The Spanish Portrait

Drawing on the collections of the Prado Museum and important international collections, this is the first book to cover over 500 years of Spanish art from the viewpoint of the portrait and it features a selection of 87 works. It includes all the leading names in this field, including El Greco, Ribera, Murillo, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Goya, Miró and Picasso. All previous investigations of this subject have focused on narrower time scales and have been less ambitious in scope, but this stunning book offers the first presentation of the stylistic evolution of the Spanish portrait, the different social implications of the genre in Spain, the self-image formulated by the various sitters that they wished to convey to posterity, and the various devices and representational strategies used by artists of each period.