Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto, “The library of the Marquis of Santillana (d. 1458) and the cultural networks of the European Renaissance".

Abstract: This talk will focus on an analysis of the books collected by Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana, one of the most prominent figures of early Castilian Humanism. Although the relevance of his library was already acknowledged in a pioneering study by Mario Schiff in 1905, art historians have tended to pay more attention to the manuscripts produced for Santillana in Castile. And yet, the books he acquired or commissioned in France and, most notably, Italy, allow us to reconstruct the dense network of political, family and cultural connections behind his eclectic patronage, and to understand how his leading role in the introduction of new visual languages in Castile granted him a towering position among the other Castilian magnates. 

Biography: Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto is Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the University of Santiago de Compostela and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Southern Denmark. She has extensively worked on late medieval book illumination, on medieval Iberian courtly art and on the Classical tradition in the Middle Ages. Her latest publication is "La biblioteca del Marqués de Santillana", for the catalogue of the exhibition El Marqués de Santillana: Imágenes y letras at the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Biblioteca Nacional de España, from 4 and 5 Oct 2022 to 8 January 2023.

The event is part of the Research Seminar series organised by the Zurbarán Centre with the ARTES Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group. The series provides an open forum for engaging with innovative research and exhibition projects relating to the visual arts in the Hispanic world.

The sessions usually take place online (zoom) on Wednesdays, 6.00-7.00 PM (UK time).