Honras

The Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in London is the world’s most prestigious research institution and library of art history. Whoever gains here a research scholarship can regard him- or herself very lucky, not only because he can research twenty-four hours a day in the huge library established by Aby Warburg, which uniquely combines the history of art with anthropology, sociology and other social sciences, but also because it is almost impossible to leave it without publishing an important study which defines his whole further career.

The Eleanor Tufts Book Award is the world’s most prestigious prize for the books on Spanish art history published in the English-speaking world. It is annually distributed to three books, published in the previous year, one of which is always the nominee of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.

This year, Ilona Katzew’s Contested Vision in the Spanish Colonial World (Yale, 2011) won the first prize. Beside it, two other books received the usual Honorable Mention. And one of these two, the nominee of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes was that Libro de las Honras de la Emperatriz María de Austria (1603), about which we wrote a year ago, that it was translated, annotated, introduced and edited by the three founders of the Studiolum publisher, the three of us, friends from America, Mallorca and Hungary. The reasons of the Eleanor Tufts Award Committee were as follows:

“Book of Honors for Empress Maria of Austria – Composed by the College of the Society of Jesus of Madrid on the Occasion of Her Death (1603), ed. Antonio Bernat Vistarini, John T. Cull and Tamás Sajó (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2011), for setting an example of a fruitful collaboration among scholars from different countries who made accessible to an English-speaking audience an important primary source and likewise for opening up a promising new line of scholarship in the fields of Spanish and Portuguese art: an annotated critical translation with facsimile of the emblems. The editors uncover a wealth of material relevant for understanding female patronage, iconography, religious practices, history, and literature of the Golden Age, and especially the importance of visual emblems in post-Tridentine Jesuit preaching. The combination of the critical and contextual essay, with the translated text, and the facsimile make this an indispensable resource for scholars and students of emblem books, literature, and symbolic imagery in early modern Spain.”

This appreciation has not mentioned one of the co-authors: György Sajó from Copenhagen, that is, Két Sheng for the readers of Río Wang, who translated and analyzed for our publication the four poems in Hebrew of the funeral decorations of 1603.

What else could we add to this? Gracias por las honras.

Book of Honors for Empress Maria of Austria - Composed by the College of the Society
of Jesus of Madrid on the Occasion of Her Death (1603), Philadelphia:
Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2011 (isbn: 978-0-916101-73-2).