Biography

Born in Madrid, Felipe Pereda taught at the Universidad Autónoma (Madrid) and Johns Hopkins, before moving to Harvard in 2015, where he is the Fernando Zóbel Professor of Spanish Art. Pereda has worked largely on Spanish and Iberian art, architecture and image theory, from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. He has written on trans-confessional image debates in 15^th-century Spain and artists such as Luis de Morales, El Greco, Zurbarán, Velázquez and, more recently, Goya. His most recent books include, The Man who Broke Michelangelo’s Nose (Penn State press, 2024), a cultural biography of the Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, and the edition of Paul Sachs’ autobiography, Tales of an Epoch (TidePool press, 2025), which documents and reconstructs art history’s project as the “Education of the Eyes.”

Project Summary

Built between 1563 and 1585 as a pantheon, a palace and a monastery to memorialize the new Spanish Habsburg Dynasty, the Escorial is identified with black and white, solid, heavy granite on the one hand, and the memory of the champion of the Catholic response to the Reformation, King Philip II, on the other. Granite, however, is not the only material out of which the Escorial was built. In fact, semi-precious stones were quarried from around the Iberian Peninsula for the ornament of its magnificent main chapel, an aspect of the building that, surprisingly enough, has received very little attention. Which materials are these? How were they selected? Where were they acquired? How was color performed in the ritual life of the building more generally? And finally, and maybe more importantly: What does color tell us about the meaning of the Escorial? This project aims at responding to this question by investigating, on the one hand, the role of materials and particularly, of their chromatic quality, in the making of the Escorial, in the media of architecture, but also painting and sculpture. On the other hand, it explores color in relation to competing theories of matter documented in the work, thought, and libraries of some of the most important actors of the Escorial fabric (from King Philip II, to his architect, Juan de Herrera, and his librarian, Benito Arias Montano). Ultimately, this project approaches color as a means of thinking about the Renaissance practice of imitation in terms of continuity rather than opposition between artifice and nature.