The works on paper of Carreño de Miranda (1614‒1685) are among the most noteworthy produced in seventeenth-century Spain on account of his highly personal style and his significant influence on the artists active in Madrid in the second half of the century. This is the first publication to carry out a systematic study of the graphic output of the artist, who was court painter to Charles II. It redefines the scope of his corpus and analyses the role of drawing in the various stages of his career, from his early religious works to his establishment as a court portraitist, as well as its important function as a vehicle for conveying ideas in his fruitful artistic relationship with Francisco Rizi. For this purpose, the Asturian’s drawings are studied in parallel with those of artists of his circle, such as Claudio Coello, Mateo Cerezo, Pedro Ruiz González and the abovementioned Francisco Rizi.

Carreño de Miranda’s drawings are characterised by a skilled handling of the pencil, which he used in the same way as a paintbrush, defining forms with touches of colour that are overlaid and blended. Studying them thus makes it necessary to broaden the traditional view of the artist as the painter who – to quote Unamuno – portrayed ‘the decline of Hapsburg Spain’ and leads us to rediscover through his drawings the luminosity of his religious painting and the sumptuousness of the decorative undertakings in which he took part.

Carreño de Miranda. Dibujos is the catalogue of the exhibition with the same title held in the Biblioteca Nacional de España. The show’s curator, Cristina Agüero Carnerero, is the main author of the volume, which includes an essay by Mark McDonald and entries by Roberto Alonso Moral, Karin Hellwig, Eduardo Lamas-Delgado, Mark McDonald and Benito Navarrete Prieto. 

Cristina Agüero Carnerero, who earned a special degree award, studied Art History at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and the Università di Bologna. She furthered her training at Patrimonio Nacional and the Museo Nacional del Prado (Prado-Meadows Museum scholarship in 2013), where she collaborated on the exhibition Roma en el bolsillo. Cuadernos de dibujo y aprendizaje artístico en el siglo XVIII. She was an FPU researcher at the Department of Art History of the UNED and a curator of the exhibition on Carreño de Miranda’s drawings at the Biblioteca Nacional, which this catalogue accompanies. She currently se holds a “Juan de la Cierva” postdoctoral position at the University of Barcelona.