Reviewed by:

• Diego Velázquez, Apeles de su siglo: historia y ficción en la obra del pintor de Felipe IV by Héctor Ruiz Soto
• Jeremy Roe

THE PUBLICATION of a new monographic study of the life and work of Diego Velázquez is an event not to be overlooked, and this book is no exception. First, it offers an insightful introduction to the work of Velázquez that engages with a range of recent research on the artist's life, paintings, and cultural context. As such it will undoubtedly provide a valuable teaching aid. Ruiz Soto's prose is well paced, and his succinct discussion of art historical, literary, cultural, and political themes distills for a new generation of students and scholars the major historiographical advances made in Velázquez studies over the last few decades by Jonathan Brown and John Elliott—needless to say—as well as Svetlana Alpers, Julián Gallego, Giles Knox, Felipe Pereda, and Victor Stoichita, among others. I highlight this facet of his book first, as it is seemingly the publisher's intended readership. The generic textbook cover informs the reader that Diego Velázquez, Apeles de su siglo is intended to réussir, and, in this case, put to very good use, the author's agrégation d'espagnol: Ruiz's book forms part of a collaboration between the publisher and France's Centre National d'Enseignement à Distance. Presenting scholarly research for a student readership is by no means an easy task, and Ruiz's work is an excellent example of how successfully this can be done. Nevertheless, one shortcoming of this book is its lack of images. As a volume that analyzes pictorial composition and color, it might have been better off as an exclusively digital publication, which would have permitted a greater budget for image rights, as well as the possibility of adding hyperlinks within the text to the many images discussed.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to judge this book by its cover and pigeonhole it merely as undergraduate reading. Indeed, the second reason to hail the publication of this book is that it is more than a textbook. Despite the academic constraints of the agrégation and those imposed by the publisher, the author presents an approach to the life and work of Velázquez that merits the attention of those already immersed in the current debates and critical minutiae of Velázquez studies and Spanish Golden Age culture more broadly. [End Page 455] For those already acquainted with Ruiz's scholarship on Golden Age theater, Góngora, and other early modern Spanish authors, this will come as no surprise; the footnotes, unlike the book's somewhat cursory bibliography, reveal how a wealth of scholarship is condensed, into this work. Admittedly, his ideas are at times overly condensed, and intriguing concepts are not pursued in the depth required to fully develop them.

The introduction is one example of this. It offers a reflection on "the relationship between history, painting, and fiction," which Ruiz claims he will explore by addressing issues of "style, composition, pictorial genres, the functions of painting, as well as its historicity and metapictorial discourse" (10; translation mine). The scholarship on Golden Age literature and, in particular, the relationships between painting and poetic and theatrical writing are a key facet of this opening discussion, which invokes a range of theoretical questions such as literary and artistic invention, veracity and verisimilitude, stylistic modes such as sobriety and grandeur, as well as the practice of ekphrasis. A fundamental concern of the parallel drawn between word and image is to address what Brown termed Velázquez's "oblique attitude" to narration, to which Ruiz responds by arguing that Velázquez was a "child of his time, who appreciated difficulty in poetry" (24). For Ruiz such difficulty is synonymous with Góngora's verse, and this is above all identified with Velázquez's final two mythological paintings: Mercury and Argus (ca. 1659) and The Spinners, or the Fable of Arachne...

 审阅者：

• 
  迭戈·委拉斯开兹，本世纪的阿佩莱斯：费利佩四世画家作品中的历史与虚构，赫克托·鲁伊斯·索托 (Héctor Ruiz Soto)
•  杰里米·罗伊

关于迭戈·委拉斯开兹的生活和作品的新专题研究的出版是一件不容忽视的事件，本书也不例外。首先，它对委拉斯开兹的作品进行了深入的介绍，其中涉及对艺术家的生活、绘画和文化背景的一系列最新研究。因此，它无疑将提供宝贵的教学帮助。鲁伊斯·索托的散文节奏明快，他对艺术史、文学、文化和政治主题的简洁讨论为新一代学生和学者提炼了乔纳森·布朗和约翰·埃利奥特过去几十年在委拉斯开兹研究中取得的主要史学进展——不用说——还有 Svetlana Alpers、Julian Gallego、Giles Knox、Felipe Pereda 和 Victor Stoichita 等。我首先强调他的书的这一方面，因为这似乎是出版商的目标读者群。通用教科书封面告诉读者迭戈·委拉斯开兹 (Diego Velázquez)，Apeles de su siglo 旨在 réussir，并且在这种情况下，充分利用了作者的 agrégation d'espagnol：鲁伊斯的书构成了出版商和法国国家远程工程中心。向学生读者展示学术研究绝非易事，鲁伊斯的作品就是一个很好的例子，说明了如何成功地做到这一点。然而，这本书的一个缺点是缺乏图片。作为一本分析图片构图和色彩的书，它可能作为一本专门的数字出版物会更好，这样可以为图像版权提供更多的预算，并且可以在文本中添加到所讨论的许多图像的超链接。

然而，以貌取人并把它仅仅归类为本科生读物是错误的。事实上，赞扬本书出版的第二个原因是它不仅仅是一本教科书。尽管受到聚合和出版商强加的学术限制，作者还是提出了一种研究委拉斯开兹生活和工作的方法，值得那些已经沉浸在委拉斯开兹研究和西班牙黄金时代文化的当前辩论和关键细节中的人们的关注。宽广地。 [第 455 页结束] 对于那些已经熟悉鲁伊斯在黄金时代戏剧、贡戈拉和其他早期现代西班牙作家方面的学术研究的人来说，这并不奇怪；与本书有些粗略的参考书目不同，脚注揭示了如何将丰富的学术成果浓缩到这部作品中。诚然，他的想法有时过于浓缩，并且没有充分发展有趣的概念所需的深度。

简介就是其中一个例子。它反思了“历史、绘画和小说之间的关系”，鲁伊斯声称他将通过解决“风格、构图、绘画类型、绘画的功能，以及它的历史性和隐喻话语”等问题来探索这一关系。 10；翻译我的）。关于黄金时代文学的学术研究，特别是绘画与诗歌和戏剧写作之间的关系是本次开场讨论的一个关键方面，它引发了一系列理论问题，例如文学和艺术发明、真实性和逼真性、风格模式等清醒和庄严，以及 ekphrasis 的实践。文字与图像之间的平行关系的一个基本问题是解决布朗所说的委拉斯开兹对叙事的“倾斜态度”，鲁伊斯对此做出回应，认为委拉斯开兹是“他那个时代的孩子，他认识到诗歌中的困难”（24） 。对于鲁伊斯来说，这种困难是贡戈拉诗句的代名词，而这首先与委拉斯开兹最后两幅神话画作有关：《水星和阿格斯》（约 1659 年）和《纺纱人》，或《阿拉克尼寓言》……