Event Title
Destierro and Desengaño: The Disabled Body in Golden Age Spanish Portraiture
Location
King Building 237
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
4-27-2019 2:00 PM
End Date
4-27-2019 3:20 PM
Abstract
The purpose of this research is to examine the role of the disabled body in Golden Age Spanish art through a focus on 17th-century portraiture. Given the proliferation of disabled jesters and servants in the royal courts, I primarily examine the work of court painters like Diego Velázquez. Although the interest that Velázquez and his contemporaries had in representing subjects we would now consider disabled is well-documented, few scholars have investigated the implications this has for how they engaged with evolving ideas regarding bodily/mental (im)perfection, and fewer still have done so without falling back on outdated models of disability. I therefore hope to demonstrate through my own research both disability’s continued cultural importance and the utility of an analysis grounded in contemporary disability theory. My aim is to determine how portraitists’ engagement with these subjects helped shape emergent understandings of “disability” in Golden Age Spain, as well as what the disabled body enabled them to express in the first place. I ultimately argue that contemporary ideas about knowledge and imagination, the social milieu of Philip IV’s court, and a baroque fascination with the grotesque combined to grant disabled bodies unique symbolic significance.
Keywords:
disability, art, portraiture, representation, early modern
Recommended Citation
Sanborn, Colin, "Destierro and Desengaño: The Disabled Body in Golden Age Spanish Portraiture" (04/27/19). Senior Symposium. 1.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/seniorsymp/2019/panel_08/1
Major
Art History
Award
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
Advisor(s)
Farshid Emami, Art History
Project Mentor(s)
Christina Neilson, Art History
April 2019
Destierro and Desengaño: The Disabled Body in Golden Age Spanish Portraiture
King Building 237
The purpose of this research is to examine the role of the disabled body in Golden Age Spanish art through a focus on 17th-century portraiture. Given the proliferation of disabled jesters and servants in the royal courts, I primarily examine the work of court painters like Diego Velázquez. Although the interest that Velázquez and his contemporaries had in representing subjects we would now consider disabled is well-documented, few scholars have investigated the implications this has for how they engaged with evolving ideas regarding bodily/mental (im)perfection, and fewer still have done so without falling back on outdated models of disability. I therefore hope to demonstrate through my own research both disability’s continued cultural importance and the utility of an analysis grounded in contemporary disability theory. My aim is to determine how portraitists’ engagement with these subjects helped shape emergent understandings of “disability” in Golden Age Spain, as well as what the disabled body enabled them to express in the first place. I ultimately argue that contemporary ideas about knowledge and imagination, the social milieu of Philip IV’s court, and a baroque fascination with the grotesque combined to grant disabled bodies unique symbolic significance.
Notes
Session IV, Panel 8 - Reframing | Margins
Moderator: Christina Neilson, Associate Professor of Baroque and Renaissance Art History and Chair of Art History