Cambridge Companion To Velazquez, The

The Cambridge Companion to Velazquez offers a synthetic overview of one of the greatest painters of Golden Age Spain and seventeenth-century Europe as a whole. With contributions from art historians and those working in other disciplines, this book offers fresh approaches to the vast literature on this artist. Velazquez's portraits of his patron, King Philip IV, and his wives are examined by two historians in an effort to reconstruct their reception and readings by contemporaries. Two historians of Golden Age Spanish literature provide an interdisciplinary account of the relationships between poetry, theater, and the visual arts at the Spanish court, as practiced by Velazquez, the poet Francisco de Quevedo, and the dramatist Calderon de laBarca. An expert on the history of Spanish music offers an unprecedented examination of how instruments "play" in Velazquez's compositions. Other essays guide the reader to an understanding of Velazquez's work -- his training in his native Seville, reflections in his oeuvre of artistic currents from outside Spain, and how Velazquez's religious paintings may be understood within the religious context of Counter-Reformation Spain.