| In this dissertation, I examine Diego Velázquez's Sevillian works (c. 1617–23), investigating the young painter's critical engagement with the city's artistic and religious traditions. I offer a new approach to studies of Spanish art by placing the painter within Seville's intellectual milieu while elucidating his challenge to local conventions of pictorial decorum.; This dissertation provides the first sustained analysis of the complex nexus between Velázquez's paintings and writings by his teacher, Francisco Pacheco, and members of Pacheco's erudite circle. Velázquez variously embraced and rejected aspects of local theory and practice, contributing in original ways to diverse areas of Seville's intellectual life. Through a close analysis of several carefully chosen paintings by Velázquez in concert with writings by Pacheco's associates, I assess the young painter's participation in contemporary debates surrounding artistic theory, visual perception, and religious devotion.; In particular, I concentrate on Velázquez's bodegones (genre scenes) and several religious works, two categories of painting that stimulated intense discussion in early seventeenth-century Seville. An analysis of Velázquez's bodegones provides a touchstone for considering the critical context of his experimentation with novel subject matter just beginning to gain acceptance in Spain. Proposing a new interpretive model for analyzing the bodegones, I use early accounts of Velázquez's competition with other artists to demonstrate that his Caravaggesque style and lowly subject matter represented a deliberate departure from Seville's conventions. An investigation of Velázquez's religious paintings entails a close consideration of his almost wholly unexplored interpretation of the traditions of Sevillian sacred art and rhetoric. Challenging art-historical distinctions between form and content, I argue that Velázquez manipulated stylistic and compositional elements in order to structure new forms of religious devotion. Through an examination of Velázquez's employment of light and shade, pictorial ambiguity, and mirror-reversals, I show that his little-studied engagement with optics informed both his early devotional works and his bodegones. By analyzing Velázquez's paintings through the prism of contemporary artistic discourse, this dissertation also sheds light on the broader relationship between practice and theory in seventeenth-century Spanish art. |
