Lecture
Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV
April 4, 2024 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm CDT – Free
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Amanda Wunder, Associate Professor of History, City University of New York’s Lehman College, and director, Global Early Modern Studies, CUNY Graduate Center
Amanda Wunder, Associate Professor of History, City University of New York’s Lehman College, and director, Global Early Modern Studies, CUNY Graduate Center
Wunder will speak about her book Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez (Yale, 2024), the first archival study of dress at the court of Philip IV, as told through the life and work of royal tailor Mateo Aguado. Tailor to the queens of Spain from 1630 to 1672, Aguado designed the striking dresses that gave the Spanish court its distinctive look in the Baroque era. The most influential dress designer in the seventeenth-century Spanish world, Aguado was responsible for creating the iconic dresses that appear in some of Diego Velázquez’s most famous court portraits. Based on new research, this book brings to life the world of Aguado and his colleagues at court. The long-lost garments and accessories that the court artisans made for their royal employers are reconstructed here for the first time. Aguado’s creations played a crucial role in domestic and international politics by shaping the royal image, and his dresses took center-stage in major political events during Philip IV’s reign. Richly illustrated with well-known masterpieces along with surviving textiles and garments, the book explores how Aguado’s dress designs shaped a new vision of Spanish style, and Spanishness, that defined Golden-Age Spain.
Amanda Wunder is Associate Professor of History at the City University of New York’s Lehman College in the Bronx. She is also on the faculty of the Art History department and the Global Early Modern Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center, which she directs. Wunder teaches graduate seminars on early modern Iberian art and material culture and on early modern European fashions and textiles. She is the author of Baroque Seville: Sacred Art in a Century of Crisis, published by Penn State Press in 2017.
This lecture is co-presented by the Meadows Museum’s Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture and SMU’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies
Lecture
The Antefixa Project: Recovering Sacro-Creative Action and the Making of Gods in and Beyond Rome
April 5, 2024 @ 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm CDT
Free
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John Hopkins, Associate Professor of Art History, Dept. of Fine Arts and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
John Hopkins, Associate Professor of Art History, Dept. of Fine Arts and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
The Etruscan Foundation presents a public lecture in advance of its 2024 annual meeting in Dallas, co-hosted by The Custard Institute for Spanish Art & Culture at the Meadows Museum.
Life in ancient Italy was steeped in rich and varied religious practices. Temples and precincts were covered in images of gods and demigods, and votives and cult statues filled spaces of belief. But when an expansionist leadership in Rome began violent military campaigns and occupation of the lands around them, they took hold of these diverse and connected sacred traditions and deployed religion as a means to erase, assimilate and appropriate sacred and social life. This included the overwriting and taking of histories of knowledge and artistic production of Etruscan- and Latin-speaking peoples, often claiming them for Rome. In this talk, Hopkins considers these itinerant, often non-Roman maker communities before and during the early years of Roman occupation. They will present the urgent need to re-examine these worlds as well as a new and innovative initiative, the Antefixa Project, which is harnessing scientific and computational imaging methodologies to recover the contributions of communities that have been silenced but were essential to sacred life in ancient Italy.
John Hopkins is Associate Professor of the art and archaeology of ancient Mediterranean peoples in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. They are author of The Genesis of Roman Architecture (2016, Yale UP, winner of the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians), Unbound from Rome: Art and Craft in a Fluid Landscape, 650-250 BCE (2024, Yale UP), and co-editor of Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (2020 the Menil Collection and Yale UP) and Forgery Beyond Deceit: Fabrication, Value and the Desire for Ancient Rome (2023, Oxford UP). They are also co-director of the Quirinal Project and director of the Antefixa Project.
