Essential Reading

(choose two)

• Antonio Feros, ‘Sacred and Terrifying Gazes: Languages and Images of Power in Early Modern Spain,’ in Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez, (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 68-86
• John Elliott, Spain and its World 1500-1700: Selected Essays(London, 1998). Chapter 8: ‘Power and Propaganda in the Spain of Philip IV,’ pp.162-188
• Erin Rowe, ‘The King, the City, and the Saints: Performing Sacred Kingship in the Royal Capital,’ in The Early Modern Hispanic World: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 62-87

Seminar questions:

- How could images articulate and reinforce Royal authority across the Empire? Consider how they were produced, circulated, and displayed.

- How did art and architecture contribute to royal propaganda, the display and affirmation of Imperial power? How were images and objects employed in the construction of historical narratives?

- What evidence can you find of change and continuity in portraits of the Spanish Habsburgs? What were these portraits meant to convey, in Spain and abroad? How does clothing (in these paintings) communicate a distinct/uniquely Spanish royal image?

- Select a portrait of the Spanish Habsburgs to discuss. What role does fashion play in the construction of a royal image?

Further Reading

• Suzanne F. Cawsey, 'King Pedro IV of Aragon, Royal Propaganda and the Tradition of Royal Speechwriting', Journal of Medieval History (1999): 357–372.
• Antonio Castillo Gómez, 'Writing on the Streets: Ephemeral Texts and Public Space in the Early Modern Hispanic World', in Approaches to the History of Written Culture: A World Inscribed, edited by Martyn Lyons and Rita Marquilhas (2017), 57–72.
• Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial New Spain(London, 2004). Chapter 4: Performing Power
• Alejandro Cañeque, ‘Imaging the Spanish Empire: The Visual Construction of Imperial Authority in Habsburg New Spain,’ Colonial Latin American Review19: 1 (2010), pp. 29-68
• John Elliott, Spain, Europe, and the Wider World, 1500-1800 (Yale University Press, 2009), Chapter 14: Appearance and Reality in the Spain of Velázquez, pp. 279-303
• John Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700 (London, 1998). Chapter 7: ‘‘The Court of the Spanish Habsburgs: A Peculiar Institution?’’ pp. 142–61
• Henry Kamen, The Escorial: Art and Power in the Renaissance(New Haven, 2010)
• Glyn Redworth and Fernando Checa, ‘The courts of the Spanish Habsburgs, 1500-1700,’ in John Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500-1750(London, 1999)
• Jonathan Brown and John H. Elliott, A Palace for a King; The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (London: 2003)