The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez

The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez offers a synthetic overview of one of the greatest painters of Golden Age Spain and seventeenth century Europe as a whole. With contributions from art historians and those working in other disciplines, this book offers fresh approaches to the vast literature on this artist. Velázquez’s portraits of his patron, King Philip IV, and his wives are examined by two historians in an effort to reconstruct their reception and readings by contemporaries. Two historians of Golden Age Spanish literature provide an interdisciplinary account of the relationships between poetry, theater, and the visual arts at the Spanish court, as practiced by Velázquez, the poet Francisco de Quevedo and the dramatist, Calderón de la Barca. An expert on the history of Spanish music offers an unprecedented examination of how instruments ‘play’ in Velázquez’s compositions.

• Scholarly but accessible for a general reader • Takes an interdisciplinary approach • Provides fresh ‘readings’ of well-known paintings

1. Introduction: a brief history of Velázquez literature Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruit; 2. Becoming an artist in seventeenth-century Spain Zahira Véliz; 3. Velázquez and Italy Jonathan Brown; 4. Velázquez and the North Alexander Vergara; 5. ‘Sacred and terrifying gazes’: languages and images of power in Early Modern Spain Antonio Feros; 6. Court women in the Spain of Velázquez Magdalena S. Sánchez; 7. Spanish religious life in the age of Velázquez Sara T. Nalle; 8. Velázquez and two poets of the Baroque: Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo Lía Schwartz; 9. Calderón de la Barca, playwright at court Margaret R. Greer; 10. Three paintings, a double lyre, opera, and Eliche’s Venus: Velázquez and music in the Royal Court in Madrid Louise K. Stein.