The Authority of Prints in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

The importance of printed sources in seventeenth-century Spanish art can be perceived in its drawings, paintings, and sculpture, as well as through contemporary records and theoretical writing on the role of prints in the artist's creative process. Artists' print collections in early modern Spain were unusually large in comparison with those owned by artists elsewhere. The reasons for this tendency are no doubt numerous, but the impressive quantities of prints owned by artists of even modest means must be significant. Documentary and textual evidence, as well as the observation of paintings and drawings, establishes why prints were central to artistic practice, how they were used and their formal influence on images made in Spain. Spain's Golden Age was defined in part by a tradition of censorship, orthodoxy and authority. The social and theological value placed by Spaniards on decorum became a defining component of the national stereotype in the early modern period. An assessment of the authority of printed images in Spain must take account of the Inquisition, the practices it engendered and their assimilation by a largely compliant population of artists. The assimilation of prints by Spanish artists became an integral component in the generation of painted images in the early modern period.