Biography

Wendy Sepponen is an art historian who specializes in early modern sculpture and its facture, particularly in the Spanish Habsburg empire. She completed her MA in Art History from the University of Toronto and her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Michigan in 2018. She has worked at the National Gallery of Art, DC, and the Meadows Museum, Dallas, where she was venue curator for the exhibition Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain. She is now Assistant Professor of Global Early Modern Art at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, where she is completing her book manuscript, Imperial Materials: Sculpture and the Making of an Early Modern Habsburg Identity.

Project Summary

Best known as patrons of painters, Habsburg kings Charles V and Philip II commissioned some of the largest sculptural projects in early modern Europe. This contradiction between taste and action raises questions about the utility of sculptures as they sought to quell their vast and expanding empire. This project argues that sculptural materiality was a key strategy employed by Habsburg patrons to assert dynastic continuity and political legitimacy. Through the consistent and repeated use of copper alloys, hardstones, gold, and silver across generations, Habsburg rulers consciously cultivated a range of key artistic and industrial centers whose material and cultural capital directly indexed their composite monarchy. By drawing from their plural colonial resources—from mines in Slovakia and Bolivia, to artists in Milan and Nuremberg, among many others—imperial sculptures demonstrated, in some cases, the material advantages to being part of the Habsburg crowns, while, in others, they manifested the empire’s practices of extraction and control.