marina núñez

The videos of Marina Núñez (Palencia, 1966) are generally developed in series that share similarities in language and iconography, and tend to have a looping structure. They persistently deploy the idea of the existence of an eternal return, projected for the history of culture by the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade.[1] Thus, the rite and the images that sustain it not only participate in the commemoration, but also take us back to the beginning. Because we stubbornly induce everything to return to its origin in a trial / error exercise whose correct result refuses to emerge. Taking a leap linked to intergenerational memory that at present has little to do with Eliade, I almost read Núñez’s images as metaphors for the fact that we will go back to experience in our flesh what our grandparents lived through. The beginning is born from the end. Or the origin always returns despite the fact that we find ourselves in the last breath of oxygen that the road allows us.

I do not know if this is what occupied my father during the last years of his life. Obsessed as he was with the end of his existence, he painted a very long series of pieces that he called Alpha and Omega, about which I did not ask him. I cannot understand why. Perhaps I was terrified of his fears, which are also mine.

I reiterate, it is obligatory to analyse how this dilemma between beginning and end is revealed in almost all of Marina Núñez’s video work. A poetics that is sharpened and charged when she intervenes on the memory of others, those who populated the Earth before us. Those who are no longer here slip into the porous surface of those objects that belonged to them, with which they lived together and that in some cases changed their status to be collected, to be treasured as «other objects» in a process of semiophorisation analysed from André Malraux to Krzyztof Pomian.[2] This is not the first time that the artist from Palencia has worked on collections, and she is not even a first-timer when intervening in heritage spaces –there are her projects in the Cathedral of Burgos (Tinieblas y luz [Darkness and Light], 2008) or in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Vanitas, 2021, Rocío de la Villa, curator). But this is a special occasion because the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, the institution that is hosting Marina Núñez’s latest exhibition, is another question altogether.

There is Nothing as Deep as the Skin is the title of this project of interventions: it uses the well-known quotation by Paul Valéry in which the French author emphasised that the epidermis connects us with the environment and the objects that surround us. The surface is not the reverse of the deep, nor its opposite. Poetic intuition wanders over the deepest realm, on the skin, where it can reach knowledge that our reason cannot grasp, as Henri Bergson had supported.[3] In this project, works specially created for the occasion, which we should understand as site-specific, are placed on the surface –which provides the establishment with form and constitution- of the Lázaro Galdiano collections, appropriating the very notion of art museum and collection as a formula that reassesses its meaning by proposing alternative museographic models: we work with a space connoted both by the architecture and the elements and devices that interweave and inhabit it.[4]

José Lázaro Galdiano (1862-1947) amassed his collections in successive batches, the difference being the places where he lived throughout his life: Barcelona, Madrid, Paris and New York. He started his collection in 1888 and concluded it when he died in 1944. Together with his wife Paula Florido y Toledo (1856-1932), they had an encyclopaedic and classical way of conceiving it: they acquired all kinds of pieces, bibliophilic articles and paintings, silverware, weaponry and suits of armour, textiles, reliquaries, sculptures, graphic works, miniatures, crockery and tableware, gold and silverware, as well as numismatics, bronzes, furniture or enamels and ivory works. This businessman and historian from Navarre and his Argentinian wife housed these collections in a palace built expressly for this purpose, Parque Florido [Park in Bloom, but it is also the surname of his wife] (1908), the building that treasured his legacy and which occupies the current museum that bears his name. Upon his death, Lázaro Galdiano donated his art collection of more than 12,000 works and his library of some 20,000 titles to the Spanish people.

I would like to avow that these collections deserve a whole new chapter when compared to other museums in which Marina Núñez has been involved, because they were originally understood as Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, along the lines of the cabinets of curiosities or the studiolos of the European Renaissance. It is also true that after the death of the collectors, their pieces were museified and presented according to consensual exhibition formulas, the idea of it becoming a historic house museum being thoroughly discarded. Despite this, some pieces still hang in the same space that the couple decided on, such as the portrait of the writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1857) by Federico de Madrazo, which we can enjoy today in the central room, a kind of elegant hall that originally served as a ballroom, which is why it has excellent acoustics.[5]

The decorative profusion was a feature of bourgeois homes at the end of the 19^th century that Walter Benjamin would analyse accurately in his essay «Louis Philippe or the Interior», as it was the private place that protected from the «illusions» of the exterior, a universe that brought together «remoteness and the past».[6] A theatrical space with semi-public areas in which the peers invited by Lázaro and Florido performed. Although Benjamin does not analyse it in the essay cited above, I believe that underlying these nineteenth-century encyclopaedic collectors, and obviously José Lázaro and Paula Florido, is a practice similar to that of the collector of the Wunderkammern of the Modern Age:

The collector is the true denizen of the interior. He makes it his business to transfigure things. He has the Sisyphean task of removing the commodity nature of things by possessing them. But he only lends them the value of his hobby instead of the use value.[7]

As early as 1903, however, the collector devised an alternative solution to democratise at least the possession of these objects in their photographic traces by issuing of a set of collectible cards. This gives us an idea of his social concern as well as of the attention he paid to ensuring that art could reach as many people as possible:

Like everything private, [this collection] is not as widely known as it should be, and only friends of the owner, people of refined taste, the Spanish society of excursions and many foreigners, who through the diplomatic representatives of their respective nations obtain the necessary permission, have visited it and have been able to admire the treasures it contains.[8]

From an artistic point of view, Lázaro Galdiano was not a thoroughly modern man. He disregarded the quintessential ornamental style of his time, Art Nouveau (it should be pointed out that he was living in Barcelona at the end of the 19^th century), but also the neo-Plateresque, which, by the way, irritated him greatly. These were the styles that seemed particularly effective at the time for concealing the flashy iron and concrete structures with which architects were building back then.[9] The Navarrese collector chose to reread Villanueva’s neoclassicism, although, as we shall see, his decorative programmes derive from the nineteenth-century tradition in a clear formula of resistance to the invasion of manufactured objects brought by industrial progress.

Lázaro and Florido would construct, as I have indicated, a Gesamtkunstwerk that intertwines architecture, craftsmanship and art and that signals their «distinction»; they designed the ornamentation and decorative programme for every corner of their house as a sort of talkative and narrative feature of this building that differentiates and individualises it; he imbued it with symbols and attributes linked to its owner that might be read by his guests past and present. For example, Lázaro chose as the decorative programme for his office paintings representing the Olympus of Wisdom, explicitly citing how relevant the Enlightenment and, specifically, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, was to him.[10] And that is where this building puts itself on view as an architecture of the nineteenth century, in a sharp contrast with the international avant-garde architectural proposals that were just about to arrive: faced with the simplicity and nakedness of the supporting and sustaining elements, the ornamentation that the collector was so fond of had entered into crisis. Decoration was considered an excess, a threat to «pure» form in the transition from artisan to industrial production formulas. This was the object of analysis of the architect Adolf Loos in Ornament and Crime, which he published in 1908, the same year that Lázaro and Florido erected their Madrid palace. When Loos lashes out against the elements that conceal the elementary forms of materials and architectural structure, he is also defending a unique authorship, the creative autonomy that claims to remain free of interference from the client. The architect, and only the architect, is the author of the commission. Any element that is added later is portable and perfectly dispensable. In fact, it is the interpreter of the vital needs of the person who will live in the rooms, assuming a certain paternal role. However, this mediating role that the architect exercises between the home and its owner is a conjurer’s trick that advocates depersonalised spaces, devoid of impulses, even defining the furniture, marking its possibilities of use and the vital tempos of those who inhabit the house. If we compare Loos with Lázaro and Florido, what for one is superfluous –let us venture to say degenerate- is for the others a sign of identity, a portrait in itself. Loos was oblivious, as Hal Foster teasingly points out, to the fact that «all design is about desire».[11]

In bourgeois homes, it was women who were responsible for making the space inhabitable, for personalising it and distinguishing it within the separation into spheres that condemned them to the private realm. If we go further back, to the Renaissance, there are numerous patrons such as Isabella of Hungary who commissioned iconographic programmes after having defined and designed them, spoon-feeding them to Titian himself.[12] Paula Florido’s role both as a designer of spaces and as a collector has been studied, although only recently – if we read her last will closely, we can see that she was constantly involved in the construction and titivating of their Madrilenian palace.[13] It is to bourgeois women, therefore, that Loos essentially subtracts the territory. With one modern stroke of the pen he took away one of the few tasks they had been entrusted with. Marriageable girls were taught to draw and embroider, not to sew: that was for the «dressmakers» who generated patterns, structures, which could then be embellished. These bourgeois women were specialists in the epidermis of the house, in keeping it up to date in the fashions of the illustrated magazines, participating in the new as a cardinal proposal of the nineteenth century. The bourgeois women of the 19^th century constructed their «kingdom» for the outside world as a harmonious space without tension; they were the angel of the home, weightless, docile and manageable, levitating above things. Again I stress that the ornamental is a translation of the personal. Although there are those who partially escaped this role; this is undoubtedly the case of Paula Florido, economically independent of her husband.

It is striking that Benjamin in his essay on the interior does not mention these bourgeois housewives who organise social gatherings, acquire paintings, bibelots, luxurious carpets, furniture, collect fans, embroider cushions and choose the silks for curtains and armchairs to match.[14] Many 19th-century women artists, in fact, transferred this domestic knowledge to the professional or semi-professional sphere, specialising in the decorative arts – some of the objects that we collect today, the ones Lázaro and Florido treasured, are designed or made by anonymous female hands. For the Berliner philosopher they did not exist, they are omitted subjects or inhabit the shadows of the unsaid. Benjamin describes the interior as man’s «case», but says nothing about it being the golden cage of the bourgeois women. Fortunately, they were already preparing their escape route: education, professionalisation or economic independence; all were coming for the pioneers, although it would take decades for these extraordinary cases to become the norm. The same industrialisation, the modernisation that pushed Loos to charge against the craft of the ornamental, opened the door to the street and threw them out. When Parque Florido was built, the well-to-do bourgeois women decorated the home, but they were also part of its ornamentation, they were a reclaimed element, another commodity for ornamentation in that delirium of patriarchy that was the house and the roles within it. «We are given hope thanks to the desperate,» and I quote Benjamin again. Out of that desperation and gender self-consciousness the feminist and women’s self-determination movements would be born.

This is the special context in which Marina Núñez has intervened, proposing a temporary change in the artistic and decorative programme of the palace, albeit after the subsequent rearrangements that turned it into a museum from the 1950s onwards. When we considered the possibility of staging this exhibition four years ago, the tricky part was selecting the spaces in which to work because we started from a basic idea, which was respect for the exquisite collection of works of art that Lázaro and Florido had patiently and passionately acquired. We wanted to carry out respectful actions in which the pieces by the great masters would maintain their centrality and would never lose their visibility or prominence. It should be remembered that the volume of the treasures in this museum means that its museography abounds in a certain horror vacui that is added to the profuse decorative programme of frescoes, woodwork, mouldings, stained glass and marquetry floors. Horror vacui is a Baroque concept that Eugenio D’Ors did not apply to a specific historical moment but to «a certain perversion of taste» that obeys the spontaneity of nature, but is also linked to the feminine, we imagine because of its connection with ornamentation.[15]

The coherence of the collections and their arrangement meant that we had to work in several areas of the museum: the ballroom (room 12), the private area of the former dormitories (now the Flemish painting room from the 15^th to 17^th centuries, room 17), the gala dining room (room 11), the hall of honour (Spanish art from the 15^th and 16^th centuries or room 7), the former entrance hall (room 9) and the portico room or vestibule (the glass atrium that now houses the armoury).

Marina Núñez makes use of ornamentation, a stylistic feature typical of a pre-industrial past by which Parque Florido still abides. A decision that constructs a new imaginary, and which, as we shall see, also has political connotations that concern the role of women in the collective imaginary and in the history of art, thus maintaining conceptual and thematic coherence with her early works from the 1990s. Let us take a look at the rooms of the museum that house her interventions.

Ballroom (current Room 12): This space, the first to be accessed on the first storey of the museum and the starting point of our project, was the place where the house’s social gatherings and shindigs were thrown. With a neo-Renaissance decoration, Ornamento intervenes in the handcrafted marquetry of the uniquely designed parquet. The artist has transmuted this public space by symbolically converting it into the most private space, the bedroom, or the most remote from life, the tomb. In a trompe l’oeil manner, women appear under a shroud. They are covered by a dense veil trimmed with a pattern of golden flowers, which nevertheless outlines their bodies perfectly. Every now and then, a limb, an arm or a foot, escapes from their shell, showing that their skin is vegetal lace as well – perhaps they are not corpses and are only asleep. Buried beneath the ornament (which has defined their femininity) they are hollow, ornamental in themselves, but they survive by claiming that their skin is also a framework, an exoskeleton. The anti-slavery writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873), whose portrait hangs in the same room, watches them taking over a space and a time in which she is more than just part of the decor of a bourgeois palace. For these women, as for the romantic writer, cloak and flesh are one and the same thing, linked to the concept of the infinite, which slithers in its folds. These dead or sleeping women of Marina Núñez float on the geometry of the pavement and its decorative stencil. While Gertrudis hangs on the wall, her presence makes us remember her name, her work; it is not an anonymous female portrait, like so many others.

Hall of Honour (Room 7 at present). This space, dedicated to Spanish art of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, is one among many sharing the same characteristic, but this one perhaps shows the greatest horror vacui, both then and now; it is full of references from ceiling to floor, sculptures, profuse ornamentation on walls, lintels, doors and mouldings… The centre of this hall is also occupied by a large museum display case. When we arrived, the room only offered one element that revealed its cold functionality: the French blinds that are visible behind the large windows. And we decided to dig even deeper into the sore spot and load the space still more by placing Botánica as blinds.

Those are gigantic female faces without hair, like shop window dummies. From their lacy skin spherical shapes sprout that look like pearls but are actually spores or eggs inside which plants hatch. These works remind me of the vases that hold worlds, the tempests of her Naturalezas muertas (oleaje y tornado) [Still Lifes (Swell and Tornado)] from 2022. These turned-green faces are receptacles, herbariums in themselves. As Christine Buci-Glucksmann recalls, re-reading Levi-Strauss, the facial ornamentation of certain tribes, such as those of the Kadiweu women, «is not reduced to being a mere supplement, since it alters the structure».[16] And here these spores are structural; they sprout from within and spread beautifully throughout their dermis, spawning still more life.

In these two pieces, the artist argues that «the symbolic has an effect on the real, art affects life», and to this end she gives life –as it were- to the representation of the flowers shown in the lace, a sort of real vegetation which, paradoxically, is once again another representation.

Gala Dining Room: Two large Immaculate Virgins by Claudio Coello and Miguel Jacinto Meléndez float over their respective wooden and marble consoles. Two other consoles symmetrically occupy the rest of the corners of the old dining room. They are the four pieces of furniture chosen for the air / water women by Marina Núñez, the series of pieces entitled Historia Natural [Natural History], to perch on, also floating in the transparency of their glass panes; they are answered from above by these religious iconographies, «pregnant» with virginity. They weightlessly flood their world with their own light, a world that is at the same time a macro and micro cosmos made up of machines and gears, viruses, a radiolarian (a type of protozoa) floating like plankton in the oceans, neurons and different plants in a nod to the cosmological models of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

The former bedrooms are now room 17; they are dedicated to Flemish painting from the 15^th to the 17^th centuries. In this case the artist has created weightless dryads on gold leaf (with the title Gótico 1 [Gothic 1]) which mingle with the small Flemish virgins, devotional pieces before becoming semiophores, works of art. They float under a red cloak through which their long curly hair escapes. The female hair has been, as Erika Bornay studied a while ago, a feminine symbol of sexuality and fertility. It was also profusely analysed and represented by Marina Núñez in her paintings of the early 1990s, studying how hair has been demonised and censored throughout history, when not used as a punishment – consider the case of the shorn women of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.[17] This is the reason why in many cultures hair is hidden under veils and headdresses that in the most extreme cases will cover the body completely, as is the case with these nymphs in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano. But under their red veils, the colour of unleashed passions, they escape in a telluric sense: their hair / grass has a life of its own and in its own way plays the role of wings, while strong, unrooted roots take the place of feet and allow us to understand that they are women / tree capable of freeing themselves of their weight and flying over a golden space with mystical connotations. They become forms that fly instead of figures that weigh. Just like witches.

This room also shows hanging brass bas-reliefs, which represent female hands preferring to simulate in their articulation that they are plants, to the point that they are thusly assimilated, and end up being fertile ground for flowers or fruit to grow from them (Envidia [Envy]).

Former entrance hall (Room 9 at present): This space in the museum is dedicated to the female portraits in the collection (The female image in the 16^th and 17^th centuries). Delicate reliquaries / busts of saints –celestial creatures with long golden hair- are the centrepiece of the hall, and on the walls hang a possible portrait of Eleonora de Médici by Sofonisba Anguissola, court painter to King Philip II, or a Renaissance portrait of the Duchess of Medinaceli. Greek-Latin mythology was a fundamental source for the production of Renaissance narratives and their hidden symbolism. This space is presided over by two Daphnes in grisaille which take the place of the Anguissola on temporary loan. Already touched by Apollo, these women have begun their vegetal transition; in profile, in the tradition of the quattrocentista portrait, one is transmuted into a Chinese cabbage, dressing her hair in leaves that end in a short beak, the other shows how her cerebral ramifications are themselves herbaceous, being surface and depth at the same time.

Entrance hall or Portico Room. Paradoxically, we end the visit in the portico, the original entrance to the palace. Marina Núñez has created some videos, Las herboristas [The Herbalists], which are interwoven with the historicist suits of armour that José Lázaro bought in the 19^th century. The area is glazed since its origin, which connects the interior of the museum with the museum gardens. With the windows covered, Marina Núñez has positioned five screens with moving images in their place. Those are ambiguous locations since they show a here (botanical garden) and a there (dark space that is unknown to us and perhaps hazardous) separated by ornate arches that are as much architecture as groves of trees. In this sense, there is a reference to the classical myth of the primitive hut –again a call to the origin-, and nods to the windows of the oil paintings of the Flemish primitives that populate the museum, or to others, such as the Virgin of Chancellor Rolin by Jan van Eyck, which, without being in the collection, has influenced the artist so much.

In the garden, the herbalists stroll somewhere out of our field of vision; these women control their territory by wandering over tiles that hold flowers, a seedbed that protects the future of the world (let us remember that never accepted within academic science, women phytotherapists have traditionally been persecuted and mistreated; they were considered witches or their knowledge was denigrated as quackery). Her skin as well as her cloak –again a reference to the translucent female veils of 15^th– to 17^th-century painting- has an identical texture of gilded lace with decorative vegetal motifs, although we do not know where one begins and the other ends. The cloaks are ethereal, as if they were a ghostly echo that continues to wander through the garden as if in a mantra. They are flowers themselves, the fractal pattern of the landscape that runs through an epidermis that translucently crosses their hollow body. They mimic their world, their identities relate to their surroundings, being one and the same in a similar way to the female characters that populated Marina Núñez’s Inmersión [Immersion] project at the Puertas de Castilla exhibition hall in Murcia (2019, curated by Pablo Sandoval and Daniel Soriano).

These gardens have no gates because their defensive needs are covered. Behind the arches, other women go through in the opposite direction in an endless and regular line. They defend the botanical garden and the herbalists by wearing a coat of mail that is their own skin. They contrast with the ornate armour of the space, a hardness associated with the material, which is nothing more than metallic skin. However, these historicist suits of armour, with their long pointed sabatons and their surface profusely covered with fruits and flowers, could not protect anyone, although they were placed between windows from the beginning as guardians of the building.

By way of coda. Marina Núñez’s intervention in the collections at Calle Serrano not only rejects the discourse of Adolf Loos but also proposes a personal grammar of the ornament considered necessary. These pieces, created with 3D software and using AI (Artificial Intelligence) for the first time in some of the details of certain works, are a twist, examples of current post-industrial production. They converse, activate the still lifes, the religious paintings –mainly Madonnas produced in the transition from Gothic to Renaissance-, the early 20^th-century architecture of Francisco Borrás –specially the ballroom, the heart of the palace from which the museum is articulated-, and the remains of warlike confrontations (these armours had a theatrical role both when they were produced and when they were recreated in the 19^th century and turned into semiophores on display). The project also highlights the museographic formulae which, despite having been «tamed» in the 1950s after the donation to the State, were based on the tradition of the 17^th– and 18^th-century painting cabinets as regards the arrangement of the objects in the space, i.e. a wall turned into a cluster-hanging display.[18]

On the other hand, as if following the discourse of her latest works (Puertas de Castilla, 2019; Thyssen Museum, 2021), Marina Núñez draws values from the ecological poetics that understand that human beings are nature; that our environment, the planet, is not something alien, doomed to be plundered into oblivion. And here she links it with the concept of ornament as something structural rather than epidermic. It is an ecology that feels a particular nostalgia for the origins, for a time when human beings had a relationship of belonging with nature, so far removed from today’s suicidal exploitation. The artist argues that nature is not the other but the same, taking up the topos of the opposition in the history of art between nature and artifice, which she undoubtedly calls into question. In this way she highlights the organic condition of human beings and their fragility; that their skins, their bodies, belong to the context in (and because of) their materiality.

And she does it with female bodies.[19]

Translation by A.G. Álvarez

[1] An idea borrowed from Eastern thought and whose history runs with an undercurrent throughout Western thought from its origins to the great epigonal thinkers of the 19^th century, such as Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. In any case, «Quid est quod fuit? Quod futurum est / What is what was? What it is to be.» This is how Ecclesiastes expresses it in St. Jerome’s version. See The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (trans. Willard R. Trask), Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971

[2] See Malraux, André, Le musée imaginaire, Paris, Gallimard, 1965. Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris-Venise, XVe-XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 1987.

[3] The verifiable aspects of scientific research and the qualitative and creative aspects of the Arts and Humanities are two parallel formulas that sometimes intersect when it comes to interpreting the world. This is the type of knowledge that we advocate for in the academic studies of Fine Arts.

[4] Museums are permanent institutions that acquire, conserve, research, communicate and exhibit ensembles and collections of historical and artistic value. The idea of the permanent collection as temporary –a collection in continuous transformation – has been gaining momentum since the beginning of the millennium when the Tate Modern in London generated a museographic paradigm shift. This conception of museography as a narrative within a panoply of possible discourses influenced the most important historical collections and art museums, which gradually subscribed to its unpublished formulas. However, there are museums that cannot grow because of their origin, such as the José Lázaro Galdiano collection. Their reactivation cannot come from within, from changes in exhibition recipes that are intrinsic to their sense as an inalienable whole, but from outside. Some neo-avant-garde artists, fundamentally those linked to conceptualism and institutional critique, had anticipated the British proposals of Nick Serota. Following in this wake, although with approaches more linked to a dialogue with the collections than with the institution itself, is the current project by Marina Núñez, or the happy solution found at the time by the Salamancan artist Enrique Marty; this offers an opportunity for a museography that is temporarily transformed.

[5] The collector’s library contains two photo albums, an account of how the inhabitants of the house interacted with the objects collected.

[6] Walter Benjamin, “Louis Philippe or the Interior” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 3: 1935–1938 (Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006. Professor Tejeda quotes from the 1972 Spanish edition, page 182.

[7] Ibid., page 183.

[8] José María Aguirre, “Cien obras artísticas propiedad del señor Lázaro [A Hundred Artworks Owned by Mr Lázaro]”, included in the magazine El coleccionista de tarjetas postales, March 1902 (Quoted by Jesusa Vega, “Por amor al arte: José Lázaro coleccionista [For the Sake of Art: José Lázaro collector]”, Goya, 330 (2010), pages 68-89.

[9] A key moment for Catalan Modernisme was the Universal Exhibition in Barcelona in 1888 – it should be remembered that Lázaro Galdiano would not leave the city until the following year. Nor was the collector akin to the Madrid tastes of the time. According to Professor Vega, José Lázaro vetoed the neo-Plateresque façade designed by José Urioste for the Palacio de Parque Florido. Ibid.

[10] Jesusa Vega, Op. Cit.

[11] See in this respect Hal Foster’s analysis of Adolf Loos’s text in Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes), 2002, Verso Books, New York. Professor Tejeda refers to the Spanish edition, Akal, Madrid, 2002, pages 13-26.

[12] See Professor I. Tejeda “Las furias. De Tiziano a Ribera [The Furies: from Titian to Ribera]” in M-arte y Cultura Visual, issue No 8, (March 2014), pages 303-307.

[13] Quoted in Ana María Peppino Barale “Paula Florido y Toledo: identidad relegada”, Fuentes Humanísticas, No 42 (2011), page 28. According to Letizia Arbeteta, Paula Florido «played a decisive role in the formation of several collections, such as those of English painting, lace, fans, small objects in pietre dure and others». Letizia Arbeteta, El arte de la joyería en la Colección Lázaro Galdiano [catálogo de la exposición], Madrid, Caja Segovia, Obra Social y Cultural, 2003, page 10.

[14] On recent visits to the palaces of the House of Alba, Liria and Monterrey, I have been surprised by the quantity of 20^th century bibelots that fill the shelves and furniture, as well as by the non-existence of contemporary art (apart from a graphic work by Manolo Valdés in one of the bedrooms in Salamanca, which is a re-reading of the portrait painted by Titian of the Duke of Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel); this evidences that collecting and the distinction it entails, if we follow Pierre Bourdieu, are the result of study, not inheritance. See Pierre Bourdieu Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984), Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press

[15] Eugenio D’Ors, Lo barroco, Madrid, Aguilar, 1944, page 124 and an additional reference to page 35.

[16] Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Philosophie de l’ornement. D’Orient en Occident, Paris, Galilée, 2008, page 166.

[17] Erika Bornay, La cabellera femenina, un diálogo entre poesía y pintura, Madrid, Cátedra, 1994.

[18] See Christine Bernier, L’art au musée. De l’œuvre à l’institution, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002.

[19] Let there be no confusion. This connection of human beings, represented by female bodies, and nature is utterly alien to the essentialist poetics of second-wave feminism.