A number of recent academic endeavors, including a 2013 conference at the Prado Museum (“Artistic Relations between Spain and Italy in the Renaissance: New Approaches”) and the project “Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas” (2016–20), have sought to reformulate, or at least probe, how we think about cultural intersections between the two great peninsulas of Southern Europe. Among and after these, Artistic Circulation between Early Modern Spain and Italy will stand as a weighty and impactful contribution.

Starting in the early sixteenth century—and especially after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis in 1556—and until 1700, the Spanish monarchy held hegemonic control in Italy. Despite this overwhelming evidence of a Spanish presence in Italy, the way in which this political reality might have conditioned artistic production in both territories has received relatively scant attention from art historians. In contrast, this book attends to the fluid, nonlinear nature of artistic exchange between early modern Mediterranean cities and invites us to consider cultural relations through the lens of a circuit of courts and artists on the move. It also shows that the study of art produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be viewed through the prism of contemporary nation-states (Spain and Italy).

Throughout ten chronologically ordered chapters, plus an introduction (significantly entitled “Spanish Italy / Italian Spain”), some ways of interchange and confluence are addressed by analyzing major trips or resettlements of Italian masters in Spain (Domenico Fancelli, Jacopo L'Indaco) or Iberian painters and sculptors in Italy (Alonso Berruguete, Diego de Siloè). The visual and textual evidence of the transmission of ideas, iconographies, and styles is also examined through objects such as books (Cacho Casal), prints (Estevez), drawings (Arias Martínez), or fountains (Redondo Cantera), to name but a few. Although most contributors question the problematic topos that posits Spain as a passive recipient of artistic innovations emerging from creative (Northern and Central) Italy, a leitmotif that runs through all the essays is that direct or indirect Italianization ends up “updating the tastes of the [Spanish] Crown and of its associates” (4). This argument about the presumed search for a style a la romana (i.e., all'antica) is not generally opposed to the coexistence of other preferences typically considered antiquated, such as a la morisca (Moorish style), a la castellana (Mudéjar), or al moderno, al tedesco, or a la francesa (Gothic style).

It is still important to move discussion forward beyond the well-known parallel that has often been established between Spain and Rome: barbarian Rome conquered Greece but was at the same time seduced by her superior culture in the same way that Spain held political but not artistic dominance over Italy. As Benedetto Croce signaled in La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la rinascenza (1917), Italian life in the sixteenth century is incomprehensible without consideration of the Spanish influence, be it in the literary, spiritual, or ceremonial spheres of cultural production.

Thus, phenomena such as the creation of national stereotypes, the impact of the Spanish education on many Italian princes, or how imperial imagery, and particularly portraiture, acquired powerful moral authority in the Italian peninsula, where it was widely imitated by the local elites, are not to be found in this volume. Likewise, apart from a few introductory words, no emphasis is placed on the role of the many Spanish prelates who resided in Italy, especially in Rome, or the doctrinal debates over copies of miraculous images such as the Veil of Veronica and the rise of relic cults of Roman martyrs, which relied heavily on proto-archaeology for their raw materials. Spain and Italy participated equally in the popularization of these fundamental early modern cultural trends, and these purposeful anachronistic manipulations challenge the dominant discourse of Renaissance as progress. Although these and other crucial arguments should have received some sort of attention throughout the volume, multiple and fascinating themes emerge from this collection of essays. In conclusion, the book is successful in asking broad methodological questions about how to study early modern Spanish art, particularly in relation to cultural production in the Italian peninsula, and how to confront the often-unwieldy baggage of historiography that the study of these two entities inevitably carries.