Praying to Portraits

“Anyone concerned with questions of diverse (and even contesting) viewership, mutability in and of art, and mediations between the religious and the modern, will profit from Jasienski’s book. Guided by his insights, we can return to even so familiar a work as Titian’s equestrian portrait of Charles V and see it from a fresh perspective.” —Nathalie Miraval CAA.Reviews “Engaging saints and royalty, elite and non-elite audiences, viewers in Spain and New Spain, the book emphasizes how flexible and complicated paintings could be, with deeply pious motivations often challenging official Church policies. Jasienski looks and listens well. Even better, he helps readers do the same.” —C. A. Hanson Choice “This brilliantly original book illuminates the relationship, long debated by scholars, between portraiture and religious images in early modern Spain and its empire. Throughout, Jasienski engages an impressively wide range of texts, whether writings on naturalism in portraiture, treatises on God-given royal power, or Inquisitorial condemnations of idolatrous devotion to portraits. Praying to Portraits is a book of great interpretive breadth and depth, and it makes a major contribution to our understanding of the visual culture of the Spanish world.” —Tanya J. Tiffany,author of Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville