Recording of a talk delivered online on January 27th, 2021 as part of the research seminar series organized by Durham University’s Zurbarán Centre For Spanish and Latin American Art with ARTES Iberian & Visual Culture Group, with the collaboration of Instituto Cervantes in the UK
This talk was delivered as part of a series of 12 research seminars, many of which will also be recorded and available on the ARTES site.
The weekly sessions usually take place on Wednesdays, 6.00-7.00pm, except the fourth session scheduled for Tuesday, 2 February. The talks last ca. 40 minutes and are followed by Q&A.
The series is free and open to all with an interest in the visual arts. Booking is essential. Please email the Zurbarán Centre (Zurbaran.centre@durham.ac.uk) to register and to receive a zoom link. Please note registration closes 24 hours before the seminar.
Prince Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School, c. 1640 – c. 1645, Wallace Collection
Date: Thursday 4 and Friday 5 March 2021 Times: 15.00-18.00 each day Location: Zoom (online)
Drawing together an international panel of eminent scholars working on the Spanish Habsburg Court and Spanish art, this two-session conference focuses on one of the best-loved paintings at the Wallace Collection, Prince Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School.
The lectures are free to members of the PSSA. A nominal charge of £3.50 is made for non-members for each lecture.
Abstract: The daughter of a well-known Sevillian sculptor, Luisa Roldán trained in her father’s circle, sculpting both over-life sized wooden sculptures for churches and intimate terracotta sculptures for domestic, devotional spaces. After her marriage in 1671 Roldán established an identity independent of her father and subsequently attracted commissions from churches and religious brotherhoods. Leaving southern Spain with her young family in 1688, she travelled to Madrid where she soon established her reputation as an able interpreter of Madrid’s religious and political environment. In 1692 she was named Sculptor to the Royal Chamber of Carlos II retaining the title upon his death and the arrival of Felipe V, and working until her death in 1706.
Biography: Cathy Hall-van den Elsen studied Spanish art at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, completing her PhD (1992) on the life and work of Luisa Roldán. After a period working outside art history Cathy returned to scholarship in 2005, contributing the introductory chapter to the exhibition catalogue Roldana published by the Consejeria de Cultura in Seville in 2007. In 2018 Cathy published a monograph in Spanish:Fuerza e Intimismo: Luisa Roldán, escultora (1652-1706), (Madrid, CSIC). In August 2020 her annotated bibliography on Luisa Roldán was published by Oxford Bibliographies Online, and in 2021 Lund Humphries will publish her monograph in English: Luisa Roldán. Cathy’s next project is a study of creative women from Spain and Portugal in early modern period.
The Department of History of Art of the University of Oxford is delighted to announce the Slade Professor for 2021 is Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Harlequin Adair Dammann Professor, Faculty of Art History, Sarah Lawrence College. Professor Dodds’ scholarly work has centered on issues of transculturation, and how groups form identities through art and architecture. Among her publications are: Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture, co-authored with Prof. Mara Menocal and Abigail Krasner Balbale; Architecture and Ideology of Early Medieval Spain; and New York Masjid, the Mosques of New York City. She was editor of the catalogue Al Andalus: The Arts of Islamic Spain (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and served as curator of the exhibition of the same name, at the Alhambra in Granada and in New York; co-editor and curatorial consultant of The Arts of Medieval Spain (with Little, Moralejo and Williams, Metropolitan Museum of Art); co-editor and consulting curator for Convivencia. The Arts of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Medieval Iberia (ed., with Glick and Mann, 1992); and, with Edward Sullivan, co-editor and curator for Crowning Glory, Images of the Virgin in the Arts of Portugal (Newark Museum). She has written and directed films in conjunction with museum exhibitions (Journey to St. James (MMA); An Imaginary East (MMA); NY Masjid (Storefront) and for wider audiences (Hearts and Stones: The Bridge at Mostar). Professor Dodds was the recipient of the Cruz de la Orden de Mérito Civil (Cross of the Order of Civil Merit) from the Government of Spain (2018).
Material Histories from Medieval Iberia
An Agonistic History of Art (Wednesday 28 April 2021)
The Great Mosque of Cordoba as Center and Periphery (Wednesday 5 May 2021)
Babylon in Flames (Wednesday 19 May 2021)
Mudejar and Romanesque. Romanesque and Islam (Wednesday 26 May 2021)
The Virgin as Colonial Agent (Wednesday 2 June 2021)
Hunting in the Borderlands: Conversions and Translations (Wednesday 9 June 2021)
Details of where and how the lectures will be delivered will be made available as soon as possible.
Susan Wilson’s copy of Robertson’s Blue Guide to Spain
Susan Wilson writes:
I have a dog eared copy of Robertson’s Blue Guideto Spain which I bought in 1977. I had hitchhiked around Spain in 1976 for three months curious to see what was happening to the country-after the death of Franco. I was 25 and interested in politics.
Many journeys followed, always with the Blue Guide. I would read it aloud to my companions, in a tent in Toledo or a pension, at night, in simple plain rooms devoid of tv, radio, or devices! We would laugh at hilarious, indignant passages where he expressed himself in trenchant terms. Here he is, noting that ‘although Spain no longer admits to being a police state, the police are still very much in evidence…’
‘In the countryside, where they now serve little purpose, the ubiquitous olive green uniformed Guardia Civil, always patrolling in pairs (and known familiarly as “La Pareja”, the couple) wearing incongruous but distinctive patent leather tricorn hats. Formed in 1844, members of this strong but singularly ineffective arm of the law, raised originally to combat rural banditry and who have since regularly intimidated rural peasantry, are seldom-officious, but are not invariably civil.’ He continues, ‘In addition…when students, Basques, crowds, demonstrations, or “Manifestations” may, in their opinion require “Supervision”… the autocratic police, recently designated “Policia Nacional”…in the process of changing from a grey uniform (when they were familiarly know as “grises”) to a brown (and already called “chocolate con porras”- the latter being a truncheon shaped fritter!). They also guard embassies, ministries, ministers, nervous capitalists, stations banks, etc. Some of them have met with violent death in recent anti-authoritarian disturbances.’ (p. 93 Blue Guide to Spain).
There is a wealth of excellent quotes from Richard Ford. Some years later I was given the three volume Handbook to Spain by Sir Brinsley Ford as part of The Richard Ford Award to Spain, but took Ian Robertson’s guide with me on the several journeys I made.
Mine is underlined, my routes marked on maps, as I followed the Guide along roads, hills and in unbearably slow forever stopping overnight trains. One, from Atocha to Granada one spring, where passengers in a compartment with eight seats told funny stories, mimed silly antics, and shared food and wine with us.
I wandered alone and with various companions to obscure churches and towns in Extremadura … and over bridges (the Alcantara bridge, Roman, still in use, was one).
Informative, scholarly and amusing, it remains a definitive guide although I am afraid that it is no longer in print and that publishers of guide books began to underestimate their readers’ appetite to see and understand a culture. Robertson made a huge contribution to the travellers’ understanding of Spain.
If you can find a copy, don’t part with it. Reading this in the pandemic is strongly recommended!
Recording of Piers Baker-Bates’ talk delivered online on January 13th, 2021, as part of the research seminar series organized by Durham University’s Zurbarán Centre For Spanish and Latin American Art with ARTES Iberian & Visual Culture Group, with the collaboration of Instituto Cervantes in the UK
This is the first in a series of 12 seminars, many of which will also be recorded and available on the ARTES site.
The weekly sessions usually take place on Wednesdays, 6.00-7.00pm, except the fourth session scheduled for Tuesday, 2 February. The talks last ca. 40 minutes and are followed by Q&A.
The series is free and open to all with an interest in the visual arts. Booking is essential. Please email the Zurbarán Centre (Zurbaran.centre@durham.ac.uk) to register and to receive a zoom link. Please note registration closes 24 hours before the seminar.
Ian Robertson, who has died aged 92, embarked on a lifetime’s scholarship on Spain and a prodigious production of travel guides inspired by an unlikely combination of the Duke of Wellington’s campaigns in the Peninsular War and Richard Ford’s accounts of his Spanish journeys. He became a leading authority on both.
His Spanish interests led to a commission to write the Blue Guide to Spain. A succession of further Blue Guides followed on France, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus, Austria and Switzerland, but his work on Spain, and especially Ford, remained his abiding passion and his crowning achievement.
In addition to several titles on Wellington’s campaigns, Robertson’s seminal work was the authoritative Los Curiosos Impertinentes about English travellers in Spain in the 18th and 19th centuries, which was published in Spanish in Madrid in 1977. Richard Ford, a major biography, was published in London in 2004. Along the way, he edited Ford’s Hand-Bookfor Travellers in Spain and Gatherings from Spain.
Richard Ford both inspired and informed him. “Time has not dimmed the scintillating perspicacity of Ford’s observations,” Robertson wrote.
Robertson’s own observations were equally masterful – combining waspish wit, artistic detail and encyclopedic knowledge – and even today it is a challenge to find a cloister or remote chapel that he had not visited and written about in his Blue Guide. The same is broadly true of all of his guides.
Robertson died in hospital from heart failure on 7 December 2020 in Arles which had been his home for the last 20 years.
ARTES 