Simulacra and Seriality: Spanish Renaissance Sculpture 1400–1600

Abstract

This special issue of the Hispanic Research Journal includes five papers presented at a symposium on Spanish Renaissance sculpture held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in July 2014. The symposium formed part of the Robert H. Smith Renaissance Sculpture Programme, which was instituted at the V&A in 2007 thanks to the generosity of the American collector and benefactor, the late Robert H. Smith. The 2014 symposium examined simulacra and seriality in Spanish sculpture during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The title of the symposium was deliberately provocative, and participants were encouraged to interrogate its terms: how was ‘Spanishness’ really defined in this period, how useful are traditional watersheds such as 1492 or terms like ‘Renaissance’, and what kind of objects and media might fall under the category of ‘sculpture’? The papers presented led to much fruitful discussion on the day, and we are fortunate that some of these essays by leading international Hispanists are now published here. Scholarship in recent years has frequently explored questions of simulacra and seriality in medieval and Renaissance art, especially in Italy and northern Europe, but less so in the Hispanic world. This collection of essays makes no claims to address this neglect in any kind of comprehensive fashion, but the diversity of these articles will, we hope, stimulate further research into these questions. A number of essays explicitly challenge the terms of the symposium. The question of ‘Spanishness’ is addressed in Ronda Kasl’s essay, which examines miraculous images in the colonial Andes attributed to Spanish or Spanish-born artists. All the other essays to some extent compare theory and practice in Spain with those elsewhere, particularly in Italy and the Netherlands. Problems of chronology and terminology are explicitly explored in Patrick Lenaghan’s essay on the ‘Gothic’ and ‘Renaissance’ tombs in San Francisco in Cuellar, now in The Hispanic Society of America, but also arise from Kasl’s discussion of the relationship between the medieval sculpture of the Virgin in Guadalupe, Spain, and its sixteenthand seventeenth-century copies. The essays embrace a variety of sculptural materials, including terracotta, bronze, hardstone, wood, and marble, and sculpture is here broadly defined to encompass funerary monuments, narrative sculpture and crucifixes, architectural details and decoration, medals and cameos. hispanic research journal, Vol. 16 No. 5, October 2015, 377–378