Philip II

This paper draws conclusions on some major issues raised in 'The Royal Inventories of Charles V and the Imperial Family' research project, funded by The Getty Grant Program and published in 2010. Besides the Emperor’s inventories, those of his closest dynastic milieu are quite significant because of the direct contribution and influence that these figures exerted on his intellectual education and the shaping of his tastes; through their privileged status among the most outstanding patrons and collectors of the period, they furnished the future Emperor with a multicultural background during his formative years. This contribution was materialized in the governing view of Charles V as restorer of a supranational horizon. Their impact is also made manifest in his own inventories which constitute a basic resource to assess the depth of his stamp on his lineage’s aesthetic judgment in general, and on Philip II’s in particular since the latter often emulated his father’s appreciation of art.

My paper analyzes the uses of meditative images in Renaissance Spain, with particular reference to court culture. Through a survey of devotional paintings and manuscripts owned by Isabella the Catholic (1451-1504), Charles V (1500-1558) and Philip II (1527-1598), I examine their functions as a focus for spiritual contemplation by exploring their relationships to contemporaneous texts on ecclesiastical oratory and spirituality. This essay’s central theme is an examination of how these images were engaged in an abstract perceptual process which employed mnemonic techniques as an empathetic stimulus for devotion. Through this approach a critical rethinking of works by Hans Memling, Juan de Flandes, Hieronymus Bosch, and Titian, among others, is undertaken.

El palacio del mercader y diplomático Antonio de Guaras y Cunchillos de Liori es uno de los monumentos más significativos del patrimonio artístico y cultural de la ciudad episcopal de Tarazona, una pieza fundamental de la arquitectura civil aragonesa del Renacimiento y memoria viva de la familia que le dio forma allá por los años centrales del siglo XVI, la rama turiasonense de la estirpe tudelana de los Eguaras, desde 1521 señores del castillo y vedado de Peñaflor en las Bardenas Reales de Navarra. El presente volumen se centra en el entorno familiar de los Guaras en el siglo XVI y las primeras décadas del XVII y en el estudio del palacio a partir de los escasos datos rescatados sobre su proceso edilicio, el análisis de sus fábricas y su comparación con otras construcciones similares de la misma época, así como en los interesantísimos vestigios conservados de su primitiva decoración.

Although the Habsburgs are generally considered as the prototype of concealed monarchs distant from their subjects, their court protocol demonstrates that they knew how to employ, with considerable skill, the range of resources offered by palace and urban ceremonial. Philip II, the most invisible of the dynasty, gave signs of this awareness, and it was fully demonstrated by his successor Philip III with the courtly religious festivals of his reign. If the peak of Golden Age ritual was to a great extent a product of the lively existing religiosity and the stimulus provided by the Counter-Reformation Church, it is also very much the case that it was sanctioned –and encouraged– by the royal presence. Their participation in the special celebrations held for saints and the beatified not only gave these ceremonies a markedly political and confessional character, but also converted them into an integral part of the court’s solemnities.

"The article examines the activism that Peruvian mestizos carried out in order to rearticulate their agency and identity in a positive and polemical manner in late sixteenth-century colonial Peru. The research focuses on two related and little-known documents from the 1580s, a 1584 memorial to King Philip II and a 1583 Latin letter to Pope Gregory XIII (English translation included in the Appendix). Part of a larger paper trail, these documents offer an important record of Andean activism before the church and the crown, set within the larger context of post-conquest struggles for the New World. The topic of mestizo agency is framed in terms of how colonial subjects actively engage in variable and adaptable strategies, through which they seek to reformulate their identity, place, and position within the Spanish colonial world."

My study, pertaining to the section of the exhibition entitled 'The Devotion of the Period and the King’s Piety', extrapolates the uses of meditative images in Renaissance Spain from the mutual implications between devotional paintings and texts on spirituality that belonged to Philip II. Works by Titian or Bosch are analysed, in a revisionist way, as part of an abstract perceptual process, which verifies a mnemonic function and provides an empathetic stimulus for devotion.

This text, the first comprehensive biography ever published of the Fourth Count of Monteagudo as a collector, shows him not only interested in art patronage, but also in bibliophily and the display of relics, as a faithful repetition on a smaller scale of Philip II’s collecting habits. Hurtado de Mendoza, member of one of the most highborn families of Spain, also belonged to Antonio Pérez’s party and was a counsellor of the Prudent King, who rewarded him with the Imperial Embassy and the presidency of the Council of Military Orders.

During 1886, the first excavation year of the large Early Iron Age cremation cemetery V logu at Kobarid in the Upper Soča Valley (western Slovenia), where until now more than 1400 graves have been uncovered, Carlo Marchesetti from Trieste found a horse skeleton above a Hallstatt period cremation grave, covered with a stone slab.
Associated with it were several metal objects: a curb bit made of iron and bronze, small iron rings, a bigger D-shaped bronze ring and a bronze spur of the Kobarid type.
A good drawing of the spur was already published in 1899 in the first synthetic work on the spurs. All objects from the horse grave, considered for a long period to be lost, were found in 2003 in the stores of the Trieste Museum by Anna Crismani. Next year the spur and the bit were presented by Giuliano Righi in an exhibition catalogue, but the D-shaped bronze ring, which very probably possessed a hook in the middle of the bow, remained unpublished.
Numerous comparable D-shaped rings with a hook were found in a settlement in Albania, in Tomb II of the Great Tumulus at Vergina, ascribed to King Philip II, and in rich tombs with human and horse burials found in the territories of modern Bulgaria and Romania and dated from the late 5th to the early 3rd century BC. They always have buttons or bulges in the corners and surely served as buckles for the leather bands of harness.
On the basis of the spur the horse grave from Kobarid can be dated to the period corresponding to the LT D1 period in Central Europe.
The D-shaped bronze ring, though very close to the early examples from the Lower Danube region, Macedonia and Albania, has no bulges in the corners. Since the absence of the buttons or bulges is a feature of the iron rectangular horse buckles, dated to the LT D1 period, it is probable that the ring from Kobarid represents a late variant of the D-shaped bronze horse buckles, contemporary with the spur recovered from the same grave.

The evolution of Madrid’s noble palaces is examined in this article, starting from the fortified medieval models to the ornamental buildings of the Emperor’s time and the Philippine classicism. My conclusions, which set up the splendid Mudejar-style domestic interiors against the urban development of austere facades, also draw a parallel between many contemporary printed and manuscript sources —such as local history and travel books, town-planning bylaws and edicts, utopian pamphlets and political theory writings— and the architectural treatises by Vitruvius and Alberti.