ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the miniaturists Giulio Clovio and Francisco de Holanda and their artistic theory and production for sixteenth-century Spain. Clovio's ability to distinguish and move between modes of portraiture was understood and matched by Holanda. Clovio's method of combining a Roman figural style with Flemish-like landscapes suggests that Clovio constructed an image that carefully situated the portraits in a hierarchy that acknowledged the Habsburg Empire, their piety, and their taste for Northern naturalism while insisting on the centrality of Rome. This practice of inventive translation, adapting the Roman artistic canon both to the tastes and interests of the Habsburgs and to the increasing demands of the Counter-Reformation for sacred art, at least partially explain his value to his Farnese patrons. Clovio and Holanda provide people with interesting perspectives that are neither strictly Italian nor Spanish. Italophiles, these men were nonetheless foreigners who adopted and promulgated the culture of late Renaissance Rome.