Enfilade

Largely a 17th-century story, but also entirely relevant to the 18th century with good 18th-century examples—and to my thinking, a really smart, helpful book for thinking about portraits of any sort (and incredibly well-written). –CH

From The Pennsylvania State UP:

Adam Jasienski, Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-0271093444, $120.

In 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.

Highly original and persuasive, Praying to Portraits profoundly revises our understanding of early modern portraiture. It will intrigue art historians across geographical boundaries, and it will also find an audience among scholars of architecture, history, and religion in the early modern Hispanic world.

Adam Jasienski is Associate Professor of Art History in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Portraits and Sacred Images in Early Modernity
1  Sacrificing the Self
2  True Portraits, Lying Portraits
3  Repainting Portraits
4  Portraits as Sacred Images
Conclusion: The Life Histories of Sacred Portraits and the History of Sacred Portraiture

Notes
Bibliography
Index