SPLENDOR, MYTH, AND VISION: NUDES FROM THE PRADO

Edited by Thomas J. Loughman, Kathleen M. Morris, and Lara Yeager-Crasselt

With essays by Jill Burke and Javier Portús

$50.00 Cloth

Handsomely designed and produced, this stunning book highlights sensual paintings from the Spanish royal collections of the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Many of the featured artists were court painters under sovereigns whose tastes influenced the art world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This superb selection of twenty-eight paintings includes works by Jan Breughel the Elder, Guercino, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Diego Velázquez. Included is Titian’s Reclining Venus with Cupid and a Musician, probably painted by the artist for Charles V, and several works by Rubens, who painted a considerable number of works for the Spanish court. Informative catalogue entries accompany an essay by Javier Portús on the Spanish royal taste in collecting and the role of painting within European politics of the day and a contemporary response to understanding the nude in Renaissance and Baroque painting by Jill Burke.

Jill Burke is senior lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Javier Portús is Chief Curator of Spanish Painting at the Museo Nacional del Prado.

Thomas J. Loughman is director and CEO of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and former associate director of program and planning at the Clark Art Institute. Kathleen M. Morris is Sylvia and Leonard Marx Director of Collections and Exhibitions and curator of decorative arts and Lara Yeager-Crasselt is interim curator of paintings and sculpture, both at the Clark Art Institute.

208 pages, 10 x 11 in.

95 color illustrations

2016

Published by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven

ISBN: 978-0-300-21874-9