Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.


Distributed by Yale University Press for National Galleries of Scotland

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This volume was produced as the catalog for an exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland on some 20 of the earliest paintings by Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), covering a period between the artist's completion of his apprenticeship with Francisco Pacheco in 1617 and his departure from Seville to Madrid in 1623. The exhibition included related works by Pacheco, Ribera, Cano and others (49 objects in all), each illustrated in large quarto, full-page color. The commentaries on the individual objects provide useful, albeit selective, information, but the greater value of the text resides in the nine illustrated essays that precede the catalog proper. Three of these concern the city of Seville and its historical context for the visual arts; the rest pertain to painting in the city, principally to that of Velazquez, his sources, training, subject matter, and technique. The main organizers of the exhibition, David Davies and Enriqueta Harris, contribute instructive essays on the subject of bodegones and on religious themes, respectively. Given the importance of Seville for the formation of art in the Americas, this volume has much to interest students of 17th-century painting in both Spain and New Spain. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty. C. W. Talbot; Trinity University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

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 .