In ‘Black but Human’ Carmen Fracchia, Reader in Hispanic Art History at Birkbeck, explores the emergence of the slave and freed slave subjects in the visual form of Imperial Spain. The book considers the links between visual regimes and early modern Spanish discourses on slavery and human diversity that are the historic roots of contemporary racism in the Hispanic world.
‘Black but Human’ is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb ‘Black but Human’ is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore how a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves.
The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately two million enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragón and Portugal. The ‘Black but Human’ topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a ‘black nation’ forges a collective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors, engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings and sketches for costume books.
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The neo-plateresque façade of the museum, begun in 1924 and designed by William Templeton Johnson and Robert W. Snyder, with sculptures by Chris Muelle
This new exhibition features a diverse selection of more than 100 outstanding works produced by leading artists from Spain and its global territories.
Spain’s Golden Age may be defined as the
extraordinary moment when the visual arts, architecture, literature, and
music all reached unprecedented heights.
Art & Empire: The Golden Age of Spain is the first exhibition in the United States to expand the notion of “Golden Age” to include the Hispanic world beyond the shores of the Iberian Peninsula. Such far-flung Spanish-controlled centers as Antwerp, Naples, Mexico, Lima, and the Philippines are represented by paintings, sculpture and decorative arts of astounding quality and variety from the pivotal years of about 1660 to 1750.
Artists featured in the exhibition include Diego Velázquez, Peter Paul Rubens, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Francisco de Zurbarán, Jusepe de Ribera, El Greco, Juan de Valdés Leal, Juan Sánchez Cotán, and many more. This exhibition also marks the first time in the Museum’s history that all five of the Spanish masters represented on the Museum’s building façade —Velázquez, Murillo, Zurbarán, Ribera and El Greco— will be shown together at the Museum.
Also on display is a contemporary response to Art and Empire: The Golden Age of Spain, featuring a group of 12 encaustic-on-canvas “portraits” of Christ’s disciples by contemporary Spanish artist José-María Cano.
The visual arts in Spain have long been haunted by the spectres of six giants: El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo, Goya and Picasso. Still today, these canonical figures tower over all others and continue to shape the story of Spanish art, which has been traditionally told in monographic form. Although the strength of the Spanish canon has informed different disciplines (literature, aesthetics, performing arts), given the recent ‘material turn’, the prosopographical dimension of the visual arts in Spain poses a disciplinary challenge. Similarly, following the ‘global turn’, the visual arts of Iberia pose a geographical challenge, intersecting with the Mediterranean, Arabic, Latin American, British and continental European worlds. The notions of ‘Spain’ and ‘Spanish art’, therefore, are necessarily nebulous and problematic, raising a host of questions: To what extent does Spanish art exist before the establishment of Spain as a nation state? To what extent is the art of the Habsburg and Bourbon empires a Spanish art outside Spain? What is the role of Spain in the wider canon of European art? Who has exploited the visual arts of the Hispanic world, geographically, politically and intellectually? These questions ultimately point to a tension between canons and repertoires; between centres and peripheries; and between consolidating the ‘core’ and expanding the ‘remit’ of the so-called Spanish school.
This conference will explode the disciplinary, material and geographical limits of Spanish art, inaugurating the Zurbarán Centre as a critical and innovative research institution for the study of Spanish and Latin American art in the twenty-first century. Papers will challenge the canonical construction of Spanish art, which can be traced back to writings from Palomino’s Lives of the Eminent Spanish Painters and Sculptors (1724) to Stirling Maxwell’s Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848), to more recent publications by scholars in the field. Papers will also probe the chronological, geographical and material boundaries of the ‘El Greco to Goya’ survey, interrogating the ways in which academics, curators, scholars and teachers narrate this material through various platforms, including publications, museum displays, exhibitions, lectures, gallery talks and academic courses. Speakers will address the various ‘terrains’ of Spanish art, from geographical constructions of Iberia as Europe’s frontier or edge, to exchange with all that lies beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
Nigel Glendinning and the Hispanic Research Journal: A Unique Voice in Spanish Cultural History Sarah Symmons (University of Essex)
11.05 – 11.20
Discussion
11.20 – 11.50
Tea & Coffee
11.50 – 12.50
Keynote Lecture: Passion and Prejudice:Attitudes to Spanish Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century Britain Holly Trusted (Victoria & Albert Museum, London)
13.00 – 14.00
Lunch
14.00 – 15.15
Session 2: Geographies Chair: Edward Payne (Durham University)
14.00 – 14.20
Beyond El Greco:The Travelling Artist between Italy and Spain—Artistic Translation and the Sixteenth-Century Hispanic Canon Piers Baker-Bates (The Open University)
14.20 – 14.40
Maestros españoles en Chile: Espacios y repertorios Marcela Drien (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago de Chile)
14.40 – 15.00
Geographic Limits and the History of the Spanish Avant-Garde Maite Barragán (Albright College, Reading PA)
15.00 – 15.15
Discussion
15.15 – 16.30
Session 3: Strategies Chair: Tom Stammers (Durham University)
15.15 – 15.35
Genaro Pérez Villaamil: Navigating Stereotypes Claudia Hopkins (University of Edinburgh)
15.35 – 15.55
Imaginary Architecture as Imagined Community: ‘The Market’ by Jenaro Pérez Villaamil Matilde Mateo (Syracuse University)
15.55 – 16.15
Hieroglyphs of Providence: Pelegrín Clavé and Isabella I of Castile Stefano Cracolici (Durham University)
16.15 – 16.30
Discussion
16.30 – 17.00
Tea & Coffee
17.00 – 18.00
Keynote Lecture Canons and Repertoires in Hispanic Art: What does StirlingMaxwell have to do with them? Hilary Macartney (University of Glasgow)
Friday 21 June 2019
9.30 – 10.00
Tea & Coffee
10.00 – 11.15
Session 4: Identities Chair: Giovanna Capitelli (Università Roma Tre)
10.00 – 10.20
El arte español más allá de la península ibérica:¿Qué significa ser un ‘artista español en la Nueva España’? Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández (Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México)
10.20 – 10.40
Constructing the Monuments of the Nation:Victor Balaguer and the Struggle to Shape Monasteries as Spanishness Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes (Newcastle University)
10.40 – 11.00
Thinking Spain from Barcelona:The Iconographic Repertoire of Spanish Art (1918–1922) Lucila Mallart (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
Specialist Workshop “Golden Age Art and Globalization in Madrid’s Museums” Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, September 2–12 2019 Deadlinefor applications: Jun 2, 2019
Many of the objects that are admired today in Spain’s major museums arrived here in the Early Modern period. Collections of art, artifacts, and objects—everythig from paintings and sculptures to armor, textiles, feathers, books, exotic shells and even animal horns transmitted a variety of meanings, many of which are lost to the average museum visitor today.
Understanding these objects (their origins, how they arrived and how they were seen) introduces students to a deeper appreciation of how Spanish history and identity has been and is created in relationship with the rest of the world, and especially with Spanish-speaking America and Asia. The course will explore these issues using ten selected objects that will provide a view of early globalization focusing on questions raised by the objects themselves. One of the topics to analyze will be the relationship of art to diplomacy, seeking to shed light on the value of paintings of distant places, peoples and animals as “proof” or “document” in the age before photography, or the place of “the others” (non-Europeans) in the history of Spanish and European societies in general, both in the past and in today’s globalized and multicultural world. Attention will also be paid to questions such as commerce, consumption, religion, and gender in a world of travelling objects and persons, always with an emphasis on elucidating how these travels created new meanings for objects in new contexts.
This course has a practical, object-based character, with practically all of the sessions taking place in museums, libraries and other collections in Madrid and its surroundings. Presentations and discussions will take place in fromt of the objects themselves. This experience will help students to work with objects and to be aware of the material aspects of globalization, further from what is expressed in academic texts and articles. It is expected too that all will feel something of the fascination and intrigue experienced by contemporaries who saw these things for the first time.
