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Eamon McCarthy

Norah Borges (1901–98) was the sister of the celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. She first began producing art in Switzerland, where her family was trapped during the First World War, and travelled to Spain before returning to her native Argentina with her new styles of painting. In the 1920s, her work was published on the covers of important cultural magazines, but she is now largely forgotten. In her works, Borges created a world full of almost angelic figures – describing it as a smaller, more perfect world – mostly a serene space dominated by women. This book explores how Borges created that space and developed her own unique style of painting, studying the connections she made with the leading artists and writers of her time.

University of Wales Press

Studies in Visual Culture

Norah Borges: "A Smaller, More Perfect World"

Jean Andrews

Luis de Morales, known as El Divino because of his intensely religious subject matter, is the most significant and recognisable Spanish painter of the mid-sixteenth century, the high point of the Spanish and Portuguese counter-reformations. He spent almost his entire working life in the Spanish city of Badajoz, not far from the border with Portugal, and did not travel outside of a small area around that city, straddling the border. The social, political and cultural environment of Badajoz and its environs is crucial for a thorough understanding of Morales’s output, and this book provides context in detail – considering literature and liturgical theatre, the situation of converted Jews and Muslims, the presence of Erasmianism, Lutheranism and Illuminism (Alumbradismo), devotional writing for lay people, and proximity to the Bragança ducal palace in Portugal as a means of explaining this most enigmatic of painters.

Painting and Devotion in Golden Age Iberia: Luis de Morales

This book is a collection of fourteen essays on the Dialogues on Painting, published by the Florentine-born Spanish painter and art theorist Vicente Carducho (1568–1638) in 1633. This was the first treatise in Spanish on the art of painting, written as part of a campaign led by Carducho in collaboration with other prominent painters working in Madrid, to raise the status of the artist from artisan to liberal artist. The treatise provides an overview of the melding of Italian Renaissance art theory and Madrilenian practice in the baroque era. It also offers first-hand insight into collecting in Madrid during this crucial period in the rapid expansion of the capital city. The present collection of essays by art historians and hispanists from the UK, Spain, Germany and the US examines each of the dialogues in detail, furnishing an account of Carducho’s campaign to establish a painting academy and to professionalise the office of the painter; detailing the publication history of the treatise and the interrelationship between painting and poetry; and it cites Carducho’s own painting in relation to the Italian and Spanish traditions within which he operated.

On Art and Painting: Vicente Carducho and Baroque Spain

The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts - from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.

The Art of the Text: Visuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literary and Other Media

Proust and the Visual is an edited volume of essays written by Proustian specialists, concerned with a rich phenomenological category, the "visual" whose prominent role in the novel is at the heart of its modernity. The "visual" is defined as manifesting in the image not only space, but also time. The "visual" is considered as a category that delineates the conditions of possibility of all visibility and constitutes an integral part of both the progression of the narrator's journey towards becoming a writer and of the unfolding of the novel itself.

Proust and the Visual

Aimée Israel-Pelletier

In the mid-nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud, the volatile genius of French poetry, invented a language that captured the energy and visual complexity of the modern world. This book explores some of the technical aspects of this language in relation to the new techniques brought forth by the Impressionist painters such as Monet, Morisot, and Pissarro.