On Art and Painting: Vicente Carducho and Baroque Spain

By University of Wales Press

This book is a collection of fourteen essays on the Dialogues on Painting, published by the Florentine-born Spanish painter and art theorist Vicente Carducho (1568–1638) in 1633. This was the first treatise in Spanish on the art of painting, written as part of a campaign led by Carducho in collaboration with other prominent painters working in Madrid, to raise the status of the artist from artisan to liberal artist. The treatise provides an overview of the melding of Italian Renaissance art theory and Madrilenian practice in the baroque era. It also offers first-hand insight into collecting in Madrid during this crucial period in the rapid expansion of the capital city. The present collection of essays by art historians and hispanists from the UK, Spain, Germany and the US examines each of the dialogues in detail, furnishing an account of Carducho’s campaign to establish a painting academy and to professionalise the office of the painter; detailing the publication history of the treatise and the interrelationship between painting and poetry; and it cites Carducho’s own painting in relation to the Italian and Spanish traditions within which he operated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783168613

Book preview

ON ART AND PAINTING

STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

SERIES EDITORS

Margaret Topping

Queen’s University, Belfast

Rachael Langford

Cardiff University

Giuliana Pieri

Royal Holloway, University of London

EDITORIAL BOARD

Mieke Bal

University of Amsterdam

Paul Cooke

University of Leeds

Anne Freadman

The University of Melbourne

Andrea Noble

University of Durham

María Pilar Rodríguez

Universidad de Deusto

Eric Thau

University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Titles in series

Aimee Israel-Pelletier,

Rimbaud’s Impressionist Poetics: Vision and Visuality (2012)

Nathalie Aubert (ed.),

Proust and the Visual (2013)

Susan Harrow (ed.),

The Art of the Text: Visuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and other media (2013)

Alicia R. Zuese,

Baroque Spain and the Writing of Visual and Material Culture

STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

ON ART AND PAINTING

Vicente Carducho and Baroque Spain

edited by

Jean Andrews, Jeremy Roe and Oliver Noble Wood

© The Contributors, 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78316-859-0

e-ISBN978-1-78316-861-3

The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Vicente Carducho, Self-Portrait, c.1633–8. Oil on canvas. 102 x 83 cm. The Stirling Maxwell Collection, Pollok House, Glasgow, PC.116. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections.

Cover design: Olwen Fowler

Contents

Series editors’ preface

Acknowledgements

List of figures

Abbreviations

Notes on contributors

Preface

1Carducho and the Spanish Literary Baroque

Jeremy Lawrance

2Painting and Poetry in Diálogos de la Pintura

Javier Portús Pérez

3Carducho the conceptista

Colin Thompson

4Observations on Readership and Circulation

Marta Cacho Casal

5Art Aficionados at Court

José Juan Pérez Preciado

6Carducho and Sacred Oratory

Juan Luis González García

7Carducho and Ideas about Religious Art

Marta Bustillo

8Carducho’s Late Holy Families and Decorum

Jean Andrews

9Zuccari and the Carduchos

Macarena Moralejo Ortega

10Italian Training at the Spanish Court

Rebecca J. Long

11Carducho and the Eloquence of Drawing

Zahira Véliz

12The Paragone between Painting and Sculpture

Karin Hellwig

13Carducho and pintura de borrones

Jeremy Roe

Plates from Diálogos de la Pintura

Appendices

Bibliography

Notes

Series editors’ preface

Studies in Visual Culture provides a forum for ground-breaking enquiry into visual-cultural production in its social, historical and cultural contexts. The series places particular emphasis on the exchanges, transactions and displacements that link Europe to wider global contexts across the visual-cultural field. The series seeks to promote critical engagement with visual media as ideological and cultural as well as aesthetic constructs, and foregrounds the relationship of visual cultures to other fields and discourses, including cultural history, literary production and criticism, philosophy, gender and sexuality research, journalism and media studies, migration and mobility studies, social sciences, and politics. The Studies in Visual Culture series thus focuses on exploring synergies and key debates between disciplines, concepts and theoretical approaches, and offers an exciting new arena for testing and extending disciplinary, theoretical and conceptual boundaries.

Acknowledgements

This project first started to take shape at a colloquium on Vicente Carducho and Diálogos de la Pintura organised by the editors of this volume at the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford on 1–2 April 2011. The editors would like to thank those in attendance for their insightful comments and questions, which helped inform many of the essays that follow. We would also like to express our gratitude to the reader for University of Wales Press, whose detailed feedback on our original submission proved invaluable in the preparation of the final manuscript, and to everyone with whom we have worked at UWP for guidance throughout the process of producing this volume. Chapters II, V, VI, IX and XII were originally written in Spanish and have been translated by the editors. We owe thanks to Jeremy Lawrance (especially in Chapter I) and Rich Rabone for additional translation, and further thanks to the former for compiling Appendices I, II and III, which complement not only his own chapter but the volume as a whole. Chapter XI was first published under the title ‘Disegno to Dibujo: Vicente Carducho and the Eloquence of Drawing’ in Master Drawings, 53.3 (2015): 295–312, and the editorial board are to be thanked for the permission to reproduce it here. Finally, we would like to acknowledge important financial contributions made to both the aforementioned colloquium and the present volume by the Faculty of Arts and the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham, the Sub-Faculty of Spanish at the University of Oxford and Hertford College, Oxford.

We have used the first edition of Diálogos de la Pintura (1633) for all quotations from Carducho’s treatise, following original spelling and punctuation for this and other early modern sources throughout.

Figures

Figure 1

Vicente Carducho, Self-Portrait, c.1633–8. Oil on canvas. 102 x 83 cm. The Stirling Maxwell Collection, Pollok House, Glasgow, PC.116. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections.

Figure 2

Frontispiece woodcut from Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piu eccellenti Pittori, Scultorie Architettori, 3 vols (Florence: Giunti, 1568). Hertford College, Oxford, sss.06.11/1. © Principal and Fellows of Hertford College, Oxford.

Figure 3

Juan de Valdés Leal, Allegory of Vanity, 1660. Oil on canvas. 130.4 x 99.3 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, 1939.270. © Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum.

Figure 3a

Detail of Figure 3.

Figure 4

Juan Martínez de Gradilla, Philip IV, King of Spain, 1666. Oil on canvas. 178.1 x 131.4 cm. The Stirling Maxwell Collection, Pollok House, Glasgow, PC.144. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections.

Figure 5

Juan Bautista Maíno, Santo Domingo en Soriano, c.1629. Oil on canvas. 228 x 124 cm. Museo de San Telmo, San Sebastián (on deposit from Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, P05773). © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 6

Pedro de Villafranca y Malagón, frontispiece engraving from Colocacion de la milagrosa imagen del Glorioso Patriarcha Sto. Domingo del Soriano (Madrid: Francisco Martinez, 1638). Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, R.MICRO/5927.

Figure 7

Michel de Coxcie, Genealogía temporal de Cristo, c.1555. Oil on panel. 192 x 139 cm. Museo de Pintura y Arquitectura de El Escorial, 10014585. © Patrimonio Nacional.

Figure 8

Juan Fernández de Navarrete, ‘El Mudo’, Sagrada Familia, 1575. Oil on canvas. 347 x 213 cm. Museo de Pintura y Arquitectura de El Escorial, 10014603. © Patrimonio Nacional.

Figure 9

Vicente Carducho, The Holy Kinship, 1630s. Oil on canvas. 165.1 x 144.8 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy of the Witt Library/Sotheby’s Picture Library.

Figure 10

Vicente Carducho, La Sagrada Familia, 1631. Oil on canvas. 150 x 115 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, P00643. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 11

Copy of Federico Zuccari and workshop, Porta Virtutis, 1581. Oil on canvas. 159 x 112. Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, Inv. D300. Reproduced by kind permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Direzione Regionale per i Beni Culturali e Paesaggistici delle Marche - Soprintendenza per i Beni Storici Artistici ed Etnoantropologici delle Marche.

Figures 12 and 13

Bartolomé and Vicente Carducho, Retablo relicario con la Anunciación, 1606, exterior and interior views. Oil on panel. 455 x 216 x 66 cm. Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, A72. © Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid.

Figure 14

Vicente Carducho, San Diego de Alcalá en gloria, 1611. Oil on canvas. 405 x 228 cm. Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, CE0888. © Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid.

Figure 15

Johannes Stradanus, Practice of the Visual Arts, 1573. Pen and brown ink, with brown wash and opaque white heightening, the contours indented with a stylus. 43.6 x 29.3 cm. British Museum, London, SL, 5214.2. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

Figure 16

Vicente Carducho, Penitent St Jerome, c.1606. Pen and brown ink, with brown wash, and some stains in red chalk. 14.1 x 20.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1975.131.207. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Harry G. Sperling, 1971.

Figure 17

Vicente Carducho, Penitent St Jerome, c.1600–10. Brush and dark brown ink, with brown wash and opaque white heightening, over black chalk; squared in black chalk. 17.6 x 14.6 cm. The Courtauld Gallery, London, D.1952.RW.3779. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

Figure 18

Infra-red photograph of Figure 17.

Figure 19

Vicente Carducho, St Jerome Hearing the Trumpet of the Last Judgement, 1638. Black chalk, with brown wash and opaque white heightening; squared in black chalk. 31.8 x 21.6 cm. J. Paul Getty Musuem, Los Angeles, 94.GA.86. © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Figure 20

Vicente Carducho, Sagrada Familia con san Joaquín, santa Ana, Zacarías, santa Isabely san Juanito, c.1630–8. Brush and brown wash, heightened with opaque white, over black chalk; squared in black chalk. 20.8 x 19.2 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, D00087. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 21

Vicente Carducho, Demonio huyendo, 1632. Black chalk; squared in black chalk. 24.3 x 18.0 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, D03808. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 22

Vicente Carducho, The Duke of Feria at the Siege of Rheinfelden, 1634. Pen and brown ink, with blue and brown wash, over black chalk; squared in black chalk. 31.8 x 41.5 cm. British Museum, London, 1850,0713.9. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

Figure 23

Vicente Carducho, Expulsión de los moriscos, c.1627. Pen and brown ink, with blue wash, over black chalk. 38.0 x 50.4 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, D03055. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 24

Vicente Carducho, Demonio, 1632. Black chalk, with white heightening, on blue-gray paper. 41.0 x 26.0 cm. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, DIB/13/1/56.

Figure 25

Vicente Carducho, Aparición de la Virgen a un fraile cartujo, 1632. Black chalk, with brown wash and white heightening, on blue-gray paper. 30.3 x 24.7 cm. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, DIB/16/35/4.

Figure 26

Vicente Carducho, Aparición de san Francisco de Asís, que exhorta a sus hermanos a seguir los preceptos franciscanos, 1626–32. Point of the brush and brown wash, heightened with opaque white, over black chalk, on blue paper. 16.6 x 20 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, D05987. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 27

Francisco Pacheco, St Mark, 1632. Pen and two shades of brown ink, with brown wash and opaque white heightening, over traces of black chalk; framing lines in black chalk. 32.7 x 22.1 cm. The Courtauld Gallery, London, D.1952. RW.1481. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

Figure 28

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Juan Martínez Montañés, c.1635. Oil on canvas. 109 x 88 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, P01194. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 29

Vicente Carducho, La visión de Dionisio Rickel, el Cartujano, 1626–32. Oil on canvas. 336.5 x 297.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, P05238. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 30

Vicente Carducho, La muerte de San Bruno, 1626–32. Oil on canvas. 337 x 298 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, P05481. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 31

Vicente Carducho, San Bruno reza en La Torre, 1626–32. Oil on canvas. 337 x 297.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, P05405. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 32

Vicente Carducho, Martirio de los priores de las cartujas inglesas de Londres, Nottingham y Axholme, 1626–32. Oil on canvas. 337 x 298 cm. Museo Nacional de Prado, Madrid, P05239. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 33

Vicente Carducho, La visión de San Hugo, obispo de Grenoble, 1626–32. Oil on canvas. 335 x 297.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, P05231. © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Plate 1

Francisco Fernández, title-page etching from Vicente Carducho, Diálogos de la Pintura (Madrid: Francisco Martínez, 1633). © The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford, AF.7.15.

Plate 2

Francisco Fernández, ‘Ratione et labore non voluptate et otio’, etching designed to accompany first dialogue. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, B 26.21 Linc, f. 25.

Plate 3

Francisco López, ‘In vanum laboraverunt’, etching designed to accompany second dialogue. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, B 26.21 Linc, f. 46.

Plate 4

Francisco Fernández, ‘Ad magna praemia per magnos pervenitur labores’, etching designed to accompany third dialogue. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, B 26.21 Linc, after f. 37.

Plate 5

Francisco Fernández, ‘Pictoribus promiscum obicetum atque poetis’, etching designed to accompany fourth dialogue. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, B 26.21 Linc, f. 64.

Plate 6

Francisco López, ‘Ars magna naturae renovat omnia’, etching designed to accompany fifth dialogue. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, B 26.21 Linc, f. 83.

Plate 7

Francisco López, ‘Ut ars natura, ut pictura deum’, etching designed to accompany sixth dialogue. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, B 26.21 Linc, f. 107.

Plate 8

Francisco López, ‘Ipsi fecit nos et non ipsi nos’, etching designed to accompany seventh dialogue. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, B 26.21 Linc, f. 163.

Plate 9

Francisco López, ‘Liberalium lux artium excelsa’, etching designed to accompany eighth dialogue. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, B 26.21 Linc, f. 130.

Plate 10

Francisco Fernández, ‘Potentia ad actum tamquam tabula rasa’, end page etching. © The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford, AF.7.15, after f. 229.

Abbreviations

Contributors

Jean Andrews is an Associate Professor at the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include royal exequies and funereal poetry, and religious painting in early modern Iberia and its colonies, with special focus on Luis de Morales and Josefa de Óbidos.

Marta Bustillo is a lecturer in Spanish art history at the School of Art History and Arts Administration at University College Dublin. Her research explores the political and social functions of religious art in seventeenth-century Madrid, with a specific focus on Vicente Carducho and the role of artists’ libraries. She has recently worked on the Clarke Stained Glass Studios Demonstrator Project for the Digital Repository of Ireland.

Marta Cacho Casal has published extensively on iconography, portraiture, graphic arts and collecting in the early modern period, particularly in Spain and Italy. She has worked at the British Museum and held fellowships in the US, the UK and Italy. Her monograph Francisco Pacheco y su Libro de retratos (2011) was awarded the Alfonso Pérez Sánchez International Research Prize, and she is currently preparing a monograph on artists’ libraries in the early modern period in Spain and Italy.

Juan Luis González García is an Associate Professor of Art History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. His research interests focus on the study of collecting and the connections between art theory, rhetoric and the theology of the image in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hispanic world, in Italy and Central Europe. He has published more than fifty essays in books, exhibition catalogues and specialist journals.

Karin Hellwig is a researcher at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. She has made major contributions to the study of Velázquez and Spanish painting and art theory of the seventeenth century. Her most recent book, Aby Warburg und Fritz Saxl enträtseln Velázquez. Ein spanisches Intermezzo zum Nachleben der Antike [Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl Decipher Velázquez: A Spanish Intermezzo on the Legacy of Antiquity] (2015), deals with the modern reception of Las hilanderas.

Jeremy Lawrance is Professor of Golden Age Studies at the University of Nottingham. His recent publications have been concerned with the formation of court civilization and the evolution of the baroque style in the first half of the seventeenth century, with studies on patronage, civil society, new concepts of the role of the artist in the commonwealth, and the interface between all these and the ideologies of absolutism.

Rebecca J. Long is the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Associate Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she oversees Spanish and Italian painting and sculpture before 1750. Her PhD dissertation focuses on Bartolomé Carducho and the role of Italian art and artists at the Spanish court. Her research interests include international markets for art in the early modern period, the work of itinerant artists, art academies and art theory, and patronage in Italy and Spain.

Macarena Moralejo Ortega teaches in the Department of Art History and Theory of Art at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She wrote her PhD on Federico Zuccari and has published widely on sixteenth-century Italian and Spanish art, art theory, religion and politics, with particular regard to Zuccari, Pablo de Céspedes and Jesuit writing on art.

Oliver Noble Wood is University Lecturer in Golden Age Spanish Literature at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow in Modern Languages at Hertford College. His publications include the monograph A Tale Blazed Through Heaven: Imitation and Invention in the Golden Age of Spain (Oxford, 2014) and the edited volumes A Poet for All Seasons: Eight Commentaries on Góngora (New York, 2013) and Poder y saber: Bibliotecas y bibliofilia en la época del conde-duque de Olivares (Madrid, 2011).

José Juan Pérez Preciado is an assistant curator in the Department of Flemish and Northern European Painting at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. He is currently preparing a catalogue raisonné of early modern Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Prado. His main research interests are collecting under the Habsburgs, art in politics and art dealing between Spain and the Low Countries in the seventeenth century.

Javier Portús Pérez is curator of Spanish painting (before 1700) at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. His research focuses on the relationship between literature and painting, and the reception of works of art in the Spanish Golden Age, on which he has published widely. He has also curated or contributed to several significant exhibitions of early modern painting at the Prado and elsewhere.

Jeremy Roe is FCT Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Universidade dos Açores. His current research explores the representation and projection of political ideology and identity in the visual culture of Portugal and its empire. His previous research addressed the art treatises of Vicente Carducho and Francisco Pacheco as sources for the spectatorship of baroque art. This also linked to his work on the contemporaneous reception of Velázquez.

Colin Thompson is an Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He has published widely on a number of canonical sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish poets, the Spanish mystics, aspects of classical reception and the relationship between literature and the visual arts in the Golden Age.

Zahira Véliz is currently Senior Conservator of Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She has published on seventeenth-century Spanish art and technical art history, and has curated exhibitions in Spain, London and Santiago de Chile. Her current research includes the technical study of paintings from the MFAH collection, ongoing research on seventeenth-century Spanish drawings and editing the letters of Mary Philadelphia Merrifield for a biography of this nineteenth-century pioneer of Technical Art History.

Francisco Fernández, title-page etching for editio princeps of Diálogos de la Pintura.

Preface

Jeremy Roe

Almost forty years ago, Francisco Calvo Serraller’s critical edition of and commentary on Diálogos de la Pintura (Carducho 1979) demonstrated the multifaceted cultural significance of Vicente Carducho’s singular contribution to the genre of Kunstliteratur.¹ In the following three decades, though aspects of his art and thought continued to attract attention from scholars (e.g. Darst 1985; Hellwig 1996; Bustillo 2000), Carducho was rarely the subject of such focused study. In 2011, he returned to the fore with the reinstallation of the series of fifty-two paintings he produced for the Monastery of Santa María de El Paular (De Carlos Varona 2013; Ruiz Gómez 2013). Then, in 2015, his corpus of drawings became the focus of critical scrutiny with an exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional de España and the publication of an accompanying catalogue raisonné. Together, these publications have prompted a revaluation of Carducho and his contribution – both theoretical and practical – to Spanish baroque art. It can only be hoped that a catalogue of his paintings will soon follow, thus enabling the full significance of Carducho’s works to be explored.

Building on these foundations, this volume of essays aims to help redress Jonathan Brown’s complaint that Carducho is ‘the most undervalued painter (el pintor más infravalorado) of the Spanish Golden Age’ (2015: 15). It presents a series of critical engagements with Carducho’s treatise that explore the significance of his art, writing, ideas and life from different artistic, literary, cultural, religious and political perspectives. The chapters that follow include discussion of his Florentine origins, his paintings and drawings, his career as a court painter and his interaction with some of the leading literary and intellectual figures of seventeenth-century Spain. The themes examined demonstrate how Diálogos is a treatise on painting that not only addresses the theoretical concerns and practical counsels that painters – as well their patrons and spectators – needed to understand, but also offers a range of insights into the broader cultural context of the literary and intellectual discourse on painting, the politics of patronage and the baroque culture of the collecting and display of art.

The publication of the modern edition of Carducho’s treatise, with its scholarly, philological and bibliographical apparatus, undertook an important historical task, which was to counter negative critical views of the text. Calvo Serraller (Carducho 1979: xxxi–xliv) offered a historiographical survey of how Carducho, categorised by nineteenth-century historians in terms of notions of sixteenth-century Florentine Mannerism, became a foil for declarations of the ‘modernity’ of the baroque as figured by the Hispanic naturalism of Velázquez. Though this historiographical legacy has proved hard to shift (e.g. Bennassar 2012: 59), a number of authors have developed a more critical understanding of Carducho’s treatise (in addition to Darst and Hellwig, e.g. Aterido 2008: 83–4), exploring in detail the cultural significance of Diálogos and its author – a court painter who served under Philip III and IV, kept company with the leading poets of the day and worked on some of the most important religious and court decorative programmes of early modern Spain.

Regrettably, the destruction of the El Pardo palace in 1604 and the sub-sequent remodelling of the Alcázar palace in Madrid has occluded Carducho’s early career as a painter, although a number of drawings do offer insight into his work at this time (Chenel and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015: 82–6 (cat. 12), 95–109 (cat. 16), 112–17 (cat. 18)). Indeed these graphic works and the paintings from this period reveal how, from an early age and thanks to his brother, the painter Bartolomé Carducho (Chenel and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015: 23–6, on the brothers’ early lives), Vicente had the skills and knowledge to take on a range of commissions and run a well-organised team of apprentices and assistants. These included Félix Castello and Bartolomé Román, as well as Francisco López and Francisco Fernández, who produced the allegorical etchings for Diálogos following their master’s designs.

Like his treatise, Carducho’s paintings and drawings have suffered from disregard and negative judgements; the perception of Diálogos as conservative, backward-looking and indebted to outmoded Italian models reinforced a similar opinion of his art. Besides signalling a cursory knowledge of Carducho’s oeuvre, such readings of his literary and artistic activity are underpinned by a concern with tracing the development of naturalist painting in Spain and the impact of Velázquez’s work. This results in a certain critical insensitivity to the rich variety of Spanish art that was the object of patronage and collecting at the time – not to mention writing on art.² A number of scholars have countered this view, perhaps none with greater concision than Alfonso Pérez Sánchez (2010: 64–71, 75–174). His lifetime’s research demonstrated the diversity of Spanish art along with its geographical and chronological complexity, often overlooked in the predominance of studies of Velázquez, the court of Philip IV and the renowned artists of Seville.

With specific regard to the quality of Carducho’s painting, Pérez Sánchez offers the following analysis of the two series produced by Carducho in the final decade of his life, highlighting the range and versatility of the work in question:

Los lienzos de las series de El Paular y de San Juan de Mata ofrecen infinidad de ejemplos de nobleza y claridad, acompañadas, además, de una intensa expresividad de los rostros: estudiados directamente en el natural y con una sobria disposición de las luces que, adecuándose a lo representado, van desde efectos de plenitud solar, que hacen vibrar los colores con suntuosidad veneciana, […] a efectos nocturnos, con luz artificial, que hace evocar, necesariamente, el mundo caravaggiesco. La riqueza y la naturalidad de los accesorios que pueblan sus composiciones con un extraordinario virtuosismo en la reproducción de las calidades de las cosas hacen ver en él un poderoso bodegonista… nada tiene que envidiar a lo mejor que hacen los especialistas del género. Lienzos como San Dionisio en su celda o la Entrevista del Papa Urbano con San Bruno tienen la misma grave monumentalidad y el recogido silencio que tantas veces se ha elogiado en Zurbarán, y los muchos lienzos de escenas dramáticas […] poseen un sentido dinámico, de violencia y de expresividad, que muy pocos artistas españoles han sido capaces de conseguir. (2010: 88)

[The canvases that make up the El Paular and San Juan de Mata series offer infinite examples of nobility and clarity, further accompanied by an intensity of facial expression: studied directly from nature and with a sober composition of lighting effects, which, in accordance with the scene represented, range from effects of bright sunlight, which make the colours gleam with Venetian sumptuousness […] to nocturnal effects, with artificial light, that can but only evoke the Caravaggesque world. The richness and naturalistic appearance of the props that populate his compositions with an extraordinary virtuosity in the reproduction of the qualities of the individual objects reveal him to be a powerful painter of bodegones … he has no reason to envy the best works by specialists in this genre. Canvases such as St Denis in his Cell or The Interview Between Pope Urban and St Bruno have the same grave monumentality and the secluded silence that has so often been praised in Zurbarán, and the many canvases of dramatic scenes […] possess a dynamic sense, violent and expressive, that few Spanish artists have been capable of achieving.]

While Carducho’s paintings are not the primary focus of this volume, it does aim to provide a framework to understand his response to a broad spectrum of the artistic tastes and concerns of his day – amongst them, Florentine drawing, Venetian colourism, Caravaggesque tenebrism, the study of nature, the popularity of the bodegón and the decorum and theatricality of the art commissioned to decorate both ecclesiastical and court spaces. In doing so, it builds on the research of Kubler (1965), Volk (1977) and Beutler (1998), who helped establish a deeper critical appraisal of Carducho, and that undertaken more recently by Bustillo (2000) and Véliz (2011).

Carducho’s treatise cannot be reduced to an account of its author’s views on art, for it was a project with significant literary, intellectual and political ambitions. Intended to lend support to a lawsuit against taxation levied on painting brought at the time Carducho was writing, Diálogos was carefully designed to rekindle interest in the formation of an academy of painting and to defend the moral status of painters and their discipline. To muster influential support, the treatise is written in an engaging literary manner, in the form of the fictional dialogue made popular by works such as Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa’s El Embaxador (1620), and it praises the patronage of Madrid’s noble collectors and above all its dedicatee, King Philip IV. It also affirms the role played by the city’s painters, as well as poets and playwrights, in not only satisfying their patrons’ wishes, but also making Madrid into a celebrated cultural capital. Jeremy Lawrance’s contribution to this volume offers an exemplary survey of these issues, many of which are taken up in subsequent chapters.

In addition to reading Diálogos for the insight it offers into Carducho’s art, as well as that of his contemporaries, a fundamental concern of this volume of essays is to undertake a critical reading of the text as a baroque literary treatise, as a text based on a complex rhetorical engagement with the theoretical and intellectual topoi, developed since the Renaissance, that structured discourses on art in seventeenth-century Spain. Diálogos is by no means merely a rehearsal of Italian precedents. Instead, through discussion of these issues, Carducho addresses a range of contemporaneous cultural concerns. A key aspect of Calvo Serraller’s edition was to frame Carducho’s study in the traditions of writing on art, and his critical edition provides a wealth of information on the genealogy of Carducho’s ideas. In the pages that follow, a focus is developed on the significance of Diálogos as a historical source for the study of Carducho and his Hispanic contemporaries.

In an attempt to engage his readers, and above all Philip IV, Carducho sought both to educate and to entertain. He thus looked to avoid lengthy digressions on theoretical concerns, such as those raised by Federico Zuccari, who, as Moralejo and Long demonstrate in their chapters, was a significant critical point of reference. In the third dialogue, Carducho’s first interlocutor, Maestro, states to his pupil Dicípulo that

la intelectiva, ó especulativa, abstraîda de la materia, me parece no ser por aora necessaria a tus dudas, por ser mas filosofica de lo que a nuestro proposito conviene. Destas tratan Federico Zucaro en su Idea, y en una difinicion que hizo Iuan Baptista Paggi, a quien puedes leer en este caso. (Diál. III. 39r–v)

[in my view intellective and speculative [paintings], abstracted from matter, are for now not necessary for your doubts, since they are more philosophical than is appropriate for our task. Federico Zuccari addresses these in his Idea and you can read the definition given by Giovanni Battista Paggi on this issue.]

Carducho’s reluctance to digress on theoretical issues was not necessarily due to a concern that his educated readers would not have understood Zuccari’s ideas. As part of his commentary on stanzas 32 and 34 of Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, José Pellicer referred to eighty-nine scholarly works on art and the theories of the mental idea, which suggests that some of his readers would have been well equipped to offer a critical response to such a discussion (Pellicer 1630: 224–7, 235–44). Carducho, however, may have been keen to avoid precisely this type of response, especially from theologians, who were seeking to curb painters’ independence.

Reading Carducho’s treatise in the cultural context of the Spanish court offers original perspectives on both the text and its author’s aims and intentions. Besides shedding light on Carducho’s own practice of painting, Diálogos also presents a revealing survey of the local values and concerns that informed the patronage, collecting and display of art in his day. The status of Maestro’s pupil signals a disjunction between the professional reality of Carducho’s workshop and the allegorical fiction of his treatise: Dicípulo is a member of the nobility whose interest in painting is unpolluted by professional concerns. He also represents the noble practice of painting, an intellectual identity mirrored in the allegorical prints, especially the first three, that accompany the poems at the close of each dialogue (Plates 2–9). Projected far from the world of the studio, the dialogues echo not mundane workshop conversation but lofty exchanges between educated patrons, collectors and spectators. The fact that much of their content is reflected in the poems, by authors such as Lope de Vega, Juan Pérez de Montalbán and José de Valdivielso, underscores the treatise’s erudite nature. Attention to these dimensions of the text opens up its significance in important ways.

Another significant contextual point concerns Carducho’s Florentine identity. The treatise’s frontispiece states that it is by ‘Vicencio Carducho’ – note the Italianate spelling of his first name – ‘dela Illustre Academia de la nobilissima Ciudad de Florencia y Pintor de su Magd. Catolica’ (of the illustrious Academy of the most noble city of Florence, and His Catholic Majesty’s Painter; Plate 1). Furthermore, the adornment provided by the allegorical figures of Theory, with the attributes of Mercury, and Practice, with palette and maulstick, invoke the Florentine traditions of writing and art he sought to emulate in his own words and images. Despite having lived in Spain from around the age of nine, never having been to Florence as an adult and being a member of the city’s academy only by proxy, Carducho chose the above terms to project his artistic and literary identity and, in so doing, distinguish himself from his Spanish peers.³

The primacy Carducho gave to his status as a Florentine academician over that of his being a court painter might be read as an allusion to the fact that the progression of his career as a painter in Madrid had been interrupted by Philip IV’s accession to the throne in 1621. It was under Philip IV that the Madrid Academy of Painting, of which Carducho was an ardent supporter, ceased to operate; thus reference to membership of the Florentine Academy may have an additional vindictive edge. Furthermore, Carducho’s promotion within the hierarchy of court painters was cut short by Velázquez’s rapid ascent through court ranks, propelled by the influence of the Count-Duke of Olivares and the Sevillian artist’s own innate skill and diplomacy. One probable motive behind Diálogos was Carducho’s desire to issue a clear statement about his importance as a learned painter with his own connections at court. However, given his advanced age, he was also staking a claim for posterity, and in this regard a parallel may be drawn with Francisco Pacheco’s Arte de la pintura: both treatises cast a retrospective gaze on what their authors considered the peak of their careers.

Although from an art-historical perspective some of Carducho’s most celebrated works date from the final years of his life, like Pacheco, he made no mention of the work he undertook at the time of writing. Pacheco’s concern for recognition is apparent in his extensive discussion of the paintings he produced during the first two decades of the seventeenth century.⁴ Carducho, by contrast, is more reticent, but his discussion of the decoration of the chapel of El Pardo in the seventh dialogue should be understood as muted, humble praise of his own work as a court painter (Diál. VII. 109v). Although the paintings themselves have been lost, preparatory drawings of a number of themes have survived (Chenel and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015: 82–9). Carducho goes on to discuss other rooms in the palace that were decorated with paintings by his brother Bartolomé and Patricio Cajés, as well as his disciples Bartolomé González and Francisco López. He thereby underlines the extent of his role as court painter under two kings and the important commissions he and his studio were awarded.

Carducho probably harboured regrets about the changes brought about by the accession of the new king, whose tastes and advisers led to the development of a new image for the court. At the start of the seventh dialogue, Maestro comments on the preparatory drawing for a painting halted by the death of Philip III. What would perhaps have been the most complex work by Carducho’s hand represented

lo sucedido en las edades del mundo, desde la Creacion hasta estos nuestros tiempos, con las personas mas señaladas y conocidas en cada edad, haziendole alusion las edades de los hombres, mostrado en cada una dellas un hecho heroico de aquella edad, de personas famosas, todo acomodado con mucha historia moral, y con mucha erudicion y exemplo. (Diál. VII. 108r–v)

[what took place throughout the ages of the world, from the Creation up until our times, with the most significant and well-known figures for each age, alluded to by the ages of men, showing in each of them a heroic deed from that age, by famous people, all accompanied by much moral history and great erudition and example.]

Whatever frustration Carducho may have felt about the cancellation of this work, it did not stop him, as Lawrance and Cacho observe, from making last-minute changes to his treatise while at press, to include praise of the Palace of the Buen Retiro and the Count-Duke of Olivares (see Appendix II).

It also did not prevent him from commending the decoration of the Alcázar in Madrid. When discussing the decorations of the New Room in the Alcázar, Maestro first addresses the work of Titian, before noting that

en el mismo salon estan otros quadros de la misma grandeza, de mano de Pedro Pablo Rubens, de Eugenio Caxes, de Diego Velazquez, de Iusepe de Ribera (que llaman el Españoleto), del Dominiquino, y de Vicencio Carduchi, y por debaxo dellos otros de menor grandeza. (Diál. VIII. 155r–v)

[in the same hall stand other paintings of similar size, by the hand of Peter Paul Rubens, Eugenio Cajés, Diego Velázquez, Jusepe Ribera (whom they call ‘Spagnoletto’), Domenichino, and Vicencio Carducho, and beneath them others of lesser dimensions.]

Complementing the catalogue of artists working at El Pardo under Philip III (Diál. VII. 109v–110v), this list of painters is one of a number of examples of the judicious balance of contrasting views that is a keynote of Carducho’s treatise. Elsewhere, for example, he advocates Florentine drawing practice and at the same time praises Venetian painterly painting; and he supports the king’s decoration of his palace with Titian’s poesie while deferring to the ecclesiastical critique of ‘lascivious’ painting. A sense of Carducho’s modernity may be configured from these contrasts; as a court painter he could survive a change of regime and he was able to conform to the tastes and values of both his religious patrons and the king. Indeed, as Pérez Sánchez suggests, his painting developed in response to the eclectic concerns of his patrons; unlike Pacheco, Carducho moved on and developed a mode of painting that responded to the new tastes that marked the reign of Philip IV and the final two decades of his own life.

The most frequently cited passage of Diálogos, Carducho’s critique of Caravaggio, which is often read as an attack on Velázquez, may appear at odds with this balanced approach. However, as Pascual Chenel and Rodríguez Rebollo remind us (2015: 28), this rivalry is essentially a legend, based on scant evidence and the supposition that Carducho’s promotion at court was blocked by Velázquez and that this caused ill will between them. I would like now to contextualise Carducho’s critique of Caravaggio by considering it as one of