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Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens. Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos—divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization. Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville's hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.

Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens. Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos -divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization. Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville's hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.

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Women’s clothes were at the center of political debate in the Spain of Philip IV (r. 1621–65), and no garment inspired more controversy than the wide-hipped farthingale, or hoopskirt, known as the guardainfante. Considered scandalous with its reputation for hiding illicit pregnancies, the guardainfante was banned in 1639. Nonetheless, the guardainfante became more popular than ever and turned into an enduring icon of Golden Age Spain during the reign of Philip’s second queen, Mariana of Austria (1649–65). Despite the guardainfante’s high level of visibility, most notably in court portraits by Diego Velázquez, very little is known about the historical experiences of the women who wore it. This article demonstrates that real women really did wear the guardainfante in a variety of contexts outside of portraiture and the theater. In Madrid and in cities throughout the Spanish empire, women of different stations and convictions participated in the political culture of their times by making, disseminating, and debating this controversial garment.

How were various strata of local history—Classical, Christian, and Muslim—incorporated into the building of imperial Seville (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and what was the impact of the critical approach to evidence developed in Renaissance Italy on actual urban projects? Three case-studies—of a noble palace, the Casa de Pilatos; of a public park, the Alameda de Hércules; and of a carpentry treatise by master builder Diego López de Arenas—reveal the malleable role of historical evidence in monumental construction projects based on classical and Christian ideals and demonstrate a more methodical use of evidence among artisans practicing traditional medieval craftsmanship.

In 1669, a year of drought, Archbishop Antonio Payno Osorio (r. 1663–69) and the canons of the Seville cathedral paid a visit to the Virgin of the Waters (Nuestra Señora de las Aguas) (fig. 78) at the parish church of San Salvador. For centuries Sevillians had turned to this sacred image for assistance in times of excessive or insufficient rains. According to Alonso Sánchez Gordillo, the Virgin of the Waters originally belonged to King Fernando III and was donated to San Salvador when he replaced her with the Virgin of the Kings. Sometime in the seventeenth century the image

Mateo Vázquez de Leca was an exemplary New World heir, the public face of spiritual reform in early seventeenth-century Seville. His father was a Ligurian merchant who had settled in Seville and married a woman from a powerful family of Corsican descent. Mateo was named for his uncle, King Philip II’s personal secretary at the court in Madrid. Thanks to his uncle’s influence, the teenaged Vázquez de Leca—who had been des-tined for a career in the Church—was named archdeacon of Carmona, one of the highest-ranking offices at the Seville cathedral. The archdeacon was celebrated for spending his inheritance

The renovation of a diminutive parish church called Santa María la Blanca—“Holy Mary the White”—was the first major new con-struction project in post-plague Seville.¹ The narrow facade of the medieval building is modest and unimposing (fig. 22), but behind the plain Gothic arch facing the street is “a little cup of gold whose exquisiteness astonishes,” as one admiring cleric de-scribed the church in the early eighteenth century. Every surface is covered with carved plaster ornaments, painted and gilded decorations, glazed ceramic tiles, and monumental paintings by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (fig. 30).² The renovation of Santa María la Blanca

Less than six weeks after Seville celebrated the reopening of Santa María la Blanca, all Spain went into mourning for King Philip IV, who died on September 17, 1665. The king’s body was entombed at the Escorial’s Royal Pantheon shortly after his death, and funeral rites were performed in the Spanish capital at the end of October. The royal exequies in Madrid took place at the Royal Convent of La Encarnación, where a three-story fu-nerary monument designed by Sebastián Herrera Barnuevo was erected inside the church and illuminated by 1,298 candles (fig. 41). Compared to cata-falques that had been made