Enfilade

New Book Series | Gender and Art in the Museum: The Prado Collection

Posted in books, museums by Editor on June 29, 2024

Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, ca. 1615, oil on canvas, 113 × 176 cm
(Madrid: Prado)

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From the Prado’s press release announcing this series from Amsterdam University Press:

This ambitious new series from Amsterdam University Press approaches the study of the collections in the Prado Museum from a gender perspective, exploring the women who became artists and the many women who promoted artists and collected works of art, as well as the women who inspired some of the masterpieces in this institution. It will offer new insights on a wide range of topics on art and women and their interactions with politics, money, and power.

Edited by Noelia García Pérez, director of The Female Perspective project, the series arises from the Prado’s firm commitment to making the role of women in the world of art visible. Studies will address the output of women artists and their presence or absence in the galleries, links between the formation of the Prado’s collections and women artistic promoters, and the role of women in inspiring some of the Prado’s masterpieces.

While women patrons and artists have motivated a significant number of publications in recent decades, this is the first series to address the study of the creation of one of the largest art collections in the world, now housed in the Museo del Prado, through a gender perspective, focusing on the women who promoted, inspired, created, donated, and conserved many of the works preserved and displayed in the institution in order to demonstrate the crucial role that they played in the production, promotion, dissemination, and conservation of art. With a broad chronology corresponding to the Prado’s collections, the series will foreground the role of women and their relationship with the arts, as well as the evolution of this important institution and its connection with them.

The editorial committee includes Estrella de Diego (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Sheila Ffolliott (George Mason University), M. José Rodríguez Salgado (The London School of Economics and Political Sience-Oxford University), Alejandro Vergara (Museo del Prado), Carmen Gaitán (CSIC), and Sheila Barker (director of the prestigious Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists / Medici Archive Project).

 

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