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With a grant to extend her doctoral research for a year, Schroth embarked on a journey throughout Spain to visit places where Lerma's vast collection might have been dispersed, and began a comprehensive reassessment of artwork created during Philip III's reign. The best-known artists from that period-El Greco, already an established painter when Philip took the throne, and Velázquez, who had begun to make a name for himself by the time Philip died-served as convenient bookends for the survey. Schroth was interested in seeing how those artists' works were influenced by the cultural, religious, and political changes that took place under the monarchy, as well as "rediscovering," and developing a new appreciation for, relatively obscure artists that she had only read about in the course of her graduate studies.
Because most of the work from the period was referred to only tangentially in scholarly accounts, Schroth had long assumed that the art was of middling value. When she encountered the work firsthand, she was struck by its consistently high quality. "When my art-history textbooks included paintings or sculptures [from lesser-known artists] from this period of time, which wasn't often, the reproductions were in black-and-white and often taken by nonprofessionals, so you couldn't get a sense for whether the work was any good or not," she says. In addition, as she scoured the countryside, she found that much of the artwork was hanging (or stored) in some unlikely places-far from the climate-controlled galleries of a Prado or Metropolitan Museum and the scrutiny of art historians.
In the stairwell of a municipal building in Valladolid, Spain, where Philip III held court from 1601 to 1603, Schroth happened on a painting of the resurrection of Christ. "It looked like it belonged to my period [of research]," she says. "It was a night scene that showed Christ illuminated in the darkness, and I knew that Lerma loved night scenes." Sure enough, when Schroth examined the painting more closely, she found the artist's signature: Pantoja de la Cruz, the royal portraitist for Philip III. Schroth would later confirm that the painting had indeed belonged to Lerma.
Other works she tracked down were located in even less hospitable places. For example, she found The Stigmatization of St. Francis, by Philip III's official court painter, Vicente Carducho, hanging in a cloister courtyard in a working hospital in Madrid, protected from the rain but little else.
The Duke of Lerma's portrait, which now hangs in the Prado, fared better. Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens visited the Spanish court in 1603 as an envoy from the Duke of Mantua. In a letter home to Mantua, Rubens wrote that he was "astonished" by the Duke of Lerma's estimable collection that included Titian and Raphael. Although he declined the Duke's offer to become the official court painter, Rubens did agree to paint the nobleman's portrait. It is one of the highlights of the Nasher exhibition. Shown mounted on a magnificent white steed, the Duke is depicted as a virile and powerful man wreathed in good fortune. And so he was. Before Philip III, most monarchs relied on a coterie of advisers, Schroth says. Philip depended so heavily on Lerma that the Duke was, in essence, the first de facto prime minister of Europe.
Her dissertation, "The Private Picture Collection of the Duke of Lerma," completed in 1990, makes the persuasive case that the Duke's prodigious collecting habits, combined with his unprecedented access to the king, created an environment that placed a high value on art, fostered innovations in artistic creation, and conferred much sought-after social status on patrons of the arts. She notes, for example, that Philip II hated the work of Doménikos Theotokópoulos, the Greek painter commonly known as El Greco. Lerma, on the other hand, recognized the artist's talents-influenced by Titian and the late Renaissance, but with a distinct style all his own-and acquired an El Greco painting of St. Francis.
"Once Lerma had an El Greco," Schroth says, "everyone wanted an El Greco." Demand for the painter's work skyrocketed, and he had to enlarge his workshop to keep up. The resulting economic security allowed El Greco to evolve and experiment as an artist.
Determined to bring her discoveries to a wider audience, Schroth continued to publish on the artists and themes that defined the era, and today is considered one of the leading contemporary art historians of early Baroque Spain. She came to Duke in 1995 as curator and deputy director of the Duke Museum of Art/Prado exchange program, served as interim director of the Nasher from 2003 to 2004, and was named the Nancy Hanks Senior Curator in 2004.
Even as she taught, lectured, and curated shows at Duke, Schroth had a vision of mounting a blockbuster exhibit of art produced during Philip III's reign that never wavered. Originally, she wanted Duke to collaborate on a show with the Prado, as the museum had featured retrospectives of every period of Spanish art except that produced under Philip III. But the costs and technical requirements of mounting a multimillion-dollar show at a university museum-especially one housed in a modest, converted sciences building-proved prohibitive.
But when the museum moved into its far more elegant digs in the fall of 2005, Schroth contacted her colleague Ronnie Baer, an art historian specializing in seventeenth-century Dutch art, whose expertise overlapped with Schroth's. The two had studied at NYU at the same time and had spent countless hours together preparing for their final oral exams. Baer had landed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she is the Mrs. Russell W. Baker Senior Curator of Paintings. With the MFA committed to the show, Schroth and Baer traveled to Spain and looked at art produced during Philip III's reign, and Baer began to discern themes to give structure and direction to the planned exhibit. These groupings include works that illustrate the birth of naturalism in Spanish art; the creation of sophisticated still-life paintings that combined for the first time naturalism, illusion, and tenebrism (a heightened form of chiaroscuro); humanized depictions of saints and other sacred figures; and extravagant portraiture.
Baer also suggested the show's title, with its emphasis on El Greco and Velázquez, the two big names likely to draw crowds. Schroth admits it provides a savvier marketing hook than the one she'd proposed: "In a New Style of Grandeur: Art at the Court of Philip III."
"Never, never in a million years could we have done this exhibit without Boston," says Schroth. "The MFA is very powerful. Because of their involvement, the Prado is loaning seven works for the exhibit, which is unheard of.
"They also got an indemnity grant from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities to insure the show," Schroth adds. "It's the most-funded show MFA has had in recent memory-and together we secured sponsorship from the Bank of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Homeland Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts."
The exhibition opened at the MFA on April 20 and runs through July 27. It opens at Duke on August 21 and runs through November 9.
Schroth's resolve to share her findings with a wider audience paid off in other ways. In an essay in the exhibition's catalogue, Laura Bass, an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Tulane University, applied Schroth's scholarship and ideas to solve the age-old paradox faced by all students of Spanish literature, until now: How could what Bass describes as a "literary efflorescence" under Philip III have occured during a supposed period of decline in the visual arts? Bass calls the reign of Philip III "one of the most innovative periods in Spanish literary history."
"The brilliance of Cervantes, Lope, or Góngora comes into focus not only as a matter of individual genius but also as a product of a society ripe for genius as a prized cultural value," Bass wrote in the essay. "Their lives are not only parallel but intersect with artists in a shared culture of intellectual and artistic promotion and production."
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