Expert Series: The Brilliance of the Spanish World: El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán

Hear from a panel of art historians and experts for a conversation about Spanish painting moderated by Tanya Paul, Isabel and Alfred Bader Curator of European Art and curator of the exhibition The Brilliance of the Spanish World: El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán.

This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.

Meet the experts

Laura Bass is associate professor of Hispanic Studies and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Her research focuses on early modern Spain, with particular attention to the intersections of literature, visual culture, and religious life. She is the author of The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (Pennsylvania State University Press), which received the Eleanor Tufts Prize for outstanding work on Iberian art. Her current project, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and co-authored with art historian Tanya Tiffany, is a scholarly edition and translation of the Vida (spiritual autobiography) of Estefanía de la Encarnación, a 17th-century Spanish painter, nun, and mystical author. Bass has published widely on topics such as civic identity in baroque Madrid, visual and literary cultures of the Spanish court, and the relationship between art and religious experience.

Rosario I. Granados is the Marilynn Thoma Curator, Art of the Spanish Americas, at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin. There she has organized the exhibitions Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th-Century Mexico in 2019, and Painted Cloth: Ritual and Fashion in Colonial Latin America in 2022, in addition to seven thematic rotations of the permanent galleries. She is currently developing a show of photography of colonial Mexican architecture that will open in December 2025. Before coming to the Blanton in 2016, she taught undergraduate and graduate seminars on Religion, Gender Studies, Cultural Heritage, and Latin American Art at the University of Chicago and Skidmore College. She holds a PhD from Harvard University, an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a BA from Universidad Iberoamericana.

Tanya Tiffany is professor and chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her first book, Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville, was published in 2012 and received an honorable mention for the Eleanor Tufts Book Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies. Among her other publications, she has co-edited a collection of essays, Velázquez Re-Examined: Theory, History, Poetry, and Theatre (2017). In collaboration with Laura Bass, Tiffany is currently completing a translation and bilingual edition of the manuscript Vida of the painter-nun Estefanía de la Encarnación (ca. 1597–1665): the only known autobiography by an early modern woman artist. The project has been awarded a Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the book is slated to be published as part of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. Tiffany is also a member of a research project funded by the Spanish government and headed by María Cruz de Carlos Varona, which focuses on artistic agency among Habsburg women (AGENART, La agencia artística de las mujeres de la Casa de Austria 1532–1700 [ref. PID2020-116100GB-I00]).

The Expert Series welcomes renowned artists, scholars, and cultural activators to the Museum for expansive dialogues that dive deeper into an exhibition, artist, or theme.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to its exhibition sponsors.

Image: Francisco de Zurbarán (Spanish, 1598–1664), Saint Emerentiana (details), ca. 1635–1640. Oil on canvas. 171.5 × 105.5 cm. Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York