Politics, art and persuasion in 15th-century Castile

To view the content freely, you only need to be registered on the Trea editions website.

Número de visitas

Open Access Book

This editorial project arose with the initial motivation of transferring the research carried out in the chapel of Álvaro de Luna (Artistic rhetoric in late Gothic Castilian: the chapel of Álvaro de Luna in context, Madrid, 2018) to an area of wide dissemination and transfer to society.

To this end, under the same umbrella of scientific rigor and quality, we proposed a work in a dual format - online and printed - and in a dual language - Spanish and English - that would clearly enhance its perceptive and multisensory nature.

An approach that has been decisive in collaborating with graphic designer Cristina Carrascal, who delicately and expertly formatted our initial project, and with TREA for its editorial support and backing of this initiative.

The visual approach determines that the anatomy of the study—the index—is structured in colors that mark the nodal axes of the work and, at the same time, reflect a symbolic reality: the blue, red, and green mottos of the Mendoza and Luna lineages, the commissioners of the commission.

We were interested in the narrative, but also in seeking interactive and multisensory forms that would generate different connections with the reader. Voice and sound flow through the musicalized verses and dances dedicated to our protagonist, contributing to the climax of the narrated events (pp. 29 and 52). Voice and movement reappear in the video made during the intervention campaign on the altarpiece (pp. 101 and 125). In a few short minutes, the assembly of the technical team from the Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute (a workshop on wheels), the on-site execution of the work, and the subsequent laboratory and library process are evoked. Time, dedication, and qualifications developed first in Toledo Cathedral and later in the IPCE laboratories.

A laborious and necessary process that allowed us to approach the work from the visible and its hidden reality, which we have synthesised in different schemes of our own elaboration intended for scales and measurements of the altarpiece and tomb, the creative process of the polyptych with the use and codification of models, the comparisons and links between foreign and Hispanic authors, the "cryptoportraits", and the confrontation and interrelation between the different imaging techniques of the works.

A learning process that includes a fundamental chapter on image analysis methodologies where we have deemed it necessary to approach the actual tooling (the description of the precise machinery) as well as the evaluation of the results through diagrams or micro-samples that, with their laboratory perspective, allow us to almost touch this pictorial reality.

Sight, hearing, touch, word and emotion as the threads of a visual anatomy of the late Gothic Hispanic.

Politics, art and persuasion in 15th-century Castile

Open Access Book

Configuración avanzada