Presenter: Seth Kimmel, Columbia University
Respondent: Erin Rowe, Johns Hopkins University
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino, Columbia University
When sixteenth-century Iberian humanists such as Juan Páez de Castro, Juan Bautista Cardona, Benito Arias Montano, and Antonio Agustín imaged what King Philip II’s royal library—eventually established during the 1560s and 1570s in San Lorenzo as part of the Escorial monastery complex—ought to look like, they invoked Italian models. Foremost on their minds was the Vatican library, whose decoration, architecture, heating technology, and, especially, bibliographic organization they hoped to imitate. The ceiling frescos of the liberal arts realized in the Escorial’s main reading room by Pellegrino Tibaldi likewise evoked a visual taxonomy of knowledge that was indebted to Italian models. In studying the Escorial’s bibliographic vision across a variety of media and scales, this paper examines the details as well as the limits of this indebtedness.
Part of the Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium series.
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Presented by the Department of Italian and co-sponsored by The European Institute & The Burke Library.
