This session will feature two presentations, focused on the functions and constructions of history in the wake of the conquest of Granada.
Please click here for more information.
To register: https://ucl.zoom.us/meeting/register
Please click here to access the site and find out more about how to navigate through its wealth of images and information
The Prado has reopened a quarter of its gallery space with Reunited, a new display of nearly 200 paintings from its permanent collection. The exhibition will run until 13 September 2020. The museum’s masterpieces are displayed in novel juxtapositions, offering a new perspective on the permanent collection. For example, for the first time Rubens’ 17th-century “Saturn Devouring His Son” will be adjacent to Francisco Goya’s depiction of the same subject, painted nearly 200 years later. See the Prado’s website for more details on the works included, the new pairings, and additional videos on the exhibition.
The Prado has reopened with a limited capacity of only 1,800 people per day, compared to 15,000 on peak days last year. Visitors will have to book at least 24 hours in advance, have their temperatures checked at the entrance, wear masks throughout the visit, and there will be markings on the floor to indicate safe distances. The museum’s finances remain a concern despite reopening. Ticket prices will be halved until September 13th, and as the museum receives approximately half its funding from ticket sales. Furthermore, foreign tourists usually represent 70-80% of its visitors. The director of the Prado, Miguel Falomir, plans to showcase the museum’s permanent collection, which will help lower costs. Like many in the art world, he is concerned about the sustainability of the expensive ‘blockbuster exhibition’ model, which relies on loans from international collections and includes high insurance costs. However, in an interview with AFP, Falomir ended on a positive note, stating ‘It will take a while, but tourists will once again fill up the museums’.
Information for this post was taken from AFP Relax News, Hoy es arte, and El Museo Nacional del Prado.
The Spanish government’s Ministry of Culture and Sport has recently published a document detailing how museums and galleries may be able to manage visitors and collections once lockdown has been fully lifted in Spain. Xanthe Brooke has written a summary of their guidance:
‘In addition to implementing hygiene and physical distancing rules the Dept. considers that in the short term at least there will be no room for block-buster exhibitions attracting mass tourism, nor social and educational activities attracting groups of visitors, and that cultural activities should resume with the limitation of capacity to one third. Museum libraries, archives and research rooms will not be available to the public until the de-escalation phases have been completed and, in any case, assistance by telematic means will prevail.
Instead museums and galleries should continue to make their collections accessible by placing their collections online by digitisation, virtual reality, and other technological means. The Dept. goes on to state that though lower visitor numbers might increase the quality of the visit, it might also lead to a more ‘elitist museum’, and so museums must ensure that future visitors are diverse, and seek out methods in which participation can involve different sectors of society.
The Reina Sofía Museum of Contemporary Art has already announced that when it re-opens, sometime in early to mid-June, as well as abiding by hygiene and temperature advice, it will: aim to reduce its visitor numbers to 30% of its previous footfall; introduce a 1-way system around its rooms; and withdraw paper brochures, maps, plans and guides to the museum to prevent the transfer of the virus, and instead introduce an app for visitors’ mobile phones.’
Please find additional information on the guidance here (in Spanish): https://www.hoyesarte.com/artes-visuales/como-planificar-la-reapertura-de-los-museos_278418/
Click here to read Gothic Architecture in Spain: Invention and Imitation, eds Tom Nickson and Nicola Jennings (London, 2020)
From the dazzling spectacle of Burgos Cathedral to the cavernous nave of Palma Cathedral or the lacy splendour of San Juan de los Reyes, Spain preserves a remarkable variety of inventive but little understood Gothic buildings. Yet Gothic architecture in Spain and the Spanish kingdoms has traditionally been assessed in terms of its imitation of northern European architecture, dismissed for its ‘old-fashioned’ or provincial quality, and condemned for its passive receptivity to ‘Islamic influence’. But did imitation really triumph over invention in the architecture of medieval Iberia? Are the two incompatible? Can inventio and imitatio offer useful or valid analytical tools for understanding Gothic architecture? And to what extent are invention or imitation determined by patrons, architects, materials or technologies? This essay collection brings together leading scholars to examine Gothic architecture from across Iberia from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and provides the first significant account of Spanish Gothic architecture to be published in English since 1865.
Deadline: Monday 25 May 2020
The School of Art History at the University of St Andrews is delighted to invite applications for the John Phillip Doctoral Scholarship in Spanish Art and Visual Culture, to start in September 2020.
Generously funded by the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica (CEEH), the doctoral scholarship is named after the nineteenth-century Scottish artist John Phillip (1817-1867), who travelled extensively in Spain, and whose work was strongly inspired by the art of Velázquez and Murillo.
The scholarship is available to both Home/EU and Overseas candidates, and is tenable for three years (full-time). It is a full scholarship, covering tuition fees, plus an annual stipend of £15,285 for living expenses, and an annual research allowance of £5,000.
The scholarship will fund a doctoral research project that focuses on the history of Spanish art and visual culture between ca. 1600 and 1700. We will also consider research projects devoted to the reception of seventeenth-century Spanish art in later periods, up to ca. 1900.
Applicants should apply via the University of St Andrews application process: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/study/pg/apply/research/
The deadline for applications is Monday 25 May 2020.
For informal queries, intending applicants may contact Dr José Ramón Marcaida (jrm32@st-andrews.ac.uk).
Click here for more information.
Picasso didn’t just draw on paper – he tore it, burnt it, and made it three-dimensional. From studies for ‘Guernica’ to a 4.8-metre-wide collage, this major exhibition, open until 13 April 2020 at the Royal Academy, brings together more than 300 works on paper spanning the artist’s 80-year career. Click here for more information.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Instituto Cervantes has organised a programme of talks and concerts paying homage to the famous Spanish artist.
Dear Fellow ARTES Members,
We look forward to celebrating the life and work of the first Spaniard to graduate from Oxford with you!
Osma Centenary
7 February
Bodleian Library
Pembroke College
Guillermo J. de Osma was the first Spaniard to study at Oxford after the Universities Test Act 1871, which opened Oxford, Cambridge and Durham universities to non-Anglicans. Osma was a diplomat, a politician, an art historian and an art collector. He served as the first president of the Board of Trustees of the Alhambra and founded the Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, a research centre in Madrid, which contains a wide-ranging collection of art works and archival materials, including medieval manuscripts, Philipp II’s state papers, textiles, ceramics, and rare books.
He then went on to found the first Spanish scholarship at Oxford – the Osma Studentship – in 1920. The Studentship, which was open to both men and women since its foundation, is under the exclusive remit of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and has been held over the past century by many distinguished scholars and practitioners.
The one-day symposium will be held at the Bodleian Library on 7 February 2020 to coincide with the anniversary of Osma’s death and will convene Osma Students from across the generations and countries, specialists from Spain and the UK, and de Osma’s descendants from around the globe.
The symposium will be held in the Lecture Theatre at the Weston Library on Broad Street. Lunch will be served at Convocation House in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson. After the symposium, we will make our way to Pembroke, where Osma read History, for an evening reception.
Welcome Coffee: 9.45 am
Start: 10.30 am
Reception: 5.30–7pm
Please click here for a conference programme and practical information.
For questions, contact: marina.perezdearcos@politics.ox.ac.uk
Marina Perez de Arcos
ARTES members with experience of using the National Library of Scotland’s Astorga Collection or expertise in topics related to its formation and contents are encouraged to contribute to an upcoming conference organised by Dr Christopher Storrs, Reader in History at the University of Dundee, to be held in Edinburgh on Wednesday 20 May 2020.
The collection contains 3,617 early-modern Spanish printed books and is one of the National Library of Scotland’s lesser-known treasures. Part of the library of an aristocratic Spanish family, the Marqueses de Astorga, it was acquired in 1826 for the Advocates Library (the National Library’s precursor) by Sir Walter Scott’s son-in-law, J.G. Lockhart. The collection contains several texts on history, theology, geography and science, and illustrated books, some with maps or hand-coloured plates. Eleven are incunabula, and many others date to the sixteenth century.
At present, the conference programme includes presentations on Sir Walter Scott and Spain, J.G. Lockhart, and themes related to the Astorga collection in a nineteenth-century British context. Additionally, the organisers seek proposals addressing the collection from a Spanish viewpoint, notably on the Astorga family, the situation of Spain in the early nineteenth century, the book acquisitions and their value to historians. Papers on Golden Age holdings are particularly encouraged.
The collection is catalogued on the NLS’ website under the shelfmark G. (click here), but a handlist is also available upon application.
For further information, and to propose a conference paper, please email Dr Christopher Storrs, c.d.storrs@dundee.ac.uk.
