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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Adam Jasienski, "Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World" (Penn State UP, 2023)
Description: Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn State University Press, 2023), art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait.Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of sec...