Becoming Actaeon: Titian and the Conceptual Gaze in Diego Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas

By Isabelle Kent, PhD candidate at University of Cambridge and winner of the ARTES 2023 Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Prize.

When: Monday, 4th December 2023 18:00GMT
Where: Instituto Cervantes London (15-19 Devereux Court London WC2R 3JJ) and zoom

In the background of Diego Velázquez’s enigmatic masterpiece, Las Hilanderas, the artist summarises with a few bravura strokes a treasure of the Spanish crown, Titian’s Rape of Europa. This citation, first identified in 1903, has underpinned many subsequent interpretations of the work, yet a second pivotal allusion to Titian’s poesie has passed unnoticed until now, that of Diana and Actaeon.

Taking these two citations as a starting point, this paper argues that Velázquez designed his painting within the intellectual framework of Conceptismo, with these quotations acting as ‘correspondencias’, mechanisms of interconnecting wit that weave art, metaphor and Ovidian myth. Combining this mode of intellectual thought as it applies to the poesie, with an embodied approach to how Velázquez as the curator of the King’s collection interacted with Titian’s paintings, this lecture (literally) pulls back the curtain on a new understanding the work, one that, as in Las Meninas, centres our ambiguous gaze.

To book your tickets – both in-person or zoom – please click here.

Isabelle Kent is a PhD candidate at Trinity College, University of Cambridge researching the heroic body in early modern Spanish art. She has been a visiting scholar at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and El Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and from 2017-19 she was the inaugural Enriqueta Harris Frankfort Curatorial Assistant at the Wallace Collection. Her work has been published in the Burlington Magazine, Apollo Magazine and the Hispanic Research Journal, and she is also editor of Collecting Murillo in Britain and Ireland (CEEH, 2020).

This event is organized by ARTES, in conjunction with the Instituto Cervantes London and with the support of the Spanish Embassy to London.