This presentation explores the main questions which emerged in the process of editing the volume Art and Artists between Iberian and Global Geographies, 1450–1550. Featuring authors from seven different countries, the collection aims to refashion the geography and chronology of artistic exchange in the Late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Focusing on the Iberian world—defined as both the Peninsula and Portugal and Spain’s overseas territories—the volume demonstrates the historical and theoretical importance of this long-marginalized region. Ranging from Sardinia to Madeira, Antwerp to Potosí, the chapters collected here construct a complex image of contacts moving in and out, north and south, east and west of the Peninsula. Several media and geographies are interwoven to create a rich tapestry held together by the concept of ‘itinerant’ artworks, artists and ideas. The essays challenge paradigms of centre and periphery, medieval and modern, local and migrant.
Yet the process of editing the volume poses difficult questions. Are the artists and objects discussed in the essays ‘hybrids’? To what extent was medieval Iberia a geographical and artistic unit? How can exchanges between Iberian possessions be conceptualised if they bypassed the Peninsula itself? Was artistic exchange in this period different from that which preceded and followed it? Does our sense of 1492 as a moment of global chronological rupture need to be nuanced? In this presentation, the editors will propose some working answers developed in the volume’s Introduction.
Dr Costanza Beltrami (Department of History of Art, University of Oxford) and Sylvia Alvares-Correa (DPhil Student, History of Art) will be presenting.
Event open to all to attend. For enquiries, please contact Alexandra Solovyev (alexandra.solovyev@history.ox.ac.uk)
