Crime and Illusion
The Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age
By (author) Felipe Pereda
The book explores the artists’ skeptical reflection on the problematic relationship of painting and sculpture to the art of truth.
According to an old historiographic tradition, the Spanish Golden Age placed the imitation of nature at the service of religion: its radical naturalism responded to the deep faith of that culture and moment. Crime & Illusion argues the opposite. It defends the thesis that the fundamental problem artists of the Golden Age confronted was not imitation but Truth. Moreover a large part, maybe the best part, of Spanish Baroque religious imagery is better understood as a complex exercise in addressing the spectators’ doubts. Hovering on the horizon of an emerging empiricism, artists created their images as pieces of evidence, arguments for belief. Crime & Illusion reconstructs and interprets this judicial or forensic aspect of early modern visual culture at the center of a political, religious, and scientific triangle. Finally, the book explores the artists’ skeptical reflection on the problematic relationship of painting and sculpture to the art of truth.
- By (author) Felipe Pereda
Other Titles in this Series
The Burgeoning European Print Trade
The Distribution of Prints via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp
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The Letters of Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
An Italian Transcription, English Translation and Critical Edition
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