Art & Architecture
Major Books on Spanish Art from
Yale University Press

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El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo--these are but a few of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists of Spain’s golden age of painting. In this authoritative and handsome book, an enlarged, extended, and revised version of his Golden Age of Painting in Spain, eminent Spanish art scholar Jonathan Brown surveys the development of painting in Spain during this fascinating period.

Focusing on the interaction between art and the socioeconomic and political conditions that prevailed in Spain’s golden age, this book offers information about religious beliefs, social attitudes, the activities of patrons and collectors, and how these were absorbed and interpreted by painters. The author sets the history of Spanish paintings within a European context and explores Spain’s contact with artistic centers in Italy and the Netherlands. He discusses not only Spanish artists but also such non-Spanish painters as Titian, Ruben, and Luca Giordano, who either worked in Spain or influenced other artists there. Brown also examines the collections of foreign paintings that Spanish noblemen and prelates assembled and how these collections affected the production of art and the social status of the Spanish artist. In this up-to-date and innovative analysis of two hundred years of Spanish painting, Brown describes a country that brilliantly transformed the artistic impulses it received from abroad to fit the needs of its own society.

Jonathan Brown is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is the author of many books on Spanish art, including The Golden Age of Painting in Spain and Velázquez: Painter and Courtier, and coauthor of Velázquez: The Technique of Genius, all published by Yale University Press. Brown was awarded the Medalla de Oro de Bellas Artes by the government of Spain for his contributions to the history of Spanish art and culture.

1999 Art
216 pp. 30 b/w + 210 colorplates, 9 3/4 x 11
Cloth ISBN 0-300-07293-7 $55.00

        The book begins with an introduction to Velázquez"s life and the technical means he employed, including pigments, canvases, and binding media. In a fascinating analysis of thirty works by Velázquez that span his entire career, the authors then examine how the artist devised the techniques to express his ideas and how these changed over time. More than two hundred photographs of details of Velázquez' s paintings vividly demonstrate how the artist realized his vision of man and nature through a highly allusive, economical manner of painting. This pathbreaking exploration of Velázquez' s technical achievement reveals as never before the miracle of the creative process of one of the world' s great masters.

        Jonathan Brown is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. He is the author of many books on Spanish art, including The Golden Age of Painting in Spain and Velázquez: Painter and Courtier, both published by Yale University Press. Carmen Garrido Pérez is head of technical services at the Prado Museum in Madrid and author of Velázquez: Técnica y Evolución.

1996 Art
192 pp. 50 b/w + 50 colorplates, 9 3/4 x 11 1/2
Cloth ISBN 0-300-06949-9 $65.00

Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), considered by many to be the greatest of Spain's great painters, spent his crucial formative years in Seville, learning his craft and producing many early masterpieces. When he departed from his native city as a young man of 24, Velázquez's accomplishments were already impressive: he left to assume the position of Court Painter to Philip IV of Spain in Madrid. In this beautifully illustrated book, an international team of art scholars explores the importance of Seville for Velázquez. Discussions range across many topics, including Velázquez's education and training, Sevillian culture and Catholic theology, picaresque literature, and Velázquez's subject matter--portraiture, sacred subjects, and the bodegones (kitchen and tavern scenes with prominent still life) in which Velázquez developed his distinctive naturalistic style.

        The Seville of Velázquez's youth was the chief Spanish port of trade with the New World and a major religious center that witnessed the passionate controversy over the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, a subject depicted in an early Velázquez painting. Other surviving paintings from the artist's Sevillian years include his first dated painting, Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618), and his famous masterpiece Water-seller of Seville.

        This book serves as the catalogue for a major exhibition on Velázquez's early work to be held at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, August 8 through October 20, 1996. The exhibit also includes a selection of influential works by Velázquez's important contemporaries, such as the sculptor Montañes and painters Alonso Cano and Ribalta.

        David Davies of University College, London, and Enriqueta Harris, the leading Velázquez specialist in Britain, devised the National Gallery of Scotland exhibition, Velázquez in Seville.

1996   Art and Architecture
206 pp. 90 b/w + 30 colorplates 7 1/2 x 10
Cloth ISBN 0300064756 $50.00

This book is the first intensive exploration of Pablo Picasso's relationship toward his native Spain and its cultural and artistic traditions. The contributors--all eminent art historians--argue that although the expatriate Picasso became a hero of French modernism, his work nevertheless reflected his identity with Spanish tradition, his inspiration from it, and his lifelong preoccupation with it.

"The book is an essential element in understanding Picasso's works."--Steve Brock, Book Reviews on the Internet

This handsome book--the first comprehensive treatment of Juan de Herrera in English--examines how the architect and his patron, Philip II of Spain, created a new era in Spanish architecture. Catherine Zerner shows that the buildings they produced--among them the Escorial, the Merchants' Exchange in Seville, and the urban renewal of Madrid--instilled new ideals that were to nourish Spanish and European architecture for centuries to come.

"The book draws on rigorous research. . . . Brilliance [and] . . . an original insight."--Jonathan Brown, New York Review of Books

    "This is a valuable book in a field whose Spanish literature is vast, provincial, and largely inaccessible."--Kerry Downes, Art Book Review

    "Zerner has fully achieved her goal of assessing Herrera's place in architecture. This is a thoughtful, perceptive, and scholarly book that will be useful not only to art historians, but to anyone who wishes to understand how things were done in the Spain of Philip II. The author's knowledge of Renaissance architecture is matched by a thorough understanding of Philip II, his court, and his bureaucracy. Perhaps more important, she has a clear grasp of the values that shaped them all--values that achieved visible form in the buildings of Juan de Herrera."--William S. Maltby, Sixteenth Century Journal

    "Zerner decodes this language for us, explores its intellectual roots, explains its implementation and, in a beautifully produced volume, presents the work of Herrera and his patron in a way that illuminates an important chapter in the development of architectural practice."--Simon Pepper, Times Literary Supplement

    "In Wilkinson-Zerner's [in review her name is hyphenated like this, above it is not] study, the powerful and uniqueness of Herrera's architecture and planning is brought to light."--James S. Ackerman, American Historical Review

    "Catherine Wilkinson-Zerner has produced a book of considerable significance. . . Wilkinson-Zerner's own very well constructed and illustrated project, the fruit of years of careful consideration and research, is successful. Juan de Herrera, her supremely efficient and effective subject, has emerged more clearly than ever before. . ."--John Bold, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society

    Winner of the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies' 1994 Eleanor Tufts Award

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