LECTURE: Steven Ostrow "Zurbarán's cartellino: Artistic Presence and Metapictorial Device"

The cartellino, a small trompe-l’oeil slip of paper bearing the artist’s signature in early modern Spanish painting, was employed in unprecedented fashion by Francisco de Zurbarán, one of Spain’s most extraordinary Golden Age painters. Steven Ostrow analyzes the ways Zurbarán exploited the device metapictorially—as a way of commenting on the art of painting and inserting his presence in works from his brush—and articulated his position on the paragone—the comparison between painting and sculpture—which he demonstrated most vividly in his images of the Holy Face. 

Steven F. Ostrow, Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota, specializes in early modern Italian (especially Roman) visual culture, with an emphasis on the post-Tridentine period and seventeenth-century sculpture. The recipient of the Pre-Doctoral Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the NEH Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, he has published on a wide range of subjects, from late-sixteenth-century tomb sculpture to early-eighteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, engaging issues concerned with patronage, iconography, and historicism; art theory and artistic practice; the interplay among art, politics, science, and religion; and the literary construction of artists’ biographies.