This talk examines what it meant—both as a theological prescription and as a social phenomenon—for painting to be thought of as conduit for the interpretation of the divine. Dr. Hernandez focuses on what treatise writers and painters understood were the conditions that allowed for the transmission of sacred knowledge—both rational and mysterious—through the holy image. The lecture explores how Vicente Carducho, Francisco Pacheco, and Jusepe Martínez—the three most important art theorists in early modern Spain—deploy theological tenets in the advancement of the status of the painter as a liberal artist, a rank that has tangible professional, economic, and social consequences. These claims—painting as a sacred medium and painting as a liberal art—do not directly explain the fascination with and deployment of the Immaculate Conception, neither as doctrine nor as image. However, the juncture of the two provides fertile ground for the examination of the notable production of Immaculate Conception paintings by some of the most celebrated artists in Spain, including Velázquez, Zurbarán and Murillo, amongst many others.
Rosalie Hernández is an associate professor in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Her areas of specialization are the literatures and visual cultures of 16th- and 17th-century Spain. She is the author of Bucolic Metaphors: History, Subjectivity, and Gender in the Early Modern Spanish Pastoral (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), as well as numerous articles focusing on Cervantes, women writers, and political and economic treatises in journals such as Hispanic Review, Romance Quarterly, Cervantes, The Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and Hispania. She has co-edited several volumes, the most recent being, with Anne J. Cruz, Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World (Ashgate Press, 2011), which won the Collaborative Project Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Until recently, her research has generally focused on the representation of “otherness” within emerging literary genres. Hernández’s present research centers on the interconnection between political, theological, and aesthetic discourses in Counter-Reformation Spain. She is also conducting research on the correlation between medieval nominalism and perspectivism in Don Quixote.
UIC Institute for the Humanities
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