The growing heritage awareness that began in Spain during the 1980s made it possible a fertile field of new readings and actions regarding the city. It provided the architecture discipline with a heightened sensitivity towards the respect for the historic city. This study aims to trace and give an account of the operations carried out by the architect Juan Antonio Molina Serrano within this context. With this objective in mind, this study first analyses the starting conditions or some of the theoretical-critical assumptions that may have underpinned Molina’s trajectory, as well as the principal routes that have been associated to his projects. In this way, three main levels or categories of intervention are distinguished: 'appropriations or nuances', 'modifications or extensions' and, finally, those that seek to 'transcend the place and build a new place'. These can be understood as clarifying categories, as well as resonance boxes of Molina’s time and context. Furthermore, they can also be considered highly personal ways of operating, based on a principle or generative idea: first and foremost, building architecture consists of thinking of building a place.
This article offers new interpretations for a number of drawings belonging to Francisco de Goya’s Album D or «Witches and Old Women Album» (1820-1823). Their study in connection with contemporary news and press articles evinces their links to the specific historical and cultural context within which they were produced and perceived. Their plurality of meanings becomes clearer when considered with regard to the social and political debates and controversies reported in the wealth of new publications emerging during the Liberal Triennium. This kind of analysis, focused on the drawings Nothing is known of this, He wakes up kicking, and on Goya’s depictions of «visions» and «nightmares», could help understand the creative process and the original use of his albums.
The convent of Santo Domingo of Inca is recognized as an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC). Despite the contemporary transformations it has undergone and the cultural use it maintains today, the image it projects continues to reflect its origin as a Dominican Foundation (1604-1835). Until now, very little was known about the initial configuration and evolution of the convent complex. This study documents the first buildings erected at the beginning of the 17th century and reconstructs their development with unpublished data from the original Dominican archive, largely lost. It provides a description of the extensive ceremonial carried out for the laying of the foundation stone of the current temple, which included folkloric elements that were not known in the town of Inca. All of this reflects the expansion of religious orders during the modern age and the context of the counter-Reformation Baroque. In addition, the evolution of the convent in the eighteenth century is explained, its transformation after the confiscation, the rehabilitation that turned it into the cultural center that it is today, and a stylistic interpretation of its fundamental elements is made.
The high level of constructive knowledge that military engineers had in Spain in the 18th and 19th centuries is well accredited, and it forms an important part of what we could call Enlightenment mechanics. One of the less ordinary chapters of this building work was the use of the pointed vault, called at that time “Gothic or ogival vault”, in the construction of gunpowder stores. This study aims to highlight the innovative spirit of such engineers, by revealing their effort to find new forms and typologies that would allow them to perfect and revolutionize the aforementioned architectural model. Different examples in the Hispanic sphere show that, compared to Vauban's prototype considered canonical, there were engineers who developed different proposals and that evolved from the warehouses built in Gibralfaro, San Fernando and Ceuta, to those that rise in the fortress of San Fernando de Figueras. The latter proves to be not only the most elaborate proposal for a warehouse with a pointed vault of the 18th century, but also the one that advances in its structure elements that will be definitively adopted in the following century, being, therefore, an antecedent of great relevance in this sense.
Having lived in Brazil for most of his life, Compostela-born painter Modesto Brocos travelled to Europe from 1897 to 1901 to work on a painting in Rome with which he had «dreamt of before becoming a painter» and on which he portrayed various passages of the Jacobean tradition. After exhibiting it in Paris and Madrid with little success, a disheartened Brocos left it in a storeroom at the Cathedral of Santiago and returned to Río de Janeiro. Nowadays it constitutes one of the great-unknown jewels of the cathedral’s art heritage, despite its crucial role in the resurgence of pilgrimages to Santiago and its importance for the cathedral’s collection of paintings. This article focuses on the painting’s creative process and vicissitudes surrounding the artist’s work, as well as on its admittance to the cathedral’s storerooms, its role in a revitalisation programme of the Jacobean phenomenon at the start of the 20th century and its recent valuation in the wake of a full restoration that prevented it of its destruction. Moreover, this article presents new dates and data that shed light on its production in Rome, conclusion, and arrival at the Cathedral of Santiago
The Galician culture of the Spanish republican exile is the subject that this article intends to address, which aims to investigate the origins of the artistic imaginary developed in the diaspora, especially by the intelligentsia that arrived in Argentina. The figure of Castelao is taken as a reference because of the relevance it had in the conformation of an ideological and artistic corpus of great influence for the subsequent development, and that would be continued by Luis Seoane, his successor in the identity cultural commitment coming from Galicianism. The article investigates the main identity links of Galicia —in the Spanish Northwest—, emphasizing the importance of the Galician language, its defense, against its popular character, which had to be made visible and restored. Next, the Galician imaginary is analyzed from the visual source, while a comparison is made with respect to the rest of the peninsula, to demonstrate the corpus that is created there and that is linked to Castelao's speech in defense of the peculiarity that this part of the Iberian Peninsula has, presenting a problem when deciding what term to refer to the territorial set.
The aim of this paper is to suggest a classification proposal of the different opening title sequence types that are used at the beginning of an episode and that coexist nowadays in the TV series ecosystem. This goal is determined by two main issues: on the one hand, the absence of specific taxonomical models aimed to opening titles sequences study. And, on the other hand, the relevance acquired in recent decades by fiction on television, which has emerged as the gravitational center of the programming of many channels. The irruption of digital content platforms has intensified this feature and has increased production. Despite of difficulty of stablishing categories, it has been possible to outline a set of groups which work as a basis to make a complete and complex observation that favors research and results in a greater knowledge of this creative redoubts.
In order to have a deep understanding of the development of health in Spain, it is decisive to approach the sanitary equipment built singularly during the third quarter of the 20th century, and further away from the major capitals. Despite their relative modesty, these hospital had a decisive relevance in the areas furthest away from the centres of research and development of Spanish medicine, especially in the less developed regions. In addition to the resources provided by the national system, the contribution of the Provincial Councils in terms of hospital equipment managed to guarantee practically universal coverage to the citizens of these territories, despite the certain formal and endowment restraint of these hospitals. We will go deeper into this by looking at the case of Zamora as an example of the moderate contributions of inland Spain. To this end, we resorted to the study of the documentation produced by the governmental institutions and the Provincial Council itself, as well as to the analysis of the architectural projects of the hospital promoted in the 1960s. In this way, we study the response provided by this hospital, which was later incorporated into the regional health system, until it was demolished in 2015.
Starting from the notion of landscape as symbolic space, this research work aims to delve into the analysis of some of the art documentaries, which are part of the audiovisual archive of the Prado Museum or refer to it as the protagonist, to investigate a possible evolution of cinematographic forms and the constitution of the museum as an audiovisual landscape. Thus, we will approach the museum starting from a multidisciplinary approach to the object of study, which starts from the work of art and the space that contains it, to account for the artistic representation in non-fiction cinema and its cultural and historical scope.
This article aims to analyse photography as a site of political resistance and affectivity for queer people, focusing specifically on photobooth photography. For this purpose, a photograph from 1953 has been chosen to analyse several issues. Firstly, the potential for spatial subversion made possible by the photo booth, as a semi-private and intimate space in public space, which allowed a momentary refuge for queer couples who could not exhibit their love publicly. Secondly, the possibility of having one's photograph taken and leaving a record of this proscribed relationship will also be one of the potencies of this space, thereby exploring the special affective relationship of the photographic medium with queer lives. It will therefore be argued that it is the indexical character of the photograph that makes it eminently attractive when it comes not only to attesting to the existence of the couple, but also to constructing it materially and symbolically. In short, everything will revolve around the exploration of queer photography as a habitable spatiality in itself; thus starting from a dialogue from the present with the past, in a consciously transtemporal and politically useful connection.
Unlike the Eurocentric and/or North American feminist approach, this article values the investigation of the failed multicultural manifestation in Peruvian cinematography through the film Madeinusa (2005) by Claudia Llosa and exposes some of its characteristic traits. In this qualitative analysis, we highlight the character of Madeinusa, a young Andean woman. Using exclusively female theoretical sources, it examines how she becomes an object of human activity due to exacerbated traditions. Her body is constantly violated, stripping her of her humanity. Madeinusa is unable to articulate her own discourse; her voice is reduced to an almost animal sound. Furthermore, her subversive memory refuses to align with imposed codes that collectively construct the past. Therefore, it is recognized how, for Claudia Llosa, this woman ceases to be a mere aesthetic variant to become a representative space of how, thanks to multicultural expressions, women are rendered invisible under the pressure to preserve traditions that perpetuate gender inequality.
This article reveals a painting on onyx with the representation of the apostle Santiago in the Battle of Clavijo preserved in the Collegiate Museum of Daroca (Zaragoza). Likewise, the artistic characteristics of the piece and its iconography are analyzed in detail and, after comparison with his graphic and painting on stone, it is attributed to the circle of the Italian painter Antonio Tempesta (c. 1555-1630). Finally, Bishop Martín Terrer de Valenzuela (1549-1631) is proposed as its possible owner.
The article aims to explore the relationship between residue and aesthetic form, identifying three main avenues of discussion: residue as form, residue as a trace, and residue as a recycling object. To do so, various works within the realm of visual arts —painting, sculpture, architecture— as well as literature, are critically analysed. Support for these reflections is found in other disciplinary fields such as physics, economics, philosophy, and history. From the analysis conducted, it is concluded that the concept of residue transversely spans the history of art, becoming a pivotal idea for establishing dialectics between center-periphery, art-politics, nucleus-limit, abstract-figurative, among many others. This marks the beginning of initial notes to establish a conceptual genealogy.
The aim is to analyze the Escuela Libre de Sargadelos (Sargadelos Free School) as an experimental project in the artistic-educational field that was developed jointly by the Technology and Communication Departments of the Laboratorio de Formas (Shapes Laboratory). This analysis is carried out through the documentary archive we have compiled: the reports on the experiences of the free school in the period 1972-1995, photographs and part of Isaac Díaz Pardo's collection held at Cidade da Cultura (Santiago de Compostela). The reports of the Summer Meetings, under the name of Cuadernos del Seminario de Estudios Cerámicos de Sargadelos (Sargadelos Ceramic Studies Seminar Notebooks, hereinafter SEC Sargadelos) are, to this day, documents of great research value that give an account of the evolution of time, describing the theoretical influences and the artistic and educational proposals developed. Although it is true that there are many scientific studies on the artistic, cultural and industrial activity of Sargadelos, the pedagogical and innovative side of the Free School has hardly been studied in depth. These meetings constitute a contemporary experimental school as a project that transgresses the processes of teaching and learning. The objective of this research is to recover all the reports and analyse them both in their conceptual and visual content.
In the last 50 years, the History of Art has undergone a deep renewal that has entailed the expansion of both the typologies under study and the ways of approaching its scientific research, mainly based on the prominence given to the image and visual culture. This article analyzes a type of artifact that has not usually been studied from the perspective of art history, but that has much to contribute to our current knowledge of the construction and reproduction of the figurative image in the Middle Ages: the wax seal. In this case, two imprints belonging to Gonzalo Pérez de Aguilar (ca. 1300-1353), bishop of Cuenca and Sigüenza and archbishop of Santiago de Compostela and Toledo, are studied; they combine the traditional figure of authority linked to the wax seal as an instrument of documentary validation, with innovations produced during the process of configuring individual identity, and its representation, in the Middle Ages.
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Galician Center for Contemporary Art, it has hosted Implosion: conceptual art in the CGAC collection (1965-1975), a project curated by Pedro de Llano Neira divided into two aspects: a first formalized through an exhibition, and a second organized around a didactic program made up of commented visits to the exhibition by the curator and a cycle of public debates aimed at reflecting on the collections put together by contemporary art museums in general and, in particular, about the CGAC collection. All of them, exercises designed to encourage the beginning of a new cycle in the institution, marked by the regeneration of its lines of action.
This article addresses the situation of art history in its social dimension precisely now, when it has become one of the most topics in digital audiovisual communication. Faced with the hyperabundance of audiovisual products dealing with art history, this article considers how this medium implies a series of transformations in the traditional modes of socialization of art history as a discipline halfway between the museum and the academia. In so doing, the crises that have plunged into our discipline will be raised, attending to cases that go beyond our own Spaniard geography.
To this end, the article approaches two essential television documentary series on the subject, Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (1969) and John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972), contrasting the models, their consequences and the possibilities afforded by the new television medium. This will lead us to apply the conclusions extracted from the previous examples to the Spanish context, where the series Mirar un cuadro (1983-1988) will be the final focus of attention. How an innovative and path breaking art history can be developed in the audiovisual economy will be the concluding question of the study.
We propose in this text a panoramic vision of the transformations derived from the emergence of the digital era and the consequent mutation that this has implied on the nature of images in contemporary audiovisual production, transformed linguistically and aesthetically by the new supports on which they are articulated and characterized by an intermedial flow that will surpass their traditional representation frameworks, all of which will also modify our perception and reception of them. The pivots on which we will rely in our approach to the case study will be the performative register and the intermedial mesh of bodies that is formed in this new field, in which we will carry out a series of tastings (the silenced body, the menstruating body, the mastectomized body) prioritizing on this occasion the gender perspective.
I seek to understand the skill of looking, the solid basis of art history, but specifically the “how to” of it that we take too easily for granted. That looking leads to seeing is not obvious. In this article I develop a theoretical metaphor that is social, ethical, and visual, and can help art history in its mission. This is how it came to me. Once, on the street, I heard a man, of obviously foreign background, murmur to himself: “they don’t even look at me”. That was the moment when the seed of the short film embedded in this article was sown, and the theoretical metaphor of visibilisation came up. The consequence of this not looking and not talking in some sort of engagement with him, is that he radically does not belong, is not part of, the group within which he exists physically – the crowd.