Full Description
In Painting Flanders Abroad: Flemish Art and Artists in Seventeenth-Century Madrid, Flemish immigrants and imported Flemish paintings cross the paths of Spanish kings, collectors, dealers, and artists in the Spanish court city, transforming the development and nature of seventeenth-century Spanish painting. Examining these Flemish transplants and the traces their interactions left in archival documents, collection inventories, art treatises, and most saliently Spanish "Golden Age" paintings, this book portrays Spanish society grappling with a long tradition of importing its favorite paintings while struggling to reimagine its own visual idiom. In the process, the book historicizes questions of style, quality, immigration, mobility, identity, and cultural exchange to define what the evolving and amorphous visual concept of "Flemishness" meant to Spanish viewers in an era long before the emergence of nationalism.
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Introduction: A Centuries-Long Relationship
Spain and Flanders
Sixteenth-Century Appreciation for Flemish Specialties: Portraits, Still Lifes, and Landscapes
A Note about Flemishness
1 Flemish Immigrant Painters in Madrid: A Portrait
Flemish Immigrants and the Choice of Madrid
Flemish Cultural Identity in Madrid: The Role of the Noble Guardia
Flemish Portraiture in Spain
"Portraits" of Flemish Immigrant Painters
2 Food and Flowers: The Visual Seductions of Flemishness
Flemish Motifs and a Distinctive Compositional Balance
Flemish vs. Spanish Still Lifes
Cocinas and Bodegones Arrive in Spain
Appeal and Danger of the Flemish Balance
Madrid Modifications
Flemish Flowers
3 Países flamencos: Picturing Flemish Distance
Distance and Distant Places
Imagining Travel by Land
Painters, Paintings, and Viewers Travel by Sea
Países flamencos and Their Distant Echoes
Coda: Rubens and the End of "Flemish" Art in Spain
Rubens's Flemishness
Rubens's Figural Focus and Its Dissemination
Absorbing Rubens in Spain
Notes
Bibliography
Archives, Archival Guides, Unpublished Manuscripts, and a Database
Published Sources
Photo Credits
Index
