Praying to portraits: audience, identity, and the Inquisition in the early modern Hispanic world

Abstract

"Praying to Portraits, art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait. Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual’s relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies."-- On front flap of dust jacket.

Contents

Introduction : portraits and sacred images in early modernity -- Sacrificing the self -- True portraits, lying portraits -- Repainting portraits -- Portraits as sacred images -- Conclusion : the life histories of sacred portraits and the history of sacred portraiture.