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This thesis deals with the Spanish artist Anglada-Camarasa (Barcelona, 1871- Palma de Mallorca, 1959) during the twenty years he lived in Paris: 1894-1914, when he enjoyed overwhelming international success. Until the 1980s, there was little institutional interest in his work and, hence, a dearth of literature on him. In my thesis I first offer an explanation of this state of affairs and then attempt a re-evaluation of his work. My explanation is articulated within the framework provided by the interpretation of early twentieth-century art history, originated in the 1970s, which emerged as an alternative to the dominating one defended by Modernist Paradigm supporters. In my discussion I situate Anglada's development within the cultural currents of his time and show how he found pictorial solutions to some of the artistic concerns of his contemporaries. Once the origins of the main features of Anglada's technique are firmly grasped, both in relation to subject matter and to pictorial means, it becomes much easier to understand his success, especially among his Russian admirers. Some of these, such as Meyerhold and Diaghilev, who were leading figures of the Russian cultural world and who were well known for their pioneering taste, found inspiration in Anglada's work for their innovations. Against the background of this historical and artistic analysis, I try to demonstrate that Anglada's figurative style influenced also Kandinsky's long transition into Abstraction, especially during the latter's stay in Murnau, before World War I, which constituted his most productive years. My overarching aim in carrying out this original investigation is to locate Anglada in the place he deserves in the beginning of the twentieth-century History of Art. By doing this, I hope not only to contribute to the still much-debated character of this period. But, more importantly, I hope to make Anglada better known, for the beauty of his work that expresses his faith in mankind potential which deserves to be given much closer attention.

Much has been written about the artistic output of Domenicos Theotocopoulos during his time in Spain, but few scholars have examined his works in Venice and even fewer have looked at the years he spent in Rome. This may be in part attributed to the lack of firm documentary evidence regarding his activities there and to the small corpus of works that survive from his Italian period, many of which are furthermore controversial. The present study focuses on Domenicos’ Roman years and questions the traditional notion that he was a spiritual painter who served the principles of the Counter Reformation. To support such a view I have looked critically at the Counter Reformation, which I consider more as an amalgam of diverse and competitive institutions and less as an austere movement that strangled the freedom of artistic expression. I contend, moreover, that Domenicos’ acquaintance with Cardinal Alessandro Farnese’s librarian, Fulvio Orsini, was seminal for the artist, not only because it brought him into closer contact with Rome’s most refined circles, but principally because it helped Domenicos to assume the persona of ‘pictor doctus’, the learned artist, following the example of another of Fulvio’s friends, Pirro Ligorio. The elitist art that resulted from Domenicos’ collaboration with Orsini, represented, for example, in his paintings of Boy Lighting a Candle and the Healing of the Blind, was partly responsible for the Greek painter’s failure to engage the interest of Cardinal Farnese, in whose palace he stayed for two years, 1570- 1572. But Domenicos was determined to establish a career in Rome, as his registration in the painters’ guild, the Accademia di San Luca, in September of 1572, confirms. Although he ultimately failed in this respect, the time he spent in the city was decisive for his understanding of both ancient and modern art, and played a fundamental role in his later artistic development in Spain.

Miró's art is regularly characterised as 'child-like' in art historical literature. That is, his work is taken visually to resemble, or as sharing some of the characteristics (freshness of vision, spontaneity, emotional expressiveness, freedom from traditional illusionistic techniques) attributed to, the artistic productions of children. This analogy with child art (exploited by Expressionists and others in the early years of the twentieth-century) dates in Miró's case to his involvement with Surrealism in the 1920s. It was understood as a more or less conscious intention to exploit the visual characteristics of the successive stages in a child's artistic development. In other words, it was one aspect of Surrealism's engagement with 'primitivist' forms of expression, in which artists appropriated the aesthetic of children's drawings, tribal and folk artifacts, and the artistic productions of the mentally ill. My discussion of Miró is supported by comparison with the work of two other artists, Klee and Chagall, who also borrowed from child art and whose production was likewise associated with childhood by critical literature. Klee's work supports my contention that although Mirós painting bears a passing resemblance to children's drawings, a more sustained analysis demonstrates that it is unlike anything that a child would actually produce. 'Child-likeness', generally a comment on form, becomes in Miró's case question of artistic content, relating to the development and constant recycling of a vocabulary of shapes largely derived from childhood memories. Comparison with Chagall, whose oeuvre was also thematically indebted to childhood memories, allows one to put forward a psychoanalytically informed explanation of the infantile origins of the content that finds expression in art. Miró's thematic 'child-like' content, from this point onwards, is used as a case study to effect the comparison between the theories of Freud (a major influence on Surrealism), and those of the Kleinian tradition within the British Object-Relations School of psychoanalysis, insofar as these have lent themselves to the discussion of art. Both approaches are developmental (Freud and Klein theorised adult psychology as a development of the thought processes of infancy and childhood), and for this reason have been preferred to the topographical and Lacanian orientation adopted in recent applied psychoanalytic literature. Whereas Freud's psychoanalysis of art concentrates on the unconscious processes and mechanisms by means of which the fantasy-distorted derivatives of repressed infantile material emerge into consciousness and become the material of art, the Kleinian psychoanalytic aesthetic developed by Segal and Stokes focuses on the unconscious revelations underlying creativity and the phantasy content that finds expression at the level of the medium. Winnicott provides a (poetic) description of the experiences, rooted in childhood perceptual patterns, to which the production of art and its reception give rise. Miró's own accounts of his creative procedures confirm that the unconscious infantile-derived thought processes, motivations and contents theorised by these authors are in .... [?] operative in the production of art, whilst also making clear that creativity is determined by socio-cultural, therefore conscious (and, as such, psychoanalytically unaccounted for) factors. Both the explanatory value and the principal methodological limitation of psychoanalytic aesthetics centre on these two final considerations.

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The following chapters examine the cultural significance of Velazquez's Sevillian paintings, and provide a study of his relationships to the thought of Sevillian patrons. The discussion is based on a methodological review of the discussion of his paintings and their relationship to painting theory. A number of Iberian treatises on painting are analysed to explore Iberian and Sevillian attitudes to painting. A focus is developed on the writing of Velazquez's patrons, Juan de Fonseca and Francisco de Rioja, which has not been examined in regard to Velázquez until now. The combination of methodological enquiry and historical investigation explores the relationship between Velázquez paintings, other intellectual disciplines and ideological concerns related to classicism and Tridentine reform in Seville. In particular the diffusion of principles of Rhetoric, through poetry and poetics, preaching and meditation, is concentrated upon.

Although it was an era of extraordinary scientific progress and fertile methodological debate, the seventeenth century was characterized by a profound vein of scepticism that can be traced throughout its literary, scientific and philosophical works. Upon his arrival in Italy, the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), one of the most innovative interpreters of Caravaggio’s painting in Europe, wittily thematized, through his series of the Senses (c.1612-1616), the aspirations, achievements and doubts of his age with regard to man’s sensorial experiences and the possibility of investigating and comprehending the functioning of the senses. Scholars have singled out both the allusions within Ribera’s paintings to scientific experimentalism and their affinity with the themes which characterised contemporary Spanish picaresque literature. However, neither the ‘picaresque vein’ nor the scientific factors in question have been analysed per se, or indeed been examined comparatively. In this regard, my main contention is that, by juxtaposing the tools of the new science with low-genre props, the Senses series clearly alludes to contemporary discussions about the function and reliability of sensory perception, a theme which was then of the utmost importance. By staging the equivalent of the pícaro, the shabby protagonist of numerous novels who has to constantly struggle for his existence and who is both assisted and misled by his senses, Ribera’s series parodies not only the experimental method which had been established by the Roman and Neapolitan members of the Accademia dei Lincei, but also Galileo’s contributions to the debate. By the same token, his connection with picaresque literature is often reduced to Ribera’s predilection for plebeian models and his propensity to represent high subject matters with ordinary figures and accessories. The main goal of this thesis is to offer a new interpretation of Ribera’s naturalism and its interconnections with the picaresque novel, as developed not only in Spain but also in Spanish Naples. My contention is, in fact, that these two aspects of Ribera’s art are not only inextricably connected, but are also specifically rooted in early seventeenth-century Roman and Neapolitan culture and society.

This study explores El Greco's language of gestures. The first part will explain the preconditions for the general development towards rhetorical gestures and draw parallels with El Greco's artistic development in the sphere of gestures. In addition, handbooks on gestures are introduced. The second part will analyse how El Greco applied gestures, using examples of his paintings. It will reveal how El Greco developed some gestures over more than thirty years, and how he creates with their help an intense concentrated mood in his paintings. It will also demonstrate how he worked by means of hyperbole to evoke an inspiring atmosphere, how he created space with the help of gestures and gaze, and how he transformed the meaning of some 'model' gestures he took over from famous Italian painters. Finally, this work seeks to renew and intensify the analysis of gestures in painting as a way of approaching the paintings and revealing layers of meaning that can not be found by an analysis solely focused on iconographic topics. In this study the body is taken as a mediator of signs, difficult to read, but decipherable. This study is intended to be a step forward in approaching a deeper understanding of the codified language of gesture. It should open the way to an intensified concern with the language of gestures, with the reading of bodily signs in paintings.

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