This lecture will consider a range of problems associated with the portraiture of Diego Velázquez, which have emerged while the speaker has been writing a book-length study of the subject. Specific portraits will be used to exemplify problems of typology and chronology; naming and interpretation; and controversies around attributions and the pressure to expand the Velázquez canon. The discussion will also take into account methodological questions which have helped and hindered in framing these problems. People sometimes wonder whether there is anything left to say about the great names in the history of art – evidently, there is.
Dr. Peter Cherry was a lecturer in the history of art at Trinity College Dublin. He has had a long-standing and internationally recognised career teaching and publishing on Hispanic art and archives. His research interests have focussed on painting in Spain during the seventeenth century and particularly in the areas of still-life and genre painting, and artists working in Seville, including Velázquez and Murillo. He has recently turned his attention to the portraiture of Velázquez for a book in the Renaissance Lives series for Reaktion. He now lives in Madrid.
Lecture organised in collaboration with ARTES - Iberian & Latin American Visual Culture Group
