THE FACTURE OF EVIDENCE: PORTRAITS, PAINTING, AND ARTISTIC KNOWLEDGE IN SPAIN, 1590-1640

This dissertation examines a series of initiatives that drew together antiquarian, naturalist, and artistic practices, as the rise of sacred history at the end of the sixteenth century forced Iberian experts––artists as much as scholars, theologians, physicians, and collectors––to engage anew with the issue of what it meant to produce, rather than find, visual evidence. At the center of the project is the history of a type of reproductive artifact called retrato (“portrait”) and its importance to Iberian histories of skepticism, ignorance, and discernment. Although traditionally regarded as separate enterprises, in Spain, at this time, projects for the recovery of the lost truth of nature and of Iberia’s sacred past were not only developing in tandem, marked by confessional polemics and the experience of imperial expansion. Together, they also began to take seriously a particular ethical problem: that Spanish scholars might be falling prey to the traps of credulity, or even worse, hypocrisy, desperately trying to cover up their cities’ Islamic and Jewish heritage by forging their evidence. In the course of four chapters, the dissertation shows that retratos became a fundamental instrument in the negotiation and redefinition of questions of truthfulness within this context, giving artists in turn––from Pablo de Céspedes to Francisco Pacheco––a particularly fruitful object with which to think about the stakes of their craft. With roots in notarial practice, retrato named by the second half of the sixteenth century a variety of material replicas produced for the circulation and exchange of newly found “testimonies”: relics, antiquities, sacred images, natural specimens, documents. Their mimetic promise ran deep; linked to it, their portability stretched both Mediterranean and Atlantic pathways of art, commerce, and erudition. By the end of the century, however, the use of these artifacts across intellectual communities and fields of expertise ultimately turned them into their opposite: not a paradigm of trustful evidence but a site for the exercise of learned incredulity. By demonstrating that the challenges posed by the portrait’s difficulties in serving as evidence were not dissolved or rejected, the dissertation calls for a reassessment of the history of early modern art theory in Spain. It demonstrates that the first projects to account for the historical and epistemic dimensions of painting emerged precisely in this context