Sacred Images and Their Contexts

These two distinct but complimentary papers analyse canvases by El Greco (1541–1614) and Daniel Seghers (1590–1661) that depict in different ways religious subject matter. Neither painter was born in Spain, and both received their artistic training outside it, but their religious works were collected and copied avidly in Castile, and became known and influential throughout the Catholic Monarchy and beyond. The aim of the papers is to explore the religious contexts of contemporary interpretation and reception, and in doing so to assess the mutually constitutive interplay of the visual imaginary and cultural matter(s) in the paintings concerned.