Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt – författare

The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez, first published in 2002, offers a synthetic overview of one of the greatest painters of Golden Age Spain and seventeenth century Europe as a whole. With contributions from art historians and those working in other disciplines, this book offers fresh approaches to the vast literature on this artist. Velázquez's portraits of his patron, King Philip IV, and his wives are examined by two historians in an effort to reconstruct their reception and readings by contemporaries. Two historians of Golden Age Spanish literature provide an interdisciplinary account of the relationships between poetry, theater, and the visual arts at the Spanish court, as practiced by Velázquez, the poet Francisco de Quevedo and the dramatist, Calderón de la Barca. An expert on the history of Spanish music offers an unprecedented examination of how instruments 'play' in Velázquez's compositions.

Velázquez's Las Meninas was sequestered in the Spanish royal collections from 1656, when it was painted, until the opening of the Museo del Prado in 1819. From that moment, it has been one of the most famous masterpieces of western painting, inspiring many published studies of its remarkable perspectival construction and of its iconography, as well as challenging later generations of artists, from Pablo Picasso to the present. The essays in this 2003 volume provide an introduction to the reception history and the critical fortunes of a painting that has received an avalanche of attention from art critics and art historians, geometricians, philosophers, photographers and semioticians. Together, the six essays trace the discussion of Las Meninas through two centuries providing the reader with a sense of the history of taste and of the ever-fluctuating parameters of art appreciation, history, criticism and theory.