Vicente Carducho
(b Florence, 1570-76; d Madrid, 1638). Painter and theorist, brother of (1) Bartolom? Carducho. He became a prolific painter for both the church and the court in Castile, adapting a late 16th-century Italianate style, introduced into Spain in the 1580s, to Spanish themes and settings. After his death this style was superseded in monastic programmes by Zurbar?n's pietistic simplicity and in altarpieces and devotional painting by the elegant compositions of van Dyck and Rubens, while Vel?zquez was unrivalled as a portrait painter. Of more enduring influence than Vicente's paintings, however, was his Di?logos de la pintura (Madrid, 1633), an erudite defence of painting as a noble pursuit and of the artist as a learned humanist. While painters in Spain struggled until the 18th century to attain freedom from artisanship, the Di?logos featured significantly in 17th-century efforts to achieve that goal, and with Francisco Pacheco's Arte de la pintura (Seville, 1649), is one of the most important 17th-century theoretical writings in Spanish.
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