Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Dramas of the Portrait
1. Visual Literacy and Urban Comedy
2. Stolen Identities
3. Blood Portraits
4. The Powers and Perils of Doubles
5. Framing the Margins on Center Stage
Concluding Reflections
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Laura R. Bass is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University. She is the co-editor, with Margaret R. Greer, of Approaches to Teaching Spanish Golden Age Drama (2006).
“Bass has interwoven detailed research in Spanish art history,
treatises on painting, and the social history of portraiture with
illuminating readings of specific plays to present an enormously
valuable perspective on a quintessential art form of the
baroque.”—Emilie L. Bergmann,University of California, Berkeley
“Despite the very complex ideas at work here, and the ambitious
reach of the project, Bass’s prose is limpid and highly accessible.
While The Drama of the Portrait is a tremendous contribution to
both visual and literary studies in the field, it will also help
disseminate this new and sophisticated approach to the comedia to a
broad audience. The richly appealing book, with its over sixty
sumptuous illustrations (many of them in color), itself makes a
persuasive case for the seductiveness of the visual image.”—Barbara
Fuchs Renaissance Quarterly
“[Laura Bass’s] erudite, innovative, elegantly written, and—it
should be mentioned—beautifully illustrated monograph is an
essential contribution to studies of classical Spanish theatre and
of early modern Spanish culture in general.”—Donald R. Larson
Iberoamericana
“[Laura R. Bass’s work] explores the drama of the portrait
reenacted in seventeenth-century Spanish theater as a historical
and cultural chapter of an ideal history of responses to human
likeness. . . . Through the study of selected plays interwoven with
visual images, crossed with the analysis of specific paintings,
understood in the wider context of art theory and of social,
political, and economic history, Bass gives a striking reading of
the practice and culture of portraiture seen through the lens of
theater as shaping the Spanish ideal of monarchy at the same time
that it reveals the underlying anxiety about its crisis.”—Diane H.
Bodart Art Bulletin
“Laura R. Bass has written a beautiful and significant book:
aesthetically pleasing in terms of the sixty-seven illustrations (a
large number in colour) and the comprehensible scholarly style; and
conceptually discerning in respect of the historical, material and
theoretical readings of select plays interwoven with visual images,
the thorough documentation in the accompanying notes, and the
exhaustive bibliographical apparatus.”—Susan L. Fischer Bulletin of
Spanish Studies
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