWED: 26 August 2011
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 August 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0038
Introduction
Most publications about the visual arts of the Iberian Peninsula have focused in the past on Spain’s so-called Golden Age in the 17th century, when its art is seen as having created its own distinctive style, exemplified by the work of celebrated painters such as Diego Velázquez. There are, however, many first-class artists—painters, graphic artists, and especially sculptors—of the 15th to 17th centuries who are still unknown beyond the world of the dedicated Hispanist. For this reason, this bibliography highlights such previously neglected areas as the multicultural artistic influences—Flemish, Italian, and Hispano-Muslim—of the 15th century, which prepared the way for what is sometimes termed the “Italian” Renaissance. This bibliography also emphasizes drawing and printmaking, an area that is often considered unrepresentative of Spain’s visual arts, though much research has been published on the graphic arts since the mid-1980s. Even more recently, publications have increased about Spanish sculpture and especially its distinctive polychromed processional figures and multitiered sculpted altarpieces (retablos). Some of the most innovative research has been technical art history using x-radiographic photography and pigment analysis on paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Much of this research has been published in the form of essays accompanying multidisciplinary exhibition catalogues, which often include discursive footnotes and a full scholarly apparatus of extensive bibliographies, detailed chronologies, and documentary appendices. From the late 1980s, many of these often blockbuster catalogues examined art patronage in the Renaissance and Baroque periods and usually illustrated lavishly both the applied and the fine arts. Initially, such important research was published only in Spanish, but increasingly exhibition catalogues in Spain are published in bilingual Spanish/English editions. Finally, there has been such a flourishing of important publications about individual 17th-century Spanish artists that only a small sample of publications has been included in this bibliography, and Velázquez has his own bibliography.
General Overviews
Kubler and Soria 1959 was the first modern overview of Spanish art. Like many surveys, it covers only the so-called Golden Age and Enlightenment of Hispanic arts, from the 16th through to the 19th centuries. It is now somewhat superseded, especially for painting, by Brown 1998 and Mallory 1990 (both cited under Painting) and in sculpture and applied arts by Trusted 2007. Despite its summary nature and monochrome illustrations, it still provides a good introduction. The remaining texts are more specialized in chronology and subject. Dodds, et al. 2008 examines Islamic art and its material culture in Spain between the 8th and 15th centuries; it developed from Jerrilynn Dodds’s work on the pioneering Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition in 1992. Yarza Luaces 1992 pays as much attention to key patrons as to individual artists in the period between the 13th and 15th centuries and discusses in particular the author’s specialist interest in illuminated manuscripts. The companion volume on the 16th century in the same series, Marías 1992, provides a good, accessible general introduction in Spanish to the arts of that period. Fernando Checa Cremades is one of the leading authorities on the Spanish Renaissance and patronage at the courts of Charles I and Philip II (see Collecting and Patronage to 1600); Checa Cremades 1983 aims to promote the thesis of a humanist, cosmopolitan Renaissance culture in Spain and to undermine previously proposed views of Spain as isolated culturally from Europe. Stoichita 1995 provides one of the very rare treatments to apply postmodern and post-structuralist theory to Spanish painting and sculpture of the 16th and 17th centuries. Marjorie Trusted’s expertise in Spanish sculpture and her grounding as a curator in an applied arts museum informs her stimulating discourse (Trusted 2007) and expands it beyond two-dimensional visual art forms to include furniture, ceramics, and textiles.
Checa Cremades, Fernando. Pintura y escultura del renacimiento en España 1450–1600. Madrid: Cátedra, 1983.
A 470-page book of essays about painting and sculpture in Renaissance Spain, with thematic bibliography, featuring the artists Jaume Huguet, Juan de Flandes, Gil de Siloé, El Greco, Sánchez Coello, Juan de Juni, Alonso Berruguete, and Yáñez de la Almedina. Also treats ephemeral festive decoration (not previously much discussed) and the history of taste. Illustrated in monochrome.
Dodds, Jerrilynn, María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Balbale. The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Integrated coverage of Islamic architectural, two-dimensional visual, textile, and horticultural arts and their influence on Christian and Jewish Spain. Small-format paperback. Well illustrated in color and monochrome.
Kubler, George, and Martin Soria. Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions 1500 to 1800. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959.
Original undergraduate textbook survey with general overview of the arts in the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies in Latin America.
Marías, Fernando. El siglo XVI: Gótico y Renacimiento. Madrid: Sílex, 1992.
Fifth volume in a series of paperback introductions to Spanish art, focusing on 16th-century Gothic and Renaissance art. Concise 222-page, well-illustrated discussion that contrasts the reinvented Gothic tradition, especially in architecture and sculpture, with the introduction of influences from the Renaissance and Antiquity. Artists featured include Alonso Berruguete and El Greco. The final of four chapters focuses on the Escorial and the funerary arts.
Stoichita, Victor. Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art. London: Reaktion, 1995.
Small-format 224-page book focusing on two- and three-dimensional art from 1575 to the end of the 17th century, illustrated in monochrome and color. Author is not a Hispanist and uses Spanish art as a case study, within a greater European context, for postmodernist theories regarding “visionary experience.”
Trusted, Marjorie. The Arts of Spain: Iberia and Latin America 1450–1700. London: V & A, 2007.
Accessibly written yet scholarly 224-page overview of Hispanic arts. Includes luxury applied arts as well as architecture, painting, and sculpture. Supported with good color illustrations, maps and time lines, footnotes, and an extensive, useful bibliography. Survey divided into six thematic chapters covering the church, secular art, Islamic and Judaic heritage, workshop practices, trade and patronage, and viceregal America.
Yarza Luaces, Joaquín. Baja Edad Media: Los siglos del Gótico. Madrid: Sílex, 1992.
Third volume in a series of paperback introductions to Spanish art. Concise 192-page introduction to Spanish Gothic art (13th–15th centuries) in its painted, sculpted, and architectural forms. Well-illustrated (mainly in color), accompanied by a summary four-page bibliography. A final chapter focuses on iconography.
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login.
How to Subscribe
Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here.
Article
- Academies
- Aemilia Lanyer
- Agrippa d’Aubigné
- Alberti, Leon Battista
- Alexander VI, Pope
- Amsterdam
- Andrea del Verrocchio
- Andrea Mantegna
- Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt
- Anne Boleyn
- Anne Bradstreet
- Antwerp
- Aretino, Pietro
- Ariosto, Ludovico
- Art and Science
- Art, German
- Art in Renaissance England
- Art in Renaissance Florence
- Art in Renaissance Siena
- Art in Renaissance Venice
- Art Literature and Theory of Art
- Art Market
- Art of Poetry
- Art, Spanish
- Art, 16th- and 17th-Century Flemish
- Art, 17th-Century Dutch
- Artemisia Gentileschi
- Artisans
- Ascham, Roger
- Askew, Anne
- Astell, Mary
- Astrology, Alchemy, Magic
- Augsburg
- Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought
- Austria
- Autobiography and Life Writing
- Avignon Papacy
- Bacon, Francis
- Banking and Money
- Barbaro, Ermolao, the Younger
- Barbaro, Francesco
- Baron, Hans
- Baroque
- Baroque Art and Architecture in Italy
- Barzizza, Gasparino
- Bathsua Makin
- Beaufort, Margaret
- Bellarmine, Cardinal
- Bembo, Pietro
- Benito Arias Montano
- Bernardino of Siena, San
- Beroaldo, Filippo, the Elder
- Bessarion, Cardinal
- Bible, The
- Biography
- Biondo, Flavio
- Bishops, 1550–1700
- Bishops, 1400-1550
- Black Death and Plague: The Disease and Medical Thought
- Boccaccio, Giovanni
- Bohemia and Bohemian Crown Lands
- Borgia, Cesare
- Borgia, Lucrezia
- Borromeo, Cardinal Carlo
- Bosch, Hieronymous
- Bracciolini, Poggio
- Brahe, Tycho
- Bruegel, Pieter the Elder
- Bruni, Leonardo
- Bruno, Giordano
- Bucer, Martin
- Budé, Guillaume
- Buonarroti, Michelangelo
- Burgundy and the Netherlands
- Calvin, John
- Calvinism
- Camões, Luís de
- Caravaggio
- Cardano, Girolamo
- Cardinal Richelieu
- Cardinals
- Carvajal y Mendoza, Luisa De
- Cary, Elizabeth
- Casas, Bartolome de las
- Castiglione, Baldassarre
- Catherine of Siena
- Catholic/Counter-Reformation
- Catholicism, Early Modern
- Cavendish, Margaret
- Cecilia del Nacimiento
- Cellini, Benvenuto
- Cervantes, Miguel de
- Charles V, Emperor
- China and Europe, 1550-1800
- Christian-Muslim Exchange
- Christine de Pizan
- Church Fathers in Renaissance and Reformation Thought, The
- Ciceronianism
- Cities and Urban Patriciates
- Civic Humanism
- Civic Ritual
- Classical Tradition, The
- Clifford, Anne
- Colet, John
- Colonna, Vittoria
- Columbus, Christopher
- Comenius, Jan Amos
- Commedia dell'arte
- Concepts of the Renaissance, c. 1780–c. 1920
- Confraternities
- Constantinople, Fall of
- Contarini, Gasparo, Cardinal
- Convent Culture
- Conversion
- Conversos and Crypto-Judaism
- Copernicus, Nicolaus
- Cornaro, Caterina
- Cosimo I de’ Medici
- Cosimo il Vecchio de' Medici
- Costume
- Council of Trent
- Crime and Punishment
- Croatia
- Cromwell, Oliver
- Cruz, Juana de la, Mother
- Cruz, Juana Inés de la, Sor
- Dance
- d'Aragona, Tullia
- Datini, Margherita
- Davies, Eleanor
- de Commynes, Philippe
- de Sales, Saint Francis
- de Valdés, Juan
- Death and Dying
- Decembrio, Pier Candido
- Dentière, Marie
- Des Roches, Madeleine and Catherine
- d’Este, Isabella
- di Toledo, Eleonora
- Dialogue
- Diplomacy
- Dolce, Ludovico
- Donatello
- Donne, John
- Drama, English Renaissance
- Dürer, Albrecht
- du Bellay, Joachim
- Du Guillet, Pernette
- Dutch Overseas Empire
- Early Modern Period, Racialization in the
- Ebreo, Leone
- Edinburgh
- Edmund Campion
- Edward IV, King of England
- El Greco
- Elizabeth I, the Great, Queen of England
- Emperor, Maximilian I
- England, 1485-1642
- English Overseas Empire
- English Puritans, Quakers, Dissenters, and Recusants
- Environment and the Natural World
- Epic and Romance
- Erasmus
- Europe and the Globe, 1350–1700
- European Tapestries
- Family and Childhood
- Fedele, Cassandra
- Federico Barocci
- Female Lay Piety
- Ferrara and the Este
- Ficino, Marsilio
- Filelfo, Francesco
- Florence
- Fonte, Moderata
- Foscari, Francesco
- France in the 17th Century
- France in the 16th Century
- Francis Xavier, St
- Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros
- French Law and Justice
- French Renaissance Drama
- Fugger Family
- Galilei, Galileo
- Gallicanism
- Gambara, Veronica
- Gardens
- Garin, Eugenio
- General Church Councils, Pre-Trent
- Geneva (1400-1600)
- Genoa 1450–1700
- George Buchanan
- George of Trebizond
- Georges de La Tour
- Ghetto
- Giambologna
- Ginés de Sepúlveda, Juan
- Giustiniani, Bernardo
- Góngora, Luis de
- Gonzaga, Giulia
- Gournay, Marie de
- Greek Visitors
- Guarino da Verona
- Guicciardini, Francesco
- Guilds and Manufacturing
- Hamburg, 1350–1815
- Hanseatic League
- Henry VII
- Henry VIII, King of England
- Herbalism/Botany
- Herbert, George
- Hispanic Mysticism
- Historiography
- Hobbes, Thomas
- Holy Roman Empire 1300–1650
- Homes, Foundling
- Huguenots
- Humanism
- Humanism, The Origins of
- Hundred Years War, The
- Hungary, The Kingdom of
- Hus, Jan
- Hutchinson, Lucy
- Iconology and Iconography
- Ignatius of Loyola, Saint
- Infanticide
- Inquisition, Roman
- Ireland
- Isaac Casaubon
- Isabel I, Queen of Castile
- Italian Wars, 1494–1559
- Ivan IV the Terrible, Tsar of Russia
- Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples
- Jansenism
- Japan and Europe: the Christian Century, 1549-1650
- Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre
- Jesuits
- Jewish Women in Renaissance and Reformation Europe
- Jews
- Jews and Christians in Venice
- Jews and the Reformation
- Jews in Amsterdam
- Jews in Florence
- Jews in Rome
- Joan of Arc
- Jonson, Ben
- Joseph Justus Scaliger
- Juan de Torquemada
- Juana the Mad/Juana, Queen of Castile
- Julius II
- Kepler, Johannes
- King of France, Francis I
- King of France, Henri IV
- Knox, John
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar
- Labé, Louise
- Landino, Cristoforo
- Landscape
- Last Wills and Testaments
- Laura Cereta
- Law
- Lay Piety
- Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
- Leo X
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Leoni, Leone and Pompeo
- Leto, Giulio Pomponio
- Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture
- Libraries
- Literary Criticism
- Literature, French
- Literature, Italian
- Literature, Late Medieval German
- Literature, Penitential
- Literature, Spanish
- Locke, John
- London
- Lorenzo de' Medici
- Lorenzo Ghiberti
- Louis XI, King of France
- Louis XIII, King of France
- Louis XIV, King of France
- Lucas Cranach the Elder
- Lucretius in Renaissance Thought
- Luther, Martin
- Lyric Poetry
- Machiavelli, Niccolo
- Macinghi Strozzi, Alessandra
- Malatesta, Sigismondo
- Manetti, Giannozzo
- Mannerism
- Mantovano (Battista Spagnoli), Battista
- Manuel Chrysoloras
- Manuzio, Aldo
- Margaret Clitherow
- Margaret Fell Fox
- Margery Kempe
- Marinella, Lucrezia
- Marino Sanudo
- Marlowe, Christopher
- Marriage and Dowry
- Mary Stuart (Mary, Queen of Scots)
- Mary Tudor, Queen of England
- Masculinity
- Medici Bank
- Medici, Catherine de'
- Medici Family, The
- Medicine
- Mediterranean
- Memling, Hans
- Merchant Adventurers
- Merici, Angela
- Midwifery
- Milan, 1535–1706
- Milan to 1535
- Milton, John
- Mining and Metallurgy
- Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della
- Mission
- Monarchy in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, Female
- Montaigne, Michel de
- More, Thomas
- Morone, Cardinal Giovanni
- Music
- Naples, 1300–1700
- Navarre, Marguerite de
- Netherlandish Art, Early
- Netherlands (Dutch Revolt/ Dutch Republic), The
- Netherlands, Spanish, 1598-1700, the
- Nettesheim, Agrippa von
- Newton, Isaac
- Niccoli, Niccolò
- Nicholas of Cusa
- Nicolas Malebranche
- Nobility
- Opera
- Ottoman Empire
- Ovid in Renaissance Thought
- Panofsky, Erwin
- Paolo Veronese
- Papacy
- Papal Rome
- Paracelsus
- Paris
- Parr, Katherine
- Patronage of the Arts
- Perotti, Niccolò
- Persecution and Martyrdom
- Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia
- Petrarch
- Petrus Ramus and Ramism
- Philip Melanchthon
- Philips, Katherine
- Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius
- Piero della Francesca
- Pierre Bayle
- Pilgrimage in Early Modern Catholicism
- Plague and its Consequences
- Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Hermetic Tradition
- Poetry, English
- Pole, Cardinal Reginald
- Polish Literature: Baroque
- Polish Literature: Renaissance
- Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, The
- Political Thought
- Poliziano, Angelo
- Polydore Vergil
- Pontano, Giovanni Giovano
- Pope Innocent VIII
- Pope Nicholas V
- Pope Paul II
- Portraiture
- Portugal
- Poulain de la Barre, Francois
- Poverty and Poor Relief
- Prince Henry the Navigator
- Printing and the Book
- Printmaking
- Prophecy
- Pulter, Hester
- Purgatory
- Purity of Blood
- Quirini, Lauro
- Rabelais, François
- Raphael
- Reformation and Hussite Revolution, Czech
- Reformation and Wars of Religion in France, The
- Reformation, English
- Reformation, German
- Reformation, Italian, The
- Reformation, The
- Reformations and Revolt in the Netherlands, 1500–1621
- Rembrandt
- Renaissance Poland-Lithuania, Art of
- Renaissance, The
- Reuchlin, Johann
- Revolutionary England, 1642-1702
- Rhetoric
- Ricci, Matteo
- Richard III
- Rienzo, Cola Di
- Roman and Iberian Inquisitions, Censorship and the Index i...
- Ronsard, Pierre de
- Roper, Margeret More
- Royal Regencies in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, 140...
- Rubens, Peter Paul
- Russell, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby
- Russia and Muscovy
- Ruzante Angelo Beolco
- Saint John of the Cross
- Saints and Mystics: After Trent
- Saints and Mystics: Before Trent
- Salutati, Coluccio
- Sandro Botticelli
- Sarpi, Fra Paolo
- Savonarola, Girolamo
- Scandinavia
- Scholasticism and Aristotelianism: Fourteenth to Seventeen...
- Schooling and Literacy
- Scientific Revolution
- Scotland
- Scève, Maurice
- Sephardic Diaspora
- Sforza, Caterina
- Sforza, Francesco
- Shakespeare, William
- Ships/Shipbuilding
- Sidney Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke
- Sidney, Philip
- Siena
- Simon of Trent
- Sir Robert Cecil
- Sixtus IV, Pope
- Skepticism in Renaissance Thought
- Slavery and the Slave Trade, 1350–1650
- Southern Italy, 1500–1700
- Southern Italy, 1300–1500
- Spain
- Spanish Inquisition
- Spanish Islam, 1350-1614
- Spenser, Edmund
- Sperone Speroni
- Spinoza, Baruch
- Stampa, Gaspara
- Stuart, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia
- Switzerland
- Tarabotti, Arcangela
- Tasso Torquato
- Tell, William
- Teresa of Avila
- Textiles: 1400 to 1700
- The Casa of San Giorgio, Genoa
- The Radical Reformation
- The Sack of Rome (1527)
- Thirty Years War, The
- Thomas Wyatt
- Titian
- Toleration
- Tornabuoni, Lucrezia
- Trade Networks
- Tragedy, English
- Translation
- Transylvania, The Principality of
- Traversari, Ambrogio
- Universities
- Urbanism
- Ursulines
- Valeriano, Pierio
- Valla, Lorenzo
- van Eyck, Jan
- van Schurman, Anna Maria
- Vasari, Giorgio
- Vega, Lope de
- Vegio, Maffeo
- Velázquez
- Venice
- Venice, Maritime
- Vergerio, Pier Paolo, The Elder
- Vermeer, Johannes
- Vernacular Languages and Dialects
- Vida, Marco Girolamo
- Virgil in Renaissance Thought
- Visitors, Italian
- Vives, Juan Luis
- Walter Ralegh
- War and Economy, 1300-1600
- Ward, Mary
- Warfare and Military Organizations
- Weyden, Rogier van der
- Widowhood
- Witch Hunt
- Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal
- Women and Learning
- Women and Medicine
- Women and Science
- Women and the Book Trade
- Women and the Reformation
- Women and the Visual Arts
- Women and Warfare
- Women and Work: Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
- Women Writers in Ireland
- Women Writers of the Iberian Empire
- Women Writing in Early Modern Spain
- Women Writing in English
- Women Writing in French
- Women Writing in Italy
- Wroth, Mary