1st Edition

Polychrome Art in the Early Modern World 1200–1800

Edited By Ilenia Colón Mendoza, Lisandra Estevez Copyright 2024
    224 Pages 25 Color & 32 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book focuses on the techniques and materials of polychromy used in early modern Europe and the Americas from 1200 to 1800.  

    Taking a trans-cultural approach, the book studies the production of polychrome sculptures, panels, and altarpieces, as well as colored terracotta and painted representations of marble and stone. The book includes chapters on treatises and contracts that reveal specific use of pigments, distribution of workshops, collaborations between specialized artists, and artistic programs centered on the use of color as an agent.  

    The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art conservation, early modern history, sculpture, material culture, European studies, and transatlantic artistic interactions. 

    List of Figures  

     

    List of Contributors 

      

    Introduction  

     

    Part 1: Pigments, Color, and the Paragone  

    Chapter 1:  “The color to imitate a man”: On the Meaning of Flesh Tones on Panel Paintings from Antiquity to the High Middle Ages  

    Esther Wipfler 

     

    Chapter 2: The colors of the Virgin: Romanesque polychrome wood sculptures in Italy and a question about azurite  
     

    Grazia Maria Fachechi 

     

    Chapter 3: Naming blue pigments and colors in Medieval Catalonia: the case of Lluís Borrassà  

    Cristina Morilla 

     

    Chapter 4: Spanish polychromed sculpture in the Low Countries. A journey through art history and techniques  

    Géraldine Patigny 

     

    Chapter 5: Pacheco’s Art of Painting: the parangón and the techniques of Spanish seventeenth-century polychrome sculpture  

    Ilenia Colón Mendoza 

     

    Part 2: Sculptures in Context  

    Chapter 6: Statue Painting in Colonial Andes: ‘Indian’ Virgins and Resacralization of the Religious Landscape  

    Mariana Zinni 

     

    Chapter 7: Worms Cannot Eat Stone: The Pugliese Presepe and the Materiality of Devotion  

    in Early Modern Puglia  

    Lindsay Sheedy 

     

    Chapter 8: Faith, spectacle and the polychromed processional figures of Luis Antonio de los Arcos and Luisa Roldán  

    Catherine Hall-van den Elsen 

     

    Chapter 9: Patrons, Sculptors, and Painters in Eighteenth-Century Spain: Polychroming Duque Cornejo’s Sculptures  

    Manuel García Luque 

     

    Chapter 10: More than Wood: Sculpture and Blasphemy in Seventeenth-Century New Spain  

    Brett Lazer 

     

    Chapter 11: The Retablos of Mani: The Convergence of Maya and Spanish Art  

     C. Cody Barteet 

     

    Chapter 12: Artists, techniques, and sacred materials: revisiting the case of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan  

    Pablo F. Amador Marrero and Patricia Díaz Cayeros 

     

    Index 

     

    Biography

    Ilenia Colón Mendoza is Professor of Art History at the School of Visual Arts and Design of the University of Central Florida, USA.  

    Lisandra Estevez is Associate Professor of Art History at Winston-Salem State University, USA.