Description

In the long sixteenth century, the Spanish Empire encompassed much of what is now 
Italy and a large part of the Americas. Yet while the arts of the two regions invite comparison—they were produced in viceroyalties, with Catholicism as the imperial religion, in territories shaped by maritime power and the new art of print—the thriving fields of Italian and Colonial Latin American studies have largely flourished in isolation from one another. The goal of this book is to propose a connected art history of the Spanish possessions in Italy and in the Americas, one that can also impact the way art history in general is studied, taught, researched, and written today.

MICHAEL COLE is Howard McP. Davis Professor of Art History and Archaeology at 
Columbia University. He is the author of Sofonisba’s Lesson: A Renaissance Artist and 
Her World (2nd ed. 2026) and Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure (2014). 
With Alessandra Russo he was awarded a Getty Foundation Connecting Art History 
Grant.

ALESSANDRA RUSSO is a Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian 
Cultures at Columbia University. She is the author of A New Antiquity. Art and 
Humanity as Universal (2024; Best Book award of the Society for Iberian Global Art), 
The Untranslatable Image (2015), and El Realismo Circular (2005)

Praise

The important visual network that connected disparate lands under Spanish hegemony 
in the early modern period is illuminated in this volume. Through robust research the 
authors argue for the power of visual rhetoric and its ability to convey the religious, 
economic and socio-political values of the elite or governing class, both local and global. 
Multi-faceted studies demonstrate how the arts, from prints to architecture, were exploited to convey the imperial mandate of Crown and Church, disseminating propagandistic messages intended to legitimize conquest, bridge provincial differences and 
consolidate power.
-Jeanette Favrot Peterson, University of California, Santa Barbara

This innovative series of essays considers Italy as an overlooked part of the Spanish Empire. Authors seek points of convergence in the visual arts between Spain, Spanish Italy, and the Latin American colonies by focusing on clusters of little-known works by little-known artists. Their comparative approach is often illuminating and generates thought-provoking and geographically expansive aperçus into the early modern visual arts. 
-Evonne Levy, University of Toronto