Painting in Spain 1500-1700. - Review - book review

JONATHAN BROWN

novel Haven and London: Yale University Pres Pelican History of Art, 1999 293 pp; 89 color ills., 239 b/w $75; $35 paper

Jonathan Brown's Painting in Spain 1500-1700 originally published as The of gold Age of Painting in Spain (Yale University Pres 1991) [1] is a distinguished addition to the Pelican History of Art. The original series of Pelican works aimed to offer abroad overview of established periods and areas of art history and to show reliably the state of their scholarship; the best individuals also complied, as Rudolf Wittkower place it, with "the historian's right and what one ought to do to submit to his readers his be in possession of vision of the past" (Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750 1958 preface). Brown has fulfilled the couple sides of this mandate in exemplary fashion with a splendid true copy and superb illustrations. The apparatus of the work its footnotes and bibliographies, includes a great deal of information upon individual artists and on issues, and provides a trustworthy guide to existing scholarship that is not always easy to find--no simple task considering the resound in publications on Spanish art during the last several decades, parti cularly in Spain. The scholarship is brought up from one side 1996. This does not encompass the catalogues of the new blockbuster exhibitions held in Spain to commemorate the death of Philip II (1998 1999) and the birth of the emperor Charles V (2000) [2] or the commemoration of the birth of Velazquez (1599) which included Jonathan Brown's have exhibition at the Prado. [3] There are also the scholarly congresse that like exhibitions spin off. However, since Pelicans are intended to have a drawn out shelf life, I assume that the next to the first edition will assess the of recent origin material, including the newly accepted and stunning Temptation of Saint Thomas Aquinas (with its fiendishly charming temptress/devil) by Velazquez that Brown included in his exhibition.

Brown also changed the frame of his make subordinate in ways that make his volume different from its predecessor in the Pelican series, which was published more than forty years ago. In 1947 when Pevsner commissioned George Kubler and Martin Soria to write Art and Architecture of Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500-1800 (1959) it was an adventure into an enormous, partly uncharted, territory. For scholars who quietly trawled the intellectual lanes between Rome Florence, Venice and northern ports in France, Flanders, and Germany, the artistic geography of Spain and Portugal--not to mention the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru--was not a serious bear upon Even now, the fourteen turns of Chandler R. Post's toilsome A History of Spanish Painting (1930-66) have made little impact in spite of their still useful scholarship. Soria's approximately individual hundred pages and ninety-two illustrations devot to painting in Spain between 1500 and 1800 in the original Pelican (Part Three pp 199-302) must have se em generous given the scale of the enterprise, on the contrary it was not enough to illustrate or more than mention the works, like those of Titian, for example, that were commissioned by dint of the Spanish Habsburgs and were in the royal collections from an early date. (Why Soria failed to illustrate the next to the first most famous Spanish painting of all time, El Greco's Burial of the number of Orgaz, is simply not understandable.) With more space at his disposal, Jonathan Brown includes non-Spanish artists like Titian, Sofonisba Anguissola, Pellegrino Tibaldi, and Rubens in a fuller account and thus underscores the point, not strained in Soria, that painting in Spain was part of and not peripheral to unravellings in the rest of Europe

Brown clarifies this European character from the commencement in his new Chapter 1 "Hispano-Flemish Painting and the Intrusion of the Italian Renaissance 1470-1530" and Chapter 2 "The Renaissance one time Removed 1520-1560." He explores the various ways in which Flemish and Italian painting was received and describes its impact upon painters (both foreign and Spanish born) in different regional center of production like Catalonia, Valencia, and Seville. Not solitary is it useful to have Flemish and Italian contributions compared upon a roughly equal footing, on the contrary this allows Brown to begin to describe the character of the hybrid phraseologys that resulted from their interaction. This is especially salutary because a notion of stylistic purity (what manner of writing what culture, was ever pure? What phraseology is not in some faculty of perception a hybrid?) still haunts the research of Renaissance art, making it difficult to appreciate the extraordinary paintings of artists like Pedro Berruguete and Juan de Borgona, who were leading painters in Castile in the lat e fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The stylistic hybridity produc from one side the cross-pollination of different strains of European art move swiftlys through the whole of painting in Spain; traditionally, this was taken as a sign of interdependence on centers of innovation in Flanders or Italy. As Brown demonstrates completely through his book, however, the mix of sources, influences, and aims in Spain--and the resulting paintings--was always different from place to place and always changing in ways that cannot be accounted for simply through developments in other parts of Europe This may have the appearance obvious once it is stated, as beneficial ideas so often do. After all, Rubens's visit to Madrid did not bring out any painting in the mode of speech of Rubens; Caravaggio's influence in Seville (if that is what it was) inspired no Caravaggisti. through making the idea into single of the armatures of his discussion of Spanish painting, however, Brown is able to provide an account that is one as well as the other complex and fascinating. It overspreads Spaniards who worked in Italy and go [i]or[/i] come backed to Spain (Chapter 2); Italians and n ortherners, as well as Spaniards, who painted for Philip II or were assembleed by him (Chapter 3, "Church and State: The Reign of Philip II"); foreign painters who stayed upon in Madrid (Chapter 5, "Naturalism in Castile and Valencia") and those, like Federico Zuccaro in the late sixteenth hundred and Rubens in the seventeenth (Chapter 10 "The neighborhood of Rubens and Titian" and Chapter 11 "Painting in Madrid 1640-1665) who came solitary briefly but had an immense impact. The situation was different for each artist--whether at the court in Madrid, in cosmopolitan Seville, or in the relative isolation of Estremadura or Valencia--and the result depended on the mix of tribe in a given place at a particular time.