Over the course of the last forty years art historian Jonathan Brown has done more than anyone to reform our approach to the art of the Hispanic world between the age of El Greco and Velázquez and that of Goya. CSA sponsors the publication of this Festschrift, the fruit of the symposium in his honor in May 2008, at the initiative of a group of close colleagues and former students wishing to celebrate his scholarship and his generosity as a teacher. This series of essays by scholars whose work and methods are indebted to his studies provide an eloquent testimony to how widespread Brown’s influence has been on recent generations of historians of the art of the Hispanic world.

This volume includes 19 essays by distinguished scholars on such subjects as El Greco’s portraits, Ribera’s Beggar Philosophers, Velázquez and the imperial court in Vienna, Goya’s Red Boy as a rival to Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Picasso’s Dark Mirror, the patronage of Italian Renaissance tombs in Spain, portraits for trade in Mexico in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the historiography of colonial art in Latin America. The introduction, by Jonathan Brown’s long-standing and no less distinguished collaborator John H. Elliott, explores the ways in which our understanding of Spain’s heritage has benefited from the interaction of historians and art historians.

Sarah Schroth is the Nancy Hanks senior curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and adjunct associate professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke. She co-organized with Ronni Baer the exhibition El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III (Boston, 2008).