In La gran sultana do.a Catalina de Oviedo (1615), Miguel de Cervantes presents an implausible story line in which the Ottoman sultan offers Spanish captive Catalina de Oviedo autonomy and imperial authority in return for her hand in marriage. Although she remains physically confined to the harem of Constantinople, Catalina negotiates the conditions of his proposal in order to preserve the...
Peruzzi and the Architecture of Painting
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This article offers a novel interpretation of an unusual and unexplained grisaille head included in the elaborate visual program of the Loggia della Galatea within the sixteenth-century Roman villa designed for Sienese banker Agostino Chigi (known today as the Villa Farnesina). Rendered by the architect of the villa and the designer of the loggia’s scheme, Baldassarre Peruzzi, this testa...
Artist as Visionary
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Francisco de Zurbar.n’s Crucifixion with a Painter (ca. 1650–55, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) illustrates the devotional aspects of his religious imagery and suggests that artistic production is the result of profound visionary experiences with the artist ultimately acting as a mediator between the divine and the viewer. This article explores the complex intersection of artistic identity ...
Relocating the Spanish Renaissance
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This article reexamines the function, decoration, and political and artistic significance of the Torre de la Estufa of Charles V in the Alhambra, a steam room decorated between 1528 and 1539 with topographic landscapes of the conquest of Tunis and paintings of grotesques. Challenging the traditional focus on the tower’s debt to the Italian Renaissance, this essay brings attention to its...
Witch and the Weather
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Since the 1990s, there has been much scholarly interest in the correlation between the Little Ice Age and witchcraft prosecutions in early modern Germany. This connection warrants further attention, however, as bad weather did not simply lead to witchcraft prosecutions. Fear of witches and weather magic was at all times culturally constructed. But how was this fear cultivated? Influenced by ...