ABSTRACT
Seville’s role as the gateway to America turned it into the most populated city of the Iberian Peninsula in the Modern Age, a thriving economic center where prosperous maritime trade was the main attraction for numerous foreign companies whose agents settled in the Iberian kingdom to control their businesses. It is possible to establish a conceptual and chronological map of Italian stylistic preferences in Seville all through the Golden Age based on the oscillating influence of Italian artists on Sevillian painters and the works that arrived in the kingdom from the different Italian schools. By the seventeenth century Sevillians were characterized by a very particular set of traits resulting from a series of concrete factors, not least of which was the weave of cultures that coexisted there. This process of cultural hybridism led to preferences for specific artists or currents at different times, in keeping with the tastes and trends in vogue in the Italian territories.
