Joan Sureda - Selected publications#

1. Joan Sureda, “Los paisajitos de Villa Medici de Velázquez o la visión de lo natural”, Cartografías visuales y arquitectónicas de la modernidad [“Velázquez’s landscapes of the Villa Medici or the vision of the natural”, Visual and Architectonic cartographies of modernity], Barcelona, Editorial UBE, 2011, ISBN 978-84-475-3540-8, pp.29-47.
This investigation raises one of the fundamental issues concerning Velázquez: his conception of naturalism and, in particular, his capacity for painting the “natural” which traditional criticism has seen as being encapsulated in the Roman landscapes of the Villa Medici.

The author begins the line of investigation of the “unicum” Velázquez with the general consideration of the Spanish Golden Age, which resulted in the book which is cited here as contribution number 6 – La gloria de los siglos de oro. Mecenas, artistas y maravillas en la España imperial [The glory of the golden age. Patrons, artists and wonders in imperial Spain], Barcelona, Lunwerg, 2006. As a mark of the quality of the research and its impact on specialist criticism, I believe that one could indicate that the cited research has acted as a framework or paradigmatic investigation for obtaining the endorsement of the scientific magazine ACTA-Artis Estudis d'Art Modern (http: // revistes.ub.edu/ index.php/ActaArtis/estructura. It is worth highlighting that the international scientific committee of the magazine, after the obtaining of the above-mentioned endorsements, is made up of Alessandro Ballarin, Profesore emerito dell'Università degli Studi di Padova; Anthony J. Cascardi, Professor of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish. Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley; Margaret E. Connors McQuade, Assistant Director Curator of Decorative Arts, The Hispanic Society of America, Nova York; Joseph Leo Koerner, The Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Ginevra Mariani, Direttore Calcoteca Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Roma;Keith Moxey, Barbara Novak Professor and Chair of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University, Nova York; Alessandro Nova, Direttore Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck- Institut, Florència; Antonio Paolucci, Direttore dei Musei Vaticani, Ciutat del Vaticà; Giovanni Romano, Professore ordinario emerito di Storia dell¿ Arte, Università di Torino, Torí; Sergio Rossi, Professore ordinario di Storia dell’Arte, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Roma;Victor Stoichita, Chaire d'histoire de l'art moderne et contemporain, Université de Fribourg, Friburg; Rosella Vodret, Soprintendente Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della Citta' di Roma, Roma y Christopher Wood, Professor History of Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

2. Joan Sureda, “En torno a la pintura de hacia 1500: tradición y permeabilidad en los reinos hispánicos”, Primitivos: el siglo dorado de la pintura portuguesa. 1450-1550 [“On painting from circa 1500: tradition and permeability in the Hispanic kingdoms”, Primitives: the golden age of Portuguese painting, 1450-1550], Madrid, Editorial Ministerio de Cultura-Secretaría General Técnica, 2011, ISBN 978-84-8181-493-4, pp.73-101.

The chapter of the book “En torno a la pintura de hacia 1500: tradición y permeabilidad en los reinos hispánicos [“On painting from circa 1500: tradition and permeability in the Hispanic kingdoms”] starts from the hypothesis that it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a classification which groups separate units together within a stable system – the way that schools are generally understood – each and every one of the creative processes of the pictorial practice of a period, nor apply to these a kind of cultural evolutionism that explains the generation of new ways of understanding, appropriating and representing reality.

This work is framed by the meeting of two processes or lines of investigation that the author has maintained over the years: that of medieval painting and that of modern painting, lines which have come together in the study of Mediterranean artistic relationships. Its impact has to be situated firstly in the fact that the text was published in the catalogue of the Primitives exhibition that was held between June 22 and October 2, 2011, in the Museo Nacional Colegio de San Gregorio de Valladolid and, with some variations, in Lisbon and Valencia. The development of this line of investigation allowed the author to conduct the management and coordination of the volume “Darreres manifestacions” (Pintura III) [“Latest Manifestations” (Painting III)] of L' Art Gòtic a Catalunya [Gothic Art in Catalonia], Barcelona, Fundació Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2006), a volume for which he also wrote several chapters.

3. Joan Sureda, Velázquez: pintor y hombre del rey [Velázquez: painter and king’s man], Barcelona, Lunwerg Editores, 2009, ISBN 978-84-9785-585-3.

The book, like the other publications presented as merits, is the fruit of the research carried out in the project/research group ACAF/ART, whose main aim is the carrying out of an analytical, critical and selective cartography of the visual and monumental environment of the political, social and cultural area of the western Mediterranean from the beginning of the 15th Century until the end of the 18th Century, which allows the configuration of the historical map of direct and/or rhizomatic relationships in which its artistic production has developed.

One line of investigation, that of Velázquez, is based on the study of the unicum, which is to say of that which is singular, extraordinary or excellent. In university teaching and in research, the book’s author works mainly on four of these singular creators: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Velázquez and Goya, thereby encompassing the whole chronology of what is considered as modern art (15th - 18th Century) and showing the Mediterranean transversality or what, in a more specific terms, Ferdinando Bologna called in another context “painting’s Mediterranean routes”.

The evidence of the quality, distribution and impact of Velázquez: pintor y hombre del rey, as well as being shown by the usual references in books and specialist magazines not linked to the author or his immediate environment, is shown by the scientific character of the publishing house, which publishes texts of a scientific nature controlled by peer review, without impairing its great capacity to present a publication of outstanding visual value.

4. Joan Sureda (curator and editor), Goya e Italia. Exposición [Goya and Italy. Exhibition] (June 1 to September 15, 2008, Museo de Zaragoza) and Catálogo crítico [Critical catalogue], Madrid, Turner, 2008, 2 vols., ISBN 978-84-7506-807-7. English edition 978-84-7506-808-49.

The works of Goya’s mature period constitute an essential part of the collective imagination of modernity. However, references to his stay in Italy are scarce. The historiography of the 20th Century tried to correct this matter, although when the exhibition Goya e Italia was proposed in 2004, the question of “young Goya” was not closed and still less so was that referred to his period of formation, which can be considered as starting in 1759 and running until the middle of 1771. In this context, the exhibition was proposed not with the objective of filling out the catalogue with works of the young Goya but with that of mapping his creative universe. That is to say, the links between Goya and his contemporaries both in his formative years in Zaragoza as well as in Madrid and Rome.

To indicate the evidence of the quality and reach of both the exhibition and the catalogue, it seems opportune to mention the institutions which lent the works, a clear testimony to the scientific nature of the project and its international relevance: Accademia di Belle Arti di Parma, Parma; Accademia di Brera, Gabinetto dei Disegni, Milán; Accademia Nazionale de San Luca, Roma; Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Palazzo Corsini, Roma; Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Roma; Archivio di Stato di Parma, Parma; Archivo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Parma, Parma; Archivo Storico Capitolino, Roma; Arzobispado de Madrid, Madrid;Arzobispado de Valladolid, Valladolid; Arzobispado de Zaragoza, Zaragoza; Biblioteca Civica Romolo Spezioli, Fermo; Biblioteca de la Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza; Biblioteca Hertziana, Roma; Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; Biblioteca Palatina di Parma, Parma; Cabildo de Valladolid, Valladolid; Cabildo Metropolitano de Valencia, Valencia; Cabildo Metropolitano de Zaragoza, Zaragoza; Calcografía Nacional, Madrid; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburg; Cartuja de Aula Dei, Zaragoza, Zaragoza; Certosa e Museo di San Martino, Napoli; Colección Ibercaja, Zaragoza ; Collezione C.D'Errico, de Palazzo San Gervasio, Museo Nazionale d'Arte Medievale e Moderna; ; Corte Constituzionale, Roma; Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis; Diocesi di Parma, Parma; Diócesis de Getafe, Madrid; Facultad de Bellas Artes de Madrid, Universidad Complutense, Madrid; Fondazione Canova, Possagno ; Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell' Arte Roberto Longhi, Florencia, Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma; Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt; Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid; Fundación Selgas-Fagalde, Cudillero; Galería Eric Coatalem, Paris; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica di Roma.Palazzo Barberini, Roma; Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze; Galleria Estense, Modena; Galleria Instituto Nazionale per la Grafica. Roma; Istituto d' Arte Paolo Toschi, Parma; Koninklijk Museum Voor Schone Kunsten¡ Antwerpen. Amberes; Ministero per I Beni e le Attivitá Culturali, Roma; MNAC. Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona; Musée de Grenoble; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest Métropole Océane, Brest; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Quimper; Musée Fesch, Ville d’Ajaccio; Musée Granet, Aix en Provence; Musée Ingres, Montauban; Musei Capitolini, Protomoteca Capitolina, Roma; Musei Vaticani, Città del Vaticano; Museo Biblioteca Archivio di Bassano del Grappa; Museo Casa de la Moneda, Madrid;Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia; Museo de Historia de Madrid; Museo de Huesca; Museo de Zaragoza; Museo dell'Academia Ligustica di Belle Arti de Génova; Museo dell¿Opera del Duomo, Florencia; Museo des Beaux-Arts de Rennes;Museo di Roma; Museo di Roma, Gabinetto Comunale delle Stampe; Museo e Gipsoteca Canoviana; Museo Glauco Lombardi, Parma; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid; Museo Nazionale d'Arte Medievale e Moderna della Basilicata - Palazzo Lanfranchi, Matera; Museum Narodowe, Varsovia; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublín; National Gallery of Scotland, Edimburgo; Obispado de Tarazona; Palais de Beaux-Arts de Lille; Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid; Pinacoteca Capitolina Roma; Raccolte Piancastelli, Biblioteca Comunale A.Saffi, Forli; Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid; Real y Excelentísima Sociedad Económica Aragonesa de Amigos del País, Zaragoza; Rijskmuseum, Amsterdam; Royal Academy of Arts, Londres; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, Berlín; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart;Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhague; Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest; The British Museum. Londres; The Burghley House Collection, Stamford; The Matthiesen Gallery. Londres; The State Hermitage Museum, San Petesburgo; Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milán; Vestjaellands Kunstmuseum, Soro;Victoria & Albert Museum, Londres; Vorarlberger Landesmuseum, Bregenz; Yale Center for British Art. New Heaven.

5. Joan Sureda, Mundos de Goya: 1746-1828 [Goya’s Worlds: 1746-1828], Barcelona, Lunwerg Editores, 2008, ISBN 978-84-9785-512-9.

The evidence of the quality and impact of Mundos de Goya, apart from citations and reviews in other publications and specialist magazines, which with art history books tend to be the usual ones, I believe has to consider the prestige of the Lunwerg publishing house and its capacity for European and American distribution. One should also take into account the fact that the text – which has been published in an English edition – is the result of the development of one of the author’s lines of investigation and, at the same time, that of the group/research project ACAF/ART, of which the author is the principal researcher. It is a line of investigation that, apart from minor contributions, has given place to three contributions of different formats which we consider to be relevant: the contribution which we are discussing here, the exhibition Goya e Italia, which is also presented as merit number 4, and the study “Sobre el viaje a Roma. El caso de Domingo Álvarez Enciso” [“Concerning the journey to Rome. The case of Domingo Álvarez Enciso”], presented at the congress "VASARI 500 años: Narrativas Biográficas en la Historia del Arte" [VASARI 500 years: biographical narratives in Art History” (2011)], research which is in the process of being published.

6. Joan Sureda, La gloria de los siglos de oro. Mecenas, artistas y maravillas en la España imperial [The glory of the golden age. Patrons, artists and wonders in imperial Spain], Barcelona, Lunwerg, 2006, ISBN 84-9785-301-6.

The book’s text is divided into two large thematic blocks. The first of these analyses fundamental historiographical questions such as the definition of “Golden Age" in Spanish historical reality. In this regard, the text expands the traditional chronology and the term itself, commonly associated with the 17th Century, employing it to classify the 16th and 18th centuries as “Golden Ages”, not now in terms of literature but in terms of art. But this makes not only a new chronological proposal but also a territorial one, as it includes the American territories not only as recipients of a visual culture but also as generators of it. The second of the thematic blocks develops, among other matters, questions of a formal character, such as “the spaces of power” and “the conceited forms”, and of a sociological character, such as the study of the representation of “the poor, jesters and prodigies” and that of “Woman and women”.

The impact of the text, through its methodological renovation, is seen fundamentally through its immediate translation into other languages, which implies a rapid international repercussion of its contributions: L' art espagnol aux siècles d' or, Paris, Hazan, 2006 and The Golden Age of Spain, New York, Vendome-Abrams-Thames & Hudson, 2007, as well as the Russian translation published in Moscow in 2008.

7. Joan Sureda, La búsqueda de lo real. El arte en el renacimiento: 1400-1527 [The search for the real. Art in the Renaissance: 1400-1527], Barcelona, Plawerg, 2006, ISBN: 84-08-46971-1.

This book was conceived as bringing together research of a lengthy chronological journey with closer visions of art history in an attempt to propose new ways of interpretation and, evidently, of signifying the artistic manifestations of the Renaissance period. The chronological definition of that period has become a continuing area of analysis, in as much as if the date of 1400-1401 is accepted with a certain unanimity by historians, that of its final limit presents strong historiographical controversies. The book proposes the date of 1527, which is to say the date of the Sack of Rome, as an act which symbolises the ending of an age, the humanistic, and its values.

8. Joan Sureda, “Les primeres imatges d'una història fragmentada” [The first images of a fragmented history] and “De Parlament a Museu” [From Parliament to Museum], El Palau del Parlament a Catalunya [The Palace of Parliament in Catalonia], Barcelona, Parlament de Catalunya, 2005, ISBN 84-9785-201, pp.15-27 and 169-175.

The author coordinated the book and carried out the corresponding research of two chapters. The first of these, “Les primeres imatges d'una història fragmentada” [The first images of a fragmented history] studies the representation of the spaces of power in mediaeval Catalonia. That is to say, in what manner the architectonic places that display power and which are used for its exercise are represented in the field of the miniature and in that of painting, from the parliament celebrated in Barcelona in 1228 until the Parliament of Jaume I which appear in the book of the Constitucions i altres drets de Catalunya [Constitutions and other rights of Catalonia] (1495). The second chapter, “De Parlament a Museu” [From Parliament to Museum] investigates the process through which, after the Spanish Civil War, what had had been the Palace of the Catalonian Parliament during the Republican period (a construction originally for military and munitions purposes, erected during the reign of Phillip IV in the 18th Century) is partly converted into the seat of the Museo de Arte de Cataluña.

The book, apart from its content, reveals the interest and capacity for team research work in the field of the humanities, given that as well as researchers from ACAF/ART, a research project already mentioned on several occasions, it also relied on the collaboration of important history professors from Catalan universities such as Josep Fontana, Borja de Riquer, Pere Anguera and Jaume Burrull. Overall, the book develops a work of diachronic history guided by the concept of the “place" of the parliaments of the Crown of Aragon and Catalonia, which it puts forward with total documentary and historical precision.

9. Joan Sureda, “La Cataluña que visitó el gran príncipe de Toscana”, El viaje a Compostela de Cosme III de Médicis [“The Catalonia visited by the Grand Prince of Tuscany"], Cosimo III de’Medici’s Journey to Compostela], Santiago de Compostela, Xacobeo, 2004, ISBN : 84-453-3892-7, pp. 387-397.

The chapter “La Cataluña que visitó el gran príncipe de Toscana” [The Catalonia visited by the Grand Prince of Tuscany] analyses the official account and, consequently, the description of Catalonia at the end of the 18th Century made by Lorenzo Magalotti, secretary to the then prince Cosimo of Tuscany, poet and diplomat. Catalonia was the first Hispanic territory visited by the future Grand Duke Cosimo III. For this reason, the account is extremely useful to determine the appreciation (definitely very little) of the people, customs, and art of a territory – Catalonia – that was far removed in every sense from the Tuscany of the period. In particular it analyses the descriptions of the artistic character of the Florentine secretary, who appears to show only a slight interest in the late-Gothic buildings, in particular the basilica of Santa María del Mar, and the early sculptural renaissance of the 16th Century, such as the retrochoir of Barcelona’s cathedral.

The study of Magalotti’s report had barely been sketched by local historians. In relation to these, the author offers a vision that is both stronger and more extensive as it examines not just Barcelona but Catalonia as a whole, and proposes a methodology of comparative analysis through the study of the Manual de Novells Ardits, that is to say of the report that it appears was made by the political leaders of the city itself. The conclusion is reached through this investigation that scant interest was shown towards what might be considered as local or peripheral. It suggests, then, the gaze of the cultural centre – which Tuscany still was at that time – towards an “other”, which in those times could be considered as a periphery that was poor in its culture and very discreet in its politics, politics that were subjugated by Bourbon centralism.

10. Joan Sureda, “Magnum miraculum est homo. Sobre la dignidad del hombre y la mujer y el arte del Renacimiento” [“Magnum miraculum est hombre: On the dignity of man and woman, and Renaissance art”], Materia. Revista d' Art, Barcelona, Universidad de Barcelona, 2003, pp.189-214.

From the representations of Hermes Trismegistus on the marble pavement of Sienna Cathedral, whose execution was carried out during the 15th Century, the investigation proposes the recuperation of Hermeticism in the Italian states of the final years of the 15th Century. Fundamentally it does so starting from the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum which was made in Florence by Marsilio Ficino and later publications by Pimander and Asclepio. It subsequently analyses the Oratio de hominis dignitate written by Pico della Mirandola in 1486 and studies the solidification of the concept of “human dignity” within the ambit of the literature of the beginning of the 16th century (Baldassare Castiglione) as well as in the field of the visual arts, making special emphasis on the plastic evaluation of human dignity in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian.

The “renaissance” of Hermeticism, analysed in an extensive way in the field of philosophical and even literary thinking, has gone almost unnoticed in that of that painting and sculpture of the period around 1500. The author – in parallel with professors Marinela Caciorgna and Roberto Guerrini who, when working on the theme at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, presented an extensive iconographic-stylistic study of the pavement of the Duomo in Sienna – has tried to develop this matter by seeking to extend the boundaries of iconographic-symbolic readings of Renaissance art to transversal fields of investigation that belong to cultural studies.