Spanish Globalization through Murillo's Eyes

Through Murillo’s Eyes is a vibrant tribute to a city and an artist that straddled a world of contrasts. While often too easy to think of seventeenth-century Spain as in decline and beginning to isolate, this book makes the invaluable contribution of showing how Spanish art was very much in conversation with the global world. * Amanda L. Scott, Associate Professor of Early Modern Spanish History, Penn State University, USA *
Murillo painted for the faithful, but Yun-Casalilla sees the world in his work. Using Seville and one of its most beloved painters as guides, this book reframes early modern globalization—not through familiar stories of ships and silver, but in the intimate negotiations among merchant families, parish priests, and painters over money, faith, and what belongs on a canvas. * Dana Leibsohn, Smith College, and General Editor, Colonial Latin American Review, USA *
Bartolomé Yun Casalilla presents a fresh perspective on early modern Spanish globalisation. Starting in seventeenth-century Seville, the great painter Murillo guides us through intimate but also expansive stories of traders, enslaved people, prodigal sons, and religious men and women. By bridging history and art history, this book presents an innovative and creative evaluation of what globalization meant and how people in the modern world experienced it. * Giorgio Riello, Professor of Early Modern Global History, European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy *
This trailblazing book looks at the painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in Seville, the city he almost never left, and where the local and the global were entangled via trading opportunities afforded by Spain’s Atlantic, African, and Asian expansion, and in which there was much money to be made... Pushing back against long-standing characterizations of the artist in the field of art history, the Murillo of this book is an engaged, socially aware artist of extraordinary pictorial acumen, whose paintings show him skilfully negotiating the forces of globalization in the diverse and conflicted society of early-modern Seville. * Peter George Cherry, Emeritus Lecturer in the History of Art, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin. *
This innovative and compelling interpretation of Murillo's paintings, in dialogue with social and cultural approaches, offers a new and fruitful understanding of his work, as well as revealing unknown dimensions of globalisation and its impact on Seville and Spain. * Benito Navarrete Prieto, Professor of Art History, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain *