Books by Adam Jasienski
![Research paper thumbnail of Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World [awarded the 2024 Eleanor Tufts Award by the Society for Iberian Global Art and the 2024 Ronald H. Bainton Prize in Art and Music History from the Sixteenth Century Society]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/96764899/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Penn State University Press, 2023
Praying to Portraits examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image ... more Praying to Portraits examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait.
Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits.
They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Art historian Adam Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual’s relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies.
Articles by Adam Jasienski
Journal of Early Modern History, 2024
The intersection of the global and material turns has led to an abundance of studies centering th... more The intersection of the global and material turns has led to an abundance of studies centering the mobility of early modern objects. But things didn’t move of their own volition. Rather, they were propelled or stilled by the emotional responses of human actors. This essay attempts to square the global turn with recent scholarship on the history of emotions. It argues for an increased sensitivity to the emotional regimes that gave lives to objects, while acknowledging the impossibility of creating a single framework for understanding emotional response in as diverse and complex a context as the early modern Hispanic world.
En las sombras del Barroco: Una mirada introspectiva, ed. Adrián Contreras-Guerrero, Ángel Justo-Estebaranz, and Fernando Quiles (Santiado de Compostela; Sevilla: Andavira; Enredars), 2023
Este artículo tiene dos propósitos. Primero analizaré un caso inquisitorial centrado en un retrat... more Este artículo tiene dos propósitos. Primero analizaré un caso inquisitorial centrado en un retrato que fue tratado como si fuera una imagen sagrada, planteando una serie de hipótesis sobre cómo entender las écfrasis de los testigos y el fiscal. En segundo lugar procuraré profundizar, en términos más generales, en la compleja relación que hubo entre la retratística y la imaginería devocional durante la Edad Moderna, sugiriendo que un retrato fácilmente podía llegar a funcionar como una imagen para la devoción, pues, entendidos como representaciones exactas, o al menos verosímiles, de personas reales, fueron empleados por el establecimiento eclesiástico para fortalecer las prácticas devocionales de los fieles. Al mismo tiempo, quizás más que cualquier otro tipo de representación, los retratos introdujeron en la imaginería católica recurrentes e irresolubles tensiones entre la teoría de la imagen religiosa y su funcionamiento práctico.
Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Maria Berbara. I Tatti Research Series 3 (Milan: Officina Libraria), 2022
![Research paper thumbnail of Velázquez and the Fragile Portrait of the King [awarded the inaugural 2024 Richard L. Kagan Prize by the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies for the best article or chapter in an edited collection on the history of the early modern Spanish world, c. 1500-c. 1800]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/77958186/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Art History, 2021
In Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan Martínez Montañés, a sculptor models a bust of king Philip ... more In Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan Martínez Montañés, a sculptor models a bust of king Philip IV. Whereas the figure of the sitter, and even the background, are highly finished, the bust is sketched in the most general of outlines. The painting’s purposeful incompleteness, this essay argues, stems from Velázquez’s experience as a censor of royal portraits. These images were subjected to strictures because they were said to be surrogates of the monarch rather than mere representations. By suspending work on the king’s bust in the painting, Velázquez astutely fulfilled the demands of depicting a fellow artist at work on his most important commission, while circumventing the subtle codes for making royal images. Although there was concern that the larger corpus of kingly portraiture could be destabilized by exemplars that did not fit its general parameters, individual artists and monarchs actually developed idiosyncratic solutions for representing the king with some frequency. Velázquez’s portrait, which represents one such solution, is examined alongside, and contrasted against, a number of other examples, in order to demonstrate the flexibility of this seemingly rigid image type.
Archivo Español de Arte, 2020
Se da a conocer un testimonio de Francisco Pacheco sobre su Libro de retratos, que permite compro... more Se da a conocer un testimonio de Francisco Pacheco sobre su Libro de retratos, que permite comprobar algunas hipótesis acerca de este manuscrito, conectadas con su materialidad, valor y biografía, y que se analiza en relación con el tema literario del manuscrito encontrado.
This article introduces a testimony by Francisco Pacheco concerning his Book of Portraits, which confirms certain hypotheses about the manuscript, including its form, value, and biography. The account is then examined via the literary topos of the found manuscript.
The Art Bulletin, 2020
When early modern individuals commissioned portraits, they likely hoped for stable and long-lasti... more When early modern individuals commissioned portraits, they likely hoped for stable and long-lasting commemoration. However, portraiture was highly mutable, susceptible of acquiring meanings that diverged from its original patrons’ intentions. Later owners often had portraits repainted, transforming them into religious images that combined individual likeness with markers of sanctity. Examination of artworks from Spain and colonial New Spain reveals that the fluid, tenuous boundary between sacred and secular imagery in early modernity facilitated such operations. In each case studied, the practice produced new art objects that, while sometimes only minimally retouched, were entirely different in function from their earlier iterations.
Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World, Nov 2014
This is a digital offprint for restricted use only |
Exhibition catalogue essays by Adam Jasienski
Exhibition brochure for "Francisco Moreno" at COL Gallery, San Francisco, January 12-February 24, 2024, 2024
Fieramente humanos: Retratos de santidad barroca, ed. Pablo González Tornel (Málaga; Valencia: Museo Carmen Thyssen; Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia), 2023
Reviews by Adam Jasienski
Sixteenth Century Journal, 2025
Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2020
Hispanic American Historical Review, 2018
he links Michel Foucault's well-trodden concept of biopower to documents and archaeological artif... more he links Michel Foucault's well-trodden concept of biopower to documents and archaeological artifacts that relate to colonial authorities' control over local forms of sugar and alcohol making and trades by indigenous communities. The book's brief afterword by Carla D. Martin is suggestive of the "ethnographic," "emotional" taste and gendered texture of the writings (pp. 176, 179).
Other Writing by Adam Jasienski
On 9-10 December 2013 nearly 80 people gathered in the main auditorium of the Museo del Prado in ... more On 9-10 December 2013 nearly 80 people gathered in the main auditorium of the Museo del Prado in Madrid for Artistic Relations between Spain and Italy in the Renaissance: New Approaches, organized by Juan Luis González García (VIT '11) and Miguel Falomir Faus. The conference, which gathered Spanish, Italian, American, French, and British specialists, was sponsored by a generous grant from the Lila Wallace -Reader's Digest Endowment Fund at Villa I Tatti, which provides support for "interdisciplinary projects in the Italian Renaissance […] that take place in a geographic area that has been underrepresented at I Tatti."
Harvard Art Museums, Index Magazine
We are constantly being told that we now live in a globalized world, yet the circulation of objec... more We are constantly being told that we now live in a globalized world, yet the circulation of objects and ideas among diverse places and peoples is anything but a recent phenomenon. A case in point is Crucified Christ, or 1943.1082, an ivory Students, Collections
Dissertation by Adam Jasienski
Simposia, Seminars, Conferences, Lectures by Adam Jasienski
Villa I Tatti Series, 2022
This book investigates the transit of texts, music, images, rituals, and ideas related to the con... more This book investigates the transit of texts, music, images, rituals, and ideas related to the concepts of sacrifice and conversion across the early modern Atlantic. When Europeans arrived on the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But what Europe was experiencing within its borders was the cause of no lesser horror: during the early modern period no European region was left untouched by the disasters of war. This volume seeks to illumine a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reformation and its aftermath: the conceptualization and repre- sentation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggle between American and European societies in colonial times. How do different cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own, and what is the role of these interpreta- tions in conversion processes? From the central perspective of sacrifice, the various articles in this book examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions — expressed in texts, music, rituals, or images — and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations.
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Books by Adam Jasienski
Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits.
They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Art historian Adam Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual’s relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies.
Articles by Adam Jasienski
This article introduces a testimony by Francisco Pacheco concerning his Book of Portraits, which confirms certain hypotheses about the manuscript, including its form, value, and biography. The account is then examined via the literary topos of the found manuscript.
Exhibition catalogue essays by Adam Jasienski
Reviews by Adam Jasienski
Other Writing by Adam Jasienski
Dissertation by Adam Jasienski
Simposia, Seminars, Conferences, Lectures by Adam Jasienski
Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits.
They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Art historian Adam Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual’s relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies.
This article introduces a testimony by Francisco Pacheco concerning his Book of Portraits, which confirms certain hypotheses about the manuscript, including its form, value, and biography. The account is then examined via the literary topos of the found manuscript.
Education programs for this exhibition are supported by Ayesha Bulchandani.
Symposium is free, but registration is required.
Co-organized by Adam Jasienski and Lisa Pon
Chaired by Adam Jasienski
Papers by Lisa Pon, Emily Anderson, Maria Lumbreras, and Stephan Wolohojian
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