Essay-like publication (not an exhibition catalogue per se) on the exhibition held at the Spanish National Library "Arte y anatomía en el Renacimiento. Juan Valverde de Amusco y la Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano" (November 2024-March 2025).

A PDF of the book is available for free at the BNE website (see link below)

A world of academic discourse that shares knowledge through word and image frames this Phd thesis in which I explore the relationship between stone lithography and language - ‘language’ being understood here in its widest sense as written text, embodied, vocal and tacit communication, symbolic and excess information, visual image, and the means through which thought becomes manifest and subjectivity is expressed. At the core of the inquiry is the artisanal practice of stone lithography: a technology that led the development of printed communications in the nineteenth century as both a method of mass communication, and an emerging artists’ technique. Invented by the Bavarian playwright Alois Senefelder (1771-1834), stone lithography had a significant impact on the world of music publishing, and I draw on this lyrical inheritance of song, dance and spoken word. I also draw on the dark legacies of colonialism that laid the ground for the development of lithography in the Age of Empire. In the light of these historic contexts, my own studio practice, and a transdisciplinary field of knowledge, this collection of texts explores the multi-modal breadth of lithographic language making and demonstrates the heterogenous nature of the languages engendered by the practices of stone lithography.

In this essay, I argue that Raphael’s double portrait of Agostino Beazzano and Andrea Navagero formed the painter’s fullest response—made in purely pictorial terms—to Renaissance prosody as it was then being developed by his friends, especially the portraits’ sitters and Pietro Bembo. The drafts of Raphael’s own sonnets on drawings made while he was painting the Stanza della Segnatura are visualizations of the intellectual labor his poetic compositions entailed. A close looking at their placement across the paper on these “ekphrastic sheets” (to use Francesco Di Teodoro’s term) as well as changes in the sonnets’ texts offer tools for understanding the double portrait of Raphael’s poet-friends. Raphael’s often dismissed efforts at poetry made on these study drawings thus blossomed half a decade later in the contribution to Renaissance literary theory he made as a painter.

Today, the term 'state' is used to distinguish between two impressions made from the same copper plate that show differences due to modifications made in the meantime by the engraver. This article aims to show how these differences gradually gained value among collectors. While they may have initially sparked curiosity and amazement, it was primarily the set of meanings attributed to them during the 18th century that determined their success. In parallel, the emergence of catalogues raisonnés further encouraged the identification and search for different states, thus helping to establish their meaning and formalize the way they were described.

Though Douglas Huebler is most well-known for his photo-conceptualist works, this article explores how the artist innovatively employed another medium: the limited-edition print. While early chroniclers of Conceptual art often emphasized the artworks’ resistance to being bought and sold, I argue that Huebler created limited editions intended specifically for the collector’s market, using the medium as a conceptual tool to reshape the relationship between artist and collector. The structure of the limited edition both prompted Huebler to conceive of art collecting as a collective endeavor, with each owner of the edition a node in an interconnected network, and endowed the artist with the ability to authorize impressions as authentic and inauthentic. In a moment when works of art were increasingly treated as financial assets, the limited-edition print provided Huebler with a vehicle for questioning the nature of ownership, authorship, and value.

The impact of Goya’s oeuvre and particularly of the Caprichos (1799) on nineteenth-century French art was immense, long lasting and multifaceted. Whereas in Spain Goya was associated with the work he produced as court painter, in France he became known as the author of the Caprichos, interpreted by the Romantics as a lampoon of late eighteenth-century Spain. This vision overlooked the fact that the true modernity of Goya’s work lies in its universalism, as a mirror reflecting the essence of humankind, unfettered by patriotism—this is also true of his monsters and witches, which are nothing more than the deformed reflection of humans. It could be argued that this was a two-way influence: Goya contributed to shape French Romantic art—and thus the beginning of modern art—and the Romantics in turn modelled his critical image. This study challenges the established interpretation of the Spanish artist that has dominated the scholarship until recently, based on Romantic stereotypes, many of which have been perpetuated to this day.

Goya became known in the French market—the main receptor of his work—through his graphic oeuvre. This was promoted by artists, critics and collectors such as Charles Yriarte, Paul Lefort and Eugène Piot, most of them in association with the Spanish artist and dealer Valentín Carderera. Goya’s influence can be divided into two broad categories: aesthetics and politics. On the one hand, artists of the Romantisme noir—focusing on the taste for the grotesque and the literary vision of Spain—saw Goya as the last representative of the Spanish School. On the other, the political impact of his work can be appreciated in the satirical prints produced by artists such as Honoré Daumier and J. J. Grandville, who held him to be a politically engaged caricaturist who fought against censorship and mocked the aristocracy and the clergy. The case of Eugène Delacroix offers the richest example of Goya’s impact on nineteenth-century French art, here backed up by a catalogue of forty of his copies after the Caprichos, some of them hitherto unpublished.

Workshop manuals on lithography tend to be written with art students in mind and the information they contain largely focuses on technical aspects of the process. It is, however, difficult to put into words the nuances of this printmaking practice, and consequently, handbooks rarely refer to sensory information and phenomenological experience. In light of this issue, my intention in Listen is to test the potential and limitations of written language as a means through which to describe the tacit and embodied knowledge of a lithographer. To aid this task, I created a two-minute video recording of myself preparing a lithography stone and this video features as a central element in the text. Prompted by a process of transcribing its sound, this video became the protagonist of a transdisciplinary encounter between lithographic sound and words. Structured as an intertextual narrative, Listen couples the transcription of the video with a historic, geological and cultural survey of sonorous stones. Punctuating the dialogue, are quotations from lithography handbooks that tether this serendipitous exchange to its intention: that being to speak about the perceptual realms of lithographic practice. At the core of Listen, is the subject of graining limestone—a process that requires both careful attention, to ensure that the surface is even and free from unwanted marks, and a tolerant sensitivity to the abrasive noise of graining stone. These two aspects, attention and noise, are entwined in the content, critical interests, and metaphorical dimensions of Listen. As a piece of written material from ongoing practice-led research that explores the intersection between lithography and language, Listen knowingly tests the protocols of academic language. My intention through this unconventional approach, is not to present the results of an enquiry, but to offer the reader a scriptural space for contemplative reflection. Somewhat akin to the practices of stone lithography, I suggest that the act of engagement that Listen proposes is rewarded by intimate attention and sensitivity to the presence of noise.