The Spanish Portrait

October 2004 saw the opening at the Museo del Prado of a major exhibition: The Spanish Portrait: From El Greco to Picasso. This magnificent book, published to accompany this unprecedented exhibition devoted to the Spanish portrait presents a survey of the development of this genre in Spanish art from the late fifteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, through a selection of eighty-seven works. The first to cover 500 years of Spanish art from the viewpoint of the portrait, it features an outstanding group of works by all the leading names in this field, including El Greco, Ribera, Murillo, Velazquez, Zurbaran, Goya, Miro and Picasso, the latter represented for the first time inside the Prado. All previous investigations of this subject have focused on narrower time scales and have been less ambitious in scope.
For this reason The Spanish Portrait: From El Greco to Picasso offers the first opportunity to present the stylistic evolution of the Spanish portrait, the different social implications of the genre in Spain, the self-image formulated by the various sitters, the image they wished to convey to posterity, and the various devices and representational strategies used by artists of each period. Featuring El Greco, Pedro de Campana, Bartolome Bermejo, Pedro Berruguete, Juan de Flandes, Titian, Antonio Moro, Velazquez, Francisco Ribalta, Jose de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbaran, Bartolome E. Murillo, Francisco de Goya, Anton Rafael Mengs, Luis Melendez, Luis Paret, Vicente Lopez, Joaquin Sorolla, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Juan Gris, Vicente Lopez, Federico de Madrazo, Eduardo Rosales, Ignacio Pinazo.